On Ruben Schade's blog I came across his text titled What's the point? and this definitely interested me. Because I often ask this question ... mostly in my head. People tend to ask this question rhethorically as a way of saying that they do not see a point in doing something. That happens to me too, I admit. I mean, some people in our village going out with a gun and for one afternoon blasting lead bullets into the olive groves aka "hunting"... what's the point?

But I disgress. I do ask myself sometimes "what then, is the point of this?" in a positive way sometimes. Actually those can be some very productive moments. Asking myself what really is the reason why I do something. Or even asking myself what (I think) is really the reason why somebody else does whatever they do.

In Ruben's case, it lead to an interesting blog post about some of the things that interest him, and what is behind it. What a good question, really.

Today I remembered this little weblog again, and as I was looking through the pages, I noticed a typo. Easy fix, I know where the posts are on my laptop, so I can fix the mistake in maybe 10 seconds locally.

But then I have to convince nikola (the static site generator) to re-build the site, so I can upload the fix. Since I haven't touched anything in a while, this might be broken... and it was.

First I had to update / upgrade the virtualenv (in Python 3 this is called a "venv" now). The magic incantation is something like this:

python3 -m venv --upgrade <path_to_dir>

(Where python3 is the python interpreter that should run the whole circus afterwards.)

Next I had to pip install --upgrade nikola, the same for pip itself, then it wanted to have jinja2 installed in the virtualenv (no idea why it wasn't)... and then it worked. Not too bad, all in all. It leaves me enough time to go for a walk before the sun goes down now.

I'm trying to reduce a bit the occurences of me writing in the wrong channel on irc. So I was looking at how to highlight the active window in irssi.

And indeed there is a solution: https://github.com/irssi/irssi/issues/244 ... adding something like sb_window_bg = "%k%6"; to the theme in the abstracts section will do the trick: The status bar of the "active" window will be cyan (%6) with black text (%k). Color codes can be found here: https://irssi.org/documentation/settings/#a_d (not a lot of choices).

To see the changes while irssi is running, you can use a quick /reload nameof.theme

Last week in one of the cafes where I frequently have my #coffice, the IPv4 didn't work. In fact it works, but the DHCP server in their little plastic CPE router doesn't work. Been like that for a long time, so I habitually set myself up with a fixed IP... and my script that does that didn't work. But then, IPv6 worked fine, so I was able to ssh -6 to my server. A couple of http servers worked also, but it was impressive how much of the web was not reachable.

And a few days later I came across this page: The transition to IPv6: Are we there yet? That was a very interesting read. All those various incentives to do and not do things, the dragging of feet, the attemtps, and the slow-moving-glacier changes.

Now I'm sitting in another cafe, and no IPv6 at all here, but at least their DHCP for IPv4 works.