I will often fall out of the habit of posting anything for weeks or maybe months at a time and will make sporadically post a variant of a weekly note with some suggestion of resuming regular writing and posting.

There's often a mix of reasons for not posting, be it other commitments taking up my time, not feeling like I have anything worth posting about, or just simply not being in the mood to write anything. Recently it's been a mix of all three.

Over the next couple of weeks I'm going to be playing catch up with posts on the previous IndieWeb Carnival themes I didn't get around to posting about, and rebuild the habit of writing on here, cos I do actually enjoy it.

Excuse this slight ramble of a post, normal service will hopefully be back soon.

Mark

IndieWeb carnival is a monthly challenge to write a post on a particular theme, so far there themes have been IndieWeb and Cooking and Moments of Joy.

This month, I'm picking the theme for August's IndieWeb carnival, which is gardening.

This can be anything related to the term gardening, be it physically or digitally.

Whether you are a keen horticulturist and have perfected your own personal oasis, or you have a digital garden that spreads many online acres or you've sculpted the greatest in-game garden in Animal Crossing or The Sims this is the month to publish your thoughts, experiences or just show off to the world your gardening prowess.

Alternatively, if you're like me and fairly useless at gardening and somehow keep managing to build up a graveyard of plants despite your best efforts (my previous achievements include de-hydrating a cactus plant) this can also be the month to share your misadventures, or as I am going to be, attempt to cultivate your gardening skills to a new level.

As ever, everyone is invited to take part in an IndieWeb Carnvial challenge. To take part, simply write a post on the theme of gardening, and share the link with me, either by sending a webmention, or sending me a link through other means and I'll put together a list of entries at the end of the month. If you would like to host a future monthly IndieWeb Carnival, please check out the details on the IndieWeb Wiki

So cue the Ground Force theme and happy gardening!

<a href="https://news.indieweb.org/en" class="u-category">#indienews</a>

It's a sunday afternoon and I'm sat in a branch of 200 degrees coffee with a cold brew coffee, so I've decided to write a week notes style post, however as I never actually seem to stick to a weekly schedule I'll go with calling these misc notes, for the time being.

IndiePass

It's been a couple of weeks since the last update of the android version of IndiePass, and having gone through the codebase a bit more, there will hopefully be another small update being released soon that should greatly improve the accessibility of the app's UI, and resolve a long running bug with the menu drawer.

With regards to future posts on IndiePass, I will shortly be publishing an update to the IndiePass website to include a post feed, with release updates etc. published on <https://indiepass.app> instead of here.

marksuth.dev

I've not really done much to marksuth.dev in the past few weeks, I've re-added the ability to livestream from my site via an embedded owncast instance, which seems to be working more effectively that my previous configuration.

I'm also starting to go through my older posts and photos to add more detail where appropriate, and adding custom layouts with suitable API integrations for things like read & watch posts for more context.

Following on recent disucssions at HWC Europe/London I'm also working to add more depth to my site, and back-fill a few more post types where I can access relevant archives.

IRL

As the weather has been pretty decent the past few days, I've been trying to make sure I get out more, and generally get more organised. The only slight hinderance is that my hayfever seems to have finally caught up with me the past few days, which is fun.

I've also finally got a new pair of matching tires for my bike, so will be cycling to and from work again, pollen levels permitting.

This is a fairly small update that mainly fixes a couple of visual glitches that were introduced in 0.81. It also updates a couple of dependencies to reduce the reliance on Jetifier during builds.

If you spot anything, please file an issue and I'll investigate.

Cheers, Mark

After a somewhat extended hiatus, the latest update to IndiePass has finally been published on the Google Play Store and will shortly be available on F-droid as well.

What's changed?

New app name

The first and most obvious change is the app's name. The app formerly known as Indigenous has been rebranded as IndiePass. To accompany this, an updated website for the app has also been published and can be found at indiepass.app

Updated to SDK Platform version 33

From a more technical point of view, the app has been upgraded to version 33 of the Android SDK platform, along with a variety of other minor tweaks and adjustments to ensure that it at least meets the current and incoming requirements of the Play Store in addition to a general spring clean of the codebase.

Visual

From a more visual point of view, I have gone through the UI and addressed a few flagged issues with things like minimum sizes of UI elements for improved accessibility, and converted all icons and graphics used in the app to vectors to improve the app's look and feel on higher resolution screens. In addition, the entire code base was put through a spell check.

Goodbye night theme, hello dark mode

As part of the visual update, there is an updated dark mode that updates the previous night theme. At present the main goal for this is to consolidate the assets within the app and make the app theme more consistent in light/dark mode. This will be refined further in the next couple of updates.

First time use improvements

While this may seem only minor, but there is now an "Add account" button on the opening screen if no account is found. the layout and graphics have been updated on the add account screen as well to match each providers current branding and to make it easier to use.

What hasn't changed (yet)

As the focus of this update was to bring the app up to the current SDK version, and play store requirements, there are still a few issues on the GitHub repo that need looking at. As the codebase has now had somewhat of a spring clean, I will be turning my attention to sorting as many of these as possible in the next few updates.

Future updates

After getting over the issue of updates to the app being rejected by Google, I am going to be submitting updates for the app on a roughly monthly basis for the time being to allow the outstanding issues to be addressed, and for a few newly flagged issues to be added to the backlog and dealt with accordingly.

Other stuff

What happened to the iPhone version?

The original Indigenous app on iPhone was pulled from the app store by Apple in 2022 due to lack of updates. It was not possible to gain access to the listing for the pre-existing version of the app, which had become somewhat mothballed and required significant amounts of work to bring it up to date.

Where's the cross-platform version?

The new cross-platform version of the app is still being actively developed in flutter. As there is a great similarity between the android version and the Flutter based cross-platform version, the core of the cross-platform version will be based on this one.

What about the desktop app?

There will be an update released for the current desktop app that renames that version to IndiePass to ensure the transition to the new name is across the board where possible. Aside from that, development on the Electron based version of the app is pretty much discontinued, and future development of the app targeting Windows, macOS and Linux will be included as target platforms of the new Flutter based version of the app, bringing everything together.

Anything else?

If you like the new update, then great! If you have any comments or spot any glitches, please open an issue on the GitHub repo.

Cheers, Mark

<a href="https://news.indieweb.org/en" class="u-syndication"> Also posted on IndieNews </a>

It's been a long time since I did a proper update on IndiePass, and to be honest since I was in the mood to spend any real time on it. However, I have spent the past couple of days making real progress on the new IndiePass app (screenshots below), and also updating the current Indigenous app to be compliant with the current and impending Google Play store SDK platform requirements.

IndiePass

First things first, I have essentially started afresh with the Flutter codebase through the mix of deprecated methods used and the benefit of having gained more experience with it elsewhere.

As it currently stands, I am filling out the UI in it's entirety, and have upgraded it to use Material 3, along with a modern dark mode that doesn't require reloading the app each time. My main focus at the minute is getting the posting experience working and complete, with support for a few additional post types that are present within things like the Post Kinds WordPress plugin by David Shanske.

Below is some screenshots of a few aspects of the app as it stands this evening on an Android and iOS device

New Post Menu

<div class="row mb-4"> <div class="col-6 col-md-3"> <img src="https://marksuth.dev/storage/post-images/100423-indiepass/android_newpost_light.png" alt="New Post UI on Android in light mode" class="img-fluid"> </div> <div class="col-6 col-md-3"> <img src="https://marksuth.dev/storage/post-images/100423-indiepass/android_newpost_dark.png" alt="New Post UI on Android in dark mode" class="img-fluid"> </div> <div class="col-6 col-md-3"> <img src="https://marksuth.dev/storage/post-images/100423-indiepass/ios_newpost_light.png" alt="New Post UI on iOS in light mode" class="img-fluid"> </div> <div class="col-6 col-md-3"> <img src="https://marksuth.dev/storage/post-images/100423-indiepass/ios_newpost_dark.png" alt="New Post UI on iOS in dark mode" class="img-fluid"> </div> </div>

New Note UI

<div class="row mb-4"> <div class="col-6 col-md-3"> <img src="https://marksuth.dev/storage/post-images/100423-indiepass/android_note_light.png" alt="New note UI on Android in light mode" class="img-fluid"> </div> <div class="col-6 col-md-3"> <img src="https://marksuth.dev/storage/post-images/100423-indiepass/android_note_dark.png" alt="New note UI on Android in dark mode" class="img-fluid"> </div> <div class="col-6 col-md-3"> <img src="https://marksuth.dev/storage/post-images/100423-indiepass/ios_note_light.png" alt="New note UI on iOS in light mode" class="img-fluid"> </div> <div class="col-6 col-md-3"> <img src="https://marksuth.dev/storage/post-images/100423-indiepass/ios_note_dark.png" alt="New note UI on iOS in dark mode" class="img-fluid"> </div> </div>

Settings UI

<div class="row mb-4"> <div class="col-6 col-md-3"> <img src="https://marksuth.dev/storage/post-images/100423-indiepass/android_settings_light.png" alt="New settings UI on Android in light mode" class="img-fluid"> </div> <div class="col-6 col-md-3"> <img src="https://marksuth.dev/storage/post-images/100423-indiepass/android_settings_dark.png" alt="New settings UI on Android in dark mode" class="img-fluid"> </div> <div class="col-6 col-md-3"> <img src="https://marksuth.dev/storage/post-images/100423-indiepass/ios_settings_light.png" alt="New settings UI on iOS in light mode" class="img-fluid"> </div> <div class="col-6 col-md-3"> <img src="https://marksuth.dev/storage/post-images/100423-indiepass/ios_settings_dark.png" alt="New settings UI on iOS in dark mode" class="img-fluid"> </div> </div>

To keep things manageable, I am purely focusing on the mobile versions of the app for the time being, and will focus on the desktop versions once these are released.

Indigenous App Update

Realistically, new IndiePass won't have every feature that Indigenous currently has for the first few releases at least. With Google Play store's app requirements changing in a few months time to require a more recent version of the SDK Platform, I am in the process of updating the app to the current SDK platform version 33 and addressing a few minor bugs while I am at it. On a negative note, I have had to remove the photo editor for the time being, as the version currently included with Indiegenous is pretty much entirely incompatible with newer versions of the android SDK. There is a current version of the photo editor, which I will look to re-add in due course. Apologies in advance to anyone who uses this feature.

Amazon App Store

Following a recent GitHub issue with regards to installing the app on an Amazon Fire tablet, I have begun the process of getting the app listed on the Amazon App Store in addition to Google Play and Fdroid.

In Summary

Things are progressing once again, and I am hoping to keep on this trend going forward to get the new IndiePass app to the point where I can release the app. Once the Android & iOS versions are published I will focus on getting the version for desktop OSes (macOS, Linux & Windows) released.

Cheers, Mark

<a href="https://news.indieweb.org/en" class="u-syndication"> Also posted on IndieNews </a>

It’s been a while since I’ve taken the time to sit down and write anything here, mainly due to a mixture of life stuff taking priority and having fallen well and truly out of the habit of posting with any kind of frequency, I’ve just not gotten back into posting.

General Projects Update (IndiePass, Custrd etc.)

One advantage of essentially running everything on autopilot pretty much for the past few months means I’m able to look at things with fresh eyes and start making progress on stuff in a somewhat more measured, and hopefully more productive manner.

marksuth.dev

It’s coming up to a year since I made the switch on the underlying codebase for this site, and it’s safe to say it had become somewhat cluttered along with a variety of bugs and quirks in the way things were being done.

I’ve taken the release of Laravel 10 as an opportunity to start on a mass code clean-up and generally streamlining and updating of both the workflow and approach taken with the site.

IRL

In short, the last couple of months of 2022 ended up being a bit shit. A mix of health stuff and other things just resulted in me feeling rather crappy and not really in the mood to do much. Thankfully, things have now either resolved themselves, or they’re in the process of being resolved/improved. It’s just meant I’ve had to re-prioritize and make a few changes, of which they are generally all for the better.

I’m aware this post has kind of been more of a mindless ramble, rather than any actual update on things. Normal service may resume soon.

Cheers, Mark

As usual, it's been a couple of weeks since I posted a week note, which still irks me that I'm not being more regular with posting these. I am however sat in a branch of Caffe Nero with a flat white, so let's see if this one gets posted. Now that I've completed a large project at work that was sucking up all my time, I'm once again able to spend time on my other projects and even spending some time offline.

Projects

IndiePass

Having completed a recent work project that relied on Flutter, and from various bits of feedback, I'm wanting to press on with getting a usable version of IndiePass out into the world for people to poke and start using. It's now been close to a year since I took over the development of this project and would've liked to have something more substantial to show for it by now, but ah well.

Custrd

I'm almost at the point of flipping the status of the git repo for this to public, happy that there's nothing in the codebase that'll result in me revealing some private API key or similar. I have still have a sizeable wishlist for this project before I even consider putting it out as some sort of release, let alone writing documentation for it.

marksuth.dev

As part of the process of getting Custrd ready, I have made several updates to the backend of the site that mean nearly all of the site meta tags, and info such as site name, social handles etc. are now driven either by the site's .env file or a database table. Likewise, the static pages are now also database driven, rather than showing coded blade templates.

IRL

I spent a chunk of last week in Germany for work, which while it meant some long, stressful days, now means I have more time to focus on other things again. I have restarted sessions with my PT after a couple of weeks off and have also restarted using Zwift on a regular basis.

I'm also taking the opportunity to have a proper sort and clear out of clothes, furniture and misc. stuff I no longer need, or have use for and am either selling, donating, or disposing of accordingly. I'm also having a digital clear-out of things, from the various screenshots in my image library I don't need, deleting accounts for apps I don't really use, and focusing on improving on the stuff I should pay more attention to.

In addition to making more of an effort to post these week notes on a weekly basis, I'm also going to start a private daily journal from 1st October and see how I get on with that after a month of updating that.

Overall, I'm taking the opportunity I'm now less busy for the next couple of weeks to make some "bug fixes and performance improvements" IRL to ease things when I inevitably get busy again in a few weeks' time.

Cheers, Mark

It's been a couple of weeks since I last posted, this is however not through lack of wanting to, I've just not had a chance to sit down and write anything. As discussed at the part of the Berlin IndieWebCamp I was able to drop in on, I try and write these while in a coffee shop, rather than at my desk at home. I find that making it a habit to write elsewhere, means I don't dwell on what I should write as much, and if nothing else, makes me get out of the house more while exploring the various coffee shops in the local area.

Custrd

As a slight change, I have been spending time building out the codebase of this site to be a full-featured IndieWeb enriched CMS that anyone could use as a simple way to get up and running with a personal website. As it currently stands, I still have some work to do to fully implement all the features and functions I want to be present,

My attention at the minute is focused on making sure I don't have anything hardcoded that relates purely to myself, such as social handles, and once I'm happy I'm not likely to spread my info around through a git repo, I'll make the repo public for others to use.

Custrd is a stupid name...

Yes it is. The idea of registering custrd.com is a reference to an (unopened) tin of custard that was sat on my desk for several months (it's since been turned into a pen pot). A mix of joking about domains missing vowels, and a promo on .com domains. resulted in me now owning curstrd.com. I didn't have any plans for it, so may as well put it to use for this. On the subject of impulse domain registrations...

Mabel.one

I started this as a mood-tracking app a few years ago, after it was recommended to help spot trends in my mental health. The apps I tried however just irritated me, and started to create my own app instead. As with most projects, this was abandoned and just sat in the depths of my GitHub account for just over 2 years. I did however own mabel.one as a domain.

This time around, however, I'm building a life admin app that combines the various spreadsheets, notebooks and apps I have for staying on top of and tracking stuff, such as my gym routine, food tracking, to-do lists, and journaling. Of course, making sure it's all secure and kept private.

I'm a few days late writing this, but at least I've remembered eventually to write for once. Last weekend was uncomfortably hot weather-wise, which is sadly going to be a much more common occurrence. At least it rained last night. Anyway...

IndiePass

I am finally making some good progress on IndiePass again. I pushed a commit that brought all the dependencies etc. up to date, rectified a couple of minor deprecations and fixed a couple of small bugs. I'm setting myself a target to get a functioning build done by 1st October, (allowing for other IRL commitments).

marksuth.dev

Firstly, thanks to Jan Boddez for letting me know about my post feed serving up unparsed markdown, I should've caught it sooner, but at least it's fixed now. In doing so, I realised I'd also included several hundred fairly useless Watch posts via my feed as well, and I've refined how the feed is generated to limit its scope on included post types.

Aside from the feed issues, I've been continuing to evolve the codebase for my site with the ultimate goal of having a publicly available generic version for others to use. The latest step has been to move things like changing hard-coded references to my name to environment variables, and the content for standalone pages is now served from the database, rather than blade files.

IRL

Due in part to it being too hot to do much at the weekend, the past week has been fairly uneventful for the most part. As it's already thursday, this week looks like it's going to be much the same, so I may make an effort to go and do something different at the weekend.

Cheers, Mark

It's been a couple of weeks since I last wrote one of these, so I'm getting closer to posting on a weekly basis if nothing else. Whenever I write one of these, I always find it quite cathartic, and get annoyed with myself for not keeping up with them, but at least it's only a 3 week gap this time instead of 3 months.

IndiePass

After re-organising the GitHub repo a couple of weeks ago, I have now also migrated, and made a few updates to, the current site for Indigenous, some of these are fairly visible, such as removing the App Store links to the now defunct iOS version, and other updates are to make it easier for me to progress with the documentation.

marksuth.dev

I've probably added more new bits to this site in the past 3 weeks than I have in a long time, with a mixture of bug fixes, adding new stuff and other general improvements. I have started importing more of my content from other sites, and figuring out how best to represent things like watch posts or check-ins for places that I have done/been to, but don't know the exact date for it. My solution to this is to add a "Distant Past" (inspired by the Everything Everything track) function to the site, which will appear at the bottom of post-type pages that have such posts.

In addition, I've also added a number of easter eggs to the site, and now want to focus on getting fetching & displaying webmentions on the site, and also proper micropub support.

IRL

I am now on week 2 of restarting weekly sessions with a personal trainer and getting a bit more structure to becoming more fit and active. At the minute the main impact is that my legs and various other parts of my body are aching, although I am now sleeping better. Similarly, I am making a more concerted effort to eat better, which is going well, most of the time.

All being well, I'll do another one of these next week. Let's see if I can keep this up.

It's been a few months since I stopped posting Weekly notes on a well, weekly basis. This is for a mix of reasons, mainly a mix of being tied up with other commitments, or just not in the mood to post anything that week.

As I'm now less tied up elsewhere and have started getting myself somewhat more organised, I'm going to give doing these on a weekly basis another shot. So:

IndiePass

After neglecting this for a couple of months, I have begun getting back in the flow of making progress with IndiePass, especially now that the iOS app is no longer available on the app store.

This is also true with the documentation side of things, and have started work on writing proper documentation on how the app works, and how to use it, rather than the current documentation which doesn't really help with using the app.

To this extent, I have consolidated the various IndiePass & Indigenous GitHub repos into an IndiePass organisation to make the project management aspect of things more clear-cut and help me with managing the multitude of Repos I've got.

I am also starting to migrate a new version of the IndiePass website over to indiepass.app domain rather than a sub-domain of this site.

HWC Europe/London

Calum recently decided to step down as organiser of the HWC Europe/London meetups, which after organising them for 6 years, is more than reasonable, so thanks Calum!

In his absence, James and I took over as co-organisers of future meetups. These take place every alternate Wednesday at 19:00 UK time, and anyone with an interest in getting started or maintaining a personal website is more than welcome to attend. Details of future meetups, along with other HWC meetups that take place can be found at <https://events.indieweb.org>.

marksuth.dev

In the spirit of being re-motivated to get working on things, I spent some time this week correcting various small bugs with the site and added a couple of features I've been meaning to add for a while. These include but are not limited to:

• Post kind archives now actually work instead of showing a 404
• Switching to markdown for writing posts instead of TinyMCE
• Making sure unpublished posts are actually unpublished
• Various date-related fixes, including showing the published date correctly, and adding "Last Updated" to the footer of updated posts
• General code cleanup of unused snippets
• Migrating from Webpack to Vite for CSS & JS compilation

I've also created about a dozen or so issues in GitHub for things to improve or add to the site, including showing webmentions on the site

IRL

I'm now a couple of months into having a new diet and various lifestyle changes prompted by a couple of medical issues that made it clear I need to be generally more active and generally eating/drinking better. I have noticed myself feeling somewhat better, and have started to notice various improvements starting to show as a result.

On the food/drink front, I'm in the progress of moving to a mostly plant-based diet and have given up drinking alcohol also.

On the "more-active" side of things, I am restarting weekly sessions with my personal trainer at the end of July, and am making an effort to walk & cycle more, in addition to getting back in the habit of going to the gym on a regular basis. This has also been helped by finally managing to get an appointment to have my nose cauterised which has put a stop to my nose bleeding multiple times a day.

Writing this has turned into much more of a ramble than I intended, but it's reminded me how much I enjoy doing these Weekly notes, so I will make a concerted effort to do the same next week.

It's been a while since I last posted a weekly note, which is annoying for a couple of reasons, 1. I enjoy writing them, and 2: they aren't weekly notes if I don't do them weekly. The lack of posting and activity in general has been mainly due to general life stuff prompting me to make a few changes to things, mostly for the better. Right then...

IndiePass

It has been a few weeks since I've really touched anything to do with IndiePass, and coming back to it now, has prompted me to prioritize getting a set of useful documentation written, which will help with defining the features and functions of the app, and prioritise where I should be spending my time, but also make it easier to explain how the app functions, and potentially flag aspects that have been overlooked or can be expanded on in later versions.

Indigenous on iOS

Due to Apple updating their policy on the apps that have not been updated for an extended period, the current version of Indigenous was removed from the iOS App Store by Apple. This means the app can no longer be downloaded and installed to devices.

marksuth.dev

I've been making a few small improvements and updates to the site, most notably fixing an issue with how URLs were being created in feeds and the various Sitemap.xml variants.

On the backend, I'm working on improving how photo uploads are handled, to hopefully avoid uploading 5MB+ image files, and allow for multiple file sizes to be automatically generated on upload. I'm also looking to add video support, although I will probably upload videos of any length to a video service like YouTube or Vimeo and embed them, rather than self-host.

On the IndieWeb side of things, my next tasks are to sort displaying Webmentions on posts, and streamline posting to brid.gy when content is published.

IRL

The past few weeks have caused me to make a few lifestyle changes, which are ultimately for the better, and have given me a much needed kick up the arse to get back on track with getting more active, eating healthier and generally living better. As a result, I've started going to the gym on a more regular basis again and have signed up to do the Leicester Half Marathon later in the year.

While some of the changes I've had to make may sound major, such as no longer drinking alcohol or fizzy drinks and not eating certain foods, it isn't that much of a change from my diet previously, albeit with a few healthier upgrades.

Kind of related to it all, I finally got myself a standing desk, which is probably one of the best things I've gotten in years. It's more exciting than the new washing machine I got recently if nothing else.

Somewhat annoyingly, my desktop PC finally packed in, with both the motherboard and GPU giving up the ghost and given its age and how heavily I've used it over the years, it's served me quite well all things considered. I'm not in any rush to replace it with anything either, as I tend to prefer using my MacBook these days, and my XBOX for any gaming I might want to do.

If I remember, I'll post another one of these on Sunday as usual.

Mark

The past couple of weeks have been pretty busy for various reasons, usually on sundays, so I've gone a couple of weeks now without posting anything much recently. Despite that, I've made some major updates and changes to this site in particular, and have made use of having a week off work to get on with decluttering, both physically and virtually.

marksuth.dev

I've finally switched to the new version of marksuth.dev, now using Laravel as a base framework rather than having WordPress as a full-fat CMS. It isn't perfect and there's a few rough edges to iron out, however it had gotten to the point of if I didn't switch, I'd probably still have the beta version under construction indefinitely.

At a quick glance, the site is visually more or less the same as before, with a few refinements and updates dotted around the site, the more obvious things like the "View Post" button now looks like a button, and the pagination now not being completely broken. I've also made various adjustments to improve site accessibility, and improved aspects such as greater usage of microformats throughout the site, a more complete h-card on my homepage, and improving how the site renders if CSS &amp; JS rendering is disabled for whatever reason.

One of the added bonuses of switching to a significantly more custom site is that I'm far more motivated to make improvements and amendments to things, and adding new features to the site that would have previously involved either significant overhead, or bodging my way around the limitations of using an off-the-shelf CMS.

One thing I have stuck with however is to use a database driven site rather than one that's statically generated. This gives me a number of advantages, where I'm able to structure things dynamically and don't need to be concerned about time taken to rebuild the site etc.

What's next?

Now that the new version is launched, I'm concentrating on getting the final few rough edges ironed out, and re-implementing parts of my old site I want to retain, namely:

• Fix micropub support
• Fix Webmention support
• re-add shortlink support
• re-add ability to tag posts and photos
• Automated POSSE (Post Own Site, Sync Elsewhere)
• Places API integration for photo tagging
• full support for RSVP, like, checkin and reply post types
• Make the site repo public and easily forkable including documentation.

IRL

I've been making use of having a week off by taking the chance to sort through the various amounts of stuff I've accumulated and either donating, selling or recycling things where appropriate (anyone got a use for a DVI to VGA cable?). This is mainly to simplify my setup in general and to make life a bit easier simply by the fact there's less stuff I don't use.

Somewhat unhelpfully, my PC's motherboard decided to give up the ghost this week, which while I was intending on upgrading it at somepoint this year, I wasn't intending on doing it just yet. Instead of getting a drop-in replacement motherboard, I'm going to see how long I can go without a desktop PC which I admittedly rarely use these days, as I tend to do any gaming on my xbox, or via cloud streaming. On the occasions I need to access to Windows, it's usually for testing purposes which I can use a virtual machine for.

Elsewhere, I finally got to see Everything Everything at Rock City in Nottingham last week, which was incredible.

It's still Sunday (just), and as it's gone 23:00, it's probably for the best that I'm not drinking coffee this late in the evening. As I'm trying to stick with the habit of doing weekly notes, I'd rather write this now, than at some-point on Monday.

IndiePass

Although I've not made any real progress on developing the app further this week, I've been spending time getting the other parts up to speed, and getting myself more organised as to how I’m getting through outstanding tasks, and what milestones I'm setting.

I've also been looking into the options of third party API integrations, along with the costs and requirements to do so for a more complete experience. For example, adding support for the Foursquare places API, Mapbox, and push notifications.

As an interim, I'm also in the process of preparing the current Android app for the Amazon app store, to make the app available on Fire Tablets. Mainly because I have a Fire Tablet, and pending any major issues, shouldn’t take any additional effort from a development perspective once the admin part is sorted.

Based on a couple of issues on the GitHub repos, I have started writing a more helpful set of documentation on how to use the app, which I will start publishing to the site as and when it's ready.

marksuth.dev

I'm inching closer to switching over to the new version of marksuth.dev having spent time this week working on the ability to interact with posts & photos, either through webmentions, or an old-school comments form.

As part of the switchover, I'll also be switching to a new hosting setup, that is a bit more thought out and streamlined in how I've set it up compared to my current VPS.

All being well, the new version should be ready within the next week, with the intention of having it ready by the next HWC London meetup.

IRL

Compared to the past few weeks, this week has been fairly uneventful, which is no bad thing. I've started on having a large scale declutter and sort out of stuff, having accumulated a rather large amount of misc. tech stuff, clothes I no longer want/need or have worn-out, and various amounts of general crud that I don't really need.

Gaming wise, I've found myself falling back into GTA V on XBOX, and a couple of stints in forza as per usual.

Event wise, I hosted this weeks HWC London meetup which was a first for me, but otherwise generally uneventful.

Cheers,
Mark

It's sunday afternoon again, however I'm sat in a Nottingham branch of Caffè Nero this week, trying to kill some time before I wander up to Rock City for a gig that was originally meant to take place in October 2020. As such, I'm currently writing this on my phone, rather than my laptop as I'd usually do.

IndiePass

I've not really done anything worth noting on IndiePass this week, focusing instead on finishing off the new version of my site.

marksuth.dev

I've been making good progress with the new version of my site, with most of the main parts in place, and all of my previous content imported, along with some additional posts and photos I’ve started uploading from elsewhere.

Functionality wise, I'm most of the way there with getting the site to publish to twitter when I make a new post on my site, webmentions almost work, and I still need to look at posting photos, and the potential of getting them to cross post to instagram. Last of all I need to fix the feeds then Im pretty much good to go. If you want a look at the new version, just head to beta.marksuth.dev to take a look.

IRL

I've finally started cycling to work again this week, and have also restarted doing rides on Zwift a few times a week as well.

As I mentioned at the top, I'm also attending the first gig I've been to since February 2020 this evening, watching The Chats @ Rock City in Nottingham.

I'll also be hosting HWC London this Wednesday (23rd) which starts at 19:00 if you're interested in this kind of thing, check out the event details here: https://events.indieweb.org/

Cheers,
Mark

Quick couple of updates:

• When adding links using your phone, make sure they use " and not ‚Äú as it breaks things.
• The gig was decent.

It's been a few weeks since I last posted, for which there are a number of reasons, from a mixture of forgetting, being too busy elsewhere, or just not having being in the mood to post anything. However, it's sunday afternoon and I'm sat in a branch of Caffè Nero drinking a flat white, so may as well get back in the habit of posting these again.

IndiePass

I've been making progress on the new Flutter based version of IndiePass, and will hopefully have something demo-able in the near future.

I have also been making a number of interim updates to the existing desktop version of Indigenous, including renaming it to IndiePass, and making a few performance/accessibility changes based on issues & feedback raised on the GitHub repo. I have a few more amends to make, but am aiming to publish an update to the app before the end of the month.

marksuth.dev

I am in the process of rebuilding the site from scratch using a custom CMS that utilises the laravel framework, rather than the current site, which is using a custom WordPress theme with way too many plugins, and a massive functions.php file to make it do what I want.

There is still a few major parts I need to get completed on the new version, in particular feeds, webmentions, and a backend that doesn't rely on me posting updates using a copy of TablePlus to post things.

As part of bringing old content to the site, I have also started importing photos from other sources, such as my old Facebook account, or images from my general photo archive that aren’t too personal. My general approach for posting photos online is to post photos of an event or place, occasionally of myself and keep the photos with family members, friends etc. private for the most part. It's not a stead-fast rule, but one I generally

IRL

Overall it's been a very busy few weeks, hence the lack of posts, however as things are now returning to a more normal pace, and I've caught up on sleep etc. I'm once again making a conscious effort to start being generally more healthy.

Food wise, I've started subscribing to Mindful Chef recipe boxes, as a way to get myself backing in the habit of cooking properly again, rather than just throwing pasta in a saucepan with some kind of sauce, or ordering takeaway.
So far I've chosen dishes that I wouldn't have made if I was just going on a regular weekly shop, such as roasted pesto salmon with Mediterranean lentils or Aubergine katsu curry with edamame & rice

I'm also trying to decrease the amount of meat I'm eating, and generally being a bit more sustainable about the way I go about things. I've not cut it out entirely, but am taking the approach of having it once or twice a week, rather than the norm.

Gaming wise, I've been grinding through the various races on Forza, and have made a start on the Hitman trilogy that's now on Game Pass.

Event wise, I attended the London HWC virtual meetup on Wednesday evening, of which I am now a co-host, and will be hosting the next HWC on 23/03/22 if anyone wishes to join us.

Cheers,
Mark

It's Sunday evening again, however this time I'm staying in a hotel room in London, and currently drinking a small bottle of red wine. Here's my weekly note recap for this week:

IndiePassss

Um yeah, about that. I've not had much chance to spend any real time on IndiePass this week, however from attempting to use the current versions of the app on iOS and Android, it has given me some insight as to areas I need to make sure work smoothly in the new version.

marksuth.dev

Main thing I've done this week is install updates, and smooth out a few rough edges (e.g. the Likes section of a post should look tidier now.)

IRL

It's been a fairly busy week, and if it wasn't for me trying to make doing weekly notes a consistent habit, I would probably not have bothered this time around.

I've decided to have a short break away in London as I've not really gone anywhere for the past 2 years at this point. I visited the Design Museum and Science Museum this afternoon, along with a general wander around Hyde Park and Kensington.

Gaming wise, I've not really switched my xbox on at all this week, the only game I've played any of was a couple of short sessions on Forza.

Event wise, I attended the London HWC virtual meetup on Wednesday evening, which was good.

Also I finally got a haircut yesterday which was very much overdue.

Cheers,

Mark

It's Sunday afternoon again, and I'm sat in my office with a cup of coffee I made myself this time (flat white with beans from More Coffee Co. if you're interested). Here's my weekly note recap for this week:

IndiePass

After finding a couple of issues on the repo for the desktop client that I'd missed, I've given the current electron app a bit of TLC, and have gone through it to update the app name and internal references to IndiePass. As I am focusing on Android and iOS initially for the flutter based version of IndiePass, the desktop client, flawed though it is, will be sticking around for a bit longer, so it seemed right to give a bit of a touch up. I'll be releasing an update for it later in the week, and thanks to @binyamin and @Cambridgeport90 for their feedback.

I also posted a more rambling overall update on IndiePass yesterday which you can find here: <https://marksuth.dev/posts/2022/01/indiepass-dev-update>

IndieFit

Although I'm probably not going to spend too much time on this project until I have launched IndiePass, I did spend some time doing a couple of tests and experiments using the health plugin for flutter that allows you to fetch data from Apple Healthkit and Google Fit. The intention is to enable straight forward posting of things like daily step counts, and runs/cycles etc. as you would do to something like Strava, only using Micropub instead.

marksuth.dev

Along with the regular fiddling and tweaking, I haven't really done much of any significance to my site this week.

IRL

It's been another fairly quiet week all things considered, I still seem to be getting multiple nosebleeds, which if that could hurry and stop I’d greatly appreciate it.

Gaming wise, the Hitman trilogy was added to Game Pass this week, I’ve played various incarnations of Hitman over the years, usually on PC, however as I'm yet to play Hitman 3 and have only played Hitman 1 & 2 on PC, I'm going to start working my way through each of the campaigns on XBOX.

On saturday afternoon I attended the Analog Meets Online IndieWebCamp Virtual Popup, for which I'll post a link to the recording of if anyone's interested once it's been uploaded.

Cheers,

Mark

It's been a couple of weeks since I posted purely about IndiePass, and the current status of the new app.

Firstly, I had hoped to have an update for Android released by now that had renamed everything to IndiePass, however renaming the app triggered the app being manually reviewed, and the update subsequently rejected. I know what the cause of this is, but requires some time and effort to get everything lined up so the name update will be accepted by Google Play. As for the iOS version, I will need to wait until the new version is done, and it’ll be released as a brand new app to the store.

As for the new version, after a couple of dead-ends and false starts, I have now settled on using Flutter to build the new version of the app, and am currently working to get the app's UI complete soon (IRL commitments permitting).

Progress has been somewhat slower than I had realistically hoped due to other commitments taking priority, but I've now got time to concentrate some effort in to properly progressing things.

To help with the clean start, and to reflect the new unified codebase, the project can be found in a new repo: <https://github.com/indiepass/indiepass> where I am currently breaking down everything into small tickets to help myself keep on track as much as anything.

In addition to help untangle things and map everything out properly, I have started on writing detailed documentation on how do each post type, and how to use the app. Once complete this will hopefully prove a useful resource.

Cheers,

Mark

It's Sunday afternoon, and I'm currently sat downstairs in a Caffè Nero making use of their free Wi-Fi for a change of scene. In what will hopefully become a habit as I've not ditched it after 1 week, here‚Äôs my weekly note recap for this week:

IndiePass

Nothing particularly exciting to report this week, the time I have spent working on it has been mainly fleshing out the UI and filling in the blanks. Given the amount of post kinds I’ve got left to go through, this will probably be the case for the next week or so as well.

As a way to help myself with what needs to go where as much as anything, I have however made a start on the documentation for the app, with an explanation on how to fill out each post type, and a breakdown of what’s submitted when creating a new post.

In populating the various post kinds, and looking at the plugins available for Flutter, I’m going to explore building a POSSE fitness tracker that integrates with Apple Healthkit & Google Fit, for more detailed logging of exercise, rather than just “I did a run” type posts. As while this could be included in IndiePass, it feels more suited to a dedicated app.

marksuth.dev

I've got various small bits done this week, there is now a little flag at the top of each post saying what the post kind is, and I have finally setup Bridgy to cross-post updates to my twitter account. I've also started making use of webmentions for things like RSVPs and logging what I've been watching recently.

I'm also slowly going through and polishing up the various rough edges in how the site looks and works, and am continuing to go through the backlog of issues flagged by the SEO audit tool I've been using, including addressing a few performance bottle necks, and slightly wonky page layout issues.

IRL

It's been a fairly quiet week all things considered, one of the side effects of it being generally cold and miserable outside is it kind of kills the urge to go out and do things. Added to which I seem to be getting multiple nosebleeds again, which at this point are more of an annoyance than anything.

On the plus side, I did get caught up with various jobs round the house, and didn't spend too much time playing Forza Horzion 5 on my XBOX (although it is very good).

I did however attend 2 virtual events this week, Homebrew Website Club Europe/London on Wednesday evening, and PHPMiNDS on thursday evening for a talk on making digital technology more sustainable by Hannah Smith (@hanopcan on twitter).

I'm also going to force myself to at least do a couple of sessions on Zwift this week, cos even if the weather's too crap to go to the gym, I have no excuse not to do that.

Cheers,

Mark

IndiePass

I have been making good progress with getting the frontend of the app built, and have more or less completed the basic scaffold of the app. Next step is to make it actually function as an app, and build out the various post types. In doing so, and also by having a look through the IndieWeb wiki, it has also given me a few ideas on features to work on in the future.

As a way to focus what I'm working on atm, I'm focusing solely on building the app up for mobile devices, as this scenario is the most common use case.

marksuth.dev

When I first deployed this current version of my site, I imported a lot of content from things like Instagram, and older versions extracted from archive.org. This resulted in a number of small issues and rough edges which irritated me. As such I spent a couple of hours on Saturday going through and correcting things like missing h1 tags, empty alt tags on images, and setting the correct post kind for photo posts. I also added a couple of extra items to the top menu for photos and articles.

IRL

First things first: I finally got to see the new Spiderman film on Monday evening, however as I not any kind of film reviewer, I shall just say: It was pretty good.

The past week has been fairly busy otherwise, and I have spent most of the week telling myself that I need to get back in the habit of going to the gym or going for a run, or spending an hour on Zwift on a regular basis, but have so far failed on doing so as I’ve either been too tired, or lacking the motivation to do anything resembling exercise. On the plus side, I have unlocked a few achievements on Forza Horizon 5, so the week’s not been a complete dead loss.

As things are slowly becoming more normal, one of my main goals for the next few weeks is to get myself into a better routine, and make time for things like reading and exercising.

Since taking over as maintainer of the Indigenous app, one thing that has not sat comfortably with me is the app's name.

The discussion for renaming the app to something more suitable, and more inclusive (not to mention easier to spell) has carried on for a while now, it seems this is as a good a time as any to actually go ahead with the process of renaming, rather than just discussing it.

On the app's wiki page, the Renaming section <https://indieweb.org/Indigenous#Renaming> has asked for people to make suggestions, and give their opinion on suggested names. As it currently stands, the most popular name, and one I also like that doesn't appear to cause any potential issues, is Indiepass. So that’s what I shall be renaming it to.

As the current versions of each of the 3 versions make several references to the name Indigenous at all levels, from UI, app modules, class names and so on, simply doing a find and replace would most likely break things. Therefore, I will be leaving these codebases with the current name intact for the time being.

As I am currently working on a new unified cross-platform version of the app, this seemed the easiest and most logical point to proceed with renaming the project.

In the meantime of course, if you have any suggestions, feedback, feature requests or encounter any bugs with the current versions, please do not hesitate to submit a GitHub issue on the relevant repo (Android app, Desktop app, iOS app)

Cheers!

Mark

It's been a couple of weeks since I last posted any kind of update, or posted in general really, so thought I'd do a quick update on how things are progressing.

Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, Indigenous will be renamed to Indiepass when I complete this re-write. With the level of internal references to indigenous in the current code bases, this is the easiest point to fully rename the app without causing any potential issues or breaking the app in the process.

After making a couple of attempts with a Cordova based Workflow, and proceeding to experiment with other similar tools aimed at cross-platform development, I have finally settled on using flutter for building the new version.

Flutter is a Google owned framework based in Dart, and allows for targeting both desktop and mobile devices from one codebase, and also devices such as the Nest Hub which I may experiment with at a later date.

Settling on Flutter also makes it easier for me to use the current Android app as a base point of reference for development, as for the time being I’m wanting to keep things similar, but improved and/or updated as necessary. In particular the library of plugins available allows me to tackle long standing feature requests such as media posting, and if nothing else, make it a lot slicker for me to take a photo and post it directly to my site without having to do any additional steps.

Cheers,

Mark

To make life easier for myself as much as anything, I’m going to be spending this month having an end of year sort out, both physically and digitally.

Site wise, I have already gone through and corrected a number of minor issues like missing alt tags, broken embeds and various other small things that needed sorting, but hadn't so far.

IRL, I have rejoined the gym, and am slowly reducing the amount of crap food I'm eating, with the aim to complete a 10k before Easter 2022.

I also realise that most of my posts on here lately have been somewhat bland Dev updates rather than anything to do with me, or proactively use the app I now maintain, which doesn't seem right.

I have released a small update (0.65) for the Android version of Indigenous.

The main purpose of this release is to migrate things like the app's OAuth endpoint from the previous maintainer's setup to my own, and to temporarily remove push notifications from the app, which based on the statistics available in the notification provider, pushy.me, wasn’t really used anyway.

As part of the migration process, I have also completed all the various additional bits of policy compliance and admin updates that have been added and or altered since the app was last updated in August 2020.

You will also notice the main accent colour of the app has darkened slightly to help improve contrast and accessibility of the app UI.

I am aware of a backlog of issues on the GitHub repo, and I am working on a roadmap for addressing these issues, along with making the app consistent across all platforms.

Couple of updates this time:

Renaming the App

Renaming the app to something that is more inclusive, and among other things, easier to spell has been discussed a few times now (see <https://indieweb.org/Indigenous#Renaming> for reference). As I now maintain the app across all platforms, and am actively look to make major updates to the app, it seems now is a good time to go ahead with the renaming. Therefore, I will rename the app to the most popular, usable option suggested on the wiki page (currently Indiepass seems to be the most popular) during the create day taking place on Christmas day.

Android App

I have now taken over as the maintainer for the android version of Indigenous, which means I am now maintain the app across each platform. In the long term, this will make it much simpler to maintain and develop the app, and ensure the app look/feel and functionality is consistent across all platforms. As part of this, the app ownership transferred to marksuth.dev on 17/11/21

Push Notifications

As part of this migration, there will be a small update released for the Android version that will remove the push notification functionality for the time being, which will be return at a future date.

Translations

I'm also going to be reworking how translations for the app are handled, and will be launching a new translation project that covers the app on all platforms, rather than just the Android version early next year.

Desktop App

I released a small update to the desktop app last Wednesday that resolved a few security issues with the version of Electron used by the app, and made a few minor tweaks throughout the app. To download the updated version, please visit <https://indigenous.marksuth.dev/downloads>

Site Updates

I have started to expand the project’s site to give dedicated pages for the app on each platform, and have started the process of updating the site copy to better reflect the project's current status. I have also started re-writing the support section of the site to cover help and support specific to the app, and linked out to indieweb.org for more info on more generalised topic, such as explaining what microsub/micropub is.

That's pretty much it for this update, I'll post again when there's anything significant to report on.

Cheers,

Mark

A Few updates for this week:

New Microsite

Launched a microsite for Indigenous on <https://indigenous.marksuth.dev>

As part of the testing process for getting the microsite live, it flagged an issue with the contrast ratio between the shade of orange used throughout. As such I have tweaked the accent colour (#D54049) used across the app and site so that it now passes WCAG for normal text.

The site's content is currently recycled copy from https://indigenous.abode.pub, however I shall be going through and updated, revising and expanding this in due course, in particular things like the privacy policy.

Backend wise, the site is built with Laravel, and as usual, the repo for it can be found on GitHub here: <https://github.com/indiepass/indigenous-site>

App Updates

I have started the process of building the relevant app bundles for each platform for a small scale 1.3.0 release, with the aim to make them available for download on the 10th November.

Although there are many areas of the app that need attention, this update focuses mainly on addressing known security vulnerabilities in Electron and migrating the build process to Electron forge, along with generally updating dependencies used. I have also included the refined accent colour (#D54049) in the app’s CSS, however this won't affect the majority of the existing in-app icons.

As for updates on progressing on the new version of the app, I'm focusing on getting the app UX nailed first, as it’s pointless having an app that no-one can use, even if under the hood it ticks all the boxes.

It's been a few weeks since I took over as maintainer for Indigenous, so I thought it was a good idea for me to give folks a bit of an update.

Although I've not had much time to dedicate on this over the past couple of weeks due to other commitments, I have come up with a list of things I want the app to do, and hopefully result in a vastly more consistent, improved experience across each platform.

As such, I'm essentially going to be rewriting the app from the ground up, making use of Apache Cordova to generate the relevant app bundles for both iOS and Desktop, and using HTML & JS as its core. This means instead of maintaining a disjointed desktop app and iOS app, there'll be 1 core app, that is then bundled and packaged accordingly for it's relevant device and platform.

For the UX of the new app, I've began the process of mapping out the flow of the app, and how everything will slot together, which I'll share once I'm happy with everything.

I am always happy to get feedback from anyone who uses, has tried to use or would want to use the app, and has any suggestions on how to improve things further. The best place to do this would be to submit an issue on the relevant GitHub repo:

Desktop repo: <https://github.com/indiepass/indigenous-desktop/issues>
iOS repo: <https://github.com/indiepass/indigenous-ios/issues>

The way these repos are managed will change slightly as development progresses, with a centralised repo for the base app, with the platform specific repos acting more like satellites. I will however keep an eye on each repo for any issues, pull requests etc.

I intend to do general updates on how things are progressing once every couple of weeks, however things might go quiet from time to time due to other commitments.

Mark

While this version of my site has only been around a few months, I have started, built, gotten bored with, then deleted multiple versions of this site over the years. Thankfully, there’s traces of a few of them on archive.org. So, for the sake of completeness, I'm starting to re-add those posts to this version of the site, with the original datestamps etc. in place. Of course I won't import all my old posts, just the ones that have some interest and aren't just I'm starting a new version of my site again, and am definitely going to stick with it this time type posts.

Should be interesting to see what I can find!

Spurred on by taking ownership of the repos for the desktop and iOS versions of Indigenous, and as I have a couple of days off this week, it has prompted me to give my setup a reset of sorts.

As a start, this version of my site is the result of me wanting to experiment with Hugo, and as a first attempt of have an IndieWeb enriched site. Visibly I'm quite happy with how it looks and will not really be changing much on that front, but if you take a quick look at the head section, you'll find tags and meta data for a whole host of stuff that doesn’t really need to be there.

Added to which this current site doesn't really support POSSE in the way I'd like to, and due to workload etc. I've not really had much of interest to post anyway.

I will still be sticking with Hugo for the site itself, but will be moving to a Ubuntu based droplet on digitalocean, which will give me more flexibility with side projects and behind the scenes type stuff.

This will also be paired with an old HP machine setup with the free version of VMware hypervisor.

My other intention with doing a kind of reset of my own setup, is to document it all as I go along, as being completely honest, whilst I love the idea of the indieweb and the idea of owning your setup, getting it working in a way that works can be confusing as hell at times.

You may have noticed that the ownership for the repos of the desktop and iOS versions of Indigenous were transferred to my github profile this morning.

I have been experimenting with a forked version of both these repos for a while, and noticing that the iOS version was looking for a new maintainer, I got in touch with @swentel who kindly transferred the repos over to me.

What's Next?

As I'm sure most people are when they see that something they use moves to a new maintainer they've got every right to be a bit cautious about what they are going to do to a project, and whether they're going to destroy something you actively use for a reason. Which is fair enough, I’ve felt the same about stuff I’ve used in the past, and wouldn’t expect others to be any different.

Initially, not much will change, and it will likely be another month or so before I start on releasing updates for anything.

I want to get a good idea as to how the current codebase for each stands, what works, what doesn’t and what kind of works but it’s a bit rough around the edges. As a first move I want to make sure they both play nicely with the current versions of their relevant dependencies and patch any vulnerabilities stemming from those.

Once I'm happy with the baseline of each, I'm going to look to get them up to parity with the Android version of Indigenous which is still being maintained and developed by < a href="https://realize.be/">@swentel and can be found here.

Of course, if you have any suggestions, or ideas, please feel free to open an issue on either one of the repos, and I will try and be proactive in getting back to folk.

All that remains now is for me to get stuck in I guess!

Mark

Since first hearing about the IndieWeb movement on a podcast about 10 years ago, I have made a couple of attempts at setting up my own POSSE site, and getting my head round the principles, and tech involved in getting myself setup, and using the IndieWeb and all it has to offer.

However, my previous attempts to getting this kind of site setup have fallen flat, and for various other reasons paired by my online presence. This time however, I have a shiny new domain (marksuth.dev) that feels like going all-in on embracing the IndieWeb is the right move.

As I slowly get myself setup, and settled into all things IndieWeb, I intend to document my adventures, in the hopes of helping a few out along the way.

If nothing else, I'll spend the next couple of weeks smoothing over the rough edges to the site and see where this goes!

Mark

In 2012, my Uncle suffered a stroke and the impact it's had on his life has been huge.

In support of him, my sister ran the 2013 Great North Run in aid of The Stroke Association . When she started her training for it, I told her that if she reached her fundraising target, and completed the run I'd join her next year. She did both. Bollocks.

After applying for my place and getting my guaranteed place this morning (18th Feb) I am now doing the 2104 Great North Run in aid of The Stroke Association.

So far, my training for this has consisted of installing a load of fitness apps on my phone and finding where I put my trainers.

I'm going to be blogging about my progress between now and September and I'll be trying out a number of apps and gadgets along the way. Here goes nothing.

If you'd like to sponsor me, please click the Sponsor Me button to donate via Just Giving, anything you can give will be greatly appreciated.

After much messing around in Dreamweaver I have finally gotten around to sorting out my own site for once. There is no use having hosting, domains and all the rest of it for something that just gets ignored by the person building it.

I have already drafted a number of articles and posts that I shall be posting on a fairly regular basis from now on, covering a number of topics, ranging from tutorials to any other nonsense I feel like publishing for all to see.

At the back of my house, there's a railway bridge that sometime last year we were told was going to have something done to it so that they could transport bigger things under it or something like that.

Several months later and they are STILL at it, and as they do any major work overnight, they use floodlights which nicely light my room up and stop me getting any sleep.

It is through this lack of sleep that I start writing stupid rambling blog posts on the pathetic excuse for a website which when I read it back at a later date I find that none of this makes sense and because I typed this all out on my tablet random letters keep appearing in words and the spelling is truly crap.

Seeing as I am using this blog more and more for this type of thing I think I might change a few things including shifting my portfolio of sites etc to a separate bit and away from this drivel.

This was originally posted to a previous version of marksuth.com in January 2011.

When I first started this site, I had all the best of intentions to make regular, meaningful blog posts with some actual purpose to them. As it turned out, most of my posts from last year consist of my next post will be worthwhile bollocks.

Starting this year having got rid of a lot of stuff and sorted out some major problems elsewhere, I can finally give this little site some attention.

Over Christmas I got a Samsung Galaxy Tab, which has probably been the best addition to my life in a long time and, twinned with the Springpad app, I’m finally getting everything in order and should hopefully stay that way.

Seeing as I now have approximately 4 or 5 different webcams in my possession I am going to give vlogging a go as so far all I’ve filmed and posted on YouTube is of a Pacman toy my aunt and uncle gave me as a present.

In other news, I had an unfortunate incident involving my right thumb and a corned beef tin which resulted in a trip to A&E. Never before have I realised how much I use my now bandaged thumb for things like opening packets, button pressing and writing and how much I suck at doing things left handed.

As I am always looking at new ways to tweak, break, and consequentiality fix this website, I shall be unleashing the latest round of modifications to this site over the next few days or so, I'm hoping to move the site away from being a blog with a site attached to it to more of a site with a blog if you get my meaning.

Aside from that, I am continuing to refine my online presence and hopefully get to a point where I have one service that I use with appropriate content aggregated where required so as to keep in tune with friends on Facebook etc. In general, my move to the cloud is progressing well, with my email server now being a hosted exchange service which suits me exceedingly well. Outside of this, I make good use of the Windows Live Essentials suite for things like document sync and remote access courtesy of Windows Live Mesh and SkyDrive, Windows Live Messenger for chatting with people whether they are on Facebook chat or WLM thanks to the level of integration. The other great tool within this mix is Windows Live Writer which I am currently using to write this blog post.

At present, my utilisation of cloud based services has generally being through a desktop client, for example my email aggregates through Outlook, courtesy of Microsoft Exchange. There are a couple of reasons I chose this approach, partly due to the offline caching it provides and cross device integration it provides between my laptop, PC and phone but also that for one reason or another, there were faults or annoyances in other services such as Gmail and Hotmail that were enough of an issue to sway me otherwise.

On the Hotmail side of things, the single issue that is preventing me from fully switching is the incompatibility of their ActiveSync implementation with Android that prevents me from syncing my contacts, emails and calendar with my phone, making it impractical for the way in which I intend to use it.

On the flip side of this however, the reason I decided against going for the Google option was due to the requirement of a continual internet connection on the desktop. Although I usually have an internet connection on whichever device I am using, the requirement of this, and the requirement of a separate tool running in the background in order for contact and calendar entries to sync irritated me sufficiently to go to a hosted exchange option.

Whilst this does cost approximately £3 a month, for the benefit it gives me, I feel this is a price worth paying to get what I require. I will continue to look at all the available options, for example I will try Office365 when it becomes available to see if that provides everything I need and so on.

This was originally posted to a previous version of marksuth.com in December 2010

Over the past couple of years, I have been making more and more use of cloud based services. As one of my uni modules focuses around this topic, I've decided to see just how much of my daily life can be done through the cloud.

Up until the new wave of Windows Live Essentials I’ve been using Live Mesh to keep all my various documents etc. in check across different PCs and also accessing the odd file when required via the web. I've since adjusted this to use Windows Live Mesh (Sameish name, sameish product, but in a way different).

I am more than aware of the Google Docs way of doing things, but I have always found myself drifting back to Windows Live/Microsoft based services for one reason or another.

When it comes to doing work, OneNote's SkyDrive integration has been exceedingly handy, especially when taking lecture notes. The other added bonus to this is that it allows for me to not lose notes etc. and makes retrieving them much easier as well.

Personal entertainment has changed a great deal over the past few years, with services such as Spotify, making it easier than ever to realise how many crap versions of Bohemian Rhapsody exists (Pan-pipes anyone?) and of course there’s the BBC iPlayer, which has become my normal method of watching Top Gear or listening to the Radio. I mean, who needs a £1 FM Radio from Poundland when you can spend upwards of £400 on a PC to listen to it on the net eh?

However, with this entire integration means it's harder to escape things when you go out. More than once have I found myself sat in the pub helping someone fix their iTunes library via emails synced to my phone or fixing some rouge setting in WordPress.

I'll probably make another post later on that makes more sense than this, possibly including pretty pictures if I can be bothered, depicting a personal cloud for a uni student in the UK.

This was originally posted to a previous version of marksuth.com in October 2010

Seeing as the beta of Internet Explorer 9 is released today, I've been playing around with the styling elements of the site, and either making things look generally better and more polished, for example the shiny new date blocks to the left of these blog posts and the refined menu bar. I don't doubt I'll tweak about some more over the next few days or so, for example I'm looking for a suitable replacement for the background image and the sidebar needs sorting out but aside from that, it should be back to business as usual sometime soon.

This was originally posted to a previous version of marksuth.com in September 2010

As I own an iPod, I have the misfortune of using iTunes to sync my music collection from my PC to said iPod. Although this can be done using apps like Winamp, I've never really got on with it and it just generally irritates me.

However, now that this shiny new version of iTunes has been released, the newness of it being made apparent by a new icon and volume slider, has been released, I think I may start getting back into the habit of using good old Winamp, even if it's little systray app irritates the hell out of me which could probably solved if I could be arsed to untick boxes when installing.

Aside from the general dislike of iTunes as a Windows app, there are many other aspects of this software that I just do not like. First of which is the way that by default it places all your music in a sub-sub-folder of your music folder making it a pain when using other applications, the smattering of helper applications it insists on installing, the worst of which being Quicktime, which by any means is the bastard child of codec based runtimes.

The single worst new feature of iTunes 10 however is their attempt at Social Networking; Ping. This spam magnet of a feature has no use outside of the iTunes eco system as you can only use it within iTunes. It's as if they looked at last.fm, got as far as making it work within their own application then gave up adding the ability for it to interact with the outside world. The thing is intended essentially for fans of a band or artist to follow them and get the latest info on gigs, Single releases etc. Which is definitely nothing like twitter, facebook, myspace, bebo, last.fm or anything of that nature.

In my opinion it's time that iTunes goes the way that Real Player has and just become some little niche media player that no-one really uses or cares about.

This was originally posted to a previous version of marksuth.com in September 2010

Leo Laporte's recent rant on social media has got me thinking about my own approach to social networking and was the main motivation for me to get my site properly setup for blogging and to act as a personal hub for my various accounts on sites such as Flickr, Twitter, lastfm and everything else.

Whilst I'm just a uni student who doesn't bear any real importance in the grand scheme of things, based on the various projects I've worked on previously. Aside from which, it's probably best I try this sort of thing on my own site first rather than putting widgets and aggregated content on a site I'm building for someone; only to have it break their site down the line.

Having sorted through the various accounts, I have become aware that through one way or another I have 9 different email addresses. as a way to combat this I’ve created a new GMail account which I intend to use as an aggregator for all my various inboxes and just use my @marksuth.com email address to send said mail to the world courtesy of fiddling around with the settings. Using a GMail account ties in well with my HTC Wildfire, being an Android phone and all. Streamlining everything down into this one account has also allowed me to have a good cleanup of my contacts, merging duplicates and the like so I can be sure which Dave I’m sending something to instead of have a lucky dip of 4 of them.

This was originally posted to a previous version of marksuth.com in August 2010

Seeing as the cesspool of files that is my PC is complaining of low disc space, I've decided to have a good clearout of files, software and generally my approach to organising files.

Bearing this in mind, I'm going to take the chance to look at what software is installed on my PC, for example I have 5 or 6 different media players installed, a number of different web browsers and a smattering of different PC maintenance tools and runtimes.

Having scanned my pc using belarc advisor, I attacked the list of installed software with a good old highlighter pen and have got rid of about half of what I have installed on my machine.

Thankfully, when it comes to reinstalling everything, I can simply use a combination of Microsoft Update and ninite to install pretty much everything I need, aside for a couple of major apps like office and creative suite.

This was originally posted to a previous version of marksuth.com in August 2010

Welcome to the newly redesigned marksuth.com!

After a couple of days hard tweaking, the new site is finally live and ready to be unleashed upon the world. My plans for this site is to act as a central hub for all my various activities and project both on the net and in real life. I’m currently in the process of writing adding new content to fill the various pages, and polishing Spotify playlists in order to post them in the Misc section of the site.

Mark

This was originally posted to a previous version of marksuth.com in August 2010

I am currently in the process of making a number of different playlists each along a different theme or purpose. As I complete each playlist, I'll post it here and will look into making a last.fm version as well.

If you haven't heard of Spotify before or haven’t used it, you are truly missing out.

Spotify is a free music streaming application that is available to users in the UK and a number of other countries around Europe. I’ve been using it for over a year now, with it pretty much replacing traditional media players such as iTunes or Windows Media Player.

This was originally posted on marksuth.com in April 2010.