Some website updates I have been meaning to do for a while

I now direct folks to this site when they ask me for a website or a write-up of something that I have done that they would be interested in. Granted, I haven’t posted much here, but I usually do when someone asks me. Last time, someone asked me to write about the DC503 Party Badge because I wasn’t at DefCon this year to talk about it. While I wrote the article, I was lamenting the sad state of my “web presence”. I am on vacation now with no family members bothering me, so I took the opportunity to make some updates.

The first thing that was wrong was that since I updated my Ubuntu OS to Bionic I had lost the jekyll gem. Trying to install the jekyll gem led to the realization that I was running a very very old version of ruby. Trying to use rvm to install a newer version of ruby led to this weird error about Google changing it’s ‘Origin’ from ‘Google, Inc.’ to ‘Google LLC’ with no real way of correcting this (Google is clearly not an LLC). Some using of Google’s flagship product lead to this StackOverflow page. I tried the rvm autolibs disable one and that seemed to work. After updating several other dependencies, I got jekyll to work on my local machine.

Next, I moved some content around. I haven’t cooked anything interesting in a long long time, so there was nothing in the ‘food’ section to write about. I replaced that one with ‘overthinking’ as I still muse and ponder about the world around me. I figured I may be able to sleep better if I wrote it all down.

I haven’t made anything interesting the craft section either. It made more sense to me to put that information in blog posts anyway. So I moved that part to ‘code’. I write a good bit of code for work and in my spare time, so I figured I could use a space to write about what I learned there. That made me rename ‘Engineering’ to ‘Things’. I couldn’t think of a better name for the electronics projects that I work on as the term ‘electronics’ often indicate commercial electronics and I don’t have much interest in that unless I want to make them do something else or something they are not supposed to do.

Lastly, I updated my font to something more readable…to me anyway. My eyesight has been slowly going bad, so I have been trying to make all of the things I read on screen more readable. To be honest, I hadn’t noticed that I was using a serif font until I went on this website overhaul. I hope that it is more readable to others as well.

I spent half a vacation day on this but it was well worth it, I think. A long overdue change.