BurgeonLab: Notes

Writing Break and WP Migration

2026-09-10T00:21:10+08:00

Writing Break and WP Migration

I’m still mentally recovering from Blaugust. 😅 During this writing break, instead of writing words, I’m writing HTML, CSS, JS and even some TypeScript/React Components (that’s for Quartz, which is confusing as hell TBH!)

Site Updates

On this site, last week I fixed:

Word count calculation mistake on the statistics page
Dreaded FOUC issue (not the first time)
- Fixed by removing the media="print" onload="this.media='all'" trick
New SVG image shortcode (used to add the two SVGs in my Blaugust 2026 recap post)
- This SVG image highlighted a XML bug I had which cut my full-text content short—which is fixed now!
- And another XML bug (thanks Chris for reporting) fixed for full-content disappearing after
  code blocks.
Refreshed the RSS/Atom feeds table on /⁠subscribe
- Found out that my preferred feed reader, FluentReader on macOS has been revived after almost a 3 year hiatus!
Saved the KeepAndroidOpen banner script (trimmed unused styles) locally, so it doesn’t require third party access.
Fixed date parsing error in JSON-LD schema
Updated my beloved heatmap calendar rather significantly:
- Instead of just including content over 300 words, it now include all activity
- Days with multiple entries are depicted with a circle
- Moved the calendar to the homepage
- New group for very short content (under 100 words)

Heatmap Calendar

The calendar feature is one of my absolute favorite things on BurgeonLab. ⁂ I actually need to update my guide and share the docs + source code which got abandoned part way. Definitely something I want to accomplish but I have too many things I want to do! 😅

Quartz Digital Garden Updates

A big task I’m working on in the last few days is to deploy my Quartz digital garden secondary site, as my Hostinger WordPress plan has expired yesterday. I have to admit I left it a bit late; I was ironing out the final kinks.

It is taking longer than expected with my complete lack of experience with TS overrides and custom .TS and .TSX files to automate OG images, for example. I don’t really like how heavy the backend is with Quartz and as Lesley (a fellow Indieweb blogger who also uses Quartz) pointed out, it is not as customizable compared to other static site generators and can lead to repeated headaches from Git merge conflicts every time updates are fetched upstream.

Possible Downsides of Quartz

This is indeed wise advice as I find both statements very true—I already had one of those Git merge nightmares having not updated for two months… But alas, I am going to push on because I already changed my mind three times (!?) after deciding to leave WordPress; I was set on ClassicPress (with SemPress theme) at first, then went to Zensical, and now Quartz.

Obsidian Prep

I proceeded to creating a fresh new Obsidian vault for my public digital garden site. Starting from scratch was very refreshing, with no plugins and default settings for everything! It wasn’t long before I reinstalled Templater though as I find the ‘Create note from template’ hotkey indispensable. I made two new templates with Quartz in mind, where I am trying to create a path of least resistance so that publishing to it will be as simple as possible.

Deploying Quartz

What remains is how the site will be deployed. I might rely on SourceHut Builds like how I deploy this site (on git push) or on some sort of crontab so that it is automated. The Obsidian vault (Markdown content) will likely be synced to my Android mobile device via Syncthing so that I can access the notes and write anywhere.

But Deployment and CI/CD is not yet the main issue as I’m facing some hosting/routing issues which I shared in yesterday’s note after migrating the “live” domain to Bunny.net Storage.

Anyhow, I hope I can sort it out soon and get into writing mode, as I really look forward to making notes for my new digital garden!

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Bunny Edge Rules for Quartz and New Supporter

2026-09-09T23:58:07+08:00

Bunny Edge Rules for Quartz and New Supporter

Thank you, kind stranger, who used my Bunny.net referral code on August 30, 2026! You’re my second successful referral to one of my favourite web services. Appreciate you supporting my web hosting fees.

Quartz SSG with Bunny Storage

I actually just migrated my secondary WordPress site from Hostinger to Bunny Storage and working on getting the routing working because Quartz outputs its HTML files a particular way which I am not used to (it is in two different formats):

Flat .html files for everything e.g. public/about.html
Directory index.html for all folder pages e.g. public/blog/index.html

Since I’m not hosting the site on a web server with Nginx or Caddy, this means that I have to rely on Bunny Edge Rules to add some functionality. Edge Rules was always (and still is to be honest) a bit confusing to me, but they’re super useful as they can do things like Override Origin URL (an action) that is triggered by different filters (aka condition).

For example, an Edge rule I have is to add .html suffix to the Origin URL {{path}}.html when it’s any page that doesn’t have a file extension AND NOT the homepage.

This works for everything except folder directory pages. In the case of the link to the blog archive, going to .com/blog with the above Edge Rule, it will apply the override origin URL and it becomes .com/blog.html which leads to a 404 page not found. The page is actually at .com/blog/index.html.

At the moment, I have only two folder directory pages: /notes and /blog, which is easy enough to add as a Edge Rule first (priority matters) before the “Add .html suffix rule”. It does the same Action of “Override Origin URL” but adds /index.html suffix instead of just .html, {{path}}/index.html when the Request URL is either /blog or /notes.

The problem is that if I eventually develop the digital garden, I will have more than just two directory / folder pages. I wouldn’t want to keep modifying the rule just to make sure the directory pages don’t 404.

I actually sent a support ticket to see what the Bunny team suggests. Perhaps they will say Middleware scripts (which I have zero experience in) or some wildcard directory filter? I certainly hope it can be worked around somehow!

Update

I’ve written a guide on how to fix this issue, with indeed a Middleware Edge script, in the end. Hope it’s helpful for future Quartz users.

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D2 Diagrams Lives On

2026-09-07T23:30:01+08:00

D2 Diagrams Lives On

One of my favorite open source tools, D2: Declarative Diagramming, is now under Hack Club! This makes D2 a fully open source and non-profit project. Thank you Alex for making this awesome tool available for everyone in the long run.

I’m really thrilled because there was some concern about whether or not this amazing project is still alive over at GitHub discussions (similarly on Discord). Sometime last month(?), I remember seeing Alex respond on Discord that he’s in the final stages of getting D2 into Hack Club… and it’s finally complete! I appreciate Alex’s take on AI in relation to D2 too that he mentions in the announcement (link below). Hope the codebase stays a “healthy dose of human”.

Personally, I was a tad bit concerned about the future of this project that I have become dependent on. I would have hated if I had to change tools because I’ve invested time to learning how D2 works and got my workflow all set up. That’s the underlying risk I guess for relying too heavily on any single tool…

In case you didn’t know, there is a VSCodium / VSCode extension and also an Obsidian plugin that is handy when testing different styles and working on .D2 files as it generates the image in real-time. Coming from Mermaid JS which is perhaps the more popular diagramming language, I was grateful that both apps I use daily (Obsidian and VSCodium) both have official D2 plugins.

All my Open Graph images on this site are created with D2 and I’ve started using it instead of Mermaid for flow chart diagrams in posts that benefit from a visual representation (⁂ will convert existing diagrams when I have time). I think it is a better tool than Mermaid (especially when Mermaid is pushing AI straight in your face). Not to mention the syntax is easier to grasp! Highly recommend playing around with it if you’re looking for a diagramming language.

Official D2 Announcement
Another project, Ghostty, which also got fiscally sponsored by Hack Club
Open Source at Hack Club
Comparing diagramming languages
D2 in action: Building professional architecture diagrams step-by-step | Gijs Reijn

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Blaugust 2026: Final Word

2026-08-31T23:56:42+08:00

Blaugust 2026: Final Word

James, a fellow blogger and friend, kindly offered me a chance to guest post on his blog: with words, wonder, so that I could tick off one more task in the Community Builder award list. This means I achieved the goal! I will try to contribute more to the Blaugust community next year for sure. Thank you, James for the opportunity!

If you want to read my guest post, it’s on James’s site now: Chinese Idioms (Guest post by Naty). Do check out all the great writing on his blog while you’re there!

This note is definitely the last post of Blaugust2026! Good night y’all.

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Some Thoughts on Advice

2026-08-31T19:39:05+08:00

Some Thoughts on Advice

This post is in response to Blaugust2026 Week 5’s Group Project:

What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given? What is the best advice you’ve ever given to someone else?

Best Advice Received

It’s hard to think of a single piece of advice that overrules all the rest, but here are some that I follow:

“This too shall pass.”
- Try to zoom out and look at the big picture once in a while.
“You can’t rush life; everyone is running on their own individual timeline.”
- Also, try not to compare yourself to others.
“The most trustworthy and reliable friend is yourself.”
- If you need to vent about someone or something; try writing it down in a journal and reviewing it once you’ve calmed down. You never know if one day your “best friend” might no longer be a friend and now they know all your “secrets”.
“Don’t be dependent on others.”
- Learn to be happy being alone, stay independent, and try to solve your own problems (but ask for guidance when you genuinely need it).
“Great achievements come in tiny steps.”
- Break down big tasks into bite-sized ones and make completing tasks a habit to achieve your goals.

Best Advice Given

I wouldn’t call my advice the “best” by any means, but I’ve given it to more than one person, so I’ll share it here:

“Instead of putting things you want to do in a bucket list, time block them into your calendar.”
- Seeing the task in your calendar can help motivate you to complete the task.
“Make everything important a habit.”
- Humans are creatures of habit. If you want to accomplish something long term, make it a routine. Use a habit tracker to help you get started with reminders; after about a month, it should become ingrained in your daily routine.
“Listen and think before you speak.”
- Personally, I am more of a listener and I believe the act of listening and thinking is more important than the actual expression.
“Step out of your comfort zone often.”
- It gives us a chance to grow, toughen up, challenges us to problem-solve, and improve as a person.
“Remember to love yourself.”
- Some people (especially carers) forget to look after themselves after giving all their energy loving others.
“Check what free resources are available at your local library.”
- In HK, the public library is free for all citizens and I find the e-resources to be super useful. It is perfect for self-improvement and learning, or even just casual reading. Taking all those short moments in the day, where nothing too productive can be done like queuing or commuting, to read is a great use of time in my opinion! Never stop learning. 📚

Thoughts on Advice in General

Both giving and taking advice is an art in itself. A giver of advice needs to be mindful of the situation of the receiver, not being forceful, ensuring the advice isn’t bad which might make matters worse. A receiver of advice needs to know how to adapt it to their own circumstances, understand that not every piece of advice applies to them, and not to follow advice blindly.

Sometimes though, when a friend comes to you for “advice”; they might just need a safe space for you to listen empathetically and can work it out themselves. At the end of the day, advice is a very subjective thing, and the quality can be extremely variable based on the amount of life experiences one has had—which is why I tend to err on the conservative side of giving advice: give it only when explicitly asked.

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Starting Over With the Pi

2026-08-28T21:29:44+08:00

Starting Over With the Pi

Since Oct of last year, I haven’t had time to reinstate my self-hosted apps like Calibre, Miniflux, Navidrome, etc on my little Pi homelab. During this time, I missed using Navidrome the most (I resorted to listening only on my Mac); with the only thing running on it being Indiekit with Docker.

Neater Installs

But that changed yesterday! After chatting with a new sysadmin friend online, I got a huge surge of motivation to fix my home server to at least what I had before. My previous setup was pretty horrendous to be honest, I didn’t know any better, and the whole Pi was in a disarray of software installed either by:

direct / bare metal
via dietpi-software
via Docker (using Portainer)

Docker Management

This time, I am setting up everything in containers with compose files. I am also dropping Portainer for just Lazydocker in the meantime. Portainer felt too heavy for me. TBH, I want to try using Dokploy but not sure if it’s an overkill doing beginner homelab things on my 8GB Pi (it only requires 2GB RAM and 30GB storage which my Pi meets). Arcane is also on my radar.

I can’t find much on people using Dokploy with Raspberry Pis except for this post by Mariano (but they didn’t specify what spec Pi they have). They also run DietPi so that’s nice to know!

Homelab Start Page

My choice of dashboard will remain with Homer as I already had the config set and don’t want to waste time customizing. I still have about four more services I have to restore—but everything is going well so far. I now know how to use Caddy to manage the services with ports mapping to the individual containers and everything will be available within my Tailnet.

When I tried working on this headless Pi project the first time, I didn’t know how to access the server outside from home. With Tailscale and Caddy this time round, I’m very happy to get access when I’m not home!

Restoring Files on the Pi

Back in the day, when I first started messing with the Pi 4B, I was hoping to transfer files directly via USB onto the USB SATA SSD boot drive from my Mac (my primary computer). But super newbie me didn’t realize that ext4 is not compatible on Macs. Rsync saves the day! With my much better Internet connection now (LAN directly from my Mac Mini to the Pi), I can very easily copy directories over with no hassle. For example, my top-level music folder was copied over from my Mac to the Pi using: rsync -avz --progress -e "ssh -p " "/mac/path/to/music/" username@:/mnt/dietpi_userdata/music/.

Remember to always add an -n (dry run) flag to double-check before running such tasks. Last night, I let it run overnight, and it copied around 200GB of music over—no problem! I was too excited and forgot to check when it finish / how long it took in total though. :P

Other than using rsync I also like using Syncthing. So I got the Pi and folders setup again so that I have a “dropbox” folder on my Mac that can quickly share files to the Pi and vice versa.

Closing

Self-hosting is a great way to learn and I personally find it extremely rewarding. Being able to run things on hardware you own (or a subscription to a VPS) and having full access and control of where your data lives is incredible. That’s the reason I got into it in the first place.

Nowadays, with the RAMpocalypse, it doesn’t really make sense though to buy a Pi to tinker with since everything is so expensive now. But if you have existing hardware though, I highly recommend you playing with some Docker containers, or even Kubernetes / Ansible if you like that kinda stack more (I don’t know much about those, but one day I want to try!) My favourite place to discover services to self-host is this awesome-list.

If you want to read about my beginnings with homelabbing, see my first post in the Homelab Beginner series: Booting a Pi with SSD.

That’s all the updates I have on my homelab situation. I will finish setting up the rest of the services soon and the next thing will probably to try either Arcane or Dokploy to see if the Pi can cope with the extra burden. A nice monitoring app would be nice too, but there are so many to choose from (Grafana, Prometheus, Uptime Kuma)? What is your favourite monitoring dashboard?

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Mac Mini 2018 i7 Hand-me-down

2026-08-24T01:00:38+08:00

Mac Mini 2018 i7 Hand-me-down

I’m really excited because a mutual friend said they’re willing to give me their retired 2018 Mac Mini (which was originally used for music production). What’s extremely exciting is the fact it’s a maxed out model with 64GB DDR4 RAM (I’ve never owned a computer with over 16GB of RAM!) with 2TB SSD. Feeling extremely grateful for his generosity. 🥰

Did a quick search to see some issues about the T2 security chip maybe affecting the installation of Linux though so I need to research a lot more. It won’t be in my hands until October, so I have some time. I installed Linux Mint on my old 2012 Macbook Air 13" (maxed out spec) with no issues but that one doesn’t have the T2 chip.

Running Linux on Mac hardware has been a wonderful experience on the MBA; although the battery is dead (need to use it plugged in at all times), there’s no bulging physically and the system runs super smoothly. Sure there’s some fan noise and it gets a bit warm, but if I’m just doing some basic web dev stuff like IDE + browser + hugo server, I don’t feel any throttling whatsoever with the 8GB RAM.

The Mac Mini M1 2020 I’m using for the last few years with 16GB RAM is often hitting yellow memory limits. Perhaps it is the way Apple Silicon works, but I feel 16GB is not enough for me to do photo editing and sometimes my many tabs (hundreds) causes it to hit memory swap. This “new” 2018 Mac Mini should feel extra powerful with 64GB RAM!

This gift is a dream come true for a person interested in self-hosting; I can’t wait to learn and do much more than the little Raspberry Pi 4B 8GB since the journey started (TBH it’s been very good for me and I’ve never hit limits). I really like reviving and using old tech hardware because it makes me feel like I’m pushing the boundaries of what it is designed to do and reducing e-waste is always a good thing!

Of course, when it arrives, I’ll be blogging about it! I’m thinking what distro to install/dual-boot… I am most familiar with Linux Mint (Ubuntu-based) and DietPi OS (Debian-based). Is it worth trying a new distro like Arch/CachyOS or completely different like NixOS?

Just a few weeks ago I was tempted to subscribe to my first VPS (again), but I think with this little powerhouse coming; I will refrain. Do you use any of these or have a preference of distros for running a home server? If you had such hardware, what would you want to self host? I’m all ears! 🙏

Resources

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About the Revamp

2026-08-22T20:12:05+08:00

About the Revamp

If you’ve been to my site before—you may have noticed a bit of a change since yesterday.

Last night, I pushed a lot of features and stylistic changes to my site (over 100 commits?!) It was long overdue and I’m feeling happy I got it done (but not too happy it was done in the month of August when I should have been focused more on writing for Blaugust). The style choices takes from some of the decisions made at the beginning of the year. I want to remain true to the current theme because I’ve grown to love it.

Even though I didn’t get to work the 100% CSS rewrite I keep meaning to do (it’s horribly messy & override hell due to previously not forking the Hugo theme), I did manage to cut out a lot of wrong use of selectors, simplify rules, and also worked on repeating myself less in the HTML partials used around the site.

I think everything should be working but if anything is broken, I’ll be super thankful if you’d let me know!

Features and Style Changes

The changelog will be updated soon with before / after screenshots. In the mean time, here are most of the changes, in no particular order:

Completely revamp the top section of pages: link to return to previous section, H1, and metadata. Date, tags, word count and read time is now hidden in a details element (with the table of content also in there if the page has TOC turned on)
New arrow icons with pixelated design by Pinhead
Remove JS dependency for light/dark mode! This was a big change. Now using prefers-color-theme
Remove drop down menu on top navigation; use an anchor link instead, that opens a details element on the home page which acts like a quick menu
Improve look of sparklines on the stats page
New 404 page
New layout (2x2 grid) for latest weeknotes and blog section on homepage
New ‘Cite this page’ link popover instead of distracting share buttons inside the page metadata details element or at the start of the footer (if the page doesn’t have have a metadata section)
New simplified admonition styles (reduced a lot of redundant CSS!)
Improve a11y by reducing the colour contrast overall on the site (both themes), from 12 to ~7 contrast ratio
Simplify ‘Responses’ and ‘Support’ sections
Use page template for single notes (example)

Bug Fixes

Bullet point now shows at the first row of multi-line list items
‘Phantom’ hover styles on mobile fixed with @media (hover: hover) and (pointer: fine)
Content layout shift (CLS) reduced for iine upvote button partial by setting height explicitly

Pending

After removing the JS light/dark mode, I noticed a bit of FOUC; which will take me some time to figure out the cause

Closing

What triggered me do do this much change? I gather it was mainly because 1) the drop down menu getting overly long and 2) the great eye opening page Chris created about HTML. I think the 404 page is my favourite change and the second being the minimal metadata + table of contents. What do you like or dislike? Let me know! 😉

Now that this is done and dusted, I better get back to Blaugust and catch up before the end of the month!

[For up-to-date content, visit BurgeonLab directly (XML feeds don't fetch updates in real-time). For topic-specific feeds, visit /subscribe. Thanks for reading my blog using a RSS reader!]

Hot Weather Effects

2026-08-11T18:08:55+08:00

Hot Weather Effects

The temperatures are stifling, with an ongoing record-breaking heatwave due to the effect of nearby typhoons with temperatures reaching 38°C in some areas of HK. Indoor temperature when the AC is off reached 39°C in my room despite cross airflow from fans and opened windows.

Air Conditioning

I’ve always been a person who tries to reduce air-con use when I can, inspired by the infamous HK meteorologist and environmentalist, the ex-Hong Kong Observatory Director Lam Chiu Ying, who uses only fans to keep his home cool.

Because I tend to get cold easily, being in an air conditioned place for long periods doesn’t exactly feel good to me. Fans, windows, and the dehumidifier are my friends. If only lüften would bring in some cooler fresh air in the mornings… because it doesn’t in this kind of weather; the temperatures overnight remain high.

There are huge, undeniable consequences of global warming and climate change. Persistent, unrelenting high temperatures cause damage to the wel-being and health of everyone—both physically and mentally. I hope everyone stays cool, hydrated, and aware of the dangers of the scorching heat!

General Tips

Make use of evaporation to cool down by misting
Try to get some crosswind air flow going
If possible, use a dehumidifier to dry the environment as it helps with evaporation of sweat, cooling the body
Get some reusable ice packs to help the body cool down initially when going to sleep, around the neck, forehead, or under armpits
A fan near the end of the bed that oscillates can help cool the feet/lower extremities
Consider getting some window films that help block heat from entering the home and close the blinds/curtains
Turn off unused electrical appliances as they generate heat
Have a few more cold water showers during the day
Get some isotonic sport drinks or oral rehydration salts for when sweating becomes excessive to replenish salts lost
If you start to have symptoms of heat stroke, please get help immediately—it can be life threatening.

Last Minute Decision: Blaugust 2026

2026-08-01T23:51:59+08:00

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Last Minute Decision: Blaugust 2026

Less than 30 minutes before August 1st ends (I better write this note quickly!) I have decided to participate in this rather infamous annual blogging event called Blaugust, created by, sadly the late, @belghast (Mark Temple).

I’m aiming to get at least the Bronze and Community Builder award (see below for a list of awards).

What?

During Blaugust, in August, try to write on your blog, every day for all 31 days, or with some sort of regularity, or randomly! This event is about creation and writing, so any post is better than none!

Don’t feel too stressed about it; the rules have become more lenient over the years so more people can participate without needing to churn out 1000+ words every day. There’s no word limit per se, but for me personally, I’ll be aiming for a minimum of 300 words before I count a piece of writing to be part of Blaugust 2026.

If you have no clue where to start, there is actually an official schedule you could use (optionally!) as a guide:

And if that isn’t enough, there are also themes/group projects and prompts (again optional) provided by Krikket if you’re feeling stuck.

Why?

If you want to build up some motivation to start writing on your blog, this is definitely a fun way to get started and to meet fellow bloggers! I am in another year-long challenge called 100DaysToOffload, and that has really given me the excitement and encouragement to just write and forget about the insecurities I have. I think Blaugust will have similar effects and it is a nice way to keep Mark’s creation living on despite his absence (RIP @belghast).

How?

Sign up with this form and I’ll see you in the Blaugust-sphere! Check out social media tags like #blaugust2026 or #blaugust on Mastodon (or Bluesky).

To learn more about the details about this event, check out Krikket’s official post about Blaugust 2026.

Who?

Everyone who blogs or writes is invited! Wilhelm / @tagn has a list of all the participants this year at the bottom of their Welcome to Blaugust entry if you want to check out what others are writing this month. Giving likes, leaving a comment or sharing posts you enjoy is appreciated! Everyone can participate; readers and writers alike.

Note About AI

This blogging event is about writing, creating, and sharing. Using AI for purely content generation is not allowed. Please see Krikket’s “Use of AI as a Blaugust Participant” section.

Resources

Some extra links if you want to learn more:

Media kit for Blaugust 2026
Another informational / welcome post by MagiWasTaken
If you use Discord, there’s a Blaugust Discord
One of the OG prompt list by the creator of Blaugust
Blaugust Mastodon account

Checklist for Awards

This is mainly for myself, but feel free to check out what you can achieve and set a goal for yourself! 💪

Core Challenge Awards

Newbie Blogger Award: Join Blaugust for the very first time by signing up.
Bronze Award: Publish > 5 blog entries during August 2026.
Silver Award: Publish > 15 blog entries during August 2026.
Gold Award: Publish > 25 blog entries during August 2026.
Rainbow Diamond Award: Beat the original challenge (publishing 31 blog entries daily during August 2026) or more!

Community Builder Award

Complete at least 3 to get the Community Build Award:

Make a post on your blog on or before August 1st, 2026 inviting other bloggers to participate in Blaugust. Make sure you link the signup form.
Make at least 5 posts directly inspired by a post by another Blaugust participant. Each of these posts should link back to the post in question.
Engage with other Blaugust participants at least once per week. Read posts, leave comments, join discussions in the Blaugust Discord and share posts written by others on social media.
Be a guest blogger on another Blaugust participant’s blog – or have someone else guest post on yours! (James invited me to write about Chinese idioms on his blog on the last day of Blaugust2026—allowing me to complete the Community Builder Award! 🥰)
At least once in the month of August, join an existing “Group Project”. Or you can create your own by choosing a topic, find other bloggers, and each post your own take on that topic on the same day. (Note: The Community Builder’s group projects are the questions in the weekly hero image/graphic, of which I have transcribed below.)

Group Projects

Week 1: Tell us all about your very first blog! (Not written in week 1, but the AuguStory post has a similar theme.)
Week 2: If you could have one magical or superpower, what would you choose and use it for?
Week 3: What creative endeavour have you always wanted to try, and who do you admire in that field?
Week 4: What non-blog related achievement are you particularly proud of, and how did you stay motivated to complete it?
Week 5: What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given? What is the best advice you’ve ever given to someone else? (Read the entry.)

Log

I will manually update this chronological list of all the posts I’ve written during Blaugust 2026 (list may not be up to date). For the latest Blaugust content, visit the automated #blaugust2026 tag page or see how Blaugust will affect my calendar heatmap!

Aug 1: Last Minute Decision: Blaugust 2026
Aug 2: A Dating Matter: Hugo, Indiekit, and Node
Aug 3: Weeknote 2026-W31: Blaugust 2026, 32-Bit Café & New Bloggers
Aug 4: Costs: Price of a Personal Site on the Smallweb
Aug 6: HTML Day: How to Join the Annual HTML Energy Event
Aug 8: Two Poems From Yonder
Aug 11: Hot Weather Effects
Aug 15: Re: The Loss of Links Continues
Aug 16: RSVP to HWC Asia Pacific: Round 2
Aug 18: IndieWeb Homebrew Website Club Asia Pacific: Reflections
Aug 22: About the Revamp
Aug 24: Mac Mini 2018 i7 Hand-me-down
Aug 25: AuguStory: The Story About BurgeonLab
Aug 27: HWC Asia Pacific: Round 3
Aug 28: Starting Over With the Pi
Aug 31: Some Thoughts on Advice
Aug 31: Blaugust 2026 Recap
Aug 31: Blaugust 2026: Final Word

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One Take Pass

2026-07-31T12:40:36+08:00

One Take Pass

The phrase “one take pass” is probably not proper English. It’s a common phrase you’ll hear in Hong Kong for taking any sort of exam or test; meaning to pass the exam on your first try.

If you’ve followed my weeknotes (W24, W30), you could work out I’ve been having lessons for about 2 months, once per week. Yesterday, I had my last 1.5h lesson and took the driving exam immediately afterwards (properly warmed up). The weather was actually dreadful, squally showers and it got really dark. But I’m happy to report that I passed, in the rainy weather! Luckily at the time of the exam, the rain eased off slightly.

I had a few, non-repeated minor mistakes and no major mistake. The rules are: repeating the same minor mistake 3+, or one major mistake is considered as a fail. The examiner was polite and professional which really put me at ease. I also got to drive in silence!

There’s always room for improvement though, and I hope to increase my experience while under the probationary year and have signed up for a few top-up lessons in a different area of Hong Kong to add to my bank of experience. Really looking forward to those!

I’m relieved to also say I’ve switched to another campus for the extra lessons; so adios to my substandard instructor! 👋 He actually continued with his mobile device usage, constant ringing and dinging of notifications, leaving voice messages, and replying calls despite my written request… ugh. I will be writing a letter of complaint to the HK School of Motoring.

About the Probationary Year

Some random facts about the HK probationary (P) driving licence and general driving in HK:

P drivers cannot go over 70 km/h on any road
P drivers cannot drive on the offside lane of expressways/highways (HK drives on the left side of the road, so offside is the right-most lane)
Any minor mistakes caught will lead to an extension of the probationary period by 6 months
A second minor mistake or one major mistake will lead to cancellation of the P licence and retaking the exam
The full driving licence can be issued on the spot at the Traffic Department offices; they are valid for 10 years and cost $900 HKD (~ $115 USD / €100 EUR)

Treats

To celebrate, I treated myself to a coconut mango drink from Heytea and a Japanese-style beef hamburger patty lunch (they have free refills of fruit-infused water, soup, rice, and broccoli) at NikuNiku Oh!! Kome.

This morning, I celebrated by brewing a special coffee from KAWA (now known as TANAT)—El Paraíso #1 Colombia by Diego Samuel Bermudez, a double anaerobic fermentation Castilo from my freezer from 2023! It was just as I remembered; peachy notes and super aromatic (can’t go wrong with Finca El Paraíso and Bermudez’s coffees). Lastly, my Mom gifted me a new Longchamp backpack too, as a celebratory present for getting my driving licence (thanks Mom!) 🥰

Two-sided Driving?

Here’s a rant about a new policy announced in mid-2025, where the HK government decided to allow China Mainland cars (which drive on the opposite side of the road!) to enter HK urban areas for up to three days.

Personally I find that baffling as HK roads are vastly different to the roads in the Mainland, the driving laws and rules are completely different (HK driving laws and design are similar to UK as it was under British colonial rule for over 150 years). Road signs are all in Traditional Chinese and English (but Mainland uses Simplified Chinese). Roads are significantly tighter and cramped in HK (it’s a very compact/dense city compared to the much bigger Chinese cities).

There’s reports and videos of Southbound drivers breaking the rules (perhaps unknowingly, but it’s still dangerous and wrong); like driving on the wrong side of the road, entering the roundabout anti-clockwise or getting onto a one-way bridge and they’re facing the wrong way.

There’s also no immediate distinctive plate on these Southbound cars that allows local HK drivers to identify them, so extra care can be taken when around them. No special colour, shape or syntax. They just have a normal looking licence plate, with the except of starting with two letters (FT) + four digits. But this is not obvious at all as HK has default plates that are usually in the same syntax, e.g. two letters + three or four digits. (There are custom licence plates, i.e., Personalized Vehicle Registration Marks Scheme, but I digress.)

Another issue is EV charging; most of the Southbound Mainland cars are EVs and their charging plug is not the one used in HK charging stations (I think they’re trying to fix this by adding support for the Mainland style plugs and building specific charging stations for these Southbound cars.)

HK is a small place and if they continue increasing the daily limit of Mainland cars driving into HK, it will put strain on the local system (lack of parking, charging spots, traffic jams). There was a limit of 100 vehicles per day since the start of this new policy, but just this week, the government is pushing for up to 200/day.

Another big issue is autonomous driving, allowed in the Mainland, but not in HK. There has been at least one video captured by locals that one of these Southbound vehicles were on a highway with no hands on the steering wheel.

// end rant

Links

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Another Backend Heavy Day

2026-07-23T21:10:04+08:00

Another Backend Heavy Day

I updated almost all the Apache ECharts and Hugo code that generates my favourite page on BurgeonLab: the /⁠stats page. With the new post types I’ve added recently: books, replies (separated out from notes), and RSVPs; I noticed some of the data on the graphs being incorrect.

New Features and Fixes

When I post more than one thing per day, the counts and data breaks.
The heatmap calendar was not able to show multiple posts per day—but now it can! I made a little simple JS popup (similar to the one when you get when you click on a Mastodon link on my site) that lets you choose which post to read when you click on a day that contains multiple entries.
In the past, the heatmap used to only indicate three post types: pages, weeknotes, posts; but now, I’ve included other post types as long as they’re over 300 words long (which is a threshold I can manually set). I feel they can belong in the heatmap calendar at that length.
Excluding fenced code blocks from word count on the whole site by creating a custom word count partial. The default Hugo word count includes everything and I feel it’s not accurate.
Increased the colour range for the heatmap calendar and updated the word count divisions/groups so it is more obvious visually.
Lots of new stats are added to the Overall Figures section, including:
- Longest & shortest post
- Count all internal and external links
- Average links per page (that has more than one link)
- Count all image assets
- Count pages with images/figures

To-Do

Count all pages with flow diagrams: D2 + Mermaid (I still have to migrate over to D2 fully)
Add another graph (pie chart) that shows the spread of different post types perhaps
Open to suggestions or ideas!

Lastly, I got to use git rebase -i HEAD~n (interactive rebase) for the first time with no drama! I edited multiple commit messages with ease. I really do enjoy learning and using Git!

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DRY Principle: Hugo Layout Templates

2026-07-22T12:00:45+08:00

DRY Principle: Hugo Layout Templates

DRY stands for Don’t Repeat Yourself.

Although what I did last night doesn’t affect the frontend / look-and-feel of my site, I am pleased to have done something I have been meaning to do for a long time: clean up the multiple repeated layout templates and Hugo conditional code that generates all my microblog-style content:

likes
replies
notes
RSVPs
and the latest one I added: books

This is opposed to long-form content:

slash pages
weeknotes
blog post/articles

And on its own are photos which is managed separately.

Templates and Partials

Using Hugo’s template lookup order, I’ve switched from section-specific single.html and list.html templates to a default one in the root layouts folder (note: as of Hugo v0.146.0, there is no longer a _default template folder).

This saved a lot of repeated code; not to mention using a single partial to generate all the entries; along with a smaller shared style sheet for it as well!

I deleted about six or so files, which means I can edit one single file to have changes reflected in all the microblog-style content. Much better than what I was doing of doing mass search and replace. The CSS also uses universal class names instead of post type specific ones, meaning editing styles will be easier too going forward.

New Book Post Type

In my previous weeknote (2026-W29), I mentioned working on posting reading / book tracking information on my own site and using a POSSE workflow instead of relying on a third-party site like Bookwyrm.

I think I got a decent looking version 1 of the book post type! What do you think? What would you want to see when you see a book being tracked?

What’s left now is for me to work out the backend with indiebookclub and Indiekit!

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Brewed a Coffee From 2022

2026-07-20T12:52:46+08:00

Brewed a Coffee From 2022

Today I brewed this special coffee with the Tsubame Kalita Wave 155 (flat bottom dripper) + 1Zpresso ZP6 Special hand grinder (4.8 clicks):

Roaster: Manhattan Coffee Roasters (NL)
Name: Sweet Valley
Producer: Cafe Granja La Esperanza (CGLE)
Farm: Potosi
Varietal: Colombia (Caturra and Hybrido de Timor hybrid)
Process: Natural (15 hr fermentation + 72 hr dehumidify)
Roast: Filter
Origin: Colombia
Region: Valle del Cauca
Altitude: 1800 masl
Tasting Notes: red apple, grape, bubblegum

Can Coffee Be Kept That Long?

Yes! I have the habit of vacuum packing and freezing the coffee I buy in either single doses (if it’s a nicer coffee) or roughly five days worth (which I bring back to temperature before opening and storing in a partial vacuum container). I’ve been doing this for years, which is why I have a “freezer coffee stash”.

You can check out what is in my stash via this Data Studio dashboard I created a while back. (Note: the remaining coffee value is not accurate as I’ve not updated the remaining coffee in the freezer for a while.)

Tip

Throwing a bag of coffee in the freezer and opening it every day is not a good idea; 1) if the bag has a valve, the freezer can impart flavours into the bag and 2) the repeated opening and closing from a cold environment to room temperature will lead to condensation inside the bag.

Instead, you could split the bag up into reusable containers like glass mason jars or food safe plastic test tubes, reducing the headroom as much as possible, and brewing those by pre-measured doses, or bringing the whole container (sealed) back to room temp before opening.

One of My Favourites: CGLE Potosi

This particular morning, I decided to dig a bit deeper than usual in my freezer coffee stash and took out the second last dose of Sweet Valley. Colombian coffee is on my personal top 5 origins, and CGLE Potosi coffees are one of the best in my opinion. They’re always incredibly juicy and bursting with aroma and fragrance.

Coffee Content

Before I started my IndieWeb / personal site journey with BurgeonLab.com; I built up a small following on IG sharing my “home barista” experiences and speciality coffee discovery.

In my ever-growing to-do list for this site, I want to import all my coffee content from IG, restart my coffee sharing habit on this site under a new slash page like /coffee. Any coffee fans here? If so, give this note an upvote and one rainy afternoon I will tackle this big IG import project…

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Thank you so much, kind stranger, for being my first…

2026-07-18T10:43:19+08:00

Thank you so much, kind stranger, for being my first secret patron on Liberapay! I am speechless and so grateful for your generosity and support.

If I had to guess what it is for, I’d put it down to the new Homebrew Website Club event I’m initiating in early August 2026 for the Asia/Pacific/Oceania time zone. I will try my absolute best to make it a worthwhile addition to the existing virtual HWCs and make it a safe and fun place for everyone interested to discuss all things IndieWeb.

If it is for the other general content I make, thank you for showing your support! I will continue to write about my experience on the small web and tinkering experiences with tech I come across. Hope it will be interesting and/or useful for someone going through similar paths.

Thanks again! 🥰

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Writers and bloggers, does this happen to you? You sit…

2026-07-12T15:23:52Z

Writers and bloggers, does this happen to you?

You sit down to write a weeknote or some journal entry, but suddenly, one of the topics becomes really long and you decide to split that off into its own separate post. You continue with your original piece (back to square one); but it happens again.

I’m just trying to write about what happened during my week! Why do I have to go on such long, ranting tangents that it becomes a +1000 word separate entity. 😱 I just don’t feel like it fits in and deserves its own post. I probably have less than ten draft posts that came from “weeknote spin-offs”… Maybe my soon-to-be digital garden will be a nice place for those personal rambles.

My W28 weeknote after a two-week break is pretty bare now because two long sections become drafts for two separate posts. 😑 It’s late, I will finish my three-week missing weeknote tomorrow.

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As an Indiekit supporter and user, I’m really…

2026-07-10T08:12:00+08:00

As an Indiekit supporter and user, I’m really appreciative of Paul for maintaining this open source project. After a short hiatus, he’s back to review pull requests and issues!

I made a PR for some Markdown quality-of-life features and I’m so happy they’re merged and available in the latest v1.0.0 Beta 28. Hope other users find it more convenient now when using the built-in editor to add Markdown links, as it is now more like how it works for on Obsidian or GitHub.

Contributing to open source is really a fun activity for me. Even if you don’t have any technical background, there are things one can help with on any project (if coding is not your thing). For example, documentation or just spreading the word! Participating in open source is rewarding and always a learning opportunity. I plan to continue to look for things I can help out with in projects I use.

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June has flown by it seems, and that means Junited-2026…

2026-07-09T13:24:31+08:00

June has flown by it seems, and that means Junited-2026 has come to an end. This initiative by Robert has got me reading a lot more blogs this month (and I actually missed two weeknotes…) I’d thoroughly enjoyed discovering new bloggers and was in a “consuming mode” for most the month. Fellow readers who discovered posts from my list and original authors of posts I shared approached me too; which was very cool!

Last month, I’ve been trying to get my old site, EclecticPassions.net, revamped with a new static generator. Originally I was set on using Zensical, but after doing multiple “hacky” workarounds for features not available or not planned; I decided to switch to Quartz instead, which is more “built for the job” of managing a digital garden.

But it was a much bigger challenge than using Zensical. It uses Node/npx/npm and the backend is lingo I have zero experience in, like React type components, TypeScript, etc. I’m one for challenges, but it was almost a bit too much! The only good thing about LLMs was I managed to use tools like DeepWiki to help me figure out how to write custom TS overrides to get what I wanted.

I even created two custom Quartz plugins during the process and I’m quite happy to get it working the way I want.

Hopefully I’ll wrap my head around imports, exports, components, and TypeScript a bit more as I continue to build on my secondary site/digital garden with this new tool.

Lastly, I’m trying to explore more examples of public digital gardens before I decide how to organize my files, like using tags and bidirectional linking instead of relying on a more traditional folder structure.

Here are some examples of digital gardens I’ve come across so far in my research:

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Troubleshooting Technical Errors

2026-06-22T22:54:21+08:00

Troubleshooting Technical Errors

Yesterday, my Indiekit docker failed to start on my Pi. I also couldn’t run npm audit fix despite reviewing and accepting npm approve-scripts --all.

As a beginner Node.js user, I am still very inexperienced. I tried removing the package.lock, node_modules/ and npm install from scratch but that didn’t fix it.

Maybe it is due to the Node version being pinned to version 22? Or was it the installation of sharp in the Dockerfile that caused it to break after updating the npm packages? I now have RUN npm ci --omit=optional --no-audit instead of RUN npm ci --include=optional --no-audit && npm install --platform=linux --arch=arm64 sharp.

In the end, I managed to fix it with the help of duck.ai (Claude Haiku 4.5) as I couldn’t work it out myself… but I am not sure what caused it.

Then, another failure came to my attention: a cron script that backs up all the content associated with Indiekit had been failing:

1git@codeberg.org: Permission denied (publickey).
2fatal: Could not read from remote repository.
3Please make sure you have the correct access rights
4and the repository exists.

It backs up the content store (Codeberg Git repo), media store (S3 bucket), and MongoDB database. I fixed the cron clone/fetch by forcing the mirror to use the HTTPS repo URL with an access token (and non-interactive Git). I updated the mirror’s origin to the HTTPS token URL, then ran git fetch from cron without SSH.

1# Force mirror to use HTTPS and not SSH
2if [ -d "$REPO_MIRROR/.git" ]; then
3 git -C "$REPO_MIRROR" remote set-url origin "$REPO_URL"
4fi
5
6# Non-interactive fetch
7git -C "$REPO_MIRROR" fetch origin

Oh, and a handy tool that helped me set the time for the cronjob was crontab.guru.

As much as I hate generative AI for all the slop; LLMs has aided me in solving technical backend difficulties such as these and I usually learn a thing or two during troubleshooting this way.

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Homebrew Website Club: Eastern June 17 2026

2026-06-20T13:03:28+08:00

Homebrew Website Club: Eastern June 17 2026

Last Thursday, David (an IndieWeb regular) couldn’t make it due to an emergency. Luckily James, another regular, caught me before I went to bed the night before to tell me the technical details on how to host the remote Zoom meeting. It was a success; luckily no technical difficulties, and we had a good turnout with a good old chat about all things websites! (Thanks too, to Thomas, for being co-host!)

Some of the topics we went through:

Blog data analytics and visualization tools
Data capture workflows
Webmention server for static sites
WordPress classic vs block editor

If you want more details about what we chatted about, check the notes/minutes link at HWC: Eastern June 17 2026.

What Is Homebrew Website Club?

Homebrew Website Club (HWC) welcomes anyone who has even an inkling of curiosity about the IndieWeb or anything related to building a personal site. HWC events are every week, alternating between the Pacific and Eastern time zones on a Wednesday (or Thursday depending on time zone).

To see the upcoming events, check out the IndieWeb events page. I invite you to join, we welcome newcomers! There will be a zoom link on the event page around 15 minutes before the event starts.

My IndieWeb Experiences

I’ve been attending these remote IndieWeb meetups for nearly half a year and I’m really grateful for the volunteers who keep it going. Which is why I’m trying to step up and give back to the community whenever I can. I am trying to improve my moderating skills—thanks for putting up with me!

Everyone is really approachable and friendly, talented in their own way, and inspirational. If you’re reading this, curious, or have any questions about this community; please feel free to reach out to me or say hi on the main #indieweb chat channel—someone will reply! Read Join #indieweb Discussions to learn more about how discussions work.

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A feature I didn’t know existed in VS Codium saved my…

2026-06-16T00:02:51+08:00

A feature I didn’t know existed in VS Codium saved my day! I was working on a untracked Git file (the zensical.toml configuration file) and accidentally, the whole file was overwritten and ctrl+z didn’t work. I thought my config was lost for good!

Luckily there’s a thing called “Local History”:

Open command palette
Choose Local History: Find Entry to Restore
Choose the file you want to recover
Choose the latest entry to recover from
Copy contents back to active file

I believe this is also accessible under Timeline View.

See the Release Notes for more information on this feature when it was first released.

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digiKam MySQL Database Upgrade Woes

2026-06-12T18:42:32+08:00

digiKam MySQL Database Upgrade Woes

Ever since I left Adobe Lightroom in mid-2025, I’ve been using digiKam from KDE for digital asset management (DAM). I quite like using it to manage my extensive library of photographs (+100k images). But almost every time there’s a version upgrade, the internal MySQL database breaks.

Database Options

There are three database options for digiKam: SQLite, Internal MySQL, Remote MySQL. I have always chosen internal MySQL as apparently SQLite doesn’t do well for libraries over 100k photos. But I can never get MySQL to work seamlessly on the get-go and it breaks every single time when it’s time to upgrade either the database or digiKam itself.

Not Again

I upgraded to digiKam v9.2.0 yesterday, lo and behold, the database broke again. I tried everything I could (with limited database knowledge) but could not get it fixed like the previous three or four times. I made notes each time when I troubleshoot, but the fixes I wrote down didn’t work this time. Previous issues include UNIX socket problems and mariadb from Homebrew was conflicting; but I checked it all this time and could not get the database to upgrade successfully.

Trying SQLite

I have decided to give SQLite a try despite being over the 100k suggested limit. Write-ahead logging (WAL mode) is turned on and I’m now waiting for the new database to be built. It’s over two hours by now and it’s past the 50% mark.

Fingers crossed that this will be last time I waste time on the digiKam database.

Additional Links

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Regular expression (Regex) is a skill I wish I have a…

2026-06-12T13:29:40+08:00

Regular expression (Regex) is a skill I wish I have a better grasp on; but I’m slowly learning! For example, I often find myself searching for a particular string pattern to replace it with something else. Today, I learnt how to search for this pattern (Markdown bullet points):

The start of a new line (^)
Dash (-)
Space (\s)
Alphabet following the space ([a-zA-Z])

Which makes the search string:

1^-\s([a-zA-Z])

The ( ) bracket around [a-zA-Z] is to capture the matching section and using it later as $1 for the first group, $2 for the second, etc.

My aim is to change the bullet points into Markdown checkboxes. The string to do that is:

1- [ ] $1

This changes the bullet to a checkbox and the captured group in the ( ) is replaced by the original.

Maybe there’s some plugin to do this in a click, but I enjoy learning things in real life scenarios.

Resources

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Maintaining My Own Brew Tap

2026-06-10T23:23:04+08:00

Maintaining My Own Brew Tap

No, not beer; but for Homebrew, the package manager which I have used for over five years…? I don’t know how I lived without it before!

I have decided to maintain my own tap for the first time because of the deprecations that will come into action later this year in around September 2026. These deprecations are for macOS software that has not signed or notarized (i.e. paid Apple) to meet the macOS Gatekeeper requirements. Issue #6482 gives more background information.

I’m not entirely sure if this is the right way to do this, so treat this as a personal tinkering log, not a guide per se.

Steps I’ve Taken

Since brew taps are just Git repos, I created one on Codeberg and copied all the ruby cask files that have the deprecation warning from the official Homebrew Cask, and removed the line # disable! date: "2026-09-01", because: :fails_gatekeeper_check.
Initialize the repo with the files in step 1, Casks/*.rb, and push to remote.
Since I’m not using GitHub, the following command is used to add a custom tap in the terminal: brew tap git-username/homebrew-name-of-your-tap https://codeberg.org/git-username/homebrew-name-of-your-tap.git
Brew will warn that this tap is not trusted. To trust a tap, run brew trust git-username/homebrew-name-of-your-tap.
Tell Homebrew to use the new tap as the source of the soon-to-be deprecated casks, e.g. run brew reinstall --cask git-username/homebrew-name-of-your-tap/cask-name. This will explicitly tell Homebrew to install the cask using the new tap instead of the official cask tap. Repeat for all casks with deprecated warning.
Once the cask is officially deprecated, running brew install --cask cask-name should pull the .rb file from your custom maintained tap without the explicit custom tap path.
Run brew tap to see a list of all installed taps and run brew doctor to check if the warning, Some installed casks are deprecated or disabled. You should find replacements for the following casks, is resolved after switching to the custom tap.

Manually Keeping Casks Updated

It’s now up to me to update the .rb files, so I’ve gathered the XML feeds of the release pages and turned on notifications in my feed reader. This will remind me to update the version number and sha256 manually, which will in turn update the tap with the latest cask details ready for tapping.

I’m using rssrssrssrss to combine the feeds into one:

1https://codeberg.org/librewolf/bsys6/releases.rss
2https://www.digikam.org/index.xml
3https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/releases.atom
4https://github.com/Orama-Interactive/Pixelorama/releases.atom
5https://github.com/qmk/qmk_toolbox/releases.atom
6https://github.com/vial-kb/vial-gui/releases.atom

To update the sha256 value, either check directly in the release if it has been provided there, if not, use shasum -a 256 /path-to-dmg.

Lastly, run the usual xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/software.app command to bypass macOS’s Gatekeeper. (A step can probably be added to the .rb file to do this automatically—but I am used to running this manually after upgrades so it doesn’t bother me too much.)

Resources

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Hong Kong Open Source Conference 2026

2026-06-04T19:14:32+08:00

Hong Kong Open Source Conference 2026

I’m attending an in-person event this weekend related to my one of my passions for the very first time; open source! Came across the HKOSCon on Mastodon via @sammyfung, the founder of Open Source Hong Kong.

I’m not sure what to expect but I’m excited! It’s held in an area of HK I’m not familiar with (which is always nice as I like to visit new areas).

Looking forward to the talks lined up; especially the one titled, WordPress, Hugo and Astro - pick the best open-source CMS, by Tony Tsui. It’s held in Cantonese so I have no clue if I can catch on because I don’t think I know any web dev terms in Cantonese! 😆 Should be a fun and eye-opening experience nonetheless.

Maybe I’ll get to meet some general tech enthusiasts like myself!

Tickets are free (on Eventbrite) but it’s this Saturday!

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My WordPress Replacement: Zensical

2026-05-30T22:12:35+08:00

My WordPress Replacement: Zensical

In the last few days, I’ve been experimenting with a new SSG (Zensical) as a replacement for my secondary site that’s still running WordPress—the CMS I learnt to create my first website. Once the migration is over, I won’t have to manage a dynamic website any more. Hurray, static sites for the win!

Ever since I created BurgeonLab, I considered multiple times if previous blog content should be merged into this one—I still haven’t. Those posts were written long before I knew about the IndieWeb, when I was still discovering the world of blogging (and constantly pestered by SEO plugins while writing in the WP editor 🤮).

This migration is long-overdue as just seeing the WP admin dashboard is a burden to me, not to mention actually managing a dynamic website. By switching to Zensical, the barrier to actually write something is much lower; plus I get to be comfortable in my IDE and Markdown.

Justifying Another Site

In recent months, two friends asked if I wrote anything “understandable for the layman” and is less technical after I sent them to this site. I wish I could have pointed them somewhere that is well maintained and user-friendly to non-techies.

Despite the difference in mindset and the stage I’m in as a blogger while developing EclecticPassions; I think it deserves a revival and refresh for the purpose of using it as a general-audience site that shall not be littered with tech jargon! And also try out digital gardening.

Having only a single website identity feels somewhat limiting to me. I guess it’s just the way I am—there are many sides to me and I like to be able to express that via websites! Having a second site is also my excuse to use learn another CMS while keeping Hugo my main CMS of choice.

I look forward to sharing the live site soon!

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I thought my secondary blog (with WordPress backend)…

2026-05-25T01:52:13+08:00

I thought my secondary blog (with WordPress backend) wouldn’t auto-update, but I think I missed the setting on Hostinger. So sadly my site is now running the new 7.0 with AI features 🤮. I immediately added the disable AI features line to config.php.

I’ll be switching to a WordPress alternative later this year when my plan expires in a few months time; so it won’t be too long before I say goodbye to WP for good.

Some non-Hugo alternatives I am considering:

ClassicPress with SemPress theme
Astro
Pelican
A docs generator?
A personal wiki?
Or something completely different?!

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Signing Git Commits

2026-05-23T18:57:27+08:00

Signing Git Commits

Getting a verified lock icon for my signed Git commits took longer than expected! It’s all set up now in the end via SSH keys (and not GPG keys).

GPG Didn’t Work

During my email migration from Tuta to Mailbox.org, I started getting the hang of the idea of GPG keys. So I tried to start using it to sign my Git commits but it didn’t work out in the end because I think these have to match:

The GPG key’s UID
The email on the hosted Git repository account (e.g. GitHub, Codeberg)
The local git config --global user.email

As I’m using a different email for privacy purposes (spam prevention) in Git commits, it failed to verify on the new Codeberg repo. Creating a new SSH key pair just for signing commits worked in the end!

New Gist Repository

My new Gist repo is now up on Codeberg!

I’ve been meaning to get something like this started for a while. It’s where I will store and keep code snippets I share up-to-date, especially useful as a resource for code-heavy, how-to posts. Decided to use this in the meantime instead of a paste bin service like OpenGist.

⁂ I will be updating my blog posts in due course to include a link to this repo.

Resources

OpenGist
Git: Keeping your email safe in public repositories | Dev.to
Ditching GPG/GnuPG by signing commits with SSH keys | Toby — This post is useful, recommend it if you’re also looking to use SSH instead of GPG keys for signing Git commits.
[Git/GPG] Fix the “Inappropriate ioctl for device” Error when Signing GPG Keys | Oscar Chou — While trying to set up GPG for signing, this error came up gpg: signing failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device. This post provided the fix.

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Hantavirus and Andes virus 101

2026-05-13T12:18:43+08:00

Hantavirus and Andes virus 101

As a trained medical professional, I feel the need to inform and raise awareness of the latest MV Hondius (cruise ship) hantavirus outbreak in early May 2026.

Here is a quick rundown of facts about hantavirus in general, and the specific human-to-human transmissible strain called Andes virus involved in the current outbreak.

General facts about hantavirus

Hantavirus comes primarily from rodents (but also seen, less commonly, in moles, shrews, and bats)
It is a group of viruses that cause disease in humans transmitted by:
- Contact with infected rodent secretions (urine, faeces, saliva)
- Consuming food/water contaminated with said secretions
- Bitten/scratched by an infected rodent
There are two “typical” hantavirus clinical presentations:
1. Hantavirus Cardiopulmonary Syndrome (HCPS) affects the heart and lungs and is the strain seen in North, Central and South America (which is the one currently involved in the May 2026 outbreak)
2. Haemorrhagic Fever with Renal Syndrome (HFRS) affects the kidneys mainly, and is seen in Europe and Asia (there’s a higher incidence rate, i.e. more people get infected per year, but it has a lower fatality rate of around 12%)

Andes virus

Most hantaviruses are not person-to-person transmissible (that we know of), except for a family called Andes virus which is found in South America, and is known to be transmissible between humans causing the more severe disease form, HCPS
Fatality rate of Andes virus is around 35-50% (so it’s quite severe)
There is no targeted antiviral treatment or vaccine available for Andes virus, only supportive care

Transmission

Person-to-person transmission of Andes virus is primarily by:
- Close contact / family clusters
- Saliva and bodily fluids (e.g. via kissing, sharing utensils/drinks/vapes/shisha aka hookah/cigarettes, handling contaminated bedding)
- Airborne droplets (coughing and sneezing)
- Breast milk
- Via the placenta from mother to fetus
- Sexual partners (higher chance of transmission compared to non-sexual partners)
- Touching a surface contaminated by virus (e.g. an infected person’s saliva from a sneeze) and then touching your mouth, nose or eyes
Incubation period (the time between exposure to an infection and the start of symptoms, in which the infection could be transmissible to others) of Andes virus is long; up to 42 days
Hantavirus can last on surfaces for up to 10 days in room temperature and more than 18 days in low temperatures (e.g. 4 °C)

Prevention

Hantavirus can be inactivated by proper cleaning using:
- Heat (sustained 30 min at 60°C)
- Detergents
- UV radiation
- Organic solvents (i.e. 70% ethanol)
- Hypochlorite solutions (i.e. bleach)
Other measures to reduce chance of infection:
- Wash your hands with soap thoroughly (minimum 20 seconds) and frequently!
- Wear a mask in crowded or in areas with poor air circulation/enclosed spaces (e.g. public transport) or when you are sick
- If you work in areas where there are are rodent infestations, wear protective equipment like face coverings and respirators
- Stay at home if you are sick, visit the doctor if you are having trouble breathing or have prolonged fever
- Cover your mouth when sneezing or coughing when possible with a tissue and dispose of properly
- Avoid touching your eyes, nose or mouth without washing your hands first
- Follow rodent control protocols: store food properly and cut off water sources, maintain a clean environment, remove possible shelter or nesting areas, seal rodent entry points to buildings
- Be extra cautious when dealing with rodent excretions by first wetting the area with a bleach solution before wiping it up to prevent the virus from becoming airborne (i.e. do not sweep or vacuum rodent droppings)

Sources

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Fixed Mac Mini M1 (2020) Disk Corruption

2026-05-12T21:08:05+08:00

Fixed Mac Mini M1 (2020) Disk Corruption

Hurray!

The drive corruption warning is fixed after first turning off FileVault and repairing the Macintosh-HD volume via the terminal in Recovery Mode.

Find the name of the disk to fix, mine is disk3.

1diskutil list
2diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk3

Run repairs with flags: -T for tree node repair, -o for repair over allocations, and -W for treating warnings as errors.
```
1fsck_apfs -ToW /dev/disk3s3
```
Restart, run the First Aid again on the AFPS Data volume and the errors should be gone. xattr messages related to snapshots will be gone when the snapshots are removed. (To remove snapshots, go to View in Disk Utility > Show AFPS Snapshots and delete the old ones if you have a lot.)
Turn FileVault back on.

Kinda happy I don’t need to reinstall the system. And thanks again to Adam who kindly helped out!

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Skipped Weeknote and Mac Disk Corruption

2026-05-07T17:15:51+08:00

Skipped Weeknote and Mac Disk Corruption

I’m feeling poorly myself for the past week (have an appointment tomorrow with the doctor), so unfortunately my weeknote for 2026-W18 will be cancelled. Not only am I not feeling well, my Mac Mini is also acting up, reporting that the primary data volume is corrupt and needs to be repaired.

What triggered me to do a scan in Disk Utility was Dictionary kept crashing. Disk Utility’s First Aid claims there’s corruption and will try to fix it, and that it is OK (fixed); but repeating the scan results in the same three messages.

Relevant logs:

1The volume Macintosh HD - Data was formatted by newfs_apfs (2235.0.13) and last modified by apfs_kext (2332.140.13).
2warning: inode (id 57148693): Resource Fork xattr is missing or empty for compressed file
3The volume /dev/rdisk3s1 was found to be corrupt and needs to be repaired.
4Performing deferred repairs.
5The volume /dev/rdisk3s1 appears to be OK.
6File system check exit code is 0.

I’ve already tried running the relevant fsck_apfs commands in Recovery Mode, but that results in another error: failed to enable crypto I/O mode for container /dev/rdisk3: invalid argument. So my next step will be to try again after turning off FireVault. If that also fails, I will inevitably have to “Erase All Content and Settings”.

Oh and I already ran a hardware diagnostic scan and it doesn’t report any hardware issues—so at least that’s a good sign. My conspiracy theory is Apple wants me to upgrade to Tahoe so it’s giving me these issues. 🤣

Here’s a few relevant links if you are have similar issues:

Disk Utility Errors - First Aid | MacRumors
The Eclectic Light Co. is a site by Dr. Howard Oakley and there’s often lots of good articles about Macs, like this one that goes through how to use Disk Utility correctly and useful apps like Mints, which can help you check inode IDs. Highly recommend this blog for Mac users.

Hope it doesn’t require a repair… 🤞

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Adding Features to Open Source Projects

2026-04-30T18:45:51+08:00

Adding Features to Open Source Projects

Ever since setting up Indiekit for adding Micropub capabilities to my Hugo blog, I have only used its web UI to post notes, photos, and likes (haven’t tried other clients yet). The interface is not bad, but one thing that that bugs me is how links are handled in the text field. I am so used to directly pasting in URLs into highlighted text and have it automatically become a Markdown link (like in Obsidian / VS Codium / GitHub).

Improving Indiekit’s Markdown Links

Not only is this not a feature on Indiekit; it was quite clunky. Here’s how it goes now: (1) select the link text, (2) click on the editor toolbar ‘Create link’ button or ctrl+k keyboard shortcut, (3) the selected text will remain selected and a [ ] will be appended to the beginning and end with (https://) attached, (4) now move the cursor to the bracket, (5) delete the https://, and lastly (6) paste the link from the clipboard. This will generate a [selected text](https://link-i-want-to-share.com).

For me that was too much. I want to be able to: (1) select the text and (2) ctrl+v. Finished. Or if I want to use the button, (1) select text, (2) press create link button, and (3) ctrl+v (cursor is already inside the empty () so it just pastes correctly in one go). Done.

And that’s what I did! I created a PR that was relatively simple (I did require some guidance from qwen2.5-coder in Ollama) and didn’t take that many lines of code. I hope Paul will merge it so the feature can be used by others. Or else, I will need to learn how to “install” (? I don’t know the right term for this) the feature so I can have it in my Indiekit server.

I’m still quite new to contributing to FOSS projects, but I will try my best to learn and contribute back to projects I use and love! (Which reminds me I need to update / revamp my /⁠contributions page…)

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Improvements for Code Blocks and Snippets Demos

2026-04-30T14:24:01+08:00

Improvements for Code Blocks and Snippets Demos

I’m currently writing a post on how to use a Bash script with Termux. In the past, when I have code snippets / code blocks present in the post, I will make comments inside the code. This results in an utter mess of code + comments mixed together (I can’t unsee it now).

A few weeks ago at a Homebrew Website Club, Ross mentioned a term I’ve not heard before called literate programming, which got me thinking on how to improve my code-heavy posts/guides. (Thanks Ross for introducing it to me.)

I will eventually go back to all the posts that have comments in the code, clean it up for a “ready-to-run” version, and offer explanations separately if required.

Paste Bins

Another thing I’m thinking of implementing is improved ways for sharing code. I think a Pastebin service (similar to GitHub Gists) would be a good option (although originally I was thinking of creating a Git repo to store all my code examples). Chris told me about OpenGist, which is an open source version of GitHub Gist and it is the way to go as I am not happy to rely on GitHub. This means it will be easier to manage the shared snippets and keep them updated than being in code blocks within Markdown posts.

I’ll be grateful if anyone has any feedback or experience regarding this topic, thanks!

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Unfortunately I have my first driving lesson today (in…

2026-04-25T12:50:36+08:00

Unfortunately I have my first driving lesson today (in the simulator) clashing with my first ever IndieWebCamp event. The 2-day event is an in-person event, with remote participation available. It’s held at Düsseldorf.

I’m really excited to see the presentations and demos from the talented and cool humans part of this community! I hope to get some tasks done myself during the camp probably on Day 2; namely starting the Instagram import I’ve been meaning to work on since the start of the year.

Relevant Links:

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This is the first time I’m using my new Pi Docker…

2026-04-22T17:55:05+08:00

This is the first time I’m using my new Pi Docker version of the Indiekit Micropub server while I’m out! Wrote about my journey in the latest weeknote if you’re interested.

And tomorrow is another IndieWeb Homebrew Website Club; where I’ll be a stand-in moderator for the first time. 😊 The more, the merrier—I’d love to see new faces!

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Came across a site called DI.Day. It’s currently only…

2026-04-17T21:46:36+08:00

Came across a site called DI.Day. It’s currently only available in Deutsch, with English possibly coming soon. It purposes that every first Sunday of the month is “Digital Independence Day”, where people are encouraged to break free from Big Tech.

The artwork and designs are bold and welcoming, and of course, I’m very appreciative of the information and educational nature of the site. I came across it on Mastodon when @bearina shared she did some de-googling!

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Despite the disruption message still on status.sr.ht,…

2026-04-11T18:38:33+08:00

Despite the disruption message still on status.sr.ht, SourceHut has been back up for me today. So I took the chance to implement what I worked on in the local bin/bash script a few days ago, into a version that works on the alpine/latest CI runner which uses bin/sh. I didn’t know this before—there’s two different command-line shells, sh is the original using POSIX and bash which is the one with more features (which I use on the Mac).

I’m really chuffed to have implemented a much leaner build manifest for my continuous integration (CI) workflow. I reduced the build log verbosity significantly with -quiet or -silent flags, continued to use set +x to disable command logging and protect secrets from being exposed, and used a Makefile successfully for the first time!

Will try to make a post on it in the future—I’m behind in terms of my finishing a few draft posts lately… Anyway, happy to learn about sh shell and Makefiles!

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I use Mermaid diagrams occasionally on my Hugo blog. It…

2026-04-09T08:57:55+08:00

I use Mermaid diagrams occasionally on my Hugo blog. It came with the theme I had so I learnt to use it. Just now as I was working on a draft post, I decided to make a diagram, and found out nothing was rendering at all for the whole site. I am not sure when/what caused it, but I couldn’t fix it quickly last night, so I resorted to using their latest ESM JS via CDN for now.

There’s a new release about a week ago, version 11.

I always try to serve resources locally, but I don’t think saving just the mermaid.esm.min.mjs is working for me; there are lots of chunk files? 🤔 I’m not familiar with #Javascript and #ESM. I guess I have to use cdn.sdelivr.net version for now only on pages with the mermaid = true parameter…

Maybe I need to look into using D2 as an alternative. I already use it for generating OG images. I wonder what it requires to run on the front-end or maybe I should just use the .SVG or .PNG output.

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My blog relies on SourceHut (aka sr.ht) Git repo and…

2026-04-08T11:42:01+08:00

My blog relies on SourceHut (aka sr.ht) Git repo and Builds (their continuous integration/CI, like GitHub Actions). They’ve been down for around two days and I couldn’t deploy my site to my static host, Bunny Storage (this is my affiliate link, I really like them, thanks for your support!)

This triggered me to create a local script that runs all the fetch and build steps as an alternative pathway to uploading my /public folder to Bunny.net directly from my Mac. It works! I took the chance to upgrade the upload method from SFTP to HTTP API too, which is more secure.

Once SourceHut is back up, I will also update my build.yml to use a Makefile, which will be a first for me—it should make the YAML a lot cleaner and the CI logs much shorter.

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After discovering TiddlyWiki from @jbaty, I went ahead…

2026-03-26T00:58:27+08:00

After discovering TiddlyWiki from @jbaty, I went ahead to give FeatherWiki (a lightweight version of TW) a spin as a personal brain-dump bin. I really like how it’s just a lightweight, 58kb HTML file!

I used it on Android but failed to get it working due to Android Storage Access Framework (SAF) limitations. I ended using the amazing Termux (once again) to run Busybox’s httpd, automate the whole process of opening, serving, and saving back to my Syncthing directory with a Bash script (security hardened browsers don’t allow selecting download destination easily). It’s running surprisingly smooth.

One downside I thought of immediately is that all the entries will be in one single file, not individual notes/entries. But there’s a plugin for that!

Update: The post on how I use Feather Wiki is up!

It was really satisfying to get it working. Do you use a Wiki software for blogging or other uses? Let me know!

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I haven’t used Indiekit to post anything recently!…

2026-03-14T17:52:03+08:00

I haven’t used Indiekit to post anything recently! Quick update on the blog: I’ve been busy working on my new Hugo theme redesign—learnt to use Git branches, forked the Anubis2 theme code so I could squash unused/overriding CSS rules, trying to redesign the theme to make it more a11y-friendly, etc. I think I’ll miss my current theme; but I will still push on with the redesign.

On an unrelated note, it’s the second F1 race this weekend (China) and I decided to create a spreadsheet to track my F1 Fantasy progress for the first time! I recommended some leagues to join if you’re interested.

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At today’s IndieWeb Homebrew Website Club: Pacific…

2026-02-19T12:28:28+08:00

At today’s IndieWeb Homebrew Website Club: Pacific event, we covered lots of different topics—RSS, ATProto, poll platforms, CMSes, databases, upvotes, YAML, etc . During the event, something @fractalkitty and @joelchrono said alerted me to two relatively “serious” bugs on my site (thanks you two!)

Pagefind search was broke because of a new BunnyCDN edge rule I added for appending trailing slash to all URLs (forgot to exclude /pagefind/*)
My blog archive list hid my Top 10 posts which uses Hugo’s front matter weight = 1 parameter.

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Halfway during my Indiekit setup, I decided to use this…

2026-01-17T12:11:00+08:00

Halfway during my Indiekit setup, I decided to use this opportunity to start using Codeberg with Gitea plugin as my content store instead of staying on GitHub. Although I had already moved all my personal repos (like my blogs’ source code and CI to SourceHut already in 2025), I want to start using Codeberg as my main Git host (Gitea/Forgejo has a lot more integration support than SourceHut).

Using Codeberg for the first time was painless compared to learning SourceHut; it looks and feels similar to GitHub. I did unfortunately experienced, two nights in a row, of Codeberg server downtime, but both lasted less than 30m I’d say. I think it will only get better as Codeberg gets more popular from #GiveupGithub movement.

Getting back to Indiekit—having the content store (the place where Indiekit Markdown files are stored) separate from my Hugo source code meant I had to figure out a way to get the .md files from Codeberg > SourceHut.

I worked out a relatively simple way of doing it in both CI and local without using Git Submodules or Git Subtree (which was a bit confusing). This note will test if it is working in SourceHut Builds CI… Sorting this last hurdle means I will be able to start writing my guide!

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This is a test note published using Indiekit. It…

2025-12-25T11:15:00+08:00

This is a test note published using Indiekit. It includes tags.

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BurgeonLab: Notes

Writing Break and WP Migration

Writing Break and WP Migration

Site Updates

Heatmap Calendar

Quartz Digital Garden Updates

Possible Downsides of Quartz

Obsidian Prep

Deploying Quartz

Bunny Edge Rules for Quartz and New Supporter

Bunny Edge Rules for Quartz and New Supporter

Quartz SSG with Bunny Storage

D2 Diagrams Lives On

D2 Diagrams Lives On

Related Links

Blaugust 2026: Final Word

Blaugust 2026: Final Word

Some Thoughts on Advice

Some Thoughts on Advice

Best Advice Received

Best Advice Given

Thoughts on Advice in General

Starting Over With the Pi

Starting Over With the Pi

Neater Installs

Docker Management

Homelab Start Page

Restoring Files on the Pi

Closing

Mac Mini 2018 i7 Hand-me-down

Mac Mini 2018 i7 Hand-me-down

Resources

About the Revamp

About the Revamp

Features and Style Changes

Bug Fixes

Pending

Closing

Hot Weather Effects

Hot Weather Effects

Air Conditioning

General Tips

Further Reading

Last Minute Decision: Blaugust 2026

Last Minute Decision: Blaugust 2026

What?

Why?

How?

Who?

Note About AI

Resources

Checklist for Awards

Core Challenge Awards

Community Builder Award

Group Projects

Log

One Take Pass

One Take Pass

About the Probationary Year

Treats

Two-sided Driving?

Links

Another Backend Heavy Day

Another Backend Heavy Day

New Features and Fixes

To-Do

DRY Principle: Hugo Layout Templates

DRY Principle: Hugo Layout Templates

Templates and Partials

New Book Post Type

Brewed a Coffee From 2022

Brewed a Coffee From 2022

Can Coffee Be Kept That Long?

One of My Favourites: CGLE Potosi

Coffee Content

Thank you so much, kind stranger, for being my first…

Writers and bloggers, does this happen to you? You sit…

As an Indiekit supporter and user, I’m really…

June has flown by it seems, and that means Junited-2026…

Troubleshooting Technical Errors