Slamet Hendry

Credit belongs to ..

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

~ Teddy Roosevelt, from the “Citizenship In A Republic” speech, April 23, 1910

#quotes #learningorg

Tiny Rocket

Few months ago I was revamping my hand-coded website project and learned of a new framework called Astro. It was still in beta at the time, but it fits my needs well, so I decided to use it.

A few things from Astro's default set up did not suit my liking, so I twiddled with it and shared the template / theme to Astro theme library and called it Tiny Rocket.

Since then, Tiny Rocket has gone through several iterations and has a few useful features to help Astro users get up and running with their website project.

  • Paginated blog
  • Site search
  • RSS feed
  • Web map
  • Self-hosted font

Check it out and please star the GitHub repo to help more people discover it. Thanks.

There and back again

#reblog

There is no “social” in “social media”

#reblog

Goodbye Microsoft OneDrive

I was an early adopter of MS OneDrive and never had any concern with it. Until a few days ago.

It was the first time I needed to download a folder containing files, since I did not have OneDrive synchronised with the machine's storage; it's not my main machine.

And OneDrive had NO option to download a folder as-is when connecting to it via the browser (nor through the app – which I installed to check).

OneDrive would always try to compress the folder into a zip format while downloading. There was no other alternative aside from downloading the file one at a time.

Even on very high broadband speed, the effective download time amounted to 120'something kb/s. This translated to hours for my download.

And nearing the end of the download, it FAILED and I had to redo it. To avoid another fail, I ended up downloading in pieces.

Oddly enough, if using the OneDrive Windows app, it will queue up the downloads, i.e. ONLY one download at a time. It cannot do something as simple as simultaneous downloads. Seriously. Doing it from the browser, it acts like typical browser download, except for the really slow zipping while downloading part.

My take on this is that I cannot rely on Microsoft OneDrive to be my online storage. Goodbye OneDrive.

#design

Good morning

A stray cat who likes to come over for a nap

ferdinand

#pics

Good morning

Looks like yin and yang

#pics

Learning to add video

I am not a video person. In the past few days I have been working on adding a demo video onto my project's landing page. And I learned a few things.

Creation

Initially there was a part of the video where I wanted to obscure the user logging into the system. This led me down the rabbit hole of choosing a video editor that I can understand and use in a short time. I found a couple of video editors that I was able to use: one is commercial and the other is kdenlive.

I got something working in both, but changed my mind about showing the login screen, so I dropped that section.

And without the need to obscure part of the screen, I found out I could just use Quick Time Player. It has only basic editing capability, but it gets the job done for now.

Streaming

I wanted to get this up and running fast and the fastest way is to use third-party. I tried YouTube and the process was smooth. Nice.

The downside was that I could not figure out how to make the video showing in portrait shape, which is less ideal for my specific purpose. So next I tried Tiktok. Wow, the process is easy with Tiktok. Fantastically easy.

In manual testing, the website felt okay, although the video div was lagging, but everything else was as snappy as usual. So I went into the weekend feeling relieved.

Performance

Come Monday, I was working on something unrelated and clicked on Google Page Speed Insights not expecting anything. To my surprise, I found out the landing page performance had dropped by a wide margin.

Aargh. The script tag that came with Tiktok embed seemed to be the main culprit in a landing page that, so far, has zero JS.

I don't think it is a huge deal at this stage of the project, but decided to investigate hosting the video myself.

I thought about Cloudinary – they have a generous free tier which is ideal for a starter. And then I remembered I looked at imagekit.io in the past and it turns out they just started beta offering for video.

I gave imagekit a spin and was able to host the video on imagekit and embed it on my landing page.

I deployed it and then checked Google Page Speed Insights again. And the landing page is back in good standing. 👍🏽

After you fall

“The greatest accomplishment in life is not in never falling, but in rising again after you fall.”

Vince Lombardi

#quotes

Olivia Dean

Last night I stumbled upon Olivia Dean's performance – “Live at the Jazz Cafe”.

Amazing!

Please check her out in whatever platform you listen or buy music on.

#random