New Site, New Me

A very rough purple pencil sketch of me sitting at my desk facing my computer. I have a beard and glasses and it's not a very good drawing

Me @ my computer by screenbeard

Hi folks! It’s been a long time since I last posted, and a lot has happened. No more than has happened to anyone else over the same time and none of it is newsworthy, but the passage of time seemed like something that that should be at least acknowledged. Which seems redundant now that I type it out loud.

One of the things keeping me from posting is just the sheer insanity of life. Things don’t so much get in the way as they make posting seem inadequate. How do you put mundanity mixed with chaos and frustration into words without boring people? How do you tease out the parts that made you happy without looking like you’re trying too hard.

And then there’s the site itself. Writing up Markdown and finding images and putting it all together in Hugo was never a fun way to write. I was tied to my desktop and although I tried to have a “workflow” the way Hugo changed from month to month meant every time I uploaded I had up to a half-dozen broken steps I’d need to work through to get it re-built.

So I ended up putting it off more and more, even though my drafts folder was growing (slowly - but growing), and now we’re here more than a year later and no updates.

This time I determined to build the website my way. It’s taken a minute but I now have a way to generate my site that’s built on technologies I understand and my own sweat and tears. More of that when I write up how it works and how and why you might want to try it, but for now - I welcome you to the new and improved The Geekorium!

I’m still dogfooding it as I go, and there are a couple of things I still know I need to do, as well as a few bugs I’m not aware of, but if I put it off until it’s perfect I’ll never release it.

You might see some items that look like this: {{< youtube xyzabc123 >}} or some links that still look like Markdown. Those are unfinished until I can port over the plugins I need to translate the Hugo exclusive tags. I have figures working, and my next goal is the youtube tags, but please be patient while I get them going.

You might also get old sites in your feed reader (if you’re still subscribed). I rewrote the Atom feed and it may not even work, so sorry if it makes your reader grumpy.

In the meantime I welcome feedback. I reached out to Georgie of Hey Georgie for design help and she graciously gave me some ways to make the site look better, but all bad decisions are my own. If you have any ideas for improvements I’m all ears, because I don’t really have an eye for design. You can get in touch via email at josh @ this.domain.au or on the fediverse at https://social.chinwag.org/@josh and if you notice any jank please let me know.

November will be this this site’s 20th anniversary. I hope this new format will make me more likely to keep it up-to-date. So here’s to 2025 and the new online me!

My Wife - a _______ Story

As I hit publish on my last silly post, I realised I could use the same template for a number of things. Namely:

My wife is . She . When I and it dawned on me **, I wanted to marry her all over again.

Thus:

My wife is amazing. She carried and gave birth to my daughter Amelynne. When I first saw my little girl and it dawned on me that I now have my own clone, I wanted to marry her all over again.

See how that works?

What I was kinda hoping Apple would post this morning.

iNothing-600px.png

Such a missed opportunity. Instead they announced some sort of e-reader thing.

It's time this ended

OK, time to step it up a notch.

You have insurance…
        Right?

This poke war has gone on long enough

Claim Theme

A new theme for a new year - only one week early.

I loved my last theme (actually, my last two themes - but the C64 one was a throwaway), but every time I make a new theme I learn something, and I wanted to incorporate some of my new skills into a new theme.

Claim Theme
        Screenshot

Screenshot of my latest theme - Claim

Inspired by my most loyal reader (hello dad!) I’ve created “Claim”, a theme to help me stake my claim to my peice of the web, that’s easier and clearer to read. It’s inspired by many, but fettered by nunn.

The Claim theme includes built-in support for these plug-ins:

  • Creative Commons Configurator - creates a licence that can be included at the base of your individual posts.
  • Link Summarizer - provides a list of the included links at the base of each post. Configured for printed pages only.
  • Ping/Track/Comment Count - Counts the comments seperately from the pings. Recommended for correct function of this theme
  • ShareThis - places a button for sharing the post in various social networks or via email at the base of each post.
  • Wavatars - an awesome plugin that creates a unique avatar for each commenter, or uses their gravatar if they have one.

Please bear with me as I tweak things around here, and if there’s anything you think I can fix, please let me know. As usual, I haven’t tested it on IE7 or earlier, so you might notice some wackyness using those browsers. I’ll sort that when I can.

Credits

Jon Tan(Jon Tan(gerine), designer and typographer) has an excellent site on design etc that you should visit (actually, his site is awesome and you shouldn’t visit ‘cause it’ll make me look bad). His site has a left margin for asides and captions which inspired mine. Hopefully he won’t mind me pinching his idea.

Tomorrows Laundry provided the blank theme that I styled and chopped up using TextMate(Top-notch text editing for the mac) and CSSEdit 2(Excellent CSS editing for the mac).

The Yahoo YUI library(link to Yahoo YUI) created the base CSS that this site is built on.

Update: 2008-01-05 Version 2.0 The “Claim” theme was not validating properly due to the Yahoo Reset, so in version 2.0 I’ve switched to Blueprint(Blueprint, a CSS framework).

Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your CSS development time. It gives you a solid CSS foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, and even a stylesheet for printing.

Blueprint CSS (Blueprint, a CSS framework) at Google Code

Today’s update also includes the Blueprint print stylesheet and some extra jiggerypokery thanks to Footnote Links(Build fancy footnotes for printed pages) created by Aaron Gustafson(Original A List Apart article by Aaron Gustafson on Footnote Links).

Update: 2008-01-09 Version 2.1 finally fixes the issues with the left margin caption/cite/metadata positioning. Now if the post markup is correct the page will render perfectly on every browser I’ve tested.

Update: 2008-04-13 Version 2.6 Introduces:

  • A tag page with tag cloud
  • Category page title and tag title integrated into page heading
  • Removed a hard coded reference to this site
  • Changed class “updatedate” to “date”
  • Improved the category/archive pages
  • Fixed a couple of img placement problems
  • Better compatibility for linux (fixed fonts)
  • Styled the RSS feed widget to match theme
  • Nicer sidebar styles
  • Tag links added to pages

Update: 2008-04-21 Version 2.7 Introduces:

  • A hard-coded about section, independant on widgets. The About section displays the Biographical Info found on your profile page on most pages, but on category pages, it displays info about the category. I may expand this later to include post excerpts.
  • Built-in support for the Link Summarizer(Plugin page for the Link Summarizer plugin) plugin. This produces a list of all the links in the post, and replaces “Footnote Links” that left numbers everywhere when styles were turned off. The list will only display on printed pages.

LOADING... READY. RUN

A screenshot of a wordpress theme showing website text that looks vaguely like the Commodore 64 initial boot screen

LOADING... READY. RUN

I loved my old Commodore 64. It had fantastically playable games, neat 16 colour graphics, and that awesome SID chip for the charmingly wonky C=64 sound. You could program on it, play on it, wait for things to load on it…

It had cartridges, it had a tape drive, it had a clunky disk drive that worked marginally faster than the tape drive. Really, it was shit compared to what we have today, but man-oh-man it still outstrips every one of the computers any true geek has ever owned since.

On Monday, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, will celebrate the C64’s 25th anniversary. CNN article on Commodore 64 anniversary

In August 2007, the Commodore 64 made it to 25 years old. And in honour of the Computer History Museum’s celebrations, I have created a Commodore 64 Wordpress theme to add to my website. If you’ve come to this page wondering why my site is all big and blue and chunky - it’s to pay respect to a truly wonderful computer.

If you’ve come here looking to get the theme yourself - let me know and I’ll see if I can make it available to download. It’s still a work-in-progress, so expect to see some changes before things finally settle and I haven’t tested it on any versions of IE. It’s a little harder to navigate, so I’ve made a menu link up there in the top right corner, so you don’t get completely lost.

I’ve made the comment areas blue too, so you can relive the joys of typing LOAD “*”,8,1 yourself, so go on and leave me a comment. And everyone, please be patient for the next two weeks and join me in remembering one of the best computers I’ve ever owned.

LOAD “*”,8,1

Hair passes forward, screams pass backward

I hate that Saturday guy... but Sunday is just a victim like me

I hate that Saturday guy... but Sunday is just a victim like me

Inspired by Wellington Grey.

joshnunn Theme

Thanks for your interest in my theme, joshnunn 0.1. joshnunn is a simple two column theme with static header, footer and sidebar. My biggest achievement with it was making it entirely with ‘em’s for maximum resizable-ness!

I’ve not put any licence on it because I’ve not made it transportable to other Wordpress setups - it requires a number of plugins to work properly, and I’ve made no effort to make it customisable with other logos/icons etc. One day I may make it available, but frankly - do you want it? Really?

Feel free to take it/modify it/make it your own, but please mention me (and this site) somewhere.

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"Little Man" stop motion animation

My first clay-mation… if you could call it that.

{{< youtube cXlTW9RN2YA >}}

My second movie on the web

This is another movie I did a while ago with iStopMotion.

{{< youtube 8Am9IsftFBM >}}

Stop-motion video

This was the first stop motion video I created using iStopMotion, an excellent little mac program for creating frame-by-frame movies. I added the sound in Final Cut Express.

{{< youtube AgsHTvMiJH0 >}}

I’m gonna start putting this stuff online, as it’s wasted sitting on my hard drive. It’s my blog - I’ll do as I like