I run a Miniflux instance on my desktop computer, which fetches all my feeds and makes the content available locally.

Inspired by a discussion the other day on HackerNews, I wrote a little script that asks Miniflux for a list of my feeds in OPML format and turns it into an AsciiDoc page, which I publish on here, as my BlogRoll & Links page:

import os
import sys
import urllib.request
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
from datetime import datetime

key = os.environ["MINIFLUX_API_KEY"]

if not key:
    print("$MINIFLUX_API_KEY not set.")
    sys.exit(-1)

url = "http://miniflux.home/v1/export"
hdr = {"X-Auth-Token": key}
request = urllib.request.Request(url, headers=hdr)
opml = ET.fromstring(urllib.request.urlopen(request).read())
updated = datetime.now().astimezone().replace(microsecond=0).isoformat(" ")

header = f"""
:title: Blogroll & Links
:slug: blogroll-links
:created: 2022-11-15 13 …

If you want to use SVG icons on a website and style them with CSS - then the SVG needs to be inline - i.e. the SVG markup needs to be included with the rest of the pages HTML markup.

Unfortunately putting things inline means that they can’t be cached. In this article I’ll show one way to get around this - and get the best of both worlds: inline styleable SVG icons, with caching!

This site has been generated using Pelican 3.3 for over two years - and I finally found some time to upgrade to the current version of Pelican, 3.6.3. This is how I did the upgrade.

I decided to be lazy and do the upgrade in-place, instead of creating a new virtualenv and copying the content & settings over. Luckily, this worked out OK, after a bit of fiddling around.

I also decided, rather cavalierly, to upgrade all the packages in the virtualenv to their latest versions while I was at it. To do this, I upgraded pip, then used pip-review. To upgrade pip & install pip-review system wide, run this on the command line:

$ sudo -H pip install --upgrade pip
$ sudo -H pip install pip-review

Then upgrade eveything in the sites virtualenv:

$ sudo apt-get install libjpeg-dev
$ workon duncanlock.net
$ pip-review …

To create image thumbnails from a PDF document, run this in a terminal window:

$ convert -thumbnail x300 -background white -alpha remove input_file.pdf[0] output_thumbnail.png

The parameters to convert do the following things:

If you want larger thumbnails, just change the x300 parameter to match. If you want to output .jpg’s (or anything else, like .gif), just change the file …

There are quite a few changes in Pelican 3.3 - most of them minor, but a few which might mean making some changes to your site in order to upgrade. This is what I did to move my site from Pelican 3.2 to 3.3.

The change that had the biggest impact and took the most work was around image linking - caused by a combination of things. I think I was doing it wrong before and things changed in a way that meant this no longer worked. I also had to update my Better Figures & Images plugin to take this into account.

Previously, I’d been linking to my images like this, both in my theme:

/* Theme CSS Image Link */
background: #2C71B8 url(/static/images/blueprint-background.png) repeat;

{# Theme HTML/Jinja image link #}
<meta name="twitter:image" content …

I recently needed to convert some FLAC music files from the increasingly common 48 bit encoding, down to 16 bit at 44100 kHz, so that they’ll play on my Sonos. Here’s how to do it:

If you don’t already have sox installed, do this to install it:

$ sudo apt-get install sox

Then run this to do the conversion, in the folder with music in:

$ mkdir resampled
$ for flac in *.flac; do sox -S "${flac}" -r 44100 -b 16 ./resampled/"${flac}"; done

And that’s it - it will convert all the .flac files in that folder to 16 bit at 44100 kHz and put the result into the ./resampled subfolder, preserving the metadata.

Thunar - XFCE & XUbuntu’s small but perfectly formed file manager - has a simple mechanism that allows you to easily add new commands to the right click menu of files and folders. These are called Custom Actions and are easy to create…​ here’s how to do it.

Click the Edit menu, then click ‘Configure custom actions…​‘. This will take you to the Custom Actions Manager, where you can create, edit or delete your custom actions.

You can enter anything into the command box, including complex bash scripts, names of scripts or executables on the PATH, or the full path and filename of the command you want to run.

On the ‘Appearance Conditions‘ tab, you tell Thunar when you want your item to appear in the right click menu: