Gatillos

If you have a MacBook or similar the easiest backup solution is Time Machine and having a small server that is always ready to backup is my recommended option, as using an external disk depends on you remembering to plug it in.

The best option was the AirPort Time Capsule but Apple discontinued it last month. Nowadays there are quite a few networked hard drives that advertise support for Time Machine but if you have a Raspberry Pi or a computer that is mostly on all the time you can just build your own. Plus, you get to launch other things on that server, including other systems for non-time machine compatible devices.

In this post I’ll just talk about how to setup a Time Machine server using a docker container.

I have now a couple of sites using jekyll, one is this one and another one is this little news site that simply posts links to happy dog news. So far I’ve always created new posts using a small shell script or simply copying the previous entry and changing date/title.

Since that is a bit annoying, I decided to try using a plugin in Sublime Text, and this article explores how to do just that (spoiler: it’s all python).

It seems that the impossible is happening and free SSL certificates are becoming commonplace. About time! If you’ve hosted sites before you will know how expensive an SSL certificate is, particularly for small sites like this one where there is no revenue.

Thankfully some big companies have joined in an initiative called Let’s Encrypt, which does just that: provide you with a free, automatically generated security certificate that is acccepted by all major browsers.

I’m making a little game using Unity, a very simple word game that hopefully I’ll soon publish for Android, iPhone and iPad.

Here’s the thing, I’m not that good a designer but I don’t have enough going on to justify hiring a proper one. Good news is, if you’re in a similar situation there’s hope for you.

Well, well, well… I finally used the multilanguage support I added long ago. In essence it detects the language you are using and displays images or text based on that. Today I translated the latest Paul the innovator comic to test this feature.

The trick is doing this all in one site without changing URLs so that the facebooks and googles of the world can see just one site. Hope it didn’t break anything, let me know if it did.

A short post for the benefit of those struggling with this as I was: the little parser that Facebook uses when you share a link is insane, don’t trust it.

That parser is what creates thumbnails for links shared in Facebook. It reads the contents of a page and allows you to choose an image. The problem is that more often than not, it can’t find the images. It’s got a lot of limitations: image size, image position in the document and it also has a tendency to just randomly stop working.

Some changes to the site: links to the archives (yes up there near that little monkey) and horrid Facebook and Twitter Like buttons. Upgraded the comment system and now every post shows as ‘0 comments’ even if there are comments, but too tired to worry about that now… Fixed now.

But the most interesting bit is that I added hi-res comics in the Paul series and the header logos. This means that if you have a retina display (iPad or iPhone 4), you will see much crisper and detailed comics. All of that thanks to me using Inkscape from the start, which uses vector graphics.

Well I finally decided to get rid of wordpress and regain control of the site. Expect a few more changes in the future.

Please let me know anything that is odd or any links that are not working. Hate mail is welcome too.

There are a few known issues:

1. The feed in Google Reader will reset and display all posts and comics as new entries… sorry about that, you’ll have to ‘mark all as read’. To be honest, I’m not sure it works at all…
2. Comment counts on index page always display 0. Working on it!
3. I need to add links to
4. LIFE/interior archive
5. Paul the innovator archive
6. Other stuff archive

The design is an evolution of a design that my friend Sergi made about two years ago as a draft thing I could start with. I’d say that taking two years to implement a design doesn’t qualify me as the greatest web developer in the world… but I get there, don’t I?

In the eternal search for the Best Way To Do Things, I’m trying to do the unthinkable: write a whole, complete script before actually starting to draw the comic.

I’m not so sure this is actually a good idea, given that the process of creation for a comic seems to be intrinsically linked to drawing. It would seem more appropriate to do sketches and scripting at the same time, which is more or less what I’ve been doing so far. I do have an idea and some draft scripting, but it’s usually not that much and when I’m actually drawing things change a lot.

Well it’s been a few weeks without updates. I actually have a few pages almost finished, this time I just wanted to try to make sure they are a bit more coherent. Not sure if it will work, of course…

I’m having a bit of a conundrum here, well I would if I knew what the word conundrum actually means. Thing is, I’ve tried color with some very nice results but most of the time it doesn’t feel right. I feel I really need to set on a small palette, maybe grays or shades of blue or something. For the time being I decided I’m going a bit back and using shades applied in Inkscape and pencil shading.