Date: February 10th, 2025
A follow up to my last blog post.
On the 7th, I finally moved my Bluesky account to the PDS I set up last month. As I mentioned previously, I do not really trust the future of Bluesky, and I moved to my own PDS to at least have control over my data.
Prior to this, I moved over the 765 Cover Bot and then the Ryo Image Bot 2 weeks after. I plan to move all the image bots over to my PDS, but given how long it took for my main account to move over due to all the media, and the fact the bots have even more blobs than my account, I'll probably do it incrementally over the next few weeks.
After previous experimentation late last year, I have finally figured out how to run Debian 12 in a virtual machine under Connectix Virtual PC, and I can now edit and push changes to my website all entirely from my Windows Me retro PC. I am running FrontPage on it right now to write this blog post, and I will use the Debian VM to push it to the website when it's done.
For those curious, it is not a straightforward process. If you try to run the installer to install normally, it won't work because everything segfaults. What I had to do was to prepare the VHD on my desktop PC running Debian Trixie: partition the virtual disk, use debootstrap to install Debian to it, then configure and install grub. Even then, it still occasionally segfaults, but it is usable enough for my purposes. For some reason sudo doesn't work (illegal instruction) but doas exists, albeit suboptimal (it doesn't have /usr/sbin in the path), but at the end of the day, it's a modern Linux distro running under an ancient hypervisor on an even older operating system. Debian truly is the universal operating system.
It's unfortunate Debian is dropping x86 support with the new version releasing in the coming months, but it in exchange will now support the future of computing: RISC-V, so you win some you lose some I suppose.
After installing git on the VM, I was quick to try out bash-atproto (the component of imasimgbot and 765coverbot that allows them to post to Bluesky) and after installing the dependencies, successfully used it to post to Bluesky.
In the last blog post I also complained on how editing raw HTML was tiring and that I wanted a CMS. I still do, but in the meantime, I have found a less sucky way to work on my website using Microsoft FrontPage XP on the previously mentioned retro PC. It has its own quirks, mainly converting everything it touches to Windows CRLF format, but it's not a big issue because I can just run dos2unix after editing.
I wrote the KernelEx tricks page and this very blog page with FrontPage and it's working well for me and more importantly my sanity.