This is Robin's personal site which he uses to note down his thoughts. He hopes you find it interesting. Enjoy.
He apologises for writing in the third person, but otherwise the idea behind the site's domain name, as seen in the header, doesn't work!
This was a simple 8.3km circular walk through the woods around Bridel and Kopstal. It was a lovely warm sunny Sunday morning day for fast paced walk with Angie. The page said the route takes two hours 20 minutes, but it took me and Angie only one hour and 45 minutes, which is what I would have expected for an 8km walk.
The walk itself was really easy with only slight inclines, almost all of it in the shade, so Angie loved it. Unusually for these circular walks, there wasn't really any view or historical point of interest. There was however some interesting information on the local water systems and how rainwater gets converted into drinking water. On this image is a German poem about the process:
In English this means:
The Luxembourg Sandstone
The ground water is filtered in the chasms and cracks
The ground water is stored in the deep
The ground water comes into the daylight in the Mamer valley
Since moving this site to Eleventy back in December 2020 I've been continually improving my publication pipeline. It started out being a manual process running bits of hacked together code on my laptop before switching to my online tool of the day for pushing the changes to the hosted site.
For a long time I was using Forestry.io which is now discontinued and I never really took to it's replacement. So I settled on simply using Github for everything. This means the source for code is pushed from my laptop to Github, the published site is on Github Pages and the processing for creating the site from the source is managed through Github Actions. Initiallly triggering these three parts were things I did manually and separately.
I soon started scripting these actions in Powershell. The first script simply pushed the changes to github. I modified this to include a pull from github before the push, to ensure there were no conflicts when pushing. After running the script, I would manually switch to GitHub to run the workkflow in GitHub Actions that actually updated the site with the changes.
Well, yesterday I finally added that task to the script as well. Using the GitHub Rest API is straighforward and creating the correct curl command was relatively easy. But I don't know much about curl and in any case the script is a powershell script. Some Googling (mainly using Bing 🙂) got me most of the way there, by using the Invoke-RestMethod. But I wasn't sure how to add one property to the command. Thankfully I found a code snippet on Stackoverflow which gave me what I needed. It had no explanations or comments, it was just posted as an answer to a question as is. Nevertheless it solved my problem.
And so this post becomes the first one pushed to GitHub and published on GitHub Pages using one integrated script. 👏
I spotted this display of Luxembourg's Restaurant Computer Systems.
Starting in 1982 and 1984 with a Commodore computer, moving to an Amiga and Kaypro in 1986, then to a touchscreen in 2003 and finally a tablet in 2023. Which one do you think is most usable? Personally I would go for the 2003 touchscreen, but I can understand the convenience of a tablet which the staff can carry around. But is that really an improvement on a pen and paper? 🤔
