Some 3 months ago I’ve finally set up encryption on this server again, using the relatively new LetsEncrypt certificates and routines.
And because it’s now almost 3 months ago and I knew that these certificates would expire, I assumed that I still had to tweak a bit, and to interact to keep it going.
But looking at those details of the green lock symbol from my Firefox now showed me this:
How cool. Automagically renewed certs, obviously valid until January now. I’ll keep checking, but what a relief. And somehow I must have done it correctly 🙂
I just discovered and then joined wikiloops at the beginning of this year (2018). And I will become a supporting member as soon as I’m back home today. Here’s Richard, the founder of this cool project:
See it like this: it’s like your rehearsal room for which you pay a low monthly rent. But into this rehearsal room come people from all over the world, and they sit down and play and sing and do great stuff. Now if that isn’t fun then I don’t know what would be.
I played along my first track yesterday, and it really is a lot of fun!
Thanks for your awesome and continued work, Richard!
P.S.: rather than explaining what this is all about, watch this:
From time to time I unsubscribe from all Youtube channels (except my wife’s of course). But now that I bought a bass, I re-subscribed to Scott Devine, who can be found here:
Thinking of also joining his academy for 14$/month – that’s way cheaper than any real music school, and after my 35-year- (or so) hiatus, I probably need something like proper training.
Here’s the first freebie of his which I found interesting enough:
So I went and subscribed to his website for free, and downloaded the backing track to that lesson. It came as an .mp3 file recorded with a sample rate of 44.1kHz, so I had to convert it (using Audacity) to 48kHz and a .wav file to have Ardour accept it with my current settings.
Then I followed his advice about first playing root notes (and fifths) only – still made some “errors” (like playing the 6 on a 5 chord, or an ‘a’ instead of a ‘g’), but it’s still fun to have a nicely played II-V-I chord progression. Will keep my busy for some time, until my fingers get used to the quite high string tension of those Fender® USA Bass 7250ML, NPS, (.045-.100 Gauges) roundwound strings (as listed on the instrument’s page).
So here’s my first attempt on it:
Oh, and to another problem I’ve had until a few minutes ago:
Couldn’t upload .ogg files, or .wav, the only file type which worked in the past was .mp3. Which seemed a bit strange for a free software package like WordPress, because if one of these formats isn’t a “free” one, then it’s .mp3. So I searched around for the error message on their site, and found this new plugin which isn’t integrated yet into the current 4.8 version of WordPress. “Lord of the Files: Enhanced Upload Security“, what a cool name! Of course I thanked the developers, and gave proper feedback (which is the least I could do)…
Anyway. As always, thanks for reading, viewing, and/or listening!
Sunday afternoon I started upgrading our server, which until then was still running Debian 7.x “Wheezy”. And that will become obsolete soon – when Stretch will be released, the current 8.x “Jessie” will change its status to “oldstable”, and the current oldstable – Wheezy – will reach its end of (supported) life.
So we had to update sooner or later anyway, and a Sunday afternoon seemed like a good idea. Only that it took much longer than I thought; sometimes newer software (like Apache 2.4 instead of 2.2) does behave quite differently from what you’re used to, and new plugins and other server software also had to be learned.
But ok; we’re back, and even with a nice new layout – today, WordPress 4.7 “Vaughan” was released, and with it came what you see here: a brand new Twenty Seventeen theme which looks really pretty if you ask me. Of course you can customize it to your heart’s desires, which is what Zuleikha is doing right now. Me, I’m slower. I have to take in what I’m offered, and consider what’s good and what’s not, so I’ll leave it like that for the moment.
I still have to do some configuration jobs on the server before I can think about my site’s design. But that will be considered, too. For the moment, I’m happy with it as it is.
And as always (some things never change): thanks for reading.
Update, from 21:30h: Ok; i did go on and change the header image to one that I took. This is the Youth Hostel in Mittenwald, Bavaria, which lays beautifully on some hill between the Wetterstein and Karwendel mountains. I was out with my Olympus E-PL1 camera which had Mitchie’s Panasonic Lumix 20mm/1.7 lens mounted. Took this one on August 16th of 2013 during the sunset at f/8, and cropped and resized it here to 2000×1200 pixels which is the standard blog header image size for the WordPress Twenty Seventeen theme. Nothing else changed on the theme so far.
Today I was working on our server a bit, updating and checking things, and everything runs smoothly. I was wondering about the past a bit while I did all this, and so I checked.
Netcraft first “saw” us in the year 2000, which means that I used Netcraft’s services to check on us. The Internet Archive, and its Wayback Machine still have some stuff starting from 2001, and our site looked like this, or like that. I also had my own hosting company during 2001, called “fairhosting.de”, but nothing much of it is left, and that was later taken by domain grabbers. From 2005 Netcraft’s site saw us hosted by other companies.
So while the oldest history might be from early 2000, I think I actually registered the domain in 1999 – would have to check with Denic to find out. And, as I wrote on one of these early pages, the internet as we know it now was barely 10 years old (that means the mouse-clickable web, some other stuff like internet news is older).
Fifteen years only, and even less since people started to stare at small screens while walking the cities. Feels much longer tho – but imagine how life was before that (hint: it wasn’t worse).
Ok – I have completely reinstalled our virtual server from scratch, starting with a minimal Debian 7 “Wheezy” image, and during the last two days I installed and configured every service you need on such an internet server. Mail was the biggest problem due to some silly config error, but that is up and running again as well.
The content? Well I don’t care that much, neither did my brother Willi, so we’re starting once more with a blank table. But we’re still looking for Mitchie’s most recent database backups. Could be on some CDs somewhere.
This page? I’ll figure out what to write about, and what to show. And after two long evenings, I can go to bed a bit earlier again, just like Tuna would do…
We had to reinstall the operating system and all applications on our server. So all previous content from lonien.de is gone for the moment, and will be filled again whenever we have time to do that.
It’s still work in progress, so thanks for your patience and understanding.
