tgray

Rockets! 🚀

The general idea is to shoot stuff (propellant) really fast out the back of your engine. We can thank Newton’s 3rd law of motion for moving us in the other direction. This is true for rockets and jet engines. Jet engines are air breathing engines. Rockets aren’t.

The quick description of (chemical) rockets is that we take the propellant and start a chemical reaction in it. This reaction releases energy in the chemical bonds and heats up the byproducts. The hot byproducts shoot out of the back through a specially designed nozzle, which pushes the rocket in the other direction. So easy!

tgray

Now I work on in-space propulsion. Plasma plays a role there but first we’ll detour into chemical propulsion (rockets!) for context. Warning, last time I took chemistry was 10th grade. More tomorrow… 🔬🚀

tgray

I need to get back to my thread about science and space technology. Last time, I mentioned some fusion schemes. Long story short, the idea is to confine you plasma in a bottle for long enough, and then get it really hot. You know, like >100,000,000 °C. No big deal. 🚀🔬

tgray

Indieweb concepts are very cool. Indieweb concepts are very frustrating to implement. There needs to be an Indieweb ‘stack’ that is easy to install and provides auth, micropub, and webmention support. Extra points if it supports static blogging and is somewhat configurable.

tgray

Now I got uwsgi running at boot. That was the slightly hard part since I installed it with pip and not with apt-get.

Also added in a ping to micro.blog to let it know my RSS feed has been updated. Hopefully that works.

tgray

Just finished up coding my own micropub endpoint. Relatively simple python that saves to hugo files. Now I just need to figure out how to get uwsgi to run at startup…

tgray

Bye bye Wordpress

I think that is it for me with Wordpress. Started using it in 2004 when it was just a baby. The new editor is not so good in my opinion. I had to install a plugin (that will only be supported for 2 years) so my brother could even post. We’ve been using Markdown there pretty much the whole time, and it doesn’t look like that is very well supported.

Apparently we both had the “Disable visual editor” checked, so the new Gutenberg engine doesn’t even let you use its new features, nor does it alert you of this fact. It just appeared broken. I don’t know how that made it through testing.

So I went to write a reasonably tame note on their support forum. The post was deleted by a moderator in minutes as I was told “these are not discussion forums” even though I was in the Feedback forum. I also can’t log in anymore. I guess I was flagged? The reply the mod wrote was pretty arrogant (I’m being nice). In reading through that forum, I found a lot more arrogance towards people expressing their concerns from the moderators. And those are the posts that weren’t outright deleted. Our way or the highway. I guess it’s the highway.

I’m a bit sad. Like I said, I’ve been using Wordpress since 1.2. I have a few people who have posted on the blog for over 14 years. I imagine it will be a fair amount of work to convert the site. I have time - the Classic editor will be supported for 2 years. But I guess that is the way forward.