Shutting down gnusocial.no and diasporapod.no

Stig Atle steffensen

Been running these websites for a long time, but I’ve recently been having major issues with both services, and I do not have the time to get it fixed (Already spend a lot of time trying to do so). So I made the desition to shut down both sites. I have not earned anything running it – it’s been running on donated hardware, but I pay with my time (and for domains). And now I do not feel I have the capacity to run it anymore, so I’m shutting them down to free up time. Gnusocial.no has been shut down as I write this, diasporapod.no will be shut down in 2 weeks. Then I’ll securely erase the server and all data on it so that it’s unrecoverable.

I want to say thanks to all of you who used the websites! And I hope you find a new place to stay.

Thanks again!

New hobby!

Stig Atle steffensen

Recently I got my hands on a telescope. I finally got to set it up outside and give it a try with my kids, and I must admit I’m hooked!
I will now save up for a better one, that can be used for much more.

The current one I use is this:

I was able to capture these images of the moon with it by using my phone:

Now it’s not the best quality, but I am now hooked. I’ll try and save up some cash so that I can buy a much better telescope.
The one I want is this one:

Pbrt render exporter update

Stig Atle steffensen

I have spent some time the last 4 days, wrapping my head around what the next step should be. I’ve been wanting for a long time to move it from python to c++, but I did not know how. So I decided this weekend to spend time figuring that out. The result now is that I have PBRT API available inside a python module, this again means that I can go to the next step – deeper and better integration of PBRT in blender, without implementing it directly in the blender source.

My focus will be that the next weeks, but I will fix important \ breaking issues in the current exporter if needed, but I want to focus all my time on getting the new addon up and running as soon as possible.

I have attached a simple image, proof of concept. In this example I load up PBRT in python, through c++, then I use that to parse in and render a .pbrt file, so it’s doing the same as the pbrt.exe but from python, this was the first step to solve.

Install Centos 8 netinstall fails – how to fix it.

Stig Atle steffensen

You can either download the full DVD or use the smaller netinstall boot image when installing CentOS 8. If you use the smaller netinstall boot image then you will get a error during setup that says ‘error setting up base repository’.

To fix this – simply enter the url: http://mirror.centos.org/centos/8/BaseOS/x86_64/os during setup. It will then find the correct repository and get the installation started.

Dropping firefox.

Stig Atle steffensen

After the recent blunder from Mozilla I’ve decided to remove Firefox completely.
It’s become too centralized, and it’s kinda crazy that the issue happened.
What happened was that they let a certificate expire, then all addons got disabled for everyone. This even affected the Tor browser – which is very scary for those who actually depend on that for circumventing censorship, and for many their lives depend on the tools they use. I have tested tons of browsers over the years, but the one I feel like switching too is Iridium ( https://iridiumbrowser.de/ ) , one of the things I like about Iridum is that it has a very strong focus on privacy, and it also has support for all the platforms I use, and it’s very fast, does not feel sluggish at all. So, if you are a Firefox user, just think about what happened, and then consider what to do about it.