Links and Notes - April 8th 2021

Nextcloud is the next adventure

I've self hosted my analytics. I've started trying out Coolify to self host an easy software deployment mechanism. I've been considering self hosting my own git repos but I don't see that much benefit in that. Even if github went away tomorrow, I wouldn't suffer because I have my work all local and git is an open tool anyway.

I was trying to figure out what I want to move on to next. The more I dug in, the more I realised why so many self hosters gravitate towards Nextcloud. It's been a long time since I looked at it again, and it's got so much going on in it. Calendars. Contacts. Note apps. Recipe storage apps. Budgeting apps. It's pretty incredible that we don't hear of Nextcloud more.

So, without lengthening this more than needed, Nextcloud is definitely the software I'll be trying to install on my self hosting servers next. Interestingly enough, the requirements aren't that heavy. Their recommended memory is only 512 MB. That's... Admirable. I need to spin up a VM already and start trying this out locally.

App idea: Create audiobooks for children with pictures and auto flips

I record audio books from time to time for my child. The only problem is that sometimes, I'd like to create a recording which is synced to photos of a book. Now I can do this using a video editor tool. I just need to record the audio, take photos of the pages I'm reading the audio for, and stitch is all together on some timeline editor.

But that's... Hard. And messy. And time consuming.

What if I could just take photos of the pages, add them to some app, and then begin recording. Within the app, I "turn" the pages while recording (left click 😁) and the app records the timestamps of page turns. When the recording is done, the app stitches it all together and outputs an mp4 video + some binary format too for editing.

You can create a book for free — I wonder if this is possible to do entirely client side using WASM — but editing afterwards is a paid for affair. Also, I don't think I'd be doing any kind of cloud storage of my own. No thanks copyright.

This is something I'd definitely build for myself and buy for myself. I think I'll sleep on this idea for a bit.

Busy day

Today was easily the busiest day of the year for me. I'm about to take a week off from work, and everything that could go weird and wonky went weird and wonky. This definitely adds some pressure on me for the experiment I'm trying at work to apply Shape Up to non product related tasks. But in a way it's good. I can already see areas where I can cut scope to make sure that the work gets delivered by April 26th. If I do this I'll be pretty excited. I'll have taken a project that couldn't seem to find the time to start for 3 weeks and through a robust process, actually delivered a pretty significant leap forward in the next 3 weeks.

For now though, it is time to sleep


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Posted on April 08 2021 by Adnan Issadeen