@octylFractal

Tiny Astronomical Changes

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 03:26:51 GMT

As foretold, I have moved my site to use a new static site generator. After looking at a lot of different options, and seriously considering writing my own, I ended up using Astro. It’s open-source, has good IDE support for .astro files (I really wish IntelliJ’s MDX support was better so I could use that…), and allows me to use JavaScript for the more dynamically generated content on my site. The idea of shipping certain islands of interactivity without needing to require it for the whole site is also really interesting, and I might take advantage of that in the future.

The bulk of the changes are backend-only, the site remains mostly the same. I did make some tiny adjustments that I had been holding off on, because they were pretty tied to how Jekyll worked. Hopefully nothing you will notice :)

Switching Fonts Again

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 08:42:47 GMT

While proof-reading the last post, I realized I didn’t really like the serif font I was using, “Libre Baskerville”. When I originally chose it, there were few lengthy posts and I didn’t have a good comparison to make. Now that I have another long post, I evaluated many fonts in my current poor reading conditions, and settled on “Noto Serif”. It really feels like a generic pick to me, but I found it difficult to pick out another readable serif font at 16px. Lots of other good candidates failed because I didn’t like a particular way a word would be rendered by it. Noto won out as the best overall.

But to be honest… I’ll probably change it again, when I have more time.

The End of the GitHub Era

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 07:47:23 GMT

Well, I return sooner than expected (see last post). GitHub has finally placed the final straw on my metaphorical camel, and broken its back, by sending me an email about GitHub Copilot CLI… with no unsubscribe link.

I did not sign up for marketing emails and actively work to keep them out of my inbox by whatever means necessary. This unsolicited notice has finally convinced me that GitHub as it currently stands is no longer somewhere that I wish to promote by continuing to push my code to its platform. This is a relatively minor event overall, but I had already been considering dropping GitHub as I find the site more and more non-functional for my day-to-day usage. I haven’t been affected much by the downtime yet, but I am continually affected by their code viewer introducing weird jank by its nature of being <canvas> based now, resulting in misaligned text, copying issues, problems jumping to lines, and more.

It worries me that they had a search downtime so severe that issues and PRs could not be properly searched for multiple days. The SPA nature of the site continually breaks my back button and history, and recently it has started failing to load new pages completely, requiring me to manually refresh the page to force it to actually make a normal web request and get the full page state. This entirely defeats the point of even having an SPA in the first place.

I haven’t kept a good record of everything that annoys me about GitHub, and I’m sure there’s more I don’t remember. But hopefully, this shows that the email I got is just the latest in a long-standing decline in quality at GitHub.

Where I’m going next

I need to balance a few different concerns when selecting where to host my code. In approximate order of importance:

Transferrable. I should be able to export my data, for the inevitable future migration.
Open Source. The project should be open source, so it’s at least possible for me to use the exported data in the original form.
Social. Others should be able to easily file issues and make PRs, with minimal friction.
Sustainable. The company or person hosting it must have a sound plan for keeping financial incentives away from the project, so it is less likely to be cost-cut to death. In practice, this means it should be a non-profit corporation or public service; or self-hosted.
Vibe. I should like the vibe of people working on and owning it. This is pretty subjective of course.

With these in mind, here are the options I considered.

Tangled

Tangled is something I recalled going around BlueSky last year. They are Open Source, and their AT Protocol base means that it can be considered Transferrable and Social as well. However, they fail my Vibe check by having some of their primary discussion platforms be Discord and X. I’d like to reduce my reliance on these platforms due to their closed nature (both proprietary and having login walls). They also fail at being Sustainable, as they are funded by VC money. At some point, those investors will want a return, and I’ve seen what happens then many times over. So I discarded Tangled as an option.

Radicle

I’d also heard about Radicle a little bit. They are again Open Source and, due to being decentralized entirely, also Transferrable. However, the current state of it is that all operations must be performed by CLI or their Desktop app. This severely limits how Social it is, as it’s much more involved for someone to even file an issue on my project. Their Vibe is a little bit uncertain for me. In terms of communication, they do still have a presence on X, but the primary development communication occurs on Zulip, which I like. Their primary funding comes from Radworks, which appears to be some kind of variant on a DAO. I’ve heard some good arguments against these, essentially that because it still has to interact with the traditional expectations of other entities, someone will always be holding the power to make changes without going through the formal on-chain process, making it not much different from a normal organization but with a lot more overhead. For example, someone has to own the domain and DNS for it, and whoever has access to that can make whatever changes they want.

However, the Radicle devs seem to be considering moving away from this as their primary funding. I’m also still not sure myself if I consider it a problem. Radworks seems to be somewhat aware that they are not entirely bound to the blockchain, and explicitly have some off-chain mechanisms. And Radicle itself is actually owned by the non-profit Better Internet Foundation. Overall, I’m not sure how I feel about them being Sustainable.

If Radicle had a usable web interface and some more time to build trust that Radworks is sustainable, I would likely pick them. I really like the ideas, but it seems they still need some more time to cook.

Self-hosting

Self-hosting, to me, is the ultimate Transferrable and Sustainable option, as I would only shut down the service if I did not need it any more. Due to my preferences, anything I picked would obviously also be Open Source, and obviously I like my own Vibe. But the one way that this currently fails is Social. The established options that are self-hostable (Radicle again, Forgejo, GitLab, etc.) all would still require users to either use weird interfaces or to sign up for an account on my personal instance. I consider that unacceptable friction. I would really like it if there was an option for federated or decentralized forges, but it’s just not there yet as far as I can tell.

I unfortunately must discard this option.

GitLab

I did not spend much time looking at GitLab as I’ve previously tried using it, and found that I really did not like how the website felt. I just don’t like the Vibe, and for me, that was enough to barely consider it.

Codeberg

We now come to Codeberg. Based on the Open Source Forgejo, they even advertise on their docs that you can migrate from their instance to another Forgejo instance using the same migration tools they offer, easily making it Transferrable as well. I’ve seen a lot of projects moving here, and they already have a sizable userbase, making it a pretty good Social contender. As a non-profit with a decent donation record, they look pretty Sustainable. And finally, I do like their Vibe. They even kept the Anubis mascot on!

So clearly, I’m going to start moving over to Codeberg. My account is at the typical octylFractal. I won’t be moving over existing repositories en-masse, but whenever I update one, I will be copying it to Codeberg first and archiving the GitHub original with a notice. I’ve started with this very site, which used to live at https://github.com/octylFractal/octylFractal.github.io, and now lives at https://codeberg.org/octylFractal/octylsite.

Let’s keep fighting the enshittification of the online web as best we can; by making conscious choices to use better things where we can.

Pretty Patterns 2

Fri, 29 May 2026 06:11:22 GMT

If pretty patterns are so good, why didn’t they make pretty patterns 2?

Well, I have now. Instead of loading a prebaked PNG and tiling it, the pattern is now generated procedurally wherever I need it, during the static site generation. It bakes an SVG that is then repeated to fill the sidebar background. The advantage of this is a lot smaller file size, and since it can be trivially inlined, it saves an extra request and no longer flickers so badly when navigating. It also fits the vibe I was going for a lot more.

The implementation does make me think about retiring Jekyll though. I really would like to be able to write with, y’know, actual functions ‘n’ stuff. Jekyll is also getting quite slow with how complex my Liquid usage is. I would probably switch to a custom system that uses JSX/TypeScript and emits a static site from that, with extension points. Why that over Java? Because JSX is well-integrated for writing HTML.

That’s all for now. See you in another two years :)

PipeWire has built-in VBAN support!

Tue, 05 Nov 2024 23:30:19 GMT

Updated Feb 02 2025.

RIP `audio-bicycle`, 2022-2024

I recently went to make some changes to my old project, audio-bicycle, but I found that it was no longer necessary! PipeWire now has built-in VBAN support (send, recv), and this works well enough for me that I no longer need audio-bicycle. I’m kind of sad to see it go, but its name will live on in the configuration of my new setup.

However, there were a few gotchas I encountered while setting this up. For context, my configuration is designed to take outgoing audio from my Linux desktop running PipeWire, and send it to my Windows machine running VoiceMeeter to be output on the speakers. The Windows machine also sends microphone audio back to the Linux machine, for use in voice calls. I like to listen to music while I work, so I need a completely clean signal with no noise.

Audio Rate and Format

The defaults for the VBAN modules are not very good, picking 44100 Hz rate and S16LE format. This requires remixing from my 48000 Hz S24LE audio, which introduces some artifacts. I recommend checking what you’re using with pw-top and setting the VBAN modules to match, or at least transferring S24LE audio. Here’s the settings I used on each module:

audio.format = "S24LE"
audio.rate = 48000

~~You should also make sure that VoiceMeeter is configured to use the same settings on its sending side, as PipeWire will not check or do any conversion for you :(.~~ [2025-17-02] I believe this is no longer the case as of this commit, but I don’t think it’s released anywhere yet.

Latency

PipeWire’s VBAN modules also pick very high latency numbers, presumably because they expect to be used over the internet. I adjusted these down for the very low latency I have on my local network:

# For send and recv, keeps a smaller buffer.
sess.latency.msec = 2

# For send only, minimizes the time between packets
sess.min-ptime = 1

Miscellaneous

I needed to increase the quantum in order to prevent certain applications from not having enough buffer, like mpv. Putting node.force-quantum = 512 on each module’s stream seemed to be enough, but this is likely environment-dependent.

Finally, I had to set node.always-process = true on both modules to ensure that the audio was always being sent and received. This is because the modules will stop processing audio if there is no stream connected otherwise, and this can cause noise when starting a new stream. This made noticeable pops when starting music or skipping tracks, which was very annoying. I assume the same could occur with the microphone, but I haven’t tested it. The cost of ~3% of one CPU core is worth it to me to avoid this noise.

[2025-17-02] None of this is necessary now, due to many improvements in Pipewire. It’s working fine on 1.2.7.

For reference, here’s my final configuration file 01-audio-bicycle.conf:

context.modules = [
    {
        name = libpipewire-module-vban-recv
        args = {
            source.ip = 10.190.229.127
            sess.latency.msec = 10
            sess.name = "audio-bicycle"
            audio.format = "S24LE" # [2025-17-02] This and `audio.rate` might not be necessary soon.
            audio.rate = 48000
            stream.props = {
                media.class = "Audio/Source"
                node.name = "VBAN Mic"
                node.description = "VBAN Mic"
            }
        }
    }
    {
        name = libpipewire-module-vban-send
        args = { 
            source.ip = 10.190.229.127
            destination.ip = 10.190.229.105
            sess.min-ptime = 1
            sess.latency.msec = 2
            sess.name = "audio-bicycle"
            audio.format = "S24LE"
            audio.rate = 48000
            stream.props = { 
                media.class = "Audio/Sink"
                node.name = "VBAN Speakers"
                node.description = "VBAN Speakers"
            }   
        }   
    }
]

Minor Site Design Adjustments

Tue, 05 Nov 2024 23:20:20 GMT

I’ve removed the monospace formatting of some parts of the site to make it easier to read, notably the navbar and post text. I noticed while writing the next blog post that the monospace font was making the text difficult to read, but I still prefer to have the other pages in monospace as I think it looks nice. I also changed the font from Lato to Libre Baskerville which looks better at 16px.

There was also a ton of adjustments to improve mobile behavior.

Pretty Patterns and Soft Shadows

Sun, 21 Jul 2024 03:42:08 GMT

On a whim, I felt like adding additional texture to the left and right sides of the site where no main content is present. I originally was going to integrate something from <css-doodle/> but I could not figure out how to make the patterns I wanted statically, as I don’t want to require JavaScript to view the site as intended (~~I’m aware that on small screens, it is required to use the navbar. If you have suggestions for this, please let me know!~~ Edit Aug 08 2024: I’ve done a hacky fix for this). So instead, I searched around and found this “Background Image Generator” and selected a pattern that I thought looked nice.

In order to ensure it meshes with the existing page, the new patterns have shadows around the edges. I also added a shadow around the navbar and footer to make them stand above the content. I’m quite happy with the results, and I hope you enjoy them as well!

Projects Page

Tue, 16 Jul 2024 02:52:17 GMT

I’ve added a new Projects page to the site. It showcases the projects I find the most valuable or interesting, and that actually work well. I hope you find them useful!

Yet Another Site Refresh

Fri, 16 Feb 2024 04:47:30 GMT

The content on this site has again been updated to reflect an approximation of my current self. Mostly this is an update to Bootstrap (5.3.2) and a move away from any third-party sites, to entirely self-hosted content. I’ve disliked relying on them due to the potential for them to disappear, and the fact that they can affect my uptime (though this site is still primarily hosted on GitHub Pages, so it’s not entirely self-hosted).

Site Refresh

Sat, 10 Dec 2022 18:49:58 GMT

I’ve gone through and given the site a slightly different theme, to better fit how I want to represent myself. I’ve also used WAVE to improve the accessibility of the site, so it should be top-notch. Let me know if you find any improvements I could make in this area. I really enjoy how WAVE works and recommend it for any accessibility work you do.

As usual, I’ve also updated some dependencies to the latest version as of writing: Bootstrap (5.2.3), Jekyll (4.3.1), and Jekyll Feed (0.16.0).

RSS Feed Added

Mon, 05 Sep 2022 19:18:54 GMT

At the request of an anonymous reader, I’ve added an RSS feed for my blog posts. It’s linked from the main blog index, as well as each individual post. You can see it on this one in the bottom-right, it looks like this:

GitHub Pages + Jekyll 4 with Github Actions!

Mon, 05 Sep 2022 17:20:26 GMT

I’ve been wondering for a while why the GitHub Pages gem hadn’t been updated to Jekyll 4, which contains many changes that I’ve really wanted in the past. It turns out that GitHub has a new GitHub Actions workflow that is intended to replace the black-box pipeline that was the default, allowing for using other static site generators or really any arbitrary code to produce a Pages site. I’m really excited for this change, and hope to experiement with other ways of creating sites besides Jekyll in the future.

However, this site doesn’t have any good reason to switch to another generator right now, so I’ve simply updated it to use the new Actions workflow and updated to Jekyll 4. A preliminary check of the site appears to show no issues, but please let me know if you find any!

downloadanykey.com

Sat, 13 Nov 2021 07:37:40 GMT

I’ve written a new site, a riff on https://downloadmoreram.com/, entitled “Download Any Key!”. This new site was a fun way for me to learn some new skills, like deploying a DNSLink-based site and Blender. As hinted, this site is IPFS-enabled, so it should theoretically last until the failure of the IPFS network, though currently with a small reliance on the DNS system as well. I hope to add more content to this in the future, and am open to PRs if you have some creative ideas!

The site’s source is available at https://github.com/octylFractal/downloadanykey.com.

Bootstrap 5, et. al

Wed, 21 Jul 2021 07:12:36 GMT

I’ve updated the site to Bootstrap 5, as well as updating some other dependencies. Let me know if anything seems broken.

Blog Navigation + Other Improvements!

Sun, 23 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve updated the blog to include navigation, between the now two posts!

Additionally, publish date and title information is visibly shown.

A New Site

Tue, 28 Jan 2020 22:53:36 GMT

Hello, and welcome to the new bio / internet home for Octavia Togami, i.e. me.

I don’t intend to update this very often, but at least the content is semi-relevant again :).