I hit my steps goal today for the first time in a while. 8k is a low goal, but after a year of being mostly sedentary it's a start. Here's to me hitting the goal every day from here on out!

I realized after I'd written more than five posts that I forgot to add pagination to the index of this blog. I finally found a few spare minutes this evening to add it. I figured with Django that it would be fairly easy, but as always with Django I was impressed with just HOW easy it was.

First, I had to add a single paginate_by property to my ListView for the index:

class IndexView(ListView):
    paginate_by = 5

Then in my view I was able to use the page_obj to iterate over my posts and show some links to navigate pages:

{% for post in page_obj %}
...
{% endfor %}

<div>
    {% if page_obj.has_previous %}
        <a href="?page={{ page_obj.previous_page_number }}">Previous Page</a>
    {% endif %}
    Page {{ page_obj.number }} of {{ page_obj.paginator.num_pages }}.
    {% if page_obj.has_next %}
        <a href="?page={{ page_obj.next_page_number }}">Next Page</a>
    {% endif %}
</div>

I have recently started using Qutebrowser (again, lol). I wanted to write / use some simple user scripts to add some functionality, but on OSX I was having some issues with things not being in my PATH. I didn't realize why / what was happening so I asked in the issues of Qutebrowser on github and quickly got my answer.

It turns out that for GUI apps on OSX they don't inheirit the path that you set in your shell profile. I decided to fix that by adding the missing things to my PATH when Qutebrowser starts in by editing it in my config.py. Now it looks something like this at the start:

"""Qutebrowser configuration."""
import platform
import os
from os.path import expanduser

system = platform.system()
home_dir = expanduser('~')

if system == 'Darwin':
    # Add things to PATH so userscripts work
    path = os.environ['PATH']
    path += os.pathsep + home_dir + '/.pyenv/shims'
    path += os.pathsep + home_dir + '/.pyenv/plugins/pyenv-virtualenv/shims'

Now I can add things to the PATH as needed for OSX!

Today was day three of running Mobian as a "daily-driver" on my Braveheart Pinephone. Much like day two, it was fairly uneventful. I chatted a bit with folks on Twitter/Mastodon and one question I got was what app I was using for Podcasts. I hadn't tried a Podcasting app yet, so I figured I would try a couple today.

gPodder

This was the first app I tried. It was reccomended to me, and I think it would probably work really well except that it wasn't scaled to work well on mobile. From what I could tell it has lots of good features though, so I hope there are improvements made on this front.

Podcasts

I found this app on both flathub and the Mobian wiki. It looked fairly simple and I decided it was worth a try. I am glad I did. It works really well looks great on a mobile screen. You can add your podcasts feeds (just the RSS feed of the Podcast) and download / play them. It doesn't have a search feature, or some of the other things that one might expect, but it does what it claims to do and does it well.

Summary

I only tried these two apps, but I can say for sure that Podcasts will do the job well. Tomorrow I am going to tackle music streaming services. I look forward to more development on this front!

Day two with Mobian on my Pinephone was honestly fairly uneventful. I was able to pick the phone up and use it for the most part. There are still rough edges on the software (both Phosh and various apps), but nothing that prevented me from being able to do what I wanted.

Anbox

I was worried that installing Anbox would be a difficult task, but it was actually fairly easy with the instructions from the Mobian Wiki.

Z-Ram

I did find that I needed to enable / increase the available z-ram. Again, it was as simple as following the instructions on the wiki. I increased my z-ram percentage from 50 to 200 and rebooted. I haven't had any issues with this, but beware that you might encounter some (as I may down the line). Android is RAM hungry and this helps apps open without hanging.

Issues

There are a number of issues listed on the Linux On Mobile Blog post about running Anbox on Mobian. The one that's preventing me from using Android apps more beyond simply opening and closing them is that the keyboard doesn't work... at all. There are some software workaround, but I decided to go the hardware route. I don't have a bluetooth keyboard, so I decided to order a mini one off of Amazon. I will be getting it tomorrow and if I like it I'll link it in a later post. This is mainly a stopgap until Pine64 comes out with a keyboard case (one is in development).

NewsFlash vs Feeds

I mentioned that I was trying out NewsFlash and Feeds yesterday. I am now leaning more towards NewsFlash because instead of trying to open posts in a full browser it fetches the content and displays it in a "readable" format. I have it synced with Feedly right now because it's not compatible with TinyTinyRSS. I have already been considering switching from TT-RSS to Miniflux so this might be the push I needed.

Screenshots