July update

Oh boy, here we go again...

Welp, as promised in my previous post, here's the post where I would write about all the exciting ideas I have for this blog.
I've tried some of them and, while they failed, I think others will be great for this blog!

I will divide this post in three sections:

  1. My current situation
    2.
  2. Ideas for the website
    3.
  3. Failed ideas
    4.

BTW, before I start, I want to mention that I accidentally closed the window while I was browsing the web, and I didn't save the file. Holy shit I'm so glad VIM has a recovery feature, literally just saved my ass.

Current situation

Right now, I can't really work on the blog nor draw. I can work on the blog but it's kinda annoying having to do it without the VScodium server plugin (more details later) nor two monitors. I'll mainly only focus on writing pages now, but I will polish the CSS when I return home.

You see, I'm on vacation with my family. And since I had to remove my HP laptop's screen (I really need to write about that, I'll link here if I ever do it and remember it), I couldn't use it here, so brought an old Dell Latitude D610 with 2gb of ram hoping that I could draw. Since Krita runs perfectly fine here, I thought that Open Tablet Driver would too. Oh boy was I wrong.

You see, until I buy a new laptop, I decided to make this dell an emergency laptop. One where I could write or do some work if in any case neither my main PC nor my laptop works.
To do it, I wanted to install Lubuntu as well, but they stopped the support for x32 bits architecture long ago the 18.04 version of the OS. And since I wanted a secure, up to date OS, I decided to go with Debian 12 i386 (x32 bit). And that's exactly the problem.

You see, Open Tablet Driver (from now on OTD for simplicity's sake) only supports officially the x64 bit architecture. I went to find a solution to their discord server and they told me to compile from source and that should work. I've never compiled anything before so I didn't know if it could work.

Spoiler, it didn't work. Turns out their compilation scripts only work on amd (x64bit) hardware, and the .net framework (a deppendency the driver has) I downloaded was also amd... it was a mess so I just kinda gave up on trying to run OTD on this laptop.
Still, shoutout to James on the server for trying to help me regardless.

So what now? You may ask.
Well, I had the idea that maybe I could go to a nearby "phone booth"??? (in Spain we have "locutorios", which is a place where there's not only phones to make calls, but also shitty, cracked windows computers. But I can't find a similar word in english lmfao), which funnily enough, it's just at the side of the repair shop that scammed me 55€ to repair the HP laptop, but that's another story I will tell on another post.

Obviously I ain't going to install (nor use that windows) anything on their compuer, so I thought about using Tails OS in my 64GB USB stick on that hardware.

I will test it once I finish writing this post (jesus I'm taking two days), tho I fear I get kicked out of the stablishment. But I think it's worth the shot regardless. Before you ask, I'll obviously ask permission to do it, if I don't I will get kicked tf out of there because he can't track how much time I've spent without telling him beforehand.

Future Juan here. The guy on the stablishment was super kind of letting me do it, tho I discovered that Tails OS is so secure that you have to reinstall all the programs. I'm not going to get into much details since you can read their official documentation, but in short the permanent storage (which is optional and it's encrypted) only stores four things:

It can also store the aditional programs you install, but these will be uninstalled when you shut down the computer and installed automatically when you boot the computer on. Since I need to install the tablet drivers (which requires a restart) this distro doesn't work for me in this particular case. But I think I'll use Tails in the future as a portable and secure linux distro.

I investigated a bit and found out that Kali linux has a live version of the system, i386 is suported. This means I can run tests on this laptop without having to test on the run. This also led me to discover this project called Ventoy. It's an open source tool to make a bootable USB with multiple operative systems. Although I think this is designed to have multiple install ISOs in a single USB, rather than having an OS with permanent storage like Tails. I just have to investigate a little further.

Outside of that, I think there's not much I could write about. Only thing would be the heat. But meh, not worth it.

Ideas for the website

The first idea I want to tell is that this blog will have an RSS (Really Simple Sindication) feed. I could go and explain it on this post, but I want to make a separated post for it. In the meantime, until I write said post, I recommend you reading this post from Nicky Case. I think it explains what RSS is in a really simple (pun not intended lol) but entertaining way.

But in short, basically is a big-ass wall of text written in the XML (eXtensible Markup Language) which is made for RSS clients to read. If you add multiple feeds, you can check all the blogs/websites on the same place without having to check manually and even get notified, organise them by labels, etc. But this pic shows everything in a nutshell:

Image by: Nicky Case

If you want to add it now, you simply have to copy https://www.juangames.com/rss.xml onto your client and you'll recieve all the post in your feed from now on unless you delete it of course. I've also discovered that you can link the feed to the home page, so if you place juangames.com it should be enough. On some browsers like Seamonkey even displays a dedicated rss button if it detects that the site has a feed. Genuinelly didn't expect that until I started writting this lol.

I personally recommend the RSS client Feeder for android, but obviously, the choice is yours. Nicky's suggestions are pretty good too!
One thing to note is that, until I convert all the blog posts onto this website, I won't update the feed.

And this leads me to another idea I've already put in practice.

If you are reading this from the future when I've already added the previous blog posts: I removed all the images that aren't mine or that I'm not sure that is free to use.
I did this for two main reasons:

So all images that weren't made by me will either be replaced by drawings, images I can use or straight up removed. While the last option is the most probable, I think it will be better. The less pics there are, the better it will run on lower hardware, I want to make sure this website is as lightweight as possible and not as bloated like the average website.

The only images I may use, that won't be necessarily made by me, will be either blinkies or buttons like old websites used to have. You know, those best viewed with x browser, made with notepad(which at this point I don't know if VSCodium and VIM counts as such lol), random memes and so on.

I'll try to make them myself but if I use some made by others, then I'll try to make sure I can use those images

The failed ideas:

OK, let's dive right into the failed attempts.

First of all, I wanted to make the blog page so it could work entirely by iframes. If you don't know what it is, it's basically an HTML tag that allows you to display other website's content in your own.

Sadly, this idea didn't work for me. The box wasn't adapting, my modifications to the css didn't work out... It was a hot fucking mess alright. And since it was basically doing the same that doing that with separated pages, it was useless. So I gave up on that.

This one isn't a failed idea per se, but I think it's worth to include it nonetheless.

When I first tried to add Nutshell to this website, I noticed than the notes created with nutshell overlapped the dropdown menu, making it unable to work propperly unless there was no notes. Some time later I discovered it was the same.

Well, atleast in Brave. Turns out it works perfectly fine on Firefox and derivatives such as Seamonkey. I've tried downloading chromium here but it doesn't support the i386 architecture anymore, so I went to test another Chromium based browser on my phone.

I tried Opera GX (you know, that web browser that sponsors every damm youtube video like War Thunder or Raid Shadow legends) on my phone, and it only works propperly on Gecko powered browsers.
Since I'm not a programmer yet, I don't know why this happens on chromium browsers. The only theory I have is that this time the buttons are made entirely on css instead of a low resolution image and this is why the text overlaps the button. I'll leave it like that for the moment, but I'll try to do something about it once I get home.

And that's everything for the moment. To be honest, I didn't think this post was going to be so long. But it was really fun to write even tho it took me a couple of days. See you on my next post!