return to the terminal
Life has most certainly gotten over-complicated and bloated and filled with largely unnecessary distractions. I think the majority of us are never really afforded the opportunity to stop for a minute and question whether what we focus on is really the best use of our time. Its like the world is constructed to make us constantly busy and to guilt us into a state were we cannot accept the idea of rest. Case in point - almost everything on the internet these days. And I really don't have to go on some diatribe about endless scrolling and dopamine highs and super quick news cycles and AI slop garbage because plenty of people have written about that extensively. Instead, I want to focus on my version of a solution which is to use terminal applications and command line interfaces as much as possible.
So yeah, this is my first dirtbag rich project and its a nice transition back into the world of geeky tech stuff after a considerable amount of time maneuvering through burnout and some much needed surgeries I put off for longer than I should have. And now, I want to see how far I can get only working with used tech hardware and a single super cheap vps up in deee cloud. If I can create some fairly sophisticated projects with discarded equipment and low power / low bandwidth, then I'll revel in the clean and elegant simplicity of my work. I'll pat myself on the back and perhaps even entertain a little jig in my step and enjoy a nice flavored carbonated non-alcocholic beverage as a treat. (yum!)
There's no method to my madness or any real end goal here. I have every intention of doing this solely for my own enjoyment and creative impulses. And, of course, I plan to give it all away. Maybe someone somewhere, hanging by a thread, tethering their phone off a single LTE bar, can benefit from my stuff. Or perhaps not. But I know I will and that is pretty much all that matters right now anyways. Ideally, I'd love to whittle down my hardware needs to a single phone device running an os that supports a desktop mode paired with a portable monitor and keyboard. That would certainly knock at least a kg off my total onebag weight. I want to be so flexible that if I break something or forget something or have something stolen or encounter a nasty customs officer having a bad day who takes my stuff, I can just pick up another cheap and used option, load a better os, and move the eff on. Life is too short, and is currently overflowing with perfectly usable garbage, to waste time obsessing over the shiny things in our possession. Its like dumpster diving but not for food. Most folks just call it permacomputing.
So to begin, my rss feed is my lifeline. It is how I interact with the internet I think 95% of the time. If I find something interesting, I pop that sucker in there. And if that sucker doesn't have an rss feed, I an VERY SAD cursing to the sky why why why. I use miniflux as my reader and take advantage of its api to perform nightly backups of my feed's opml file. Since I spent literal years building this feed, I want to make sure I don't lose it in a freak internet accident or a sloppy fat finger keypress or just general stupidity. And I use that opml file to generate this blog's inks page. It is a not a too terribly complicated process. Just a few lines of bash code with the itty btty binaries yq and jq doing some heavy lifting. Bash loops cycle through the opml file, yq converts the xml to json, jq parses and pulls out the relevant bits, and bash prints out the html. It all looks like this:
yq -p=xml -o=json opml-2026-04-24.xml | sed 's/+@//g' | jq -r '.opml.body.outline.[].text' \
| while read -r ctg; do
echo "<h3>${ctg}</h3>"
yq -p=xml -o=json opml-2026-04-24.xml | sed 's/+@//g' | jq -c -r --arg ctg "${ctg}" '.opml.body.outline.[]
| select(.text == $ctg) | .outline | sort_by(.title) | .[]' \
| while read -r line; do
title=$(jq -r '.title' <<< "${line}")
url=$(jq -r '.htmlUrl' <<< "${line}")
echo "<a href=\"${url}\" target=\"_blank\">${title}</a><br>"
done
done
Simple and to the point. If you, dear reader, don't already have a snazzy way to generate your own links page on your own blog from an rss reader's opml file, then please feel free to use mine. Alter it to your hearts content. Use it as inspiration for you to invent a new way to create your own links list. I hereby decree the little code snippet is free to go out into the world and seek its fortune. And I'd like to see more personal blogs list links to other websites they like.
As I go along, I plan to post more of this type of work which is hopefully interesting to people other than myself. And I don't expect the format of all of my tech posts to look like one of those long-winded cookbook recipes where the author writes their life story and you have to scroll through lengthy unrelated ramblings just to get to the ingredients list and what temperature to set the oven. But, for the first part in the series, I figure a little anecdotal setup is warranted.