Posts
Fixing Search Problems in Hugo Hextra theme
The Hugo Hextra theme used by this blog has a useful search feature, implemented using the popular FlexSearch library. But after playing with search for a while, I discovered that it often returned only a small subset of the expected posts. For example, my blog has 20 posts that contain the word “firefox”, but search displayed only five of those posts. Here I describe how to fix this problem, which actually turned out to be several problems.
July 6, 2025
Tiny House 9: Insulation, roof prep, and an expensive mistake
I haven’t been able to work much on the tiny house due to family obligations involving frequent trips to the SF Bay Area, and delays on material deliveries. But I finally received the roofing panels and some extra strapping yesterday, so I was able to make a little progress.
July 3, 2025
Enlarging the Firefox Scrollbar
On Linux Mint, the scrollbar in Firefox is very narrow, and doesn’t appear unless you hover the mouse cursor over it. This is a problem for my mom, who refuses to use the scroll wheel on her mouse, and insists on scrolling the hard way. But the scrollbar is so small, she has to struggle slowly and tediously to use it. Here is a fix for the ridiculously hard-to-see scrollbar.
June 28, 2025
Csup email client
#Software#Notmuch#Crystal#Linux#Csup
Terminal-based email clients may seem like an anachronism from the 1970s, but they have their place even now. They don’t require a browser, they can run on servers via ssh, and they are very fast to operate, being keyboard-driven and character-based.
June 24, 2025
Pagination in Hugo Hextra theme
I recently switched this blog to use the Hugo Hextra theme. Compared with the previous theme I was using, Hextra had a search function that actually worked correctly, and it had a more pleasing and simpler appearance. But one problem I noticed right away was that it didn’t support pagination in the listing of posts: the summaries of all 283 posts for this blog appeared on one page. After examining the official Hugo documentation for pagination, I was able to apply a simple patch to the theme’s layout, and create some custom CSS for the pagination controls.
June 20, 2025
Tiny House 8: Door and Window
The door showed up yesterday, so I spent much of today installing it.
June 17, 2025
Tiny House 7: Insulation and a word about the design
Something I should have mentioned at the beginning of this series: the design of this tiny house is due to David Howard of FirstDay Cottage. My ex-wife and I built one of his house “kits” in Vermont in 2012-2013.
May 31, 2025
Tiny House 6: Sheathing and House Wrap
I continued to install more sheathing boards (1x6 pine t&g) until I ran out of wood about 1/3 of the way through the east roof. Otherwise it’s done. Here’s a partial view of the interior:
May 28, 2025
Tiny House 5: The Work Resumes
I had to stop working on the tiny house at the end of January due to the onset of the rainy season, after a 24 day dry spell. The day before it rained I covered the whole thing with tarps (which are expensive!).
May 9, 2025
Moving from Git to Fossil
#Linux#Software#Fossil#Git#Apache
This article describes the procedure I used to convert my git repositories to Fossil. Git is a perfectly fine source code manager; it was designed for large projects that have hundreds of contributors, like the Linux kernel. But for small projects git is a bit of overkill, and there are number of things that I find annoying about it.
May 8, 2025