Recently I purchased a Mikrotik hap-ac router as I am in the process of moving away from the unify access points I currently use in my home network. The main reasons for this is the numerous GPL violations, the introduction of a call home feature without telling users, as well as the lack of deeper control that only comes with open source software. In any case, the end goal is to leverage Openwisp as the wireless access point controller, and OpenWrt powered access points everywhere in the house. One nice thing about using OpenWrt is that my older Unify AC-LR, also supports it, so I can use a similar process to the one I will describe in this article to leverage my older equipment in the case I do not sell it right away.

This article will detail how to install OpenWrt on the Mikrotik hap-ac router, but will save setup of the access points as well as Openwisp to another article.

I am happy to announce that this site is nearly complete. There are a few additional features I still intend to add, mainly to do with offline viewing and user experience, but all-in-all I am quiet happy with it. Now I intend to mainly focus on populating this blog with more content and writing a little more frequently. Also for those of you wondering if pagination is working, it is, completely! Both on the tag pages and the blog page, however currently I don't have enough articles to trigger multiple pages (greater then 6 is required), so the pagination next/prev/first/last page links at the bottom of the page are plain text. I at some point may address this but it will only really be an issue for another few articles and could be resolved quiet easily in the case of 6 or less articles.

Recently, I came across an article saying to my dismay that the Application Cache API is being depreciated in firefox. I say to my dismay because this site uses Application Cache so it can be viewed offline, which means I'm going to have to refactor my site for Application Caches replacement. Some would say offline viewing is overkill for a blog but initially I attempted it as a learning exercise, but am pretty happy with the end result of a pretty smooth offline viewing experience.

Currently as some may have noticed, the "See Comments" link under each individual blog post does nothing. This is because I have been struggling to find a good solution to handle comments. Of course many people choose to use Disqus. Unfortunately due to the proprietary nature of Disqus, I refuse to use it (See this). There are some open source solutions including:

Isso

• Written in Python.
• Supports modern browsers (IE10+, Firefox, Chrome, ...)

Juvia

• Written in Ruby
• Not maintained

There are quite a few others, though I haven't spent much time investigating them as many of them are incomplete or unmaintained. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6818416 for a decent discussion of "Disqus Alternatives".

I've tried Isso but because my blog is a Single Page Application (SPA) where pages can be addressed directly or using a anchor url. For example, this post can be reached via /#/posts/about-comments.html or /posts/about-comments.html. Forgive my vague explanation, its been a few months since I last played with Isso. Its too bad I couldn't get it to function because from all the open source options, it seems to be the most mature solution.

Another option that came to mind is to use a sub-reddit for my blog and post new threads for each blog post as a way for people to submit comments. I don't like this as the content would then not be hosted on my servers and it would require users to create a account on Reddit. Not to mention the process wouldn't be simple to automate so I'd have to go create a new reddit thread in my sub-reddit every time I submitted a new post.

The last option I've considered is just foregoing comments all together. Personally, I rarely leave comments on blogs and if I'm interested in getting a hold of someone I generally prefer to use email.

What do you think? Feel free to email me at collin.doering@rekahsoft.ca with any comments and/or suggestions. Anyways, over the next while I hope to find a solution, but for the time being use email or IRC if you wish to contact me.

Recently I have had the pleasure of completing the course Nand to Tetris on Coursea. Firstly, I'd like to highly recommend it to anyone! I never thought it would be possible for me to understand computers all the way down to the hardware level (past assembly that is); Nand to Tetris has shown me otherwise! It has also inspired me to pursue learning a real world hardware description language and attempt to implement the Hack system on an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array). In this article I will describe how the process is coming and the what remains to be completed.

For the impatient, the repository is located here and is documented here.

Hi all! Thanks for taking the time to visit my new blog. The terms of use of the content and source code for the blog are on the homepage. This site is still under light construction, if you notice any issues please take the time to let me know via email.

The purpose of this blog is to allow me to 'put my thoughts to paper' so to speak. I hope you will find at least some of my exploits entertaining, as I will discuss varying topics of personal interest including computers, linux, programming, and math, among others. In an upcoming post I will detail how I built this Hakyll powered blog. Though as I mentioned earlier there are still a few little touch ups to be completed before everything is to my satisfaction; particularily, I haven't got pagination to work yet. Anyways, once I have it working I will write a post detailing how I setup this blog. For now, that's all; thanks for reading!