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Prepared the sheep platform for winter

This week, we did a lot of different things, but most notably, we prepared the sheep platform for winter.

Monday 20 October

New week with new possibilities! It was a rainy day. Both DW and I worked from home. In the evening, I thought I would log out of work and continue with my new server. That is not how that went, because dinner is also essential. Then, a new load of scaffold material from the neighbor. There will be more tomorrow as well.

In the evening, after carrying scaffold material around, I looked into the new server. I started setting up the email again. Without realizing it, I put lyrics-editor.com offline just before going to bed.

Tuesday 21 October

This morning, I realized I had put lyrics-editor.com offline, and I restored it. We went to the office. It rained heavily today, so there was no discussion of biking. Besides, I brought DW to the train station.

After work, I had a look at the new server. It went from bad to worse. I had one certificate service across several sites, and I wanted to split that certificate, but you cannot do that. Nothing worked as I had hoped.

Then, more scaffold material. I helped offload that material, then I could continue with the servers. At some point, I removed all certificates and then reintroduced them. Now it worked.

Wednesday 22 October

This morning, I had an idea for a new logo for the lyrics-editor.com site. It is a new character combining lowercase L with E. It looks faintly like a note, too. After work, I drafted the new lyrics editor letter and added it to the site's log. I will try this for a while. It has a classic look and evokes several associations. It can look like a letter 'j' from Jens, like a musical note, and like the combination of 'l' and 'e', obviously. I think of adding thin lines as well, but that is for another time.

I worked on the email server in the afternoon.

It was time to go to the physiotherapist. Do you recall my bursitis last week? Yes, I know —it was so painful, and now it is gone! I was a bit nervous about going to the physiotherapist. It went well. The physiotherapist is the same lady we got Merida from. We went to her on 24 June 2023. Then, on 8 July 2023, we got Merida. Now I was back for therapy.

She checked up on my situation and concluded I have to do something about my chest. I need to be more upright. For this, I got three exercises.

1. Lie down on the ground with a roll of cloth between the shoulders.
2. Lie on the belly over a ball, hands stretched out behind.
3. Lie on my back over a ball, doing curl-ups.

She massaged my back. That was intense.

In the evening, I continued with the email server. It didn't work, and it got late.

Thursday 23 October

DW worked from home, and I went to the office. On the way to the office, I heard sounds from the wheels, so I drove directly to the garage. The mechanic will be off next week, so there won't be time for the car. I got an appointment for the week after that.

Setting up an email server is a lengthy, very complicated technical process. I need that email to continue developing the services at lyrics-editor.com. This is the second time I'm doing this, and I've gotten past the point where I got stuck last time, but just barely. It feels like I have been stuck at the same point for two weeks now. I learn a lot, and that is nice. I am using Postfix and Dovecot. On that, I use PostfixAdmin with MariaDB, NGINX, and PHP.

I'm on my way home. It is raining. There were not many people in the office today. Schools are on an autumn holiday this week. The storm Benjamin entered, but it was not that bad.

In the evening, I continued working on the email server. It got really late again.

Friday 24 October

It was a windy night. DW worked from home, and I had a day off. In the morning, I moved the sheep to the southwest field. That was the only farm activity I did today. I worked on the email server the whole day. I set up SPF, DMARC, etc, and I got the server working in the afternoon. That was such a great feeling!

The first thing I did was to get a free Trustpilot account for lyrics-editor.com and add a free widget to the site. Then I submitted a five-star review of my own site. Later in the evening, it got approved, and I thought that was it.

We celebrated my achievement by getting my favorite pizzas, making a fire in the stove, and watching a film. We watched "Hur många lingon finns det i världen?" It was a great film! Halfway through the film, I received a message from Trustpilot stating that I am not allowed to post reviews of my own services on the platform. My review had been removed. Oh well.

After the film, I looked into sending an email via PHP on the lyrics-editor site, and it worked. I will create a feature that lets people create an account on lyrics-editor, and I am looking forward to that. We went to bed early; I was tired.

Saturday 25 October

The main project for today was preparing the sheep platform for winter. We wanted to raise the center of the platform so that water and other stuff can flow to the sides. For this, we had to buy at least 500 kg of sand.

We could have a truck deliver a pile of sand, but we don't know who to contact to do that quickly. It would be the cheapest method. We could also have a so-called big bag delivered, but that would not be quick either, and where would the truck driver put the sand? Big-bag sand delivery can be found online. We could also go to a hardware store and buy twenty bags of sand. That would be more expensive but the quickest method. We found a hardware store where the bags were almost 0.0796 euros per kilo, and that was okay.

We loaded the trailer and the back of the trunk in the peak of the rain. The tail of the storm let out the water it had collected. When we came home, we let the rain cloud pass us while we had a cup of coffee. There was more rain forecast, but it didn't rain all the time, luckily.

We picked up the tiles, spread the sand, and put the tiles back. It sounds so easy, but we were pretty much broken in the evening.

	Here, we let the sheep help us. That did not work very well.
	This sheep with blue fur compresses sand much better.
	Drive the car near the platform.
	The tiles are removed.
	Here we are emptying the bags.
	The ladies are let back in.
	"What are you doing?"

 

In the evening, I started thinking about how it would be nice to connect to the server remotely and debug the website in real time. I found an article by Sean O'Brien about this: "Remote SSH-Based PHP Development with Visual Studio Code." I decided to have a look at this tomorrow. For the rest, I sat aimlessly, scrolling feeds and feeling broken.

Sunday 26 October

This was the last Sunday of October; hence, winter time has now started. We put the clock back by one hour. I think of it as remembering the great summer behind us, looking back, setting the clock back one hour. The opposite on the last Sunday of March, looking forward to the upcoming summer. This morning still felt a bit demolished after yesterday's activities.

I so much wanted to sit behind my desk in my home office and try to configure PHP according to Sean O’Brien’s instructions, but it didn't feel right to be lazy. There was sun outside, and we will need to put our garlic beds in order, and it will not happen by itself. There was no option but to hold back my urge to start programming and go out and work on the garden.

The cucumber scaffold had to be dismantled. That was easy. Then I collected the porous water pipe from our irrigation system. I rolled the pipe onto the cardboard box we got the sink from the barn's restroom.

While working on the scaffold and irrigation pipes, I noticed that the wild strawberries are still flowering. That is a little out of season.

We have not enjoyed the wild strawberries so much this year. We are thinking about getting rid of them, but they are survivors, as you can be sure.

At last, I could sit down and work a little on the PHP instructions. My back hurt, but it felt great.

I followed the instructions as well as I could. On my server, things aren't done exactly the same way, so that was a bit confusing. I tried to emulate his intentions. The first part was getting VSCode to log in to the remote server and use the files on that server; that worked for a short while. It was not robust. Then the last part — making VSCode do remote debugging — did not work at all. It felt like falling into a configuration hole again. Last time I set up email, that took a while. Now I am in this hole, mocking around. I will solve it eventually.

I found something shocking. I had not turned on the firewall. Not on the new server or the old server. The firewalls are now turned on. How could this be possible? Another thing that troubles me is that the old server had its firewall off for 9 years. Not good. Oh well, that is solved now.

Here ends this week's blog. In my spare time, I worked on the email server, and it worked as I anticipated on Friday afternoon. There is more work to be done, but for now I can concentrate on other things. I went to the physiotherapist and got suggestions to walk more uprightly and look more proud. Work in progress on that one. We put sand under the tiles on the sheep platform so they will not lie in puddles. I started clearing the vegetable kitchen garden so we can plant the garlic, but more about that next week. Also, more about PHP and Xdebug next week.

I wrote 1759 words this week. That is not that much, but I am okay with that.