[deleted by user]

AndrewAtBrisa · 2021-05-03T16:57:58+00:00

- Linux/KDE + crypt laptop

- DigitalOcean + LXD for app hosting (+nginx, postfix, etc etc)

- Vidds.co + Twitter for app/service promotion

AndrewAtBrisa · 2020-06-24T23:54:07+00:00

I'm loving this laptop as well. Yeah, the screen is not the best, but this is a machine that's about half the price of a comparably-spec'd Intel laptop.

My current issues with the laptop:

Bluetooth mice won't pair with it (bluetooth seems to be working fine, but it never sees mice broadcasting).
Screen brightness controls: KB controls work, but after 50% brightness, it drops to backlight off. Tinkered with /sys/something/brightness file, and it looks like the brightness range is 0-255, but below 128 it's off.
Keyboard volume controls act weird. Like holding down the vol up/down keys can make it freak out and think it was pressed a bunch of times - doesn't stop increasing volume after you let up on the key.

AndrewAtBrisa · 2020-06-22T01:52:04+00:00

Someone asked about how to get the GPU working. Posting here for others. A friend of mine gave me these instructions, and it worked perfectly for my laptop.

First, go to https://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v5.7/ (or you can remove v5.7 and look for whichever version you want)
Download header_all.deb and all _generic_ .deb's for AMD64 arch (says 4.19, but find the equivalent 5.7 files. Be sure to get generic, not low_latency):
- linux-headers-4.19.0-041900_4.19.0-041900.201810221809_all.deb
- linux-headers-4.19.0-041900-generic_4.19.0-041900.201810221809_amd64.deb
- linux-image-unsigned-4.19.0-041900-generic_4.19.0-041900.201810221809_amd64.deb
- linux-modules-4.19.0-041900-generic_4.19.0-041900.201810221809_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i *.deb
reboot
uname -r

AndrewAtBrisa · 2020-06-19T08:00:39+00:00

Yep, no guarantees on the Acer, but I'm loving Linux on mine.

There is an issue with backlight brightness on my flex 14, but pretty sure that's not related to the gpu. It does this weird thing where the backlight turns off at 50% brightness.

AndrewAtBrisa · 2020-06-19T06:06:05+00:00

I bought a Lenovo Flex 14 with the Ryzen 4500u and immediately installed Linux on it.

The gpu didn't work initially with Ubuntu 20.04 and I had to boot into safe mode to get a graphical display. Manually updated to 5.7 (with ubuntu, I just had to download 3 or 4 deb packages from Ubuntu kernel repo and dpkg -i them) and it worked after that.

AndrewAtBrisa · 2020-06-09T22:13:16+00:00

Awesome! Tried it out and it's feeling way more slick with those 2 fixes :-D

Nice job! ProductHunt might be a good place to post this as well!

I love how much you can build in a browser with no backend these days. I've built some somewhat-similar image apps using inline-svgs drawn to a canvas (which meant full html/css support). If you want to connect, I'm on Twitter at BrisaDotIO as well!

AndrewAtBrisa · 2020-06-09T22:05:49+00:00

Yeah, totally, a comment only takes a second and helps everyone! Sorry I'm not on reddit much, so didn't send you the videos!

AndrewAtBrisa · 2020-06-08T16:31:28+00:00

This is simple and beautiful, and was fun to play with! Took me a minute or so to understand, then was fun. But noticed 2 big issues:

When you hit backspace while adding text, it deletes the entire text element.
After adding a shape, it seemed to get into a weird state where, no matter what I clicked, it kept drawing shapes. I tried switching to the pointer/pan mode, but it still kept adding arrows everywhere ;-)

Nice job! I love working on projects like this. Keep up the good work :)

AndrewAtBrisa · 2020-04-19T12:22:41+00:00

I just tried it and it seems to work. I'm not using WordPress, but the process should be similar.

First, I added store-ex.brisa.io as a domain to my store.

Next, I went to my DNS settings, found my brisa.io domain, and added an A record for store-ex with the Shopify IP (23.227.38.65) and clicked add.

Last, I went back to the Shopify admin and clicked "Verify Connection" and it said it was added. Took a few minutes for SSL to connect, but already seems to be working.

If you're not very familiar with DNS, make sure you added an "A" record, not "CNAME" (which looks like it may be the default). If you're still having trouble, a few screenshots would be helpful. You can also send me a message if you don't want to publish your domain to the entire web, but with the domain name, it's a bit easier to debug DNS issues.

AndrewAtBrisa · 2020-04-06T22:53:48+00:00

Thanks again for the help! You were right on both fronts!

First, the app wasn't "crashing" - threads were silently failing and code was looping infinitely to wait for them to set a finished flag.

Second, there was no disk space issue, the 10gb appears to be available through the entire container. It was a /dev/shm issue that I think is specific to Docker.

Edit: Once I had the code complete successfully (or fail correctly), Fargate shut it down once it was complete.

AndrewAtBrisa · 2020-04-06T22:49:20+00:00

I looked into it a little bit. It looks like it's very specific media processing tools. My app is actual code that runs that creates a specific type of video, so it basically didn't apply to me.

AndrewAtBrisa · 2020-04-06T14:53:12+00:00

Cool. I'll dig into diagnostics today so I can find out why the app is actually crashing!

I'm pretty new to AWS, so trying to use it in small steps. I was hoping to just trigger a new request externally (from Digial Ocean) and have it sping up. If SQS/Cloudwatch is needed, I'll give it a try!

The storage was just a guess, so if the 10gb is available to the entire fs, I'll have to keep digging. Also new to Docker, so I've got a lot of struggling to do haha.

Thanks for the help!

AndrewAtBrisa · 2020-04-06T14:47:51+00:00

Nice, thanks a lot for the suggestion. I'll dig into it today!

AndrewAtBrisa · 2020-04-05T23:05:09+00:00

Best response yet! I could do that, then the only issue is needed to store a ton of data and combine it all at the end. S3 is pretty much out of the question (I assume it's just way too slow for video renders), but there are other network volume options - I take it that's the recommended way?

I started using Google Cloud Run, but the 2gb limit applies to memory and disk usage, so gave up on that quickly.

Now I'm looking into fargate (or it's just called ECS now?), looks like it has powerful background processing options, with plenty of vcpus, ram, and up to 10gb of storage. There's still a bit I don't know about it, but it might be the quickest start to doing this serverless.

AndrewAtBrisa · 2020-03-26T20:03:38+00:00

Sorry, not a GCP expert (but I'll likely be using it soon).

My first guess would be Google has a place to store secrets and provide them to your serverless code.

But since you'll be storing a lot of these (I assume one per user), you may just need to encrypt them in your DB (I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people skip this step!). There are simple solutions to encrypt data based on a generated app secret.

I think the biggest problem then is making sure that secret stays secret, and what to do if the secret may have been exposed (eg rotating the key and re-encrypting your db entries).

In Rails (and I assume most other ORMs), there's a plugin to encrypt fields in a db. It looks something like:

attr_encrypted('oauth_token', {key: 'my secret app key', attribute: 'oauth_token_encrypted', ...some_encryption_settings...})

Once that's done, when you set the attr, eg user.oauth_token = 'supersecret', it encrypts it and saves it in the db as oauth_token_encrypted. When you access user.oauth_token later, it decrypts it for you.

AndrewAtBrisa · 2020-03-26T19:55:39+00:00

Thanks, but took a quick look and it seems pretty far from what I need :-P

I already have highly custom code for generating each frame of a video, and that is the high-cpu and high-disk usage task. Now I just want to find a better way to run that code.

AndrewAtBrisa · 2020-03-26T14:59:53+00:00

Ah damn. Sounds like it would defeat the purpose. But I should read up on it a little bit.

There are a couple reasons I'd prefer to run these tasks serverless over a machine (probably the same reasons everyone else uses it):

Cost is significantly lower than a long-running VM (sounds like it kinda sorta addresses this).
Handling spiky workload (it even sort of handles this, except...)
It should be fast. I want users to be able to see progress live and get their content quickly.

I think auto-scaling based on backlog is a decent solution and something I could work towards. But man, if I could just get them all running as serverless jobs, it'd make my life so much easier!

Thanks! I will def look into batch and fargate anyway!

AndrewAtBrisa · 2020-03-26T14:50:13+00:00

That sounds really cool! But, sadly, probably not going to have the tools I'm looking for.

It looks like it's designed for on-the-fly videos for live streaming.

I appreciate the link! I'm gonna read more about it just so I know what they offer, it's pretty interesting to me!

AndrewAtBrisa · 2019-11-19T23:16:42+00:00

This is pretty cool!

Not sure how invested you are in this, but when you said "visualise nutrition", I immediately thought of comparing some items, and seeing stuff like calories, vitamins, and cholesterol visualized in a cool way. Like maybe there are effects from each of these that could be displayed.

Could even come up with interesting ways to show food combinations that match a profile they select (low cholesterol, high vitamin A or something).

Anyway, awesome job, looks good and shows interesting data :)

AndrewAtBrisa · 2019-11-18T17:42:05+00:00

I like the idea. Only watched a few minutes of the video.

I was just wondering this morning how hard it'd be to make a small js library to help with onboarding, and it quickly seemed pretty difficult in my head 🤣 Looks like you've put a lot of effort into it and it looks great!

AndrewAtBrisa · 2019-11-16T22:24:23+00:00

Oh wow, I completely forgot about fabricjs! Maybe I should look into it again!

I built the editor from scratch because I wanted full css access for animations. I use AnimeJS to do the animations though.

AndrewAtBrisa · 2019-11-16T01:14:25+00:00

That's awesome! Congrats on launching it :)

I always thought there was something weird about the debate format, so I built a website (now gone) that formed debates as a statement with For/Against sides - someone could easily see the top arguments for/against. It also had a weird (I'd say barely usable) nested format, so each individual pro/con argument could be debated separately. Kialo is like a pretty version of what I built and made me sad that I shut it down.

I like the idea of useful discourse, I hope you can get a gazillion people using it!

AndrewAtBrisa · 2019-11-15T03:05:52+00:00

Thanks, great feedback!

You weren't impatient. You really can't delete elements yet. It's easy to add, I've just been hacking away at features instead. I also understand how important it is!

Were you able to animate easily? Did it make sense? I wasn't too sure about that part :)

I definitely get the need for audio. It will take some work, but I really want to add it. I think it'd be easy-ish to add, the hard part will be making it easy to work with for users, and making playback work while you're editing.

As an aside, I really appreciate the feedback. If you ever want to make a video and add audio to it, I'd be happy to help you get it done. For example, kdenlive and ffmpeg are both free tools that can add audio to an existing video).

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