We’re coming close to releasing Version 5.0 of Webmentions for WordPress. This is the culmination of a long process of rewriting(and a few long periods of not) the entire plugin. There are a lot of low level improvements that will set the stage for more in the future. Entirely new parsing code, rewritten display code, new storage. The reason it has been so long is the migration of data to the new storage. There is more for future, but that will occur after this version is released.
Tomorrow is World Backup Day, so I’m embarking on redoing my network attached storage and associated backup process. The long part is waiting and testing new hard drives. I have to, make another backup of the data locally, remove all the drives from the NAS, install the new SSD OS drive, and the bigger data drives, do a complete self test(which for a 10TB drive is about 16 hours). Then restore from the backup…test…if the restoration doesn’t work, remove the new drives and bring back the old 3TB drives and start all over again…I’ll be done by…sometime in April.

Visiting the Ashokan Reservoir

On March 31, 2021, took another family drive. This one looping around the Ashokan Reservoir.

The route started out along State Road 55 past the Neversink Reservoir, and spurring off onto Route 55A, which goes along the other side of the Roundout Reservoir.

Spurring onto Sundown Road, we headed into the Sundown Wild Forest. The 30,100-acre Sundown Wild Forest covers a large swath of the southeast Catskills, including several ridges and 10 mountains over 2,000 feet. We had planned to stop by the Peekamoose Blue Hole, but missed the turnoff and only saw it from a distance. It is a depression in the streambed rock of the Rondout Creek, a unique natural feature formed by sand and swirling gravel in an ancient whirlpool.

The route continues into the Slide Mountain Wilderness, which encompasses more than 47,500 acres and is the largest and most popular wilderness area in the Catskill Forest Preserve.  This brought us into the Town of Olive, which is inside the Catskill Park. The Catskill Park is 700,000 acres, of which 287,000 acres are owned by the state as part of the Forest Preserve.

Heading through forest, we finally reached state road 28A and the Ashokan Reservoir. The Reservior, part of the NYC water system, and is the city’s deepest reservoir at 190 feet. It was built between 1907 and 1915.

The Ashokan Reservoir, of all the ones we’ve visited in the last year, has the most walking and biking trails. This includes the 11.5 mile Ashokan Rail Trail. While I’m always disappointed at the loss of rails, this was well executed.

We stopped to eat our lunch at the Woodstock Dike Trailhead. It was windy, and it is cold this year. But at some point in the future, we may return to walk the trail further.

The return trip looped around the remainder of the Reservoir, before cutting back to Accord, NY.  When my mother was a child, she stayed at bungalow colonies in Accord.

We passed through Ellenville on Route 209 back to our starting point.

Simple Location 3.6.3 Released

Version 3.6.3 of Simple Location has been released. This adds Aaron Parecki’s Compass server as a location provider.

Location providers in Simple Location look up the current location of the user.  As I write this, I realize that I set it up to globally look up the location, and I could make it, since Compass has users, allow for a different lookup per user.  Future feature, I suppose, along with looking up historic location.

Since I hate to do just one thing, I added in a new weather provider that had been on my list, APIXU.

The goal I have in adding as additional providers that perform the same function…map, weather, location, reverse geocoding, elevation is that I do not want to be beholden to one company. If my access shuts down, I can switch to another one. Someday, I may implement automatic fallover.

Setting up Compass with GPS Logger for Android

After much debate about whether to build my own solution or install one, I installed Aaron Parecki’s Compass.

Compass is a GPS Tracking server. It is specifically tailored to an iOS app Aaron developed called Overland. Which creates a problem as I am an Android user.

So, I needed an Android app that could send data to Compass. I tried GPS Logger. It is a popular GPS Logging app, although I’m not sure if it was intended for 24 hour a day use. It seems the biggest use cases it is used for would be gps tagging of photos and tracking hacks.

It supports logging to a custom URL. THe following settings have to be set

  • URL: https://example.org/api/input?token=xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • HTTP Header: Content-Type: application/json
  • HTTP Method: POST
  • HTTP Body: { “locations”: [ { “type”: “Feature”, “geometry”: { “type”: “Point”, “coordinates”: [%LON, %LAT, %ALT] }, “properties”: { “timestamp”: “%TIME”, “speed”: %SPD, “direction”: %DIR, “activity”: “%ACT”, “provider”: “%PROV”, “battery_level”: %BATT, “horizontal_accuracy”: “%ACC”, “annotation”: “%DESC”, “device_id”: “%SER” } } ] }

The above sends a variety of preset parameters GPS Logger provides in the format Compass expects.