parenting – Dan Q

Twenty Inches

I let the elder kid choose her lunch. She chose a pizza so huge that each slice is larger than her entire face. Needless to say, she needed a little help with it!

A Selfhosted Static Site Editor

My 12-year-old was interested in learning some HTML and CSS and making her own website. If she were anybody else I’d point her at something like Nekoweb as a starter host because their web-based (VSCode-based) “Nekode” text editor makes writing your first static site simple.

But I’ve got a NAS sitting at home on a fibre connection, so I figured: I might as well just host something similar here.

Here’s how I did it:

1. DNS

I pointed her domain at my static IP, plus a subdomain for the “backend” interface. Suppose her site would be at example.net (and www.example.net) with the admin interface at admin.example.net: my DNS configuration might look like this:

@     10800 IN     A 172.66.147.243
www   10800 IN CNAME example.net.
admin 10800 IN CNAME example.net.

2. Caddy

I’ve got a Caddy webserver acting as a static server and a reverse proxy already, so I just added a new static site with a configuration like this:

example.net, www.example.net {
  root /volumes/example.net/public
  encode gzip
  templates
  file_server
}

The templates directive means that, if/when she wants to, she could use Caddy’s built-in SSI-like features. Or if she decides someday she’d prefer a static site generator then I can sort her out with shell access or something.

It probably wouldn’t be much harder to set up something like this from scratch on e.g. a Raspberry Pi: Caddy’s fast and easy to get set up.

3. Editor

I used the OpenVSCode Server Docker image to provide a browser-based VSCode interface in which she could edit HTML, CSS and JavaScript and drag-drop files from her local machine. I’m using Unraid on my NAS so I didn’t have to think much about running a new Docker container, but I guess that if I did then I’d have typed something like:

docker run -d \
  # 7890 is the port on my NAS that I'll proxy Caddy to:
  -p 7890:3000
  # /mnt/user/example.net is the path on my NAS;
  # /example.net is where it'll appear within VSCode:
  -v "/mnt/user/example.net:/example.net" \
  # this tells OpenVSCode-Server to mount the directory to begin with:
  -e OPENVSCODE_SERVER_ROOT=/example.net \
  gitpod/openvscode-server

Now all I needed to do was point Caddy at it. For the time being I simply restricted access to only “computers on my local LAN”, but it’d be easy enough to add authentication using basic auth and/or client certificates if she wanted to be able to work on her site from elsewhere:

admin.example.net {
  # Restrict access to 192.168.* LAN:
  @allowed {
    remote_ip 192.168.0.0/16
  }
  # Proxy permitted folks to the container:
  handle @allowed {
    reverse_proxy http://nas:7890
  }
  # Block everybody else:
  handle {
    abort
  }
}

That’s literally all it took to put together a web-based editing environment that publishes directly to a static website. And because it’s on my own infrastructure, it’d be trivially easy to modify it in the future if she decided to go in a different direction, e.g. a PHP site, or continuous deployment from a repo, or static site generation from a shell.

That’s all!

Here’s a test site I threw together using exactly this stack, demonstrating the entirely browser-based editing workflow (not shown is drag-and-drop to upload, but I promise that works too!):

F-Day plus 12

It’s now twelve days since a flood struck my house, causing the ground floor to be submerged under a couple of feet of water and ultimately leading us to kick off an insurance claim process.

A home office with its floor stripped down to poured concrete and an industrial dehumidifier running. — My regular home office of the last six years sits stripped-down, with no flooring, skirting boards, or power (with the exception of the specialised circuit powering an industrial dehumidifier).

And man, a home insurance claim seems to be… slow. For instance, we originally couldn’t even get anybody out to visit us until F-day plus 10 (later improved to F-day plus 7). The insurance company can’t promise that they’ll confirm that they’ll “accept liability” (agree to start paying for anything) until possibly as late as F-day plus 17. Nobody will check for structural damage until F-day plus 19¹.

Oh, and the insurance company have advised us to look for something like a “12 month let with a 6 month break clause”, which is horrifying. We could be out of our home for up to a year.

Dan, a white man, stands with his arms raised outside a nicely-decorated converted barn. — Right now, though, we’re spending two weeks in this holiday let about half an hour’s drive from our house. It’s pretty nice, except that we have to commute over the ever-congested single-lane Burford Bridge to get the kids to and from school every day².

Some days it feels like being stuck in a nowhere-place… but simultaneously still having to make the regular everyday stuff keep ticking over. Visiting the house- currently stripped of anything damp and full of drying equipment – feels like stepping onto another planet… or like one of those dreams where you’re somewhere familiar except it’s wrong somehow.

But spending time away from it, “as if” on holiday except-not, is weird too: like we’re accepting the ambiguity; leaning-in to limbo. Especially while we’re waiting for the insurance company to do their initial things, it feels like life is both on hold, and not-allowed to be on hold.

A nervous-looking French Bulldog in a teal jumper looks up from under a desk. — The dog gets it. I had to take her to the house for a while on Monday³ and she spent the whole time leaning against my feet for reassurance.

And I worry that by the time they’re committed to paying for us to stay somewhere else for at least half a year, they lose any incentive they might have to contract for speed. There’s no hurry any more. We’re expected to just press pause on our home, but carry on with our lives regardless, pretending that everything’s normal.

So yeah, it’s a weird time.

Footnotes

¹ I’m totally committed to this way of counting the progress, which I started on F-day plus 3. I get the feeling like it might be a worthwhile way of keeping track of how long all of this takes.

² Normally, the younger and older child are able to get to school on foot or via a bus that stops virtually outside our house, each day, so an hour-plus round-trip to their schools and back up to twice a day is a bit of a drag! We’re managing to make it work with a little creativity, but I wouldn’t want to make it a long-term plan!

³ And do some work from there, amidst the jet engine-like noise of the dehumidifiers!

“I’m glad I’m not the only one”

Still at MegaConLive. I’ve not done this kind of con before (and still wouldn’t, were it not for my tweenager and her various obsessions). Not my jam, and that’s fine.

But if there’s one thing for which I can sing it’s praises: everybody we’ve met is super friendly and nice. Sure, you can loudly telegraph your fandoms and identities via cosplay, accessories, masks, badges, bracelets or whatever… but it’s also just a friendly community of folks to just talk to.

The fashion choices are, more than anything, just an excuse to engage: a way to say “hey, here’s a conversation starter if you’d like to talk to me!”

Overheard a conversation between my kid and another of a similar age, and there was a heartwarming moment where the other kid said, “oh wow, I thought I was the only one!” Adorbs.

It’s Eddie Bowley!

I may have been dragged to MegaConLive London by my multi-fandom loving 12-year-old, but I at least managed to find somebody worth getting a selfie with.

MegaConLive London

My 12-year-old’s persuaded me to take her to MegaConLive London this weekend.

As somebody who doesn’t pay much attention to the pop culture circles represented by such an event (and hasn’t for 15+ years, or whenever it was that Asdfbook came out?)… have you got any advice for me, Internet?

67 Bananas

I think my “six seven”-obsessed younger child was in the kitchen with a biro earlier. How do I know, you ask?

Note #27906

The younger kids’ taekwondo school put on a free ‘new years workout’ class this morning. It was pretty awesome.

My watch says my heart rate averaged 146bpm, peaking at 169bpm. It’s possible I’m not as fit as I used to be. 😅

But at least I don’t feel like I might die, like I did during the ‘dads go free’ promotion last year. Progress?

Bee

As part of my efforts to reclaim the living room from the children, I’m building a new gaming PC for the playroom. She’s called Bee, and – thanks to the absolute insanity that is The Tower 300 case from Thermaltake – she’s one of the most bonkers PC cases I’ve ever worked in.

Note #27831

Back at the Rollright Stones fire New Year’s Day, per family tradition. This year the younger child counted 74, the elder 59. The curse that prevents you counting the same number twice continues!

Note #27806

I asked the younger child to “help” me calculate how much Yorkshire pudding batter to make for this Christmas dinner.

“Well,” he began, “I’m going to want FIVE Yorkshire puddings, soo…”

Duck shunning

I’m not sure which of our children was last in this bath, but the configuration in which they’ve left their toys makes me feel as though I’m the subject of some kind of waterfowl-related shunning.

Perhaps they finally got wind or my heretical opinions on the God of Ducks (may he throw us bread) and they’ve collectively decided to disassociate from me?

Happy Polyamory Day 2025

Happy Polyamory Day y’all. (Plus max props to Petra without whom I’d have forgotten about it, like most years.)

Closest thing I did to celebrating it was going out to the pub last night for beer and food with my metamour, while our partner-in-common took our kids to see a film. Polyfam life isn’t always glamorous; but it is full of love.

How I Learned the Pythagorean Theorem

The younger child and I were talking about maths on the school run this morning, and today’s topic was geometry. I was pleased to discover that he’s already got a reasonable comprehension of the Pythagorean Theorem¹: I was telling him that I was about his age when I first came across it, but in my case I first had a practical, rather than theoretical, impetus to learn it.

It was the 1980s, and I was teaching myself Dr. Logo, Digital Research‘s implementation of the Logo programming language (possibly from this book). One day, I was writing a program to draw an indoor scene, including a window through which a mountain would be visible. My aim was to produce something like this:

All of these graphics were made using my own 2019 implementation of Logo, TRRTL.COM: click on any graphic to continue drawing!

My window was 300 “steps”² tall by 200 steps wide and bisected in both directions when I came to make my first attempt at the mountain.

And so, naively, starting from the lower-left, I thought I’d need some code like this:

RIGHT 45
FORWARD 100
RIGHT 90
FORWARD 100

But what I ended up with was this:

Hypotenuse? More like need-another-try-potenuse.

I instantly realised my mistake: of course the sides of the mountain would need to be longer so that the peak would reach the mid-point of the window and the far side would hit its far corner. But how much longer ought it to be.

I intuited that the number I’d be looking for must be greater than 100 but less than 250: these were, logically, the bounds I was working within. 100 would be correct if my line were horizontal (a “flat” mountain?), and 250 was long enough to go the “long way” to the centrepoint of the window (100 along, and 150 up). So I took a guess at 150 and… it was pretty close… but still wrong:

I remember being confused and frustrated that the result was so close but still wrong. The reason, of course, is that the relationship between the lengths of the sides of a triangle don’t scale in a 1:1 way, but this was the first time I found myself having to think about why.

So I found my mother and asked her what I was doing wrong. I’m sure it must have delighted her to dust-off some rarely-accessed knowledge from her own school years and teach me about Pythagoras’!

The correct answer, of course, is given by:

\sqrt{100^{2} + 100^{2}}

I so rarely get to use MathML that I had to look up the syntax.

The answer, therefore, is… 141.421 (to three decimal places). So I rounded to 141 and my diagram worked!³

What made this maths lesson from my mother so memorable was that it fed a tangible goal. I had something I wanted to achieve, and I learned the maths that I needed to get there. And now it’s impermeably etched onto my brain.

I learned the quadratic equation formula and how to perform algebraic integration by rote, and I guarantee that it’s less well-established in my long-term memory than, say, the sine and cosine rules or how to solve a simultaneous equation because I’ve more-often needed to do those things outside of the classroom!

So I guess the lesson is that I should be trying to keep an eye out for practical applications of maths that I can share with my kids. Real problems that are interesting to solve, to help build the memorable grounding that latter supports the more-challenging and intangible abstract maths that they may wish to pursue later.

Both kids are sharp young mathematicians, and the younger one seems especially to enjoy it, so feeding that passion feels well-worthwhile. Perhaps I should show them TRRTL.COM so they can try their hand at Logo!

Footnotes

¹ You know the one: the square of the triangle’s hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. You could conceivably know it by some other mnemonic, but the essence is that if you know the lengths of two sides of any right-angled triangle, you can derive the length of the third with some moderately-simple arithmetic.

² Just one way that Logo is/was a cute programming language was its use of “steps” – as in, turtle-steps – to measure distances. You might approximate them as pixels, but a “step” has meaning even for lines that don’t map linearly to pixels because they’re at wonky angles, for example.

³ I’d later become unstuck by rounding, while trying to make a more-complex diagram with a zig-zag pattern running along a ribbon: a small rounding error became compounded over a long time and lead to me being a couple of pixels off where I intended. But that’s another story.

Distractingly Amazing

Found the younger child not-in-bed but dancing around his room, using his pyjamas as perhaps some kind of streamers or flags.

Me: “Why aren’t you in bed?”
Him: “I’m sorry; I got distracted by how amazing I am.”

Hard to argue with that.