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Stillstehen

Die Schnecke steht still Wird ihr Ziel nie erreichen Huch wo ist sie hin?

War wohl nicht so wichtig

Du wirst es mir nicht glauben Ich hab den Sinn des Lebens gefunden Grad beim Scheiße aufklauben Als ich spazieren ging mit den Hunden Kennst sie ja, sind total lieb die beiden Doch eben auch noch recht jung Ich sags dir, da muss man Katzen meiden Auch eben trotz guter Erziehung Die Nachbarskatze zum Beispiel Die heißt übrigens Eunuch Find ich als Namen zwar etwas skuril Aber sie erinnert mich immer an dieses Buch Ach wie hieß es denn nur? Weißt schon, mit dieser Katze die spricht Die Essen bekommt rund um die Uhr Der Schrecksenmeister oder nicht? Bei dem Buch hatte ich damals noch Musik auf den Ohren Während dem lesen mein ich, so nebenbei Dadurch hab ich an vielen Liedern die Lust verloren Du kennst doch Alt-J, die warn leider eben auch dabei Im Moment hör ich wieder viel King Gizzard Vor allem an dem neusten Metal Album Hör ich mich grad einfach nicht satt Da gehts um Klimawandel kurzum Mit der Natur schauts ja leider immer schlechter aus Naja heut werd ich noch die Sonne genießen Kommste mit mir noch n bissl raus? Wollte heut eh noch das Hochbeet gießen Das wächst dieses Jahr echt erstaunlich gut Da kann man sich wirklich nich beklagen So ich hol jetzt nur noch schnell meinen Hut Warte mal, was wollt ich dir nochmal sagen?

Selbstbewusstsein

Oftmals nachm Sport Da fällt mir etwas auf Dieses eine kleine Wort Wart nur ich komm gleich drauf Da muss ich dann dran denken Wenn ich viel zu schnell nach Hause fahr Und das Auto grad noch so um die Kurve lenke Mit viel zu lauter Musik, is ja klar Oft ists Metal oder Hyperpop oder Techno Hauptsache richtig richtig laut Und natürlich n schnelles Tempo Wenn man sich dann einfach traut Als wärs ein riesiges Konzert Komplett schrill und ungehemmt So laut wies geht nur mitplärrt Und sich dabei trotzdem so gar nicht schämt Wenn es egal ist was man macht Wenn es egal ist was die andern toll finden Der Scham einfach entgegenlacht Man muss sich eigentlich einfach nur überwinden

Das Mordmotiv

Die Maus und der Strauß sitzen draus vor ihrem haus. Lebten in einem Landhaus nähe Moskaus von Haus aus schon in saus und braus. Doch liefs durchaus eines Tages im Treppenhaus auf was anderes hinaus. Der Strauß fand an der Maus eine Laus und machte aus Angst heraus ihr den Garaus.

Es gab den Schein alles wäre fein doch ist das Fräulein nun ganz allein. Sie war nicht gemein, war kein Schwein und warf obendrein nie den ersten stein. Wieso nur kams in diesem Heim insgeheim zu dieser Pein? Was man doch alles tut nur für den Reim..

Bin dabei

Wenn ich gefragt ob Ja ob Nein Und Präferenz fällt mir nicht ein Wird meist von mir ein Ja gewagt Denn für ein Nein würd nicht gefragt

PURPOSE

Who am I? Why am I here?

The reason for which something is done, created or for which something exists. The Big Why. That inarguable reason.

Where am I going? Why am I headed in this direction?

Purpose is defined as the reason for BE-ing, for EXIST-ence. A driving force that propels.

To discover purpose is to dicover why we are here.

Anyone or anything whose purpose is not known is in danger of abuse.

Dr. Myles Munroe How can the best version of a life be lived when the reason for its existence is unknown?

In 2024, some think the idea of finding purpose is cliche. It’s not.

Purpose is powerful! The impact of clarity of purpose in a life changes everything.

By the time I found the answers to the question of my purpose I was years out of college. Seminars, books, student counselling sessions didn’t do it for me. On the other hand, there are those who already knew as soon as they could speak what their purpose was and that doesn’t make it any less valid.

I think there is something beautiful about the fact that we all have our own unique journeys to finding our purpose. The discovery of purpose creates a novel experience for each person.

Even when I found the answer to the question of my purpose I wasn’t sure if I had the right answers because the answer did not tick off the checklists from the many self-help books I’d read. All that about passion, gifts & talent, excitement, great sacrifice and work not feeling like work.

I just knew that I’d moved from doing and functioning to being and with that came a deep sense of meaning and fulfillment.

The impact was earth shaking, life changing!

“Work on being, not on having, for with what you are you shall have.” ~ Daisy Osborn

The sad thing though, is that many never find purpose. When I discovered my purpose I realized everyone on earth is here for a specific reason. I also realized that there are those who never find their purpose. The thought that a person can come into this world and just exist without finding true purpose is scary.

Most people just want to be doing something, especially when that something is lucrative and they are successful at it.

I recently came accross this quote by Diana Mereu “When you are purpose-oriented, you will move from “doing” to “being”, you will ask yourself more “why” questions than “what” questions, and you move from being just functional to fantastical.”

I couldn’t help but wish I had come accross this sooner as it resonated so much with my experience of finding my true purpose. My journey from the life of doing, getting and having to being and becoming.

It’s the inspiration for this blog.

What’s your purpose and how did you discover it? Find out mine in my next post.

“We did not just happen to be, we were chosen by God to exist” – Mother Angelica

“More men fail through lack of purpose than lack of talent.” – Billy Sunday”

The real tragedy is not death but a life lived without purpose” – Rick Warren

Hey there!

Thinking about writing a blog..., erm..not just individual posts

Starting a daily blog series.

Yep. Its a huge committment

Not sure if I'm totally ready

Follow my journey ....

https://beyoubecomemore.wordpress.com/

https://write.literatur.social/me/c/becoming-more

introduction

Since 2019 Klaudia and I are running the Mastodon instance literatur.social. Back then, we knew that we do not have the time to maintain a Mastodon fork or even a customized installation. We already saw several other smaller instances being haunted by their custom Mastodon installations and every security release would involve a lot of stress getting the code base updated in time.

While the resource footprint of our instance has changed in the last years, the setup itself is still pretty much the same, simple (ansible-managed) docker-compose setup running the official docker image, with easy maintainability as the main design goal.

In summer 2023, we had the need to back-port several upstream changes for admin-webhooks for our automatic account approval system. Additionally we wanted do a few smaller changes, like extending the number of possible poll options was something that we really wanted to try out and also a few (hard-coded) rate limits needed changes. A customized docker image was born.

managing and maintaining small changes with minimal effort

We don't want to maintain a full fork of the Mastodon repository. We basically just want to create and maintain simple, minimalistic patch files. One can do this with the basic diff and patch tools, but especially updating patches that break due to changes is not possible in a meaningful way.

This is where quilt comes in:

Quilt is a tool to manage large sets of patches by keeping track of the changes each patch makes. Patches can be applied, un-applied, refreshed, etc.

It is extensively used, among others, by OpenWrt to manage several hundred Linux kernel patches, by Debian to maintain patches for building packages and others. Both OpenWrt and Debian have quilt pages, but they are quite specific and you will probably find better how-tos.

a quick quilt introduction

For quilt you will have a patches folder with: – the patches/*.patch files you work on – a patches/series file that lists the currently enabled patches with their order

If you have worked with version control systems like git, working with quilt will feel quite familiar, although there are a few differences: – patches are created before making the actual changes – files are added/assigned to patches before making the changes – everything outside of the added files will not be tracked

A typical workflow looks like this: 1. quilt new 001-my-patch-change-foobar-patch – create a new patch 2. adding the file and making the changes: – quilt edit foo/bar/fileToChange.bar – directly edit with quilt and your favourite EDITOR, or – quilt add foo/bar/fileToChange.bar – add file to edit it in an external editor afterwards 3. quilt refresh – update the patch once you made your changes

The commands quilt push and quilt pop will allow you to apply and remove patches in your current working tree, changes are typically added to the last applied patch.

Disclaimer: This is not intended as a quilt tutorial, there is a lot more to it, (dealing with multiple patches, refreshing of failing patches, etc.) If more people are interested in this I might write another blog post, just write me a note at @datacop@literatur.social 😉

building a customized image

Building a custom Mastodon Docker image from scratch with the original Dockerfile would be the obvious way, but part from the build time and required build resources, the official image is well-tested and verified by the community within minutes of a new release.

This is why we decided to go the minimalistic way and apply our patches on top of the official release image by installing quilt, pushing the patches and re-compiling the assets.

This is the Dockerfile that we use to create our customized image:

FROM ghcr.io/mastodon/mastodon:latest
ARG DEVELOPMENT

# add a nice '+custom' version suffix
ENV MASTODON_VERSION_METADATA="custom"

USER root
RUN apt-get -y --no-install-recommends install quilt vim

# add patches and .quiltrc
COPY --chown=mastodon:mastodon patches /opt/mastodon/patches
COPY --chown=mastodon:mastodon .quiltrc /opt/mastodon/

# back to the mastodon user
USER mastodon
WORKDIR /opt/mastodon

# push all patches in the `series` file, do not fail if DEVELOPMENT
RUN quilt push -a -f || [ -n "${DEVELOPMENT}" ]

# Precompile assets again
RUN OTP_SECRET=precompile_placeholder SECRET_KEY_BASE=precompile_placeholder rails assets:precompile && \
    yarn cache clean

.quiltrc is just for nice looking patches and vim as default editor:

QUILT_DIFF_ARGS="--no-timestamps --no-index -p ab --color=auto"
QUILT_REFRESH_ARGS="--no-timestamps --no-index -p ab"
QUILT_PATCH_OPTS="--unified"
QUILT_DIFF_OPTS="-p"
EDITOR="vim"

docker build

To pull the lastest Mastodon release and build the image, run:

docker pull ghcr.io/mastodon/mastodon:latest
docker build . -f Dockerfile mastodon-custom

The image mastodon-custom will be your new, customized Mastodon image.

creating and updating patches

For creating and updating the patches I use this small shell script that builds a Mastodon container, starts it up with the local patches folder mounted as volume, and drops you in a shell where you can use quilt to do your changes and update your patches:

#!/bin/sh
set -xe
docker build . --build-arg DEVELOPMENT=1 -t mastodon-patch
docker run --rm -it -v $(pwd)/patches:/opt/mastodon/patches mastodon-custom /bin/bash
docker image rm mastodon-custom -f

conclusion

That's basically all the magic. This is an easy way to work with a few patches, and not lose the advantages of using the official Mastodon image. Especially backports of unreleased features from Mastodon's development branch were really easy to integrate.

We're currently running this in a GitLab instance to take advantage of GitLab's internal docker registry. On most Mastodon releases it is just needed to hit the rebuild button, once the Mastodon upstream image was updated.

Disclaimer: YMMV, further research is needed.

a word on dealing with major version updates

You might ask, But what if my patches break on updates?. Yes, you will have to fix and refresh your patches.

In our experience, smaller upstream changes are usually easily fixed by force-applying the patch, fixing every part of the patch that did not apply and refreshing the patch afterwards. We typically upgrade our instance within 1-2h of a new release.

For larger version updates, the upstream code might have changed so much, that you will have to re-write the patch. As soon as there are release-candidates, you can (and probably should) try to apply your patches on the release-candidate image tag to see if something breaks.

On bigger patch fails, find the pull request on GitHub that changed the parts you want to patch and understand what the upstream change intends to do. Mastodon's release notes are quite good, so the chances are quite high that you will find it there.