DylanLeigh.net (Posts about site-updates)

Software Updates: Go and Webassembly

Dylan Leigh — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 21:48:37 GMT

Another project I worked on briefly at the start of this year was a space-scavenging game in Python-arcade; after thinking about packaging for less technical users I started looking into using Webassembly so it could be browser-based, and maybe learning Go and/or Rust.

Read more… (1 min remaining to read)

Software Updates: New and Improved Todo Software

Dylan Leigh — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 21:44:19 GMT

Over the last year or so I've occasionally worked on some little software projects (todo.txt scripts and webassembly for games) but it was pretty minor so I never posted an update about it. So this is the first of a few belated update posts.

Read more… (1 min remaining to read)

Hierarchical Navigation Bar

Dylan Leigh — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 13:53:19 GMT

As you should be able to see above, I'm experimenting with a two-level navigation bar.

Originally this was going to be "Blog"-style posts vs "Site"-style pages (mostly uni stuff from my old RMITCS site), but it's morphed into "Blog" vs "Projects". Hopefully both of them will get more varied content in the future.

I'm not really happy with the style from either a aesthetic or technical point of view and may create my own lightweight Nikola style for the site, with some nicer multi-level navigation. In particular, I would like to get rid of all site-wide Javascript dependencies, with just the occasional game or similar form-interactive pages that use JS.

Processed Honours Final Presentation Video

Dylan Leigh — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 19:41:53 GMT

I've cleaned up and merged the videos of my final research presentation that I recently uncovered The cleaned up version has been put on my ZFS Research Page.

Alternatively you can watch it on YouTube:

Finally a Favicon

Dylan Leigh — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 15:12:07 GMT

When checking my sites network usage earlier, I was reminded that browsers will try to load a file called favicon.ico from any site and mine didn't have one. I was initially inspired by the two-triangle fast-forward symbol to make a site logo with my initials, in the form of a basic SVG.

Read more… (1 min remaining to read)

Videos of my Final Research Presentation

Dylan Leigh — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 12:21:23 GMT

While looking through some old USBs I've discovered a recording of the final presentation of my Honours Research in late 2014. I had believed this was completely lost, like the video of my BSDCan presentation which was not successfully recorded due to technical issues.

The video files have been put on my ZFS research page. The orignals are shot in profile on a 2013 era smartphone and the volume is very low - I might to try and clean them up a bit, but very glad to have the files regardless.

Small Site Retheme, and some File Size info

Dylan Leigh — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 20:18:32 GMT

Inspired by some Solarpunk Lemmy discussion especially Smolweb.org I had a look at the overhead of my Nikola site theme and was suprised by how heavy the JS and CSS was even though it was barely doing anything.

Thus, I've switched to the lighter base theme for both my personal site and Research Site. These still contain (post-compression) 9.5 KB of CSS and 4.1 KB of JS, which still seems quite excessive but it's a big improvement for minimal effort on my part.

Read more… (1 min remaining to read)

didyouknowthatyoucanhaveonlysixty-threecharactersinadomainlabel.net is moving to didyouknowthatyoucanhaveonlysixty-threecharactersinadomainlabel.dylanleigh.net

Dylan Leigh — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 03:52:48 GMT

To save US$20 per year on a domain name for a 20 year old joke, I'm moving the three sentence index page at http://didyouknowthatyoucanhaveonlysixty-threecharactersinadomainlabel.net/ to a subdomain of this site, http://didyouknowthatyoucanhaveonlysixty-threecharactersinadomainlabel.dylanleigh.net/ . There's a redirect in place at the old site for now, but I'll probably let the domain expire when it is due for renewal.

Articles from drwxr-xr-x.org transferred to dleigh.net

Dylan Leigh — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 16:47:49 GMT

All of the articles from my 2019-2021 blog Readable by all (drwxr-xr-x.org) have been moved to this site, with one exception - the very first "About" post which was about how the new blog format should help me post more frequently, which obviously didn't happen.

Read more… (1 min remaining to read)

Returning Home(page)

Dylan Leigh — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 11:00:00 GMT

So, no updates for over two years.

I've been very unwell to the point I need assistance to do even basic household tasks like cleaning and preparing meals. Unfortunately I've already used the title "Rumours of my death have been slightly exaggerated" back in 2018, and it wasn't even the last post I had to make on this topic.

While most of my life is a complete mess, I do have a few ideas about being able to actually get some more stuff I've done posted online.

Read more… (1 min remaining to read)

Disability and Rarity of Updates

Dylan Leigh — Thu, 21 Oct 2021 13:28:36 GMT

Haven't made any updates to this site or my "new" blog in over a year until I cleaned up and posted this biology article a few days ago. Even before then, I hadn't made a post talking about my disabilities and past and how badly it affects my ability to get things done.

This post (originally on the new blog) will explain some of those issues, what I've been up to since last year, and what I might be able to do in the future.

Cooking Reference Tables and New Blog

Dylan Leigh — Sat, 09 Nov 2019 15:41:11 GMT

At the start of the year I started assembling some cooking reference tables - reference lists of cooking times, types of fillings, sauces, doughs, herbs and spices used in different cuisines, etc. I never got around to finishing the doughs and sauces, and I was going to wait until they were all done before "announcing" it. But it looks like it's not going to get done anytime soon, so this post is the belated and incomplete announcement.

Due to my tardiness in making updates here, I'm considering creating a new blog-type site where I can have a fresh start and post little snippets every now and then.

Introducing the Price And Nutrition Tracking System

Dylan Leigh — Wed, 06 Feb 2019 16:09:15 GMT

In early 2017 I had just gone onto disability pension. Desperate to improve my health despite being broke, I was looking for a way to get the maximum fibre and protein from my food for the minimal cost and calories. I started entering in all the nutritional data from food I bought into a spreadsheet, calculating and plotting those protein:fibre:cost:calories ratios.

Later that year I started to create and analyse recipes which combined different ingredients. This quickly became cumbersome in a spreadsheet, so I started a Django project initially called the Price And Nutrition Tabulation System (P.A.N.T.S) for storing and visualising the data for both recipes and ingredients.

Soon I also realised since I was entering in all my recipes here it would also be easier if I used it as my daily calorie counter and added a "food diary" to the system, renaming it the Price And Nutrition Tracking System.

Example screenshot of the diary view:

The Pseudorandom Rhythm Section

Dylan Leigh — Sun, 03 Feb 2019 07:43:23 GMT

Last year RMITCS ran a Algorithmic SATB Composition Competition, to generate a SATB song from arbitrary text. I wasn't able to get anything working for the competition, but I did learn a bit about generating and manipulating musical scores in Python.

I already had a random chord progression generator in my miscellaneous scripts repo. I tried playing around with using that to generate scores with harmonically pleasing chords. I didn't have much luck with text analysis; the project shifted into attempt to do some kind of instrumental jazz/bebop generator.

The melody got dropped as well, and the result is the Pseudorandom Rhythm Section, which generates a random chord progression and piano/bass acompaniment. The output is a score in MusicXML with both parts and the chord symbols. Ideal for practicing improvisation or coming up with ideas for composition.

Yes, I only posted once last year

Dylan Leigh — Sat, 02 Feb 2019 09:00:23 GMT

Unfortunately my health somehow got even worse last year, and then took a turn for the yet more worse this summer with the record-breaking heat. I've switched up medication a few times and things seem to be improving slightly (although I might have to just take it easy until after summer).

Although I spent most of the year too exhausted to function I did release some software on my github repo in August and January; respectively a jazz-comping generator and my nutrition tracking system.

I'll be posting in detail about these as soon as I've finished dusting off the cobwebs of the software section of the site. Maybe even this month!

Rumours of my death have been slightly exaggerated

Dylan Leigh — Sun, 04 Mar 2018 09:15:43 GMT

My illnesses have been a bit worse over summer and I dropped off the internet for a while. Now it's cooler I'm going to make more effort to stay online and keep up with communities and OSS projects and apps, maybe expand the food section of this site as planned last year.

Site changes:

Fixed minor nav issues on small screens
Fixed some outdated links in the notes
Fixed dates showing incorrectly sometimes
Fixed expired DNS records

Citations on Research Site

Dylan Leigh — Fri, 11 Aug 2017 08:02:33 GMT

My honours thesis was cited in this month's issue of Digital Investigation! Also glad so see someone is doing the work to get TSK working on ZFS pools.

I've added citation links to the publication list on my research site.

Research Site Redone

Dylan Leigh — Wed, 09 Aug 2017 00:14:56 GMT

research.dylanleigh.net has been rebuilt using Nikola as well, with all previous ZFS Forensics content present or redirected to its new location.

I've also put all of my 2012 Data Hiding in Financial Transactions material up on my research site, since it belongs there - and it has been recently cited in IEEE Access and the book Digital Watermarking by Nematollahi, Vorakulpipat and Rosales. :)

Minimum Viable Page

Dylan Leigh — Mon, 07 Aug 2017 15:39:04 GMT

I've copied enough content (and put in redirects for everything missing) to be satisfied with replacing the old site.

Read more… (1 min remaining to read)

Rewriting my site using Nikola

Dylan Leigh — Thu, 03 Aug 2017 04:14:41 GMT

As my old site design had became rather grating (both visually and on the backend) I've decided to rebuild my site completely.

The previous system, from 2004 (!), used Make to "compile" a set of PHP scripts together, producing a mostly static HTML result. Consistent sidebars, headers etc were just PHP includes. A few directories were built with special Make/PHP targets to convert a collection of XML into HTML, or generate a static image gallery from a directory hierarchy of images.

Although I am starting over again - and avoiding PHP this time - I want to do things a similar way, building a static site from a set of files that can programatically generate content.

After looking into a few ReST, Markdown and templating alternatives - including rst2web and Sphinx - I settled on using Nikola.

Nikola works similarly to my old system of "building" a dynamic site into static HTML. Page content can be added to a source tree using ReST or a variety of other formats, and the build process takes care of converting it and adding consistent navigation and styling. It also supports image galleries like my old site system, taking folders of images and converting them into a static gallery with thumbnails etc.

As an added bonus, it includes excellent blog post support, so hopefully I'll be making more posts like this.