Updating my website from my iPad | Hacker News Reader

Updating my website from my iPad

dddiaz.com

37 pointsselljamhere44 comments

"The Amazon CloudFront distribution is configured to block access from your country. We can't connect to the server for this app or website at this time. There might be too much traffic or a configuration error. Try again later, or contact the app or website owner. If you provide content to customers through CloudFront, you can find steps to troubleshoot and help prevent this error by reviewing the CloudFront documentation. "

People are strange

"The Amazon CloudFront distribution is configured to block access from your country"

I feel offended by this message. I don't know why, i shouldn't care. I just click every article that makes it to nyc top

Same here. This should be illegal: not really different from racism in my opinion.

Security! Only those pesky mainland Europeans and Chinese are out to get me

Presumably this isn't about things people are stuck with (skin color, etc.) but things they choose (laws, etc.) and while discriminating on the former should be illegal, discriminating on the latter generally shouldn't be. Although when scaled up to such a large group, I can understand the perception of being almost entirely stuck in a situation (because it's not an individual choice for practical purposes) even when it's not a protected class.

i also feel offended by european union's take on protecting my privacy by invading it. i don't feel protected at all. i. just want to be left alone, goddammit.

i feel offended A LOT on internet these days.

member when internet was free? pepperidge farm remembers.

> i feel offended A LOT on internet these days.

American, yeah?

> Presumably this isn't about things people are stuck with (skin color, etc.) but things they choose (laws, etc.)

That is weird. I was never asked to choose my laws. Maybe sometimes I can have an imperceptible influence by being able to vote on a person who might have some say in the laws.

What I'm saying is by far and large laws are things people are stuck with just as much as their skin color.

I never chose the law, I never ever voted for the ones who chose laws of where I live in, which is where I'm born.

I'm being discriminated based on where I'm born (and can't move from for many reasons): So it's the same.

If we were to draw a line in the sand between "impossible to choose" and "possible to choose" I think generally moving is possible. There could be a million reasons why you'd prefer not to (huge risks, desires to put your efforts elsewhere, etc.) but that doesn't make it impossible, and generally the concept of protected classes (i.e., things we don't discriminate by) applies to things that are impossible to change. Maybe you even need to break a law to move, but that's more readily possible than changing your skin color, gender, etc.

I get the risks: for example probably there is more bot attacks from my IP range (and I'm behind CGNAT anyway) as I live in a less-developed country where people install everything (including pirated software) onto their (generally Windows and Android) devices blindly, with lots of malware.

Then again, the argument still applies: that kind of discrimination (IP-based geoblock because more attacks originate from that IP range) is not so different from skin color discrimination (prejudging, say, dark skin colored people because statistically more dark colored people involve in crime etc.).

I get it, perhaps I admit might even sometimes do it myself (not against skin color, but other factors) but I still think it's wrong.

I mean it's not that strange. I block China, India, Russia, The Philippines and I stopped getting drive-by hacking attempts entirely.

God I wish iPad OS was a better developer experience. Github's Codespaces feature is awesome, but as a front-end dev there is no way I could use iPad/iOS to build a website. There is no dev tools. The OS keeps trying to suspend apps/tabs in the background when I switch between them. I use the Vim extension in the VS Code remote editor but certain key combos on iOS straight up didn't register. Maybe I'm asking for too much.

Why don't you use Termius and SSH into the Codespaces instance? That way you could just use vim directly from there.

Also could install a browser based VSCode on that remote server and access that.

https://github.com/coder/code-server

Or Blink Code which runs VSCode in it's own browser control and has a filesystem extension.

https://docs.blink.sh/advanced/code

Mosh on server and blink shell on iPad with a VPS running the actual Vim (or NeoVim) is a much better experience. I am using LunarVim with LSP support, so I can get functionality close to what Vscode provides.

I still wish I could run things locally without an internet connection, I am considering some portable SBC but it seems a waste of potential, as the iPad is much more powerful.

re: tabs suspending in the background

It's not talked about much, but one of the benefits of Stage Manager from iOS 16 is that all apps in the same "app set" are running concurrently and not getting suspended. So if you have your editor/ssh/browser in one app set, you can freely switch between them without fear of them suspending. And they can still be full screen, so no need to suffer the lessened screen real-estate, if you don't need to display 2+ windows at once.

Apple wants the iPad OS developer experience to be bad

Their #1 focus is lock-in, preventing being commodified, and extracting value

No apps that run operating systems, no apps with windowed environments, no app-store-like apps / third party app stores, no browser engines, no Flash, terrible mobile safari experience, no OS mods / jailbreaks, no desktop-style cursors, physical iPad keyboards lacking escape keys. Wanting 30% of all payments for digital goods that occur on an iPhone.

Being able to eg "run Docker on your iPad" would go against all that. I think it's also a big part of why they charge $99/yr for being a developer - otherwise people would be able to sideload apps much more easily

Nice article related to this: https://subconscious.substack.com/p/aggregators-arent-open-e...

Hard to imagine just how different things might be right now if things were more open. iPhones are always on and connected to the internet - you could run servers from them! maybe mesh networking could actually be a thing?

The mother of all demos would not be allowed on the app store. Squeak/smalltalk would not be allowed. Feels disrespectful to humanity that the most popular platform in the US is so locked down. Idk how things would change here without government intervention -- this all seems to be in shareholders' interests.

Seems like a good time to be running a competitor. iOS being so locked down means they'll have lackluster support for the long tail of desired AI use cases. And cross platform development via react native is really good now, imo.

The Inspect Browser app mostly makes up for not having dev tools in Safari.

The background app issue is my biggest problem. I kind of work around it by using my phone to avoid app switching on the iPad.

No, actually, the lack of a damn escape key on the iPad's Magic Keyboard is my biggest issue. Yeah I map capslock to escape but my lizard brain can't handle that. I have a pair of server-side tricks to map ` to escape in bash and vim but it's a pain when I'm hopping around systems all day.

This is what I see when I visit the link:

    The Amazon CloudFront distribution is configured to block access from your country.

So I did learn something from the article, if I ever want to exclude visitors to my site from certain countries.

Getting 403.

Mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20230517173906/https://dddiaz.co...

So am I.

> 403 ERROR. The Amazon CloudFront distribution is configured to block access from your country.

Yeah I don't understand why anyone would configure that.

Thought I don't feel like missing out, very little substance in the article.

Well, I wrote some Ruby on Rails code on my Samsung tablet some years ago. I mean, I was running the editor and Rails on the tablet, inside Dex for Linux which is an Ubuntu 16.04 container (LXC?) sharing the kernel with Android. Samsung and Canonical worked together to port X11 to the tablet so I had a Unity desktop. I remember it came with VSCode preinstalled inside the container.

It was a little slow but probably not much slower than my laptop back in 2005 when I started coding in Rails, if it was any slower at all.

I was yesterday researching options to use my tablet for upcoming extended trip and found that the Linux stuff Samsung had is sunsetted and couldn't find any alternative. Think I'll just bring a 13inch laptop.

Yes, Samsung killed Dex for Linux with the update to the next major Android version. I think they decided that the sales it added to their bottom line were not worth the maintenance cost. Too bad, because a local and almost real Linux environment is great.

I'd say use GitPod over Codespaces. Originally Microsoft had VS Code Online before they migrated it over to GitHub's ownership.

When it was under Microsoft it was rock solid stable. I never had issues with it. When they migrated it to GitHub they removed access to everyone that had been using it for months and failed to migrate users across.

Months went by of waiting in the GitHub beta list (for something I'd already been using...) and by the time I got access to it again I couldn't believe how much worse the service had become. It has degraded a lot.

Sometimes ports get "stuck" and require a full container restart, which took time, so I ended up writing a script to randomise which port the service I was writing would use. Sometimes it had errors with saving files and they'd just vanish.

I've found GitPod to just work. I only use these services when I'm on the move, and use my desktop when at home. I couldn't imagine relying on Codespaces at all.

Use GoCoEdit on your ipad - its a FANTASTIC code editor with connectivity options that actually work well. ( I have no affiliation with the product - I just find it remarkably well done )..

I did something similar with some configuration to apache, mod_vhost_alias and dropbox. I was able to quickly update some tiny websites I keep. I just edit the files locally and a few secs later they are updated.

In my dropbox folder I created a Sites folder, where I keep some websites to serve. This folder is shared with another dropbox account syncing on the server, from where the contents are served.

To add a new website, I just create a new folder under Sites and point the DNS records to the VPS IP address.

Code-server for life, just one command to install & one file to config the auth/ports & boom after a service restart you are freed from your desk

I know VS Code is Electron anyway, but why would you need an online editor? Couldn't Microsoft (or anyone who's forked it) just release VS Code for tablets?

Surely something as powerful as the iPad Pro can handle a fancy text editor.

There's already a bunch of good code editors for iOS, such as Textastic, Koder and Buffer.

Working Copy is a fantastic combined Git client and text editor, which I've used extensively to edit my own website, and Secure ShellFish from the same developer is a great SSH client, file manager and editor.

If you just combine Working Copy (of which I'm a huge fan) and github actions to build the site on merge to main, you get simple setup that really should do the trick for updates to a static site.

Yep, I use Working Copy with both Jekyll and 11ty sites on Netlify to do the same thing.

Even made a Shortcuts action to create new posts - it formats the YAML frontmatter, inserts the date, asks for title, then creates a new document in Working Copy with the proper file path. Super useful.

And using Working Copy allows you to work offline. If your blog is based on Markdown, e.g. Hugo, then Working Copy will even give you a reasonably reliable preview of the article.

Supposedly you can use VS Code inside Blink already: https://docs.blink.sh/advanced/code

Or for a simple site update, use the file edit function in Github

Yep, I've updated GitHub pages sites from my phone with the editor many times. Not ideal, but works in a pinch.

Or hit . to start a browser-based VSCode for that repo.

I think you answered your own question. Electron doesn't support iOS as a build target due to imposed sdk restrictions. So it's not a hardware issue but a platform limitation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(software_framework...

If you just have a static webpage (html, css, js), I have found Working Copy + GitHub Pages to work perfectly for updating website copy/markup from iOS.

Timesharing is dead, long live timesharing!

Overengineering for HTML pages.

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