Thrasher on diary

Project updates and SteamOS exploration

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:11:19 -0600

Firstly, everything mentioned in the previous post is done. I’m especially happy with the solution I came up with for build-level config in fpc-ctl:

Config within the per-project shell script is removed, excepting a pointer to the project’s JSON config file
Everything that was in the script is moved to a builds object in the config
The configmap, which maps project configuration attributes to build variables, has been extended
- When a configmap value contains ::, the right-hand side of the value is treated as an override to the value given at the project level

This has made it possible to cleanly have multiple builds (or even subprojects) defined with a single config file, all managed by fpc-ctl.

fpc-ctl and Thrasher Updates

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 21:03:33 -0600

I did some work this week on the media side of Thrasher. I intended to work on playlists, but my mind went elsewhere. Most of the changes made were little cleanups, fixes, and catches. The one new thing was making facets and people clickable in the web UI to run a query on that facet or person. This was ported over to the music side of things.

I should probably run a new build on t.fp.n so that people can take advantage of that, as well as the fact that the previous button now acts like it does on pretty much all other music players (jumps to beginning of current track unless you push it twice in two seconds).

Devmode

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 21:20:33 -0600

I started work today on playlists in Thrasher. It was mostly groundwork and UI exploration, so that isn’t what this entry is about.

This entry is about how happy I am with the new devmode feature in the fpc-ctl script. It’s a simple idea, and a borrowed one (including from Hugo, the static site generator that I use for this blog). But it’s a really good one that saves a lot of time and faffing about.

General Updates (But Mostly Thrasher)

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 22:25:46 -0600

I really fell off the updates there. Oops. While I’ve been away, I have mostly been focused on Thrasher. A couple weeks of work went into an overhaul/rewrite of the mobile UI.

There was never an intent to evern have a mobile interface, as I am horrible at UI programming generally, and I had no desire to try to make something like Thrasher work on smaller screens. But not long after getting the desktop version working, of course, I found myself wanting to be able to take it with me. So I hacked together the most minimal possible finger-friendly UI. It was seriously done in about 2 hours of initial effort, followed by maybe a day of tuning. And then it sat for months while much bigger changes were made to the service and the desktop client.

Thrasher Update

Fri, 08 May 2026 23:02:30 -0600

So much work has happened here in the past couple weeks. First I entered all my visual media into the DB and then erapped up all initially planned media handling work. returned to the music side., and a brief description of what has changed there is:

The old, multi-port, multi-Srvr architecture is gone
In its place is a single Srvr, on a single port, which is session-aware
Sessions are implemented with secure (as long as you’re using TLS), HTTP-only cookies
Users are now a required part of the system
There is now a login/authentication flow
These architecture changes introduced a race condition on the Catalog instance
- …which was resolved by having the Srvr maintain a set of extant sessions, with a Catalog for each
- …which caused a change in the Catalog, moving to cloning the DB in-memory only optionally (and not by default)
Finally, sessions usefully survive Srvr restarts, if only minimally so at the present time

And all of this work makes it possible to have things like playlists, and playback that resumes across restarts, in the not-too-distant future. It’s pretty cool.

Cleaning Day

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 10:14:19 -0600

Yesterday, following my abortive attempt to get a Forgejo runner fully operative, I did as I said I would in my previous post, and borrowed the pre-commit hook from Petrel’s repo and put it in all three of Thrasher’s repos.

This led to a pretty big number of small changes, mostly from golangci-lint but also a few from go fmt.

I didn’t do this initially, because Thrasher was – initially – a quick-and-dirty project. A proof of concept, to see if a thing I was interested in was possible. I suppose this means that it’s a real project now, as if the fact that I use it constantly didn’t already mean that.

Intro to Thrasher

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 22:36:20 -0600

Since restarting this blog, I haven’t just also restarted work on old projects. I actually have a new one, which is quite far along. In fact I use it pretty much every day, sometimes for hours at a time.

It’s called Thrasher – after the curved-billed thrashers who frequent my yard, and the brown thrasher which is the state bird of my home state, but don’t tell the curved-bills that last part – and it’s my media catalogue and music player.