TL;DR: Miss Biscuits is 90% fluff, 3D printed ghosts instead of guns, snarfed down three Adrian Tchaikovsky books at hyperfocus speed, shipped feedspool-go v0.2.0 with over-engineered lazy loading, learned about GitHub Actions cross-repo triggers, got obsessed with a TR/ST song on repeat, and caught up on Classic Doctor Who featuring cyborg Loch Ness monsters.

Caturday

Happy #caturday from Miss Biscuits who is 90% fluff:

3D Printing Shenanigans

Ended up in a fun thread with folks about my 3D printer setup. I'd shared a photo of my basement rig - Prusa MK4S in an enclosure with cereal canisters full of filament spools as dry boxes. The whole thing's enclosed as much as possible because... cats.

I also saw a thread about ghost guns and 3D printed parts. I mentioned that I just skipped the gun part and printed some ghosts, because that's more fun.

Reading

Over the last weekend, I finished reading Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky after getting more and more hyperfocused on snarfing it down.

Struck me as a wild mix of Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky, Brin's Uplift series, Stephenson's Seveneves, Hawley's Alien: Earth, and odd bits of Star Trek optimism. Somehow it all worked fabulously for me. Oh yeah, and there are bits of exposition straight out of nature documentaries and I was eating all that up too.

One thing I really like: the author managed to build some narrative Necker cubes in this series. That is, from one perspective, something reads like horror - but with a few more details, the perspective flips and it's suddenly the complete opposite.

On Monday, I started reading Children of Memory, the next book in the series, and just absolutely housed that down in a day or two.

After that, I picked up Elder Race (also by Adrian Tchaikovsky) and snarfed it down in a day since it was about half the length. I've gotten through 7 of his books since last spring. I guess I have a new favorite author.

Now I'm like, do I chase the ADHD serial enthusiasm and get into more of his books or try something else?

feedspool-go v0.2.0

Spent some time hacking on my feedspool last weekend. Found a bug that I realized was making me miss a whole lot of feed items. Fixed that, which made it start rendering a whole lot more items. So I fell down a rabbit hole of making the web UI aggressively lazily loaded.

Now I've got a statically generated news stream that incrementally loads as I scroll down the page of feeds, only loading as much as I want to see, just before I want to see it. The whole thing is a static site with a 5kb index.html, which is good because I accidentally linked to my personal feedspool rather than the project page and brought down the Mastodon orbital link-unfurler laser on my homelab.

I should probably rig this thing up to publish to GitHub Pages so I can leech off their static hosting bandwidth. One problem: the static site generator produces a lot of file churn that does terrible things in a git repository. Eventually throws a wrench into GitHub Pages.

The whole thing is inspired by Dave Winer's River of News concept, which I wrote about in the v0.2.0 release post. It's me trying to build the RSS reader I actually want to use.

GitHub Actions Cross-Repo Triggers

TIL you can trigger GitHub Actions workflows in one repo via workflows in another repo with the proper access token and the repository_dispatch event.

So I can kinda build a whole CI / evaluation system in a separate repo, even make it reusable between a few different related projects. This seems like it could be handy for maintaining a bunch of related Go CLI tools.

Random Media

Suddenly obsessed with repeating a playlist that just keeps going back & forth between "Dressed for Space" by TR/ST and the Ari Mason cover.

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Also: had a song from Muse's album The 2nd Law come up on shuffle today. I was like, "oh, I haven't heard their new album in awhile." That album came out in 2012. They've had several more since then, including one I missed in 2022. My brain keeps doing this to me. Stop it, brain.

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What else? Oh yeah, I was watching the Classic Doctor Who channel on Pluto TV, playing Terror of the Zygons wherein I forgot it's about tentacle aliens who deploy a cyborg Loch Ness monster to wreak havoc on Tom Baker. "You can't explode depth charges in Loch Ness, Brigadier!"

Miscellanea