Tag: miscellanea
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2025 May 31
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- Hello world!
- I need to come up with a process here that keeps these miscellanea posts marked as a draft, if I never get past "Hello world!"
- I start a new file every morning from a template, with the intent that I'll drop by and jot some things here throughout the day. But, this week turned out to be particularly busy. So, I went a few days never getting past "Hello world!" and that's not super interesting to publish.
- At some point, I want to hook this stuff up to Mastodon and Bluesky accounts. I don't want to just post templated nonsense. (Just intentional nonsense.)
- Maybe there's something in the air, because a week or two ago I got suddenly compelled to dive down a rabbit hole about the transformer robot watch I had when I was a kid in the 80s.
- The one I had was confiscated by a teacher and never given back. I'm still salty about that.
- But, just a couple days ago, I saw this video from Secret Galaxy on the history of the Kronoform watch
- From there, I found this giant-sized printable version of the Takara Kronoform in desktop clock form - I'm going to have to give that a try.
- I kind of want to try building some version of the robot watch with some smart guts. I probably won't get around to it, but why do smart watches have to be so boring?
- Maybe I can split the difference by sticking a smart display in the desktop clock version? Hook it up to Home Assistant and make it do... I don't know what.
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2025 May 29
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- Hello world!
- Been doing a bunch of vibe coding lately in Windsurf, "pairing" with Claude. A thing I keep wondering is how to make this process more multiplayer.
- Like, there's a conversation between Claude and I. But I can't easily share that transcript with another human teammate.
- That conversation is about as important as the code for making sense of things. More so, if we start to consider the code as an increasingly derivative product of the conversation.
- So, if my teammate is also working in Windsurf with Claude, they're missing all the context I built up that brought the project to its current state.
- And this isn't even getting into the notion of "mob coding" where maybe there's 2-3 of us humans with an AI agent riding shotgun.
- I'm thinking the conversation with the agent is a particular form of documentation that should be preserved - maybe as an artifact paired with each discrete git commit?
- Of course, the conversation is messy, with lots of iteration. So maybe it would help if there's a summary or a tl;dr ginned up at commit time, too? (That could be the commit message, I guess?)
- I like the notion of Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) - I wonder if something like that could work for iteration sessions with an AI agent?
- If we can scope a session to something discrete like a feature and capture the conversation from start to end in one of a rolling series of markdown files, that might be interesting context for both human and AI.
- I know all the above presupposes that coding with an AI agent is a real and valuable thing. But, after putting a bunch of hours into giving it a try, I've morphed from skeptical disbelief to cautious buy-in.
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2025 May 28
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- Hello world!
- Busy day, so not as many words spewed onto the internet.
- But, even if I'm not exactly producing best-sellers here, I've been fairly pleased with having gotten into a daily groove of writing.
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2025 May 27
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- Hello world!
- It's a caremad day, I guess.
- This blog publishes every 10 minutes, if I have changes to the day's markdown document.
- I'm starting to feel like that's a Pomodoro timer if I'm off on a rant. I need to beat the micro-deadline and be done with it.
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2025 May 26
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- Hello world!
- Figured I might write a bit more here over the weekend, but instead I mostly puttered around the house catching up on some needfuls.
- There's a part of me who kind of wished I'd taken photos and written about it - but meh, not everything needs documenting.
- Dumped some thoughts about Glitch, but also feeling a further rant brewing about how I'm really not feeling like it's 2004 again anymore.
- I'm not optimistic that anything like the open web as we know it survives the bots.
- Maybe something different follows?
- Maybe that looks like MCP?
- Maybe the web goes the way of dial-up BBSes - they're still around, mind you, but just as a weird little niche hobby that won't fund my mortgage.
- Mostly I'm really sad, lately. I'm trying to get past that to some renewed enthusiasm.
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2025 May 22
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- Hello world!
- Taking a couple days off work for a long weekend. First leisure activity scrubbing down my balcony to open it for the season.
- Home-ownership isn't so much a dream as it's a hobby and a part-time vocation.
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2025 May 21
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- Hello world!
- Boy, Sam & Jony really like to talk. What was that all about?
- After making the tweaks to this blog to make it easier to post and publish more frequently, I discovered that I'd doubled my AWS S3 bill! 😅
- Turns out that the process I set up over 7 years ago just re-uploads the entire site, every time I push a change. That wasn't a noticeable problem until I started pushing multiple times per day.
- So, I'm looking into a new workflow based on rclone that should be able to do more differential uploads based on changes.
- The first version of that workflow deleted the contents of my blog. (Oops.) The second version re-uploaded everything in about 6 minutes.
- One more thing I should write about if I get around to an entry describing the current state of this contraption.
- Juggling a couple AI related ideas in my head that might turn into a longer post:
- Seems to me like most AI-assisted tools these days are single-player and it's really hard to pass the baton of a project underway to someone else.
- Seems to me like many folks using AI-assisted tools think they're the only Chosen One in the world with access to those tools and everyone else around is an agency-free NPC
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2025 May 20
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- Hello world!
- Added support for a
draft: trueflag on entries here, which should at least help me keep half-broken things from deploying mid-rant - Now I just have to make sure to use that flag right so I still don't include half-broken things here 😅
- I should figure out a decent way for showing really long strings here, like the path names in that cloud saves post today 🤔
- How the hell do I remember things like "Pumas on Hoverbikes is at monkeybagel.com" but I have to remind myself to eat lunch as a separate step from making lunch?
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2025 May 19
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Hello world!
"Log Lady Look-Alike Contest Photos: She’s Got the Look (and the Log)"
- I love this city.
Interesting bugs here in my Rube Goldberg blogging machine involving Syncthing and Obsidian, where sync conflicts become clashing ghost entries 🤔
I should tweak support for a
draftflag here, so that posts that I'm still editing don't get published automatically. This flow is almost too frictionless, at this point.I've been using Obsidian for about 5 years now for my daily notes. I've been tempted to take another swing at writing my own notebook, because I barely use any of Obsidian's fancier features. I mainly like that's it's a good cross-platform Markdown editor with a few plugins that I've settled on for regular use.
I have a vague notion to make a USB or wifi interface for an old Atari Video Touch Pad. Could use it as a Stream Deck (if I ever stream again) and / or hook it up to Home Assistant.
I need to find a better way to insert images like this 😅
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2025 May 18
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- Hello world!
- I made lentil stew and roasted coffee.
- Also cooked some dried pinto beans in the Instant Pot for dinners this week.
- Played a little Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and DOOM: The Dark Ages.
- The Lampmaster is a jerk
- Beating a boss demon at tennis is fun
- Wanted to work on some tinkering projects but couldn’t quite find the motivation. 🤷♂️
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2025 May 17
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- Hello world!
- Today was Eurovision day, and not much else got done.
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2025 May 16
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- Hello world!
- I listen to podcasts at between 1.8x - 2.5x, depending on the day's mental weather. That means, when I've met a podcaster I listen to, they sound drugged or drunk to me.
- I’ve had folks tell me this sounds stressful. But, I get distracted in the gaps and my mind wanders. Easier for me to follow rapid word dumps.
- This is not a flex, this is a coping strategy.
- The new Peter Murphy album, "Silver Shade", sure is Peter Murphy.
- I don't hate this at all.
- I'm really digging the collabs he did here, teaming up with folks like Boy George, Trent Reznor, and Justin Chancellor.
- Hey, you, service provider on the web that I pay for: I am annoyed that I'm constantly signed out when I come to visit. You don't remember me, and you are constantly trying to call-to-action and dark-pattern me into your growth hacks when I already have an account.
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2025 May 15
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- Hello world!
- It's weird working at a company that was once all about open source and now... isn't so much. There are things I'm doing that I don't think I should be talking about. And yet, I want to talk about them.
- But, also, I think we should be talking about them. And also making it all open source. 🤷♂️
- Been checking out are.na - it seems like Pinterest for horn-rimmed-glasses aesthetics. That's not meant as an insult, mind you.
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2025 May 14
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- Hello world!
- Looks like I ended up with an AI-heavy posting day, today. I think I broke the seal yesterday. I'll probably post about other things in the near future.
- I've been meaning to write something up about the Rube Goldberg machine that runs this blog now. Writing this bullet point to irritate myself to do it soon, maybe.
- I bought a BOOX Tab Ultra C almost 2 years ago. I use it almost daily for writing notes and journal entries. It's also been pretty great for reading comics in color. Two things I really don't like about it:
- It's got a camera bump on the back, so it doesn't sit flat on a table without a case on.
- The case that came with it is disintegrating into dust.
- So, I'm considering trying to design my own replacement case - or at least a layer to stick on the back to even out the camera bump.
- Hoping to use #3dprinting and embed magnets that line up with the device's own internal case mounting magnets.
- But, like, why put a camera bump on a tablet?
- Why design a camera bump into anything, really? Just make the device thicker and fill the rest of the space with battery.
- I need to stop before I go on a cranky rant about my intense disgust for camera bumps and notches and other failures of design from Apple that the rest of the industry have just copied.
- Really, I'm just caremad, because I used to be a huge fan of Apple - had the sticker on my car and everything. But, they have betrayed me over the years with stuff that seems to matter only to me. 🤷♂️
- Just noticed that jpmonette/feed - a node.js module for generating RSS, Atom, and JSON feeds - got a new release a couple days ago after about 4 years of dormancy.
- Looks like they may have possibly fixed a few of the issues I had with it, when last I tried using it. 🤔
- I need to work links & bookmarks into this new blog in a better way. Like these:
- Nintendo Revises User Agreement, And If You Break It, Nintendo Reserves The Right to Brick Your Switch
- Well, that just makes me want to jailbreak my Switch even more and then never again connect it to the internet.
- Critical Warning for External Purchases in App Store
- Yeah, it's stuff like this that's got me fixed on switching back to Android with my next phone.
- I've only bought one iPhone and I've never felt the Courage or the Magic the whole time I've used it. It's never felt like my phone, always felt like a loaner with a breathalyzer and a bill acceptor slot.
- That said, the thing is physically a tank and will probably survive intact to annoy me for a few more years before I can justify the replacement cost.
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2025 May 13
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- Hello world!
- I'm in a weird place with this current AI wave in the tech industry. Drafting up some thoughts, maybe they'll turn into a post? I started just riffing here, but the riffing kept expanding, so I think I should give it some time to cook.
- And, indeed, I went ahead and posted a separate entry on what I'm thinking about AI and LLMs! Maybe too many words that no one will read, but I wanted to get it out of my head for future noodling.
- None of what I wrote there about AI & LLMs is particularly novel - in fact, the post is probably about 2 years behind the times. It's just that I think I needed to get it written down to get my own head straight. And maybe to refer to it later?
- Also, this AI stuff makes me self-conscious about my love of em dashes, which predates the popularity of LLMs for generating text? This shell command says I've used at least 172 of them around here:
find . -type f -name "*.md" -print0 | xargs -0 grep -o "—" 2>/dev/null | wc -l - I can tell you exactly where I picked up my love of em dashes: Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, sophomore year of high school. It was a conscious decision to adopt them. My opinions on that book have changed, but my use of em dashes remains insufferable.
- feedsmith: "Robust and fast parser and generator for RSS, Atom, JSON Feed, and RDF feeds, with support for Podcast, iTunes, Dublin Core, and OPML files."
- Well, that's relevant to my interests. Might be worth replacing my half-baked RSS template on this blog with that, at least.
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2025 May 12
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2025 May 11
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2025 May 10
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- Hello world!
- Nice day in Portland! Took the car to get serviced, walked for a sammich at Snappy's, then walked over to TOTL Games to see what's what there. Bought myself an Xbox 360 HDD expansion. Someday, I'll get around to hacking that thing and loading it up with all the Rock Band ever.
- Time for a bike ride! I've got a 15 mile route in Portland that I take around the Willamette River just about any weekend when the weather's pleasant. Not all that long, but rather pleasant, and gets me out of the house.
- I'm still playing with #meshtastic a little, but I think the two devices I have are really only receiving and not managing to transmit to anyone. At least, no one's ever really responded to any of my "ping" messages. Not sure whether I want to go further down the rabbit hole and buy any more robust antennas and the associated paraphernalia that goes along with.
- Responsive CSS is hard, let’s go shopping.
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2025 May 09