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.
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.
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.
I'm probably going to keep #metablogging here for awhile, as I work out the kinks with the revised system. I do have other projects & pursuits that I want to start rambling about here. Also kind of hoping that having an easy channel for show & tell will encourage me a bit to actually spend time on them and document a bit.
This Carousel + Lightbox + Glow demo on CodePen is too fancy for my blog, but it's really nifty. Maybe I need to just code my own up from scratch and I'm overthinking this lightGallery thing?
"Molly White argues it’s time to reclaim the web: move your work to spaces you control, support open tools, and help build a web that serves people, not profit." She's been banging this drum for a long while, and she's right.
Considering integrating responses from Bluesky and Mastodon here and posting entries from here to there. Those aren't exactly space I control, but they're relatively open tools, and I can archive things here. Also, I think it'd be meeting folks more where they are.
I thought maybe requiring a Bluesky or Mastodon account to respond here would be a pain in the butt. But, I gave my Disqus widget a fresh try over the weekend and it's not exactly pleasant these days. I guess I can see why a lot of blogs just punt and link out to Hacker News threads for their comments - but I am not at all a fan of the orange site, myself.
I post the occasional toot on Mastodon and I post links to my half-baked Pebbling Club profile. Tempted to do the PESOS thing and copy those into daily entries over here.
Pushed out some RSS feed fixes:
images should be properly linked with absolute URLs
posts with timestamps in the future should be omitted (i.e. like my daily miscellanea that's not "final" until just before midnight)
links to feeds from tag pages should work now, both as visible in-page links and in the head of the page for auto-discovery
A thing I have realized: filling all the vents of my Crocs with #3dprinting nonsense makes them a bit too warm to wear. 🥵
Man, this image gallery component I lashed together just isn't behaving right. Image sizes are all over the place. I've seen this particular lightGallery widget work well on other sites, so I'm pretty sure it's something I'm doing that's disagreeable. Not sure how to fix it, tempted to switch to something else entirely - on the hypothesis that picking it up and shaking it like an Etch-a-Sketch may result in a better outcome.
I don't often get feedback & comments via the Disqus comments widget I've embedded at the end of every post. That could be because a) folks aren't reading my blog or b) Disqus is too annoying to use these days. Probably both. I can work on the former by posting better stuff more often and sharing it around. As for the latter, I dunno. I don't want to open a spam honeypot, but I think I need to offer some simpler way to at least give a lil thumbs up as a response.
I'm tempted to hook this stuff up to accounts on the Fediverse and Bluesky, try to get feedback from those channels. That could be worth hacking on for a bit.
Just like my RSS feeds, though, I don't want to generate churn on those networks as I iterate on posts over the course of a day. I'm still thinking through how to balance editing flexibility with publishing stable things when word goes out to the world.
Maybe these miscellanea posts get a 24-hour delay, because they're where I expect to futz around the most throughout a day. If you happen to read them, you're an early alpha reader I guess. Other posts that bud off from this daily scratchpad will likely be stable enough to send out immediately.
I guess that means I need to implement a defer-until feature in my Easy-Blog Oven 🤔 Maybe I can set the post date into the future and implement logic such that no post shows up in a feed or gets sent out to another service until after that time? Too clever?
Hmm, I sent out "Word to your mother" on #meshtastic and someone replied. Maybe my messages are getting out?
I'm starting to look into getting a doorbell camera that works with Home Assistant. I've seen a few recommendations for PoE widgets. Like this REOLINK Video Doorbell PoE Camera. That seems troublesome, unless I'm careful to stick it on its own VLAN / DMZ / whatever? Like I'm imagining someone could walk up at 4am, unhook it, plug in a laptop, and have fun on my network?
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.
Been watching "Resurrecting Sinistar: A Cyber-Archaeology Documentary", which has been great. Played Sinistar last at Portland Retro Gaming Expo in October and was digging the heck out of it. They squeezed so much out of that 8-bit processor - I guess it had a multitasking system that could handle like over 100 game entities? In 1983?! The source code has actually surfaced, so you can see how they did it.
I was starting to do "weeknotes", this month. But, this week, I decided what I really wanted to do was just blog more. So, that got me started hacking on my blog software.
I'm just going to deploy these changes to the blog. Some things might be broken, but I'll fix them as I go. I want to start actually using the thing.
Thinking I'll start each day off with a miscellanea entry like this one and fill it full of little bullets.
Maybe I'll start spawning little entries for bookmarks and quotes?
One of the main things I'm thinking about with all this hackery and ASCII art is whether I'll be able to do something with all these files in 10 - 20 years' time. Granted, I'll be pushing 70, so maybe I won't care by then?
But, the writing is the important part to me. I could write a whole new blog publisher from scratch and still read all the file formats. I've done that a couple times now and I can still handle stuff I wrote back in 2002. I think that's pretty cool.
And here I am, attempting to blog from Obsidian on my phone? Is this the future?
Next thing I need to work out is how to upload and display images via Obsidian on my phone. I think it's very doable, just a few more bits of Rube Goldberg crud to slot into place.
I've been asked to write up how this whole mess works - that might be a thing I'll do this weekend in greater detail. It really is an accumulation of random little parts.
Dang, now that I have this easy channel from my brain into my blog, I'm feeling like a motormouth. I'll probably settle down, soon enough. I'm always giddy with a new toy.
