thats where frasier lived

it's like a big portland

that's a lot of linux gaming machines

rip reubens, he would have made a great cast for the westernized Like a Dragon reboot

This time we will be adding a database to store chat history and turning on WEBIRC so that Gamja actually works.

Below is our new docker-compose file. Don't forget to replace irc.example.com with where you are hosting this server. The first post I wrote on Ergo explains the details of this and what else you need to do in Coolify.

services:
  ergo:
    image: 'ghcr.io/ergochat/ergo:stable'
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - '6697:6697'
    volumes:
      - 'ergodata:/ircd'
      - './ergo-config.yaml:/ircd/ircd.yaml'
      - './ircd.motd:/ircd/ircd.motd'
      - './certs/private/irc.example.com.key:/ircd/privkey.pem'
      - './certs/certs/irc.example.com.crt:/ircd/fullchain.pem'
    depends_on:
      mysql:
        condition: service_healthy
  mysql:
    image: 'mysql:8'
    volumes:
      - 'ergodb:/var/lib/mysql'
    environment:
      - 'MYSQL_USER=${SERVICE_USER_MYSQL}'
      - 'MYSQL_PASSWORD=${SERVICE_PASSWORD_MYSQL}'
      - 'MYSQL_DATABASE=ergo_history'
      - 'MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=${SERVICE_PASSWORD_MYSQLROOT}'
    healthcheck:
      test:
        - CMD
        - mysqladmin
        - ping
        - '-h'
        - 127.0.0.1
      interval: 5s
      timeout: 20s
      retries: 10
  caddy:
    image: 'caddy:latest'
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - './Caddyfile:/etc/caddy/Caddyfile'
      - 'caddy_data:/data'
      - 'caddy_config:/config'
  traefik-certs-dumper:
    image: 'ldez/traefik-certs-dumper:latest'
    entrypoint: 'sh -c '' while ! [ -e /data/acme.json ] || ! [ `jq ".[] | .Certificates | length" /data/acme.json | jq -s "add" ` != 0 ]; do sleep 1 ; done && traefik-certs-dumper file --version v3 --watch --source /data/acme.json --dest /data/certs'''
    volumes:
      - '/data/coolify/proxy/acme.json:/data/acme.json:ro'
      - './certs:/data/certs'
volumes:
  ergodata: null
  ergodb: null
  caddy_data: null
  caddy_config: null

Here's what changed: The Ergo image now depends on a MySQL image to start. That MySQL image means we have a new volume for persisting the database. Now we just need to adjust the Ergo configuration file to use it.

The datastore portion of the configuration has a mysql object. Make sure enabled is set to true and you have put your database's username and password in.

datastore:
    path: ircd.db
    autoupgrade: true
    mysql:
        enabled: true
        host: mysql
        port: 3306
        user: "YOUR-USER"
        password: "YOUR-PASSWORD"
        history-database: "ergo_history"
        timeout: 3s
        max-conns: 4

Now I want to enable WEBIRC so Gamja can talk to IRC using websockets. In the config's server object towards the top of the file there is a place to define listeners and we want to add port 8067 with websocket set to true.

        ":8067":
            websocket: true

At this point it should look something like this:

server:
    listeners:
        "127.0.0.1:6667": # (loopback ipv4, localhost-only)
        "[::1]:6667":     # (loopback ipv6, localhost-only)
        ":6697":
            tls:
                cert: fullchain.pem
                key: privkey.pem
            proxy: false
            min-tls-version: 1.2
        ":8067":
            websocket: true

Now we are going to have our websocket port proxy through our Caddy server using reverse_proxy in our Caddyfile.

:80 {
	root * /data/gamja
	reverse_proxy /webirc ergo:8067
	file_server
}

I didn't cover how I installed Gamja this way in my last post. Sorry about that!

The way I did it was by looking for the directory on my server where the docker volume that holds our Caddy data lives since the Caddy docker image doesn't have git.

Once you ssh in to your Coolify server, this will help you find the real volume name for where Caddy's data is stored:

docker volume ls | grep -i caddy-data

Which will output something like this:

local     MYHASH_caddy-data

So if that was your volume name, you can cd in to it like this:

cd /var/lib/docker/volumes/MYHASH_caddy-data/_data

From there you can clone the Gamja repository and cd in to it:

git clone https://codeberg.org/emersion/gamja.git
cd gamja

Now generate your Gamja config by customizing this to be where you set reverse_proxy in the Caddyfile to live:

echo "{ \"server\": { \"url\": \"wss://irc.example.com/webirc\" } }" > config.json

And now all that is left is to install the dependencies.

npm install --omit=dev

And that should be it! Unless I think of other parts of Ergo that I think it would be helpful to write about.

also them: hasn’t worked in years, just has AI do everything for them

also them: lays off entire industries so the people who had jobs no longer can work

The first thing that made this challenging is that Ergo wants the SSL certificate and key as files, and we want to use the ones generated by Traefik in a JSON file. The least-worst way I have found to do this is by using the traefik-certs-dumper docker image. It watches an acme.json file where Traefik saves all your certificates and keys and generates files for them.

Now you also need to give it a reason to make keys at all, so any HTTP server will do, you could even set it to web IRC client like The Lounge or Kiwi IRC. I prefer The Lounge myself, but Kiwi has more IRC v3 features. Since it isn't important, I will just use Caddy at it's most basic level to redirect to where I already have The Lounge hosted.

I've put together a Docker compose file showing how I have it all connected. You will need to know where you are going to host the server and replace all the instances of irc.example.com with your domain.

services:
  ergo:
    image: 'ghcr.io/ergochat/ergo:stable'
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - '6697:6697'
    volumes:
      - 'ergodata:/ircd'
      - './ergo-config.yaml:/ircd/ircd.yaml'
      - './ircd.motd:/ircd/ircd.motd'
      - './certs/private/irc.example.com.key:/ircd/privkey.pem'
      - './certs/certs/irc.example.com.crt:/ircd/fullchain.pem'
  caddy:
    image: 'caddy:latest'
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - './Caddyfile:/etc/caddy/Caddyfile'
      - 'caddy_data:/data'
      - 'caddy_config:/config'
  traefik-certs-dumper:
    image: 'ldez/traefik-certs-dumper:latest'
    entrypoint: 'sh -c '' while ! [ -e /data/acme.json ] || ! [ `jq ".[] | .Certificates | length" /data/acme.json | jq -s "add" ` != 0 ]; do sleep 1 ; done && traefik-certs-dumper file --version v3 --watch --source /data/acme.json --dest /data/certs'''
    volumes:
      - '/data/coolify/proxy/acme.json:/data/acme.json:ro'
      - './certs:/data/certs'
volumes:
  ergodata: null
  caddy_data: null
  caddy_config: null

The Caddyfile I've made should be editable directly from Coolify. Though, you may have to tell Coolify that the Caddyfile file is a file and not a folder.

:80 {
 redir https://thelounge.example.com 301
}

In Coolify, we now need to setup the domain. In the service stack, click on the settings button next to Caddy, or other docker image of choice, and set the domain to your version of https://irc.example.com:80. Other docker images may require different ports to be mapped.

Because of how we mapped the certificate files, you don't even need to touch the configuration, but you probably should before you start the stack.

Update: Check out Part 2 where I dig in to Gamja and persisting chat history

This month my wife, Vivianne, and I started a blog together. We're mostly blogging about things we like that we want to share with you. If you want to get an idea of why we started it, I recommend starting with The Introduction. Oh, and don't forget to sign the guestbook!

I have not dug in to why we chose to host it with Pika, so I will go in to that here. Yes, we could have done this with Eleventy, and honestly we still could. We passed for now because we didn't want to get lost in the building of the blog. Our focus is the writing. When looking for a hosted blogging platform we quickly scratched out the transphobic ones. We considered Bear Blog, Pika, and Weblog.lol. While I'm awaiting Weblog.lol's upgrade to Neato, we decided to look at it again when it comes out.

Because none of these appear to offer multiple author support, we would need to be able to easily share an account. This is why we announce who is writing in every post and assign our name as a tag.

The next thing we looked at is how these blog platforms promote the people who pay to use them. Pika had a disastrous feature called Pulse that was shut down shortly after launch. Bear Blog has up-vote buttons and a discover page with an algorithm that features rage bait and and dorky influencer behavior among what are some legit good blogs.

And, well, that's why we chose Pika. We like it, it has a nice editor. Bear Blog seems good, I just don't want to have to think about rankings or what kind of content I'm shown next to. After all, we are in this to write.

My wife is a huge fan of Rayman 2. So much so, she made me play it on stream when we were seperated by an ocean and a global pandemic. I think it was a test, you know, to see if we were compatible. So don't be shocked to see her name in the credits of this Unreal Engine fan made version of Rayman 2. It's perfectly familiar while being it's own thing. I really like what they've done and I want them to continue.

• 🔖 Bookmarks: Linkding
• 🌐 Browser: Firefox†
• 📆 Calendar: Fantastical
• 📷 Camera App: Obscura
• 💬 Chat: Delta Chat
• 📨 Mail: Proton
• 🎺 Music: Navidrome, Amperfy, Symfonium
• 📝 Notes: Obsidian
• 💰 Personal Finance: Copilot Money†
• 🖼️ Photo Management: Ente (use code MELANIE for more storage)
• 📑 Read Later: Readwise Reader†
• 📖 RSS: Feedbin, Reeder, Capy Reader
• 🐚 Terminal: Ghostty
• ✅ To-do: Todoist

†: On thin ice for forcing AI and/or cryptocurrency features where they don't belong.

Damn, this year sucked. I have to assume we didn't enjoy much, but it's good to reflect on the things that did bring you some relief from all the fucked up shit. As I wrote this list I couldn't help but make peace with listing things that I know didn't see much widespread love. I'm probably not going to list your favorite things, your favorite things are for your list. This one is mine.

Before we get in to the lists, I want to call out some other media that brought me relief from all the daily loads of horrible shit I can't possibly stomach. The Twitch streamers DeadBlossomJesse and Tom Walker, the Dropout streaming service, and all the Smosh channels on YouTube. I got to see Dropout and Aunty Donna perform live this year, that was so cool! Basically anything that got me to smile really had to put in the work, and I'm so grateful for it.

Games

• Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time
  • I never got the multiplayer to be something I wanted to do, but this was a very pretty mashup of a lot of games in to one fun adventure.
• Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii
  • I just love this series and learn so much about the world around me through it, no matter how silly.
• Donkey Kong Bananza
  • This game follows the Mario Odyssey template with a destructible environment. It's been so long since Odyssey came out that even as a return to a formula it felt nice.
• Metal Eden
  • Not only did my wife work on this, I actually had fun playing it. I don't play a lot of first person shooters anymore, and never really any like this, but this was a good time.
• Pokemon Legends: Z-A
  • This game feels like a bunch of improvements on what a Pokemon game can be. While "Legends: Arceus" felt like an attempt to make Pokemon less of a menu-focused turn based game, Z-A improves upon it in every way and the classic Pokemon mechanics. It is not too different than how the Final Fantasy series has evolved to a more active combat game.

Movies

• Friendship
  • I think a lot of people wanted some Oscar-worthy comedy out of Tim Robinson. I don't. What I got was a real comedy film, something we don't see much of anymore.
• Mickey 17
  • Similarly to Friendship, I just had fun with this one. This was never going to be another Parasite, but it is a humorous sci-fi adventure.
• Bugonia
  • This is a Yorgos Lanthimos remake of the Korean 2003 film "Save the Green Planet!" but with some changes and twists that keep it fresh even if you saw the original. Based around the concept of a guy realizing the only reason CEOs would be so dead-set against destroying our planet is if they weren't from this planet. Then you get to see a CEO get tortured, which is the catharsis we all need in 2025.
• Pee-wee as Himself
  • This is split in to two parts, and the first part left me wondering if the director was the right person to take on this biography. I know Paul Rubens can be difficult, but the director seemed unprepared for that. The second part put a lot of that in perspective and made me understand Paul Rubens more than I did going in.
• Gianmarco Soresi: Thief of Joy
  • I had a few good choices of comedy specials to pick from this year, but Gianmarco Soresi has really stuck out to me this year and this special was fun and thought provoking.

TV Shows

• Pluribus S1
  • It took me until after Better Call Saul ended to appreciate it. Hell, Breaking Bad's first three seasons were painful. I don't mean bad, but painful to watch Walt continuously go down self-destructive roads. I'm in a different place in my life now, and I'm really enjoying Pluribus's slow burn. As I write this we're only about halfway through the series but it's been thought provoking and challenging the whole way. I like it.
• Severance S2
  • The way Severance S1 was going and by the time I got to the cliffhanger finale I was upset it wasn't a limited series. S2 justified it's existence. It just took longer to come out than it should have. Hell, that anything gets made at all is a miracle.
• Murderbot S1
  • How does one adapt a series of short books about a gender-less robot who just wants to watch TV shows to a TV show? I don't know but this attempt did a good job. I think ultimately the tone of how you read the books and how it was adapted to the screen to be completely different. But hey, casting David Dastmalchian is never a mistake. Also this is from the writers of Antz and Rogue One? lmao.
• The Rehearsal S2
  • I didn't think we would get a second season, because of who distributes the show and because of the concept of the show. What I got was an educational comedy of proportions I could have never imagined. I honestly wondered what the aftermath of this season would be. I'm not going to say the lack of serious FAA reform is shocking, especially when this country is set on tearing everything down, but I was hoping to see a little more than a response from the FAA saying "nuh-uh."
• The Chair Company S1
  • Like Tim Robinson's Friendship, I think some might be let down by his normal guy conspiracy comedy, but that's what makes it special. It captures the raw emotion of being a person in a way you don't normally see, but may experience first hand in a way you wouldn't want to reveal about yourself.

Albums

• Winona Fighter: My Apologies to the Chef
  • I found a new band! I don't know much about them, but I've really enjoyed their debut.
• Sleigh Bells: Bunky Becky Birthday
  • I love Sleigh Bells, but it's been a minute since we've gotten an album that sounds like the sound I want from them. This album nailed what I wanted so I am happy.
• Frost Children: Sister
  • I was glancing at the 100 gecs community recently and it seems fans have gotten the impression we might not get anymore music from 100 gecs, so they've latched on to Frost Children. That would be sad to think no more 100 gecs, but I do enjoy Frost Children a lot and this album is really good.
• Streetlight Manifesto's New Album Preview Mixes
  • Initially we were told we would finally, after over 13 years, get a new album from Streetlight Manifesto. Real fans know to take that with a grain of salt, so when the album's release date came and went we, I was happy to at least get some early mixes of three songs from the album. Good enough for me. The album was rescheduled for this fall, but uhh, I think we are in winter now? Oh, Streetlight Manifesto, I love you.

This year I've been running Jellyfin alongside my Plex server. I didn't force any of my friends and family to jump over to it. Running both side by side is possible, but their latest security issue meant I would have to help my parents reconnect Plex, so I set them up with Jellyfin and Plex just in case there was something they missed about Plex.

It's too early to tell if they've taken to Jellyfin like they have Plex, but I can tell you what apps I've tried.

For a full list of Jellyfin apps, check out Jellyfin's client list and the awesome-jellyfish client list

The best premium app for Apple devices is Infuse, but it's not cheap. A cheaper alternative for Apple devices is VidHub. On iOS and Android Streamyfin is quite nice, free, and open source. For listening to music on computers and web browsers I like Feishin, which is also nice, free, and open source. On Android Symfonium is pretty great, but not free. For listening to music on Apple devices, Manet is also good, but only available with a subscription, though a cheap one.

One of the coolest things about Jellyfin is that it also supports books. There's a great official plugin that lets you access your books over OPDS that is very simple to set up. I'm also keeping an eye on the open source project JellyBook which is an iOS and Android app for reading your books from Jellyfin.

As a very long time Plex user it sucks to see them go out like this, but I think Jellyfin is a refreshingly nice alternative.

I've tried a wide variety of bands. Currently, I'm using the 2024 Pride loop. I like it because it's easy to put on. I don't have to worry about fastening it to the wrong notch in the band and feeling off all day. Maybe that's the problem? I'm wearing it wrong? Oh, fuck off. We're not entertaining that kind of argument again. Jobs is dead. Let him decompose.

The issues in the beginning were two fold: the back of the watch would imprint on my skin. I'd have a square, watch-shaped indentation with an even deeper divot of the round, spherical sensors that you can often see flashing green lights on the skin. The other noticeable issue was the "farmers tan," which was embarrassingly obvious when I wasn't wearing the watch, or when I was wearing it in a slightly different position on my wrist. I'd notice the occasional scab-like dots on my skin that would form from the watch rubbing on it.

Sure, some of this is just watches, but most watches don't have shit pressing in to your skin to provide shoddy at best and otherwise mostly inaccurate vital information. So, that's the benefit of this, right? I used to think that was cool. Having historical health statistics for yourself is all well and good when you trust everyone involved. But do I trust the people who can't make a decent watch face? Do I trust the people who have a history of shipping an alarm clock feature that from time to time just forget to go off? Maybe I did. I'm not saying I was right to, but now I live in a fascist dictatorship with no laws or order. This data went from being nifty to being a potential target.

Having this data on hand now sounds like a bad idea. We're in the Apple Intelligence era, where the game is made up and the points don't matter. Yes And is a good rule of thumb in improv, but with data about real people and their lives it's very dangerous to make up answers. Using that data to train AI is also very dangerous. We have zero transparency in to what the reality of this situation is. It's like they say: assumptions make an ass out of u and me, and there's no me in AI.

When AI snake-oil salesmen talk about AI, they talk about "knowing" and they talk about "hallucinations." Both of these words are very carefully crafted and deployed by these companies to keep you anthropomorphizing their software. Software doesn't "know" anything. Software cannot "think." It has no mind, so it has no way of imagining ideas. It simply cannot "hallucinate." Software is as software does as software is told to. AI is just simply software that uses stolen data to see which plausible word comes after the other. Or in the case of photos, what pixel typically comes after the last pixel. That's it. It has no idea what it is doing. It's not even as smart as a toddler repeating a cuss in public that they heard their parents say.

So now I have a watch from a company that steals intellectual property, makes shit up as they go, and destroys the environment. There's no benefit in that unless I suspend my disbelief. I'll do that for art, but not for a corporation that has given millions in bribes to a fascist head of state. That didn't even get them excluded from the tariffs that will destroy their cash cows. Bribes don't work, Cook. You know, just like any of my outdated Apple products.

If this device is such a pain point, why have I continued to wear it? The reasons aren't good. They are the reasons I tell myself, though.

First, there's Apple Pay. When it came out, it was a unique way to pay. One that was instantly identifiable as the goofiest way to pay. Let me know if this sounds familiar to you. The cashier is ready for you to tap your watch, so you bring your arm forward and then twist it inside out so that the back of your wrist can aim the Apple Watch at whatever non-ergonomically placed sensor is. It feels like losing at arm wrestling. Every. Time. I look silly. I feel silly. This is silly.

The other poor excuse I have for wearing it is so that I know when I get an important message or phone call. I've noticed that when I'm not wearing my watch, I'm almost 100% more likely to miss a call or respond to a text message hours later. These can be helpful, but more often than not they are just annoying. When I'm working on something important and I start getting lots of notifications over and over again, I will take off the watch and place it on my desk. I'm not mad that I'm getting messages; I'm frustrated that the watch keeps trying to steal my focus from whatever important thing I am trying to do. I don't think of it as a pleasant device. I think of it as a shackle.

So, what are these two excuses, really? One is not wanting to have to carry a wallet with me every time I leave home, which I am going to call "laziness." The other is quite clearly FOMO.

I don't really need either of these things, do I? I'm not gonna contribute to making e-waste with this post, but I am definitely wearing it less and less and I probably won't replace it. Before the Apple Watch, I didn't wear a watch. You know how many things have auto-updating clocks built in to them? Too many! I wish my microwave and oven didn't even try to be a clock.

Now, if you will excuse me, my bulky smart ring has made a blister between my fingers again.

Music is so intimate and our tastes in which are so diverse and unique to each and every one of us. "Do you like music?" has always been such a bullshit question and it implies that if you don't like their music you don't like any music. The idea of writing about it never hit me as something I would want to do. But here I am: collecting and sharing the good bits I have ended up writing over on Crucial Tracks with very little editing.

And I do mean very little editing. Sorry about that. I'd edit them now, but that feels disingenuous, and I'm feeling lazy. You want over produced polished shit? Go play a triple-A game. Go watch a blockbuster. Here? On the internet? We do things a little differently: however we want.

If my taste in music sounds interesting to you, there's also an ever updating playlist you can follow on Apple Music.

May 9, 2025: AM Radio, by Everclear

What song do you associate with the current season?

What season is it actually versus technically? I don't really care. Everclear's 90s grunge sound feels like whatever this season is. If I recall correctly I heard this song for the first time on a road trip with my mom, but there was no way to know what was on the (admittedly, FM) radio. Not too long later my friend was introducing me to their other hits Santa Monica, Everything to Everyone, Father of Mine, and Volvo Driving Soccer Mom. The front-man was diagnosed with MLS, which feels like one of the most tragic outcome for a guitarist, but that didn't stop them from releasing a new song a few years ago in the year of the tiger called Year of the Tiger that maintained everything I love about that Everclear sound.

May 10, 2025: Crown On the Ground, by Sleigh Bells

What’s the first song you’d play at a party?

Maybe I don't know shit about parties, but I feel like the first song can be whatever you want because you probably start before people are there. I don't recall ever being at a party where people were like "ok gather around i'm gonna open Winamp." I don't recall being at a party where music played an important role outside of a birthday party, and even then that music is provided by the guests, I don't get to say "everyone lets sing Money Machine by 100 gecs, you all know the words!" Though it would be fun to hear a group of people say "Hey you little piss baby."

So I'm going to pick something self-indulgent so that I can get it out of the way before I force my musical taste on people who didn't ask for it. Sleigh Bells has a new album out and it's good! I mean, it's the closest thing to their first few albums in a while and that's pretty cool to see them do. I've also been listening to their first few albums again and I currently think this song sounds pretty loud and fun.

May 11, 2025: Cheer Up, by Reel Big Fish

What is a song that feels like home to you?

This song feels like the home that is the real world we all live in.

I've got a funny feeling
We're all born to lose
And I've got a funny feeling
That this life ain't worth living through

I love this song a lot, despite those brutally honest lyrics, but keep going and you'll see. You'll see.

I'm not giving up yet
That's not the end of me
But it's not gonna be all right
You'll see, you'll see, hey!

The reality of life is the game is rigged, things keep getting worse, injustice keeps escalating as the truth leaks through the cracks. But you can't give up as the only way out is through. We're all in this together, and we will cope the best we can in our attempt to...

May 16, 2025: Nobody Dies, by Thao & The Get Down Stay Down

A song from a genre you didn’t think you’d like—what changed?

Genres are weird. Wikipedia says this band is "folk rock," "alternative," and "nu-disco." I can't say I'm invested enough to know the meanings. What the hell does "alternative" even mean? I imagine I could look it up and find out it's got some deep and appropriate meaning, but in all my time listening to music I've never been able to figure it out. Music doesn't really fit in to these confined little boxes we call genres.

I think a lot of how I find new music and genres is to just come upon it without trying. I was at some live podcast taping at the Marines Memorial Theater in San Francisco and Thao Nguyen came out and played some songs on an acoustic guitar. She was just so good that the songs stuck with me. So I continued to listen to their music and I think their big new album at the time was A Man Alive and I just kept listening to it over and over again. It's still so beautiful. A few months later Thao was performing at The Filmore in San Francisco and I had to go. Only show I ever saw at The Filmore. Only show I needed to see at The Filmore. From where I was standing in the pit, I could see her warming up before coming on to the stage. The way Thao was dancing to the song that was playing through the venue's speakers before the show started was just so mesmerizing I could never forget it.

May 18, 2025: Expensive City, by Ravenna Golden

What’s your favorite deep cut from an album?

Last year I moved from the most expensive city, San Francisco, to a relatively cheaper expensive city, Portland. Living in San Francisco will really fuck with your head when it comes to pricing, and I lived there for over a decade. For the entirety of my time in San Francisco I lived in studio apartments around 400 square feet. I was paying absurd prices for that privilege. $3,200 a month. I got priced out of the city when I married my wife and we needed a bigger place to live. Yeah that's right, we lived together in a tiny studio in San Francisco for a time, with my cat. We were fine but my cat really needed more space.

I'm sick of all the wasted time and money
I'm sick of all the jokes that weren't that funny
I'm sick of money that I never spent
The money always goes to pay my rent

Days before my wedding, I was told my long standing remote job was becoming an in-office job, but not for my managers who lived outside of California. Well, we needed a bigger space and I couldn't afford do that in San Francisco. So we moved to Portland, a place where many of my coworkers were allowed to continue to work remotely from. They fired me the second I got in the city. It wasn't a shock, but it was a pretty petty and shitty thing to do, especially after they said I would be allowed to continue working there for a while at least. I was hired to be remote and I worked remote for nearly 5 years.

I waste my money and I still feel shitty

I'm just glad I moved out of San Francisco when I did because my savings would not have lasted very long at all. It barely lasted me the time I needed to find a new job in a slightly less expensive city. My career advice out there for people would be to never go along with any ultimatums given to you by corporations.

Also, you can probably guess what would have happened if I had stayed at that job. Here's a hint: it rhymes with gay lofts. Corporations don't give ultimatums when things are going well, they just don't.

May 19, 2025: Freak Mode, by Dorian Electra

What’s a song that grew on you over time?

It took a minute for Dorian Electra to grow on me, but I think this song just kinda got wedged in my head.

Catch me throwing cake at the Leonardo,
Fucking up my face, looking like Picasso

In researching this post I've learned the whole album is about internet celebrity-ism, so I'm not sure if what initially pulled me in to this song is the actual meaning. I just believe people should be able to do what they want with their body. It's hard to be queer and not believe that.

But more importantly: I think it's OK to destroy a Leonardo painting in protest. If the rich want to control art and destroy the world, what does it matter if we take their art away from them? They were going to destroy it anyway in their pursuit of destroying the world through excess and pollution. Does it make you mad? Good!

If you can't take care of the planet, the art on that planet is doomed. But more importantly: the inhabitants.

May 24, 2025: Ball and Biscuit, by The White Stripes

Describe your favorite summer as a kid using a single song.

I don't know, but I have fond memories of listening to Elephant at the pool. Once I was doing underwater laps, challenging myself to see how many times I could swim back and forth without coming up for air. I started at the same time that this song started playing, and I credit it for giving me the drive to complete 5 laps without coming up for air, my record.

May 25, 2025: What Kind of Future, by Mitchie M & Hatsune Miku

What song reminds you of your first heartbreak?

You said first, get ready for first.

The kids at school convinced me to beg my mom to get a new Game Boy game, so mom took me to the old caged-in tech section at Walmart. We needed an employee to unlock the glass case and reach in to grab one of the cardboard boxes with square cartridges in them. I asked for Pokemon and I was presented with a choice: red or blue? Obviously I picked the blue one with a big turtle on the cover. Maybe it's because I like water and as a kid I was very scared of my house burning down. Maybe it's because I don't find an orange dragon too appealing? I remember studying the instruction booklet and memorizing the Type vs Type damage table inside. I miss the damage charts. I miss the readable damage charts, now they're too complicated with seemingly infinite types and combinations.

The instruction booklet didn't help me at my first challenge of the game. I started the game, typed my name in, went down stairs to talk to mom, and... that was it. I was trapped in the house. You see, the only other game I put a lot of time in to, but never progressing the story, was Link's Awakening. The difference between Pokemon and Zelda was that in Zelda the doors to leave buildings were clearly defined. I didn't know that a rug at the south side of the room meant "door" and the game didn't tell me.

I remember taking my big original Game Boy to school the next day to ask if anyone in my class could help me. It was a field trip day so we were gathered in the gym and one of the kids explained doors to me. In later iterations of the game when you got close to a door a down arrow would appear. I assume that kid's uncle really did work at Nintendo.

Okay so, this is supposed to be about heartbreak right? Well, I spent the summer playing this game nonstop. I took it to a computer summer camp and would play it any chance I could. I collected all the badges and knew what to do next: The Elite Four at Victory Road. I don't know how many tries it took me, but I did beat them. I got my in-game certificate, the credits rolled, and it put me at the title screen. I had never beat a game before, and to my knowledge once you beat a game you... start again. So I hit New Game and started over. And eventually saving over my game. I called the friend who taught me doors and told them the good news: I had finished the game. They told me to have fun catching the rest of the Pokemon. My heart dropped as I asked "what?" and was told that I had deleted my game and that it wasn't over yet. I still had to catch Mewtwo. I still had to catch all 150 (or rather 151, 152 if you count Missingno) Pokemon. I felt awful, but I started again.

Epilogue

The next summer I would get Pokemon Red and I used both cartridges to finally collect every Pokemon possible on my Pokemon Red cartridge. I put the cartridge away as a monument to my achievement. It would be over a decade later before I learned that these fucking cartridges had hidden batteries inside them, so once again I have to assume my save is lost. Rest in peace, my beloved pocket monsters.

this from the guy so "courageous" as to wait to reluctantly come out after they were at the top of one of the most powerful companies in the world.

— after Switch 2 price announcement —

everyone else: things are bad, my toy costs too much
marginalized groups: so what

cherry blossoms on grass

obstructing a famous portland landmark with cherry blossoms

wired: dansup/pixelfed can read all your private posts

branches of cherry blossoms

cherry blossoms in portland

I will say, that the secret to using an iPad as a primary computer is the expensive and shockingly heavy keyboard and touchpad case. Together it is thicker and heavier than a similarly sized MacBook Pro. And yet it is still too top-heavy to prevent it from falling over onto it's back like a turtle.

So we have an expensive device that needs a keyboard and touchpad to be useful and it's heavy. Great, did you make a tablet or a really bad computer? Because I'm starting to think the parts of the iPad I like just make it a bad computer.

In the same way, I think the best apps for iPad are web apps, and this is also why I think Linux is a great option: if it's already all web apps, why not move to a platform that's actually decent to work in? It also has a proper file manager!

And how about one that treats me with respect? Whenever my $100 laptop running Linux needs an update, it doesn't automatically re-enable some garbage AI features I've turned off that nobody wants.

When the platform itself becomes an adversary, I think it's time to leave. And hey, why not do some real-world good and save the environment by getting a refurbished computer from a charity?

melanie kat, internet skull fucker and front-end engineer

...but I did it in 2025, oh no!

I started building a Bluesky-to-JSONFeed app because I find Bluesky too annoying to use. These days it is trying to force me to see trending topics from the whole of Bluesky. They let you dismiss it, but then they shove it back in front of your face without respecting your preference. Typical big tech bullshit. "Hey want to hide this? You can, but if you refresh it will be there again." Literal buttons that don't do anything. The illusion of choice.

I also built a Mastodon-to-JSONFeed app. I figure if I can control the data in to feeds I can control what I see and ignore the toxic parts of social media. Maybe I'll do this for other closed networks. Who needs Apple-only apps like Reeder or Tapestry when you can make any feed reader do what they do? (minus subscription fees and ads)

I learned a lot about Bluesky by doing this. Do you want to know why, despite Bluesky being open source, there are not many apps? It's because the API returns a JSON object that can only be described as a mess. Not only is it a mess, but once again, it doesn't respect your preferences. I have to manually filter out replies and reposts, despite my account having a preference saying I don't wanna see that.

When you look at the structure of the data used for posts you can quickly see its limitations and hacks. Upon my initial glance at Mastodon's structure, I felt a little similar, but now that I've seen Bluesky's structure I like Mastodon a lot more.

Here's an example of how Bluesky conveys video data:

"embed": {
  "$type": "app.bsky.embed.video#view",
  "cid": "[...]",
  "playlist": "[...]/playlist.m3u8",
  "thumbnail": "[...]/thumbnail.jpg",
  "aspectRatio": {
    "height": 2160,
    "width": 3840
  }
},

I bet someone out there could explain to me the thought process behind how Bluesky handles video. No matter what the answer is, it won't be satisfying. They give you a thumbnail to use as a poster image, but then they give you a playlist file, .m3u8, instead of an expected video file, like an .mp4 file. This leads to most browsers I've tested being unable to handle playing the video. But even then, sometimes it will only play audio.

Because my Bluesky and Mastodon timelines to JSONFeed code are written to be nearly identical I thought I would lay out some data:

Unfortunately, it's 2025 and the amount of social media I want to ingest is plummeting to protect my mental health. I wrote all of this code to build these feeds for fun. All I can think is: hooray I did it, now make it go away. I don't know, but now that I control the data and how it gets consumed maybe... maybe I can fix her! lol. lmao. nah.

Update: I have put the core code I used in this project up on a gist. It does not include a HTTP server, so you will need to bring your own.

I've recently moved my photos to melkat.pics and my social media posts to melkat.lol. Like this blog, they too are collections of markdown files with feeds and syndication to platforms like Mastodon. The IndieWeb term for this is POSSE. I use Robb Knight's Echofeed to syndicate posts automatically. Now the question is: why?

Well, I want to own my content in full. This comes partially from playing with data export tools like those included with Pixelfed and Bluesky where they give you your data in obtuse formats that not even an engineer could be satisfied with. I've previously written about how Pixelfed doesn't even export your photos. I've since seen what Bluesky does: they give you a .CAR file and tell you to write some GO code to get your data out of it. Now I write in my own plain text Markdown files and avoid all of that garbage.

Since all of my Eleventy sites deploy to Bunny CDN on commit to the main branch, all I need to do is make a Markdown file. Easy peasy on computers. On mobile devices I've developed a workflow for me that works pretty well. I create a new note in Obsidian and apply a template.

Here is my template for melkat.lol posts:

##

## date: {{date:YYYY-MM-DD}}T{{time:HH:mm:ss}}Z

So when I write my post and I am ready to share it, the output becomes something like this:

##

## date: 2025-02-20T21:28:33Z

visiting vancouver for the first time and it’s exactly as dave and graham described it over 15 years of stop podcasting yourself episodes

Now that I've got my post as a Markdown file, I share the file from Obsidian to my favorite Git app for iOS, Working Copy, which handles committing and pushing it.

The great part, that works especially well because of how great Echofeed is, is that when I insert an image Echofeed will take it, with the alt-text, and include it with the post. You can see what I mean in this commit and the output on Mastodon and Bluesky.

To some of you, this may sound complicated or unnecessary, and to you, I say: sure but shouldn't posting have a little more friction? Shouldn't we be a little more intentional?

As a transgender woman in 2025, I don't want to casually browse social media feeds anymore. I have some industrial-grade filters, and yet it still feels full of doom and gloom. My mental health is already at rock bottom, I don't need any more pushes when I'm this close to the edge. I need reasons to live, not reasons to be another statistic.

All I want to do is write jokes and share them on the internet. I don't need the harassment that can come with that. I don't need reminders that everything sucks. I know. Reel Big Fish knows.

vancouver tesla drivers for lyft are on a whole other level

guess where i put all your posts

not to brag (lol, bragging that i’m a loser) but i 100%’d all of fortnite’s battle passes. imagine what other games i could finish if only they let me play as hatsune miku.

I grew up online and the effects of which I’m still discovering. Something tough to identify is when I’m being harassed. In the last week, I’ve been verbally harassed on Mastodon and sexually harassed by text message. In each case, it took me an embarrassing amount of time to figure this out.

You see, online, we have a tendency to let things get really bad before we might take action. Hmm, I wonder where we learned that from, America. As both of these incidents took place online, I had a written record that I could refer to. If it had happened in the real world, I probably wouldn’t have that. I would have to rely on my feelings and memories.

Last month my wife and I were harassed walking down the sidewalk for wearing our masks. My immediate reaction was that this person was trying to be helpful. My wife is hard of hearing and a lot of times when someone is trying to get our attention in public I’m the one who notices. Maybe I’m just impatient. Either way, after I had reacted I realized this guy was fucking with us. Shit. Initial reactions are hard.

Recognizing when you are being harassed is hard. Even when it's blatant. When I first started being sexually harassed by text messages, my initial reaction was to make fun of it and turn it into a set of standup jokes. I do this to a lot of traumatic incidents in my life. The time my car flipped over three times before landing between two telephone poles? I can make that funny! My high school experience that ended after one semester because of death threats? Also funny! My brother wanting to invite me to a sexual fetish and kink sex community? Funny! Until it's not! Apologies to the asexual community, but my way out of it was to tell him that I am asexual. Am I? Partially, maybe? Who cares! Respect the boundary I put up. For you, I'm asexual.

I'm kind of angry at myself that I started pitching this harassment as comedy. I should add, that was only briefly as I didn't want to harm my brother. I shelved the jokes out of respect for this guy. I still hadn't realized I didn't owe this guy any respect!

Then I got a 400-word text message yesterday. It once again mentioned the fetish and kink community my brother wants me to join. I took a screenshot and shared it with my friends. I hadn't fully understood what it said, unfortunately. Then I got a text from my mom that read, "Call your dad about [brother's] text". I immediately sent it to them because a 400-word text message about a fetish website couldn't be what they expected.

So I did call my dad. I read him the full text message aloud. As I was reading it I realized this was not funny, it was very sexually explicit, and I needed to apologize for sharing this with my friends and my parents right away.

You are missing the best part of life and it worries me. When I was in your age I was fucking my brains out.

I'm missing the best part of my life because of the American people who want to make everyone's life miserable! My sex life, which you know nothing about, has nothing to do with it!

You will never fit in the vanilla world.

Buddy, do you know how many doctors and therapists have me on a fucking watch list right now? I am a transgender woman in 2025. Figure it out!

I want you to be happy. Having sex in your head will never bring you human contact and emotional intimacy. Those are the best things in life. Go out and live.

At this point, I should say I don't communicate with him. He is a few decades older than me, so we didn't grow up together. He did help introduce me to Linux. These types of messages and updates about his cancer are all I've gotten from him in years. I don't even know if he remembers that I am married.

It would have been so easy for me to just read that text to myself and never realize how bad it is. If I hadn't made the mistake of trying to pass off my sexual harassment as humor, I probably would have never come to terms with the extent of the harm and danger going on.

As I write this I haven't even blocked him from sending me texts. This shit sucks! Even when you realize it, it's hard.

Be nice to yourself. Give yourself the benefit of the doubt. You matter.

And for those who think their entire life needs to be about getting sex: please go get help before you hurt someone.

spencer agnew from smosh appreciation post

When you watch that many films, you are bound to hit some stinkers, and yeah, I did. I also found some gems. I want to write about a few of them here. I don't write reviews on Letterboxd or do star ratings. I either enjoyed a film or I didn't. Trying to rationalize what I like down to a scale of five is too simplistic.

Some of the best films I watched were short films

Guilty by Matt Kane, starring Amanda Lehan-Canto was no I Live In Your House by Patrick McDonald, also starring Amanda Lehan-Canto, but it didn't have to be, I just like watching Amanda in ambiguous situations. It made me feel like Sarah Christ on an investigation trying to piece together the clues.

Guts by Margaux Susi, starring Angela Giarratana and Kate Burton was on my radar last year and I'm glad it finally got a wider release. I love watching Angela in anything and everything. After the last few months, this film brought some healing to the overwhelming dread of life.

The Accountant, by Ray McKinnon with Walton Goggins is from 2001, so it can be hard to find but I was able to watch it on Tubi, which is essentially a lost media streaming service supported by ads. You may know Ray McKinnon as the pastor on Deadwood and Walton Goggins from Justified. This dark comedy feels like a Coen Brothers-style moral parable about what lengths someone might go to save the family farm.

Mourning The Passing of David Lynch

I watched Morbius for the first time and I planned to watch every disastrous Spider-Man spin-off Sony has made with zero course correction. But then David Lynch passed away and so I had to do the course correction that Sony wasn't capable of doing. My wife is Polish and David Lynch made a Polish folklore film called Inland Empire that I had been putting off watching because it's 3 hours long. I watched it over two nights, but I needed to log a film, so I quickly watched one of Lynch's short films, Premonition Following an Evil Deed. Once I learned that David Lynch got into film because he wanted to see his paintings move, I started understanding the impact of his short films.

The Worst Films

In the category of "finding out your thesis for a research paper is bullshit but you still turn in your work anyway" was Seeking Mavis Beacon. Mavis Beacon taught typing, but social media taught our young filmmakers the art of stalking. This film uses AI deepfakes to alter real news clips to present falsified information as fact. For example, there's a clip of Barack Obama honoring Mavis Staples, but the film alters it so that he says "Beacon" instead of "Staples." It was so infuriating and misleading that I couldn't trust anything this movie had to say.

And then I watched Emilia Perez. I want to make an exaggerated joke like "This movie is so bad it made me transphobic" or "Maybe I'll consider detransitioning." It didn't really, but damn this movie is bad. Learning nothing from The Danish Girl, it's a musical with such great hits as "La Vaginoplastia." It ends with the cast all dying in a car crash, leaving the viewer thinking "damn, wish that were me."

Excited to scrub the toilet

Sometimes when selecting a movie I would tell myself "Pick something you know is going to be good." This led to me finally watching Perfect Days by Wim Wenders. Like Guts, this film is a good reminder to focus on the good mundane times in your life and relax. It's got some beautiful shots of some Shibuya toilets I can't wait to piss in one day. Fingers crossed.

Shit, here I am announcing my plans again. Don't tell god.

As you may know, I love Hatsune Miku. When rumors started circulating last month that she was finally coming to Fortnite, I took notice. I never got into Guitar Hero and the like when it was popular, but my wife and I did buy a cheap plastic guitar to play Clone Hero with a few months ago, and it works with Fortnite Festival, their Rock Band-like mode. I've also not played Fortnite outside of one or two brief moments. I had to do it. For her.

I purchased the big Miku bundle, but there was also a "battle pass" for more Miku as part of a "Music Pass." The concept of a battle pass was so good for Epic's revenue that they couldn't resist making more and more battle passes to pay for. The trick here is to buy a monthly $12 subscription to avoid paying $10+ per pass. But then you have to remember to cancel it when you're not playing, the predatory nature of all subscription fees. So, yeah, I also got the Fortnite Crew pass of passes.

I started by playing a lot of Fortnite Festival with my wife. We have both unlocked all the Miku content, which felt briefly rewarding. I've primarily played on my Xbox controller, so now I have a blister on my left thumb from hitting its non-standard directional pad awkwardly.

One of my favorite gadgets from last year is the Retroid Pocket 5, a PlayStation Portable/Vita-looking Android device for playing retro games. Since it's Android though, it can install the Epic Game Store for Android, and from there I can play Fortnite, Fall Guys, and some not-quite-Rocket League game. Fortnite runs better on this handheld than it does on the Nintendo Switch, where it feels almost unplayable. Yet somehow the Nintendo Switch gets the full version of Rocket League, how odd.

Speaking of Nintendo Switch I had around $20 in V-Bucks that I could only see or use on the Nintendo Switch, so I bought some songs for Festival that are accessible to me everywhere. Platforms are so open about their monopolistic grasp it's disgusting.

I like the Hatsune Miku models they made for Fortnite. The Neko Hatsune Miku model is trans pride themed, which is rad. Sometimes the people who make 3D models of Hatsune Miku love to approach it was a horny male gaze. For a perpetually sixteen-year-old girl. Gross. I love that every player model in Fortnite comes with a Lego version. While I have the Hatsune Miku costume in Fall Guys, the Fortnite model doesn't come with a Fall Guys bean skin when you play the Fall Guys-styled levels in Fortnite.

Anyway, my wife and I have been playing a bit of Fortnite Lego Odyssey. It's a little lacking, but it's a decent Minecraft-like multiplayer Lego game with Hatsune Miku. It works like having a Minecraft Realm server but you don't have to pay a subscription fee to do it. It's not perfect, and it's a little janky at times.

Did someone say jank? Here's the most surprising thing: I thought Fortnite would be more battle-tested and solid for an 8-year-old gaming juggernaut. It's strange how it will find new and unique ways to break. My favorite is that Epic decided to push a big required Fortnite update on Thursday night at the same time that they shipped their first actual version of an Epic Game Store for Android. Until now, the Epic Game Store on Android was just an installer for three of Epic's games. Unfortunately, they didn't test this big game store update, and the install and update buttons didn't work. This meant I couldn't play or update Fortnite all day Friday. They finally got a working update for the game store on Saturday. How odd, releasing right before the weekend? Any engineer could tell you how that goes: it means you're working through the weekend.

Last night I spent time playing some of the "experiences" not made by Epic. If you don't know what "experiences" are, it's a term Fortnite made up in their lawsuit with Apple to pretend that Apple's rules for games didn't apply to them because they aren't a "game," they are an "experience." Well, let me tell you about the experiences: poor-quality content sludge. Have you seen Roblox? It's like Roblox.

I did try Roblox a few months ago when Dress to Impress was popular. I spent a few hours feeding literal garbage to rich people in a restaurant simulator. You collect trash from an alleyway and put it on a plate and rich people come in and pay bespoke prices for it. I like the politics, but a key difference in the low-quality sludge on Roblox and Fortnite is that Roblox keeps putting up popups under your cursor to try to trick you into buying their Robux currency. The world of free games for kids feels so predatory. Hell, it probably always has. It makes paying $70 for a game feel like a worthwhile investment by comparison.

I like Hatsune Miku. I'm glad she's in Fortnite. It's fun, but it is not without it's performance and predatory issues.

Throughout this cycle, the 2020s are shaping up to be a lost decade for tech and for no other reason than the billionaires want it to be. We've seen the big ideas tech has been trying to push for the last five years, all fads that nobody wants and cost more than they could ever recover. So here we lay unemployed and without any kind of democracy in sight.

In 2022 when Mastodon got its big push into being a thing, I spent a lot of time seeing if I could finally set up Pixelfed. In the four years since I last looked into it, Pixelfed still lacked proper documentation. I finally got something to work, but the S3 support was not working. Fine, no S3. Maybe it could be fixed soon?

Last year, I paid for a managed self-hosted Pixelfed server. It only needed to be powerful enough for me and maybe two or three others, but it was a little more expensive than I wanted to pay. I never really found anyone interested in joining. It was so slow. The UI would randomly change styles. Features disappear when you use the mobile version. There wasn't an official mobile app openly available.

A few months in I found a better service to run a managed self-hosted Pixelfed server, so I migrated there. It got a little better, but it still feels sluggish using the web app. This re-energized my posting on Pixelfed, but only briefly. I was kinda disappointed that Pixelfed wasn't getting any attention as the project maintainer seemed to keep getting distracted with other projects, like a TikTok clone. Do you know who else was interested in making a TikTok clone? Instagram! Though lately, the project maintainer started posting. And by that, I mean posting like a Founder (derogatory). C'mon, I'm tired. I just came online to feed my Neopets, and now I have to see your ego splashing all over the place. Which one of us is gonna clean this up?

I think it might be me.

I'm not rushing to delete my server, but I probably will. I'm not saying the project is cooked, but I am saying I don't think it is cost-effective for me at this time. I will be watching to see what becomes of this newfound interest in Pixelfed going on right now.

Exporting Your Photos and Data

Pixelfed's data export tool is seriously lacking. In its current state, it's capped at your latest 500 posts and does not provide any media files or data about photo collections. They have this commit here where they removed the 500 item limit. I am not sure why this fix hasn't been released. I don't have that many posts, but I imagine over time one would. They teased a new data export on January 4th, claiming it would be available that day. Pixelfed has not received an update since early November. That commit above is from January 5th.

This morning I wrote a quick script to take the outbox.json file from a Pixelfed data export and turn it into an 11ty/Astro compatible folder of markdown file posts and all your media downloaded. If you are comfortable with NodeJS, feel free to try it out by installing the dependencies (yaml, sanitize-html) and putting your outbox.json file in the folder with the package.json and index.js.

today i learned two things: ted turner had a think different poster and ted turner is apparently still alive.

do you also like dhh for his sports car driving skills? do you also like henry ford for his writing?

I never did lose a battle
But I'm feeling further from the end of war
Deplored, ignored and rarely ever self assured
Why does it seem like the ones who have everything have nothing inside?
— Streetlight Manifesto

Hello, it's me. The scary transgender woman your shitty divorced-dad shoddy-rocket maker hero warned you about. I moved on from the products of anti-LGBTQIA+ rhetoric spewing Micro.blog and Scribbles founders pretty quietly last year. Not quietly enough for some, but can a trans woman, or just a woman in general, ever slip by quietly enough for the patriarchy? No. I won't do any "labeling" or "name-calling" here. I won't say these people are bigots or anything, but their rhetoric has. When they got mad that I wrote "trans rights are human rights no matter what the guy who runs this website says," and quit using my Scribbles blog a year ago, I just let them stew in their anger. I have enough problems, and these men are simply 100% unimportant to me.

Men who can be angry at a woman for weeks after she leaves? That's gender-affirming care, baby! When the men continue to behave that way after half a year? That's an obsession. It's funny that it's still a raw wound for them. Here is what I said at the time when I was trying to avoid mentioning them directly. They wouldn't shut up then, and now it's been around six months and they are still very angry about me. It feels obsessive and dangerous. Not only does it feel dangerous because of their anger, but because of the rest of what is going on in the country, or rather, the world.

I've been trying to keep to myself. I don't look at my phone as much as I used to, and if I do, it's not the internet I'm looking at. Which is sad, because I love the internet. The internet is messy, but it's been my home and my community my entire life.

My sense of humor has always been very self-degrading, politically dark, and… sometimes it doesn't land. Well, what does this have to do with anything? It means sometimes I make a joke that doesn't go over with people the way I want it to. Which means I fucked up, plain and simple. And when I fuck up do you think I double down and try to tell the person I hurt they are wrong? No, never.

I'm a huge Smosh fan. I didn't know what Smosh was until after the pandemic hit when everyone else thought they died. The cast is pretty diverse and queer these days. You can tell they do a lot to make sure everyone is welcome with their comedy, just like Dropout. They have this guy named Spencer Agnew. An editor who worked his way to being cast through his great personality. Spencer will make some jokes that if any other straight white guy said it, there is no way they would land. That is why he is so fucking funny. How does he get away with it? Not to spoil his episode of I Spent a Day With but it's because he'd be truly sorry and apologize immediately if and when he does. He very-apparently works hard on having empathy for marginalized groups, which is pretty cool. That may sound phony, but when you see people who can't do that basic thing it is wild.

Can you imagine hurting someone? I've done it! It sucks! I would never want to make someone feel bad, that's never my goal. To those I've hurt, even if you no longer talk to me: I get it, I'm truly sorry. I wish I could blame my anxiety for my actions but I know I can only blame myself.

I spend so much of my life worried I might offend someone inadvertently. I think very hard about my actions to the point of rumination. I am not kind to myself, I hold myself to a higher standard than I may be capable of. Even if they are wrong, like the guys who are still raging about me online, I will still ruminate on how I could have done things better. I think saying "trans rights" and nope-ing the fuck out of a toxic website is fine because if that makes you angry we are never going to see eye to eye. My identity has never been up for debate.

To Manton and Vincent: please stop. I've seen enough commentary from you and your friends about me. I ignored your emails because I'm done. I just wish you were too. I wish I wasn't writing this but here we are. I will acknowledge and say thank you to Vincent for refunding every cent I ever paid. If Manton wants to give back my $100, donate it to Trans Lifeline, that would be very kind.

I'm a huge proponent of standardizing dates as ISO 8601. Dates need not be complicated. While I'm not exactly sure why 11ty outputs different dates on my local machine than it does after being deployed from my Gitea server. I tried setting the timezone and everything, but that had no effect.

So I started looking in my posts for dates that worked and dates that did not work. It's basically what 11ty had documented, but I want to spell it out in a way that my head can understand.

I had two kinds of dates in my posts:

• Not 11ty Friendly: 2025-01-18T17:23:30-08:00
• Good: 2024-05-14T18:17:00Z

From looking at these two dates I can see that one has a timezone and the other ends with a Z without declaring a timezone. Essentially, making the time listed "UTC" without really caring about the UTC version of the date. Phew, I didn't want to convert dates to a timezone I don't personally use.

My fix was to use regex to chop off the timezone and replace it with a Z.

• Regex ^(date: \d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}T\d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2})-\d{2}:\d{2}$
• Replace with: $1Z

Now I just need to update my tooling to quickly grab a timestamp (or just remember to rip the timezone off). Maybe I can use Zod to do a quick check to keep me safe.

I have been a huge fan of Astro ever since it launched. I was an early adopter and that meant as Astro learned its footing I would constantly face breaking changes. That was fine, but after a few years, it became less understandable. So when Astro decided to end 2024 with version 5 they decided to introduce yet another new breaking change. The documentation explaining how to adapt was incomplete and not helpful. They had a way to preserve compatibility but I know what that means: delaying the inevitable. Besides, I had already gone through enough, it was time to leave.

I had heard of 11ty from a lot of people I respect and I didn't know anyone using Astro. Hell, one of my favorite mentor's photos is at the bottom of every 11ty documentation page. That is a pretty good endorsement. My wife's favorite animal, the possum, is 11ty's mascot. Another good sign. The way 11ty works is quite new to me, so it took a lot of endurance to get accustomed to it. At different parts of my journey, I would briefly consider a hosted blog solution, but lol, I had just gone through the shit with a particularly transphobic blog host last summer. Never again.

Okay, so, let's dig into what I did and what my pain points were. I tried to map out all the features of my blog and what I could improve or upgrade. I was trying to find a good way to do PostCSS with Autoprefixer. I didn't see any ways to do this that didn't repulse me, but I did learn that the beta for TailwindCSS v4 has CSS auto-prefixing built in. So I took this to bring my JavaScript-based Tailwind config to a CSS-based config. It was challenging at times, but ultimately I feel good about it.

My main pain point with 11ty was learning where all the variables live. Would the data I need be in {{ page }} or {{ post }} or somewhere else? Is the front matter exposed like {{ title }} or do I need to do {{ page.title }}? Getting that right was frustrating. Knowing where I could use variables and where I couldn't was another issue.

Sometimes, variables can be used in the front matter, but sometimes, they can only be used under a eleventyComputed definition. Here's a case where the title is valid, but if I put it in the root where you normally would, I couldn't get it to work. Why does permalink work?

---
permalink: "{% if pagination.pageNumber > 0 %}{{ pagination.pageNumber + 1 }}/{% endif %}index.html"
eleventyComputed:
  title: "{% if pagination.pageNumber > 0 %}Page {{ pagination.pageNumber + 1 }}{% endif %}"
---

I'm sure I could figure out exactly why, but I figure I will learn over time. I kept hoping I would have more access to the {{ metadata }} object in places where I couldn't. I wonder if it would be possible to expose all the variables accessible (and where) for an 11ty dev tool browser extension or something?

11ty has grown fast over the last five years. It makes finding out what the current best practices are hard. In trying to preserve the functionality of my features like "see a list of link posts pointed to a domain" or "paginate through many posts tagged with a specific tag" I realized that the built-in pagination feature of 11ty wasn't going to save me. This is, apparently, called Double Pagination and this blog post by Desmond Rivet helped me figure out what I needed to do: program my own custom collection definitions. Luckily, a lot of the code I wrote to do this with Astro just copied over with almost no changes needed.

The best part of 11ty I've found is how images are handled with their image plugin. It's neat because it works like how I would have wanted Astro or NextJS to handle them: by asking very little of me. Unfortunately when I was playing with deployments, converting to avif image files took over 5 minutes and took my entire VPS offline before the process was eventually killed. I wasn't using avif with Astro either, so no real loss.

Let's talk build times. 11ty loves to talk build times. My Astro blog took around 1 minute to build, while the 11ty version takes around 50 seconds. That's not a huge difference from Astro. The 11ty performance page seems to show around 11x performance gains on markdown builds, a far cry from my ~1.2x real performance gain, but I'm doing more than just building 4000 random markdown files. And who knows, maybe I could, god forbid, fix my code to help speed things up.

The best part about the change is that I only needed to change one of my markdown files. An old post with a JSX code block was causing my build to break. I didn't find any of the errors to be helpful, but thanks to Robb's help I was able to fix it by wrapping that code block in a Nunjucks raw tag so it would know not to try to make sense of my code.

Speaking of code blocks, since Prism works well with 11ty, I decided to make a mashup of Catppuccin's latte and mocha themes for Prism so they change with the user's choice of dark or light mode.

Ultimately, I'm happy I'm on 11ty now. Zach Leatherman sounds like a great maintainer. Thanks to Bob Monsour for showing me The Stability of Eleventy, a post about how they have successfully avoided breaking changes for years.

As always you can see the code! Let me know what I should fix or what I should do better on. I would love to hear from you.

i can imagine the facebook PR people are tired and should quit, but when you let this qualifier slip in your official comment you are saying the quiet part out loud.

bridge #campsnap

my neopets could beat up your honor roll student

cool so are we gonna do anything about that?

“lol no”

so now i’m stressed about stress, on top of everything? how is that helping?

fall #campsnap

• 🤖 Automation: Apple Shortcuts, Superkey, Rectangle Pro
• 🗄️ Backup: Backblaze
• 🔖 Bookmarks: Linkding
• 🌐 Browser: Safari, Vivaldi
• 📆 Calendar: Fantastical
• 📷 Camera App: Obscura
• 💬 Chat: iMessage, TheLounge
• 🌩️ Cloud Storage: iCloud Drive, OneDrive, Nextcloud
• 📇 Contacts: iCloud Contacts
• 👩‍💻 Editor: VS Code†, Nova
• 🖋️ Illustration: Affinity Designer, Dotgrid
• 🚀 Launcher: Raycast†
• 📨 Mail Client: Apple Mail, iCloud Mail
• 🏣 Mail Server: iCloud Mail
• 🐘 Mastodon: Mona, Phanpy
• 🎞️ Media Tracking: Last.fm, Letterboxd, Trakt, Play, Book Tracker
• 🎺 Music: Apple Music
• 📰 News: no.
• 📝 Notes: iCloud Notes, Obsidian
• 🔐 Password Management: 1Password†‡, iCloud Passwords‡
• 💰 Personal Finance: Copilot Money†
• 🖼️ Photo Management: iCloud Photos
• 🎨 Photoshopping: Affinity Photo
• 🎤 Podcasts: Reeder
• 📑 Read Later: Readwise Reader†
• 📖 RSS: Reeder
• 🖥️ Screen Sharing: Screens, Remote Desktop
• 🛒 Shopping Lists: iCloud Reminders
• 🐚 Terminal: iTerm†, Kitty
• ✅ To-do: iCloud Reminders

†: On thin ice for forcing AI and/or cryptocurrency features where they don't belong.

‡: On thin ice for being not being good.

Happy end-of-year listing to you and yours! I decided to try and compile my annual list of media I've enjoyed this year and, well, man this year sure was a year, wasn't it? TV suffered due to the studios wanting to treat their writers and actors like bits and bytes and not, you know, humans. Games too, but I fear we've not yet seen the result of all the layoffs. If there's no one left to make games, what do publishers have to release? Companies sure do love to shoot themself and ask who could have done such a thing.

I watched a lot of movies this year. I'm beginning to understand why filmmakers dislike television, and I can see a lot of those reasons in social media too. Then there's the fact that we have a hundred streaming services and they all want more money, so I decided to give them no money. There isn't much of a point in paying for streaming services when they want to raise the price on giving you less. Oh, and ads. Gotta have ads. That reminds me, I need to ask my doctor if dysentery is right for me.

Games

Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth — No game connects with me like a Like a Dragon game. They have things to say about modern life, and they clearly have fun doing it. I had to play every part of this game, including delaying the story for two weeks to finish the Animal Crossing mini-game.

Astro Bot - An accessible platformer with a character from Like a Dragon and the Boku no Natsuyasumi games. I love it.

Nastu-mon: 20th Century Summer Kid - The west apparently isn't ready for Boku no Natsuyasumi, but that's OK, we get Crayon Shin-chan and Nastu-mon. You play a little boy spending his summer vacation in rural Japan, which sounds so nice. My allergies cry when thinking about it.

Film

I Saw the TV Glow - I've written a lot about this movie already, and I'm still glad it exists.

Queer - It's hard not to romanticize a gay story of Americans abroad blissfully unaware of whatever the current crisis going on in America is. Then there's the rest of the movie, which is a trip.

Drive-Away Dolls - Lesbians and a Coen brother. Look, when making this list I had to ask myself which lesbian crime thriller was Drive Away Dolls and which was Love Lies Bleeding. I had more fun with the dolls, but both were good.

TV

Sunny - Evil tech — I think we can just call it "tech" now, the evil is implied — meets a swearing Rashida Jones. Pretty good.

Mr. & Mrs. Smith - Donald Glover and Maya Erskine (PEN15) make this a fun ride. I like that this works as a limited series, but I think they want to keep it going in a Fargo-style seasonal anthology of different couples, which could also be fun.

Albums

SMILE! :D, Porter Robinson - I really enjoyed all the singles that came out leading to the album's release. It was a delight to see a collaboration with Frost Children.

No Name, Jack White - The release of this album was fun in a way only Jack White could do: he put an unlabeled record in the bins at his record store for one day. When people figured out what it was no one knew if this album would get a proper release, a track listing, or anything. Then people were writing about how good this record was, bringing in the sound of The White Stripes we all love. A week or so later, when it showed up on streaming services, I can't say I wasn't a little disappointed, you know, commit to the bit, but the album is too good not to release widely.

Finally!, The Aquabats - I love that The Aquabats can release a great album after so many decades. Their music video for the song Let's Go Live in a Cave! was a joy. The more this year went on I started looking up Zillow listings for caves. That said, I was disappointed that their other music video for this album was made using AI. The brilliance of the early days of The Aquabats was their use of practical effects in their on-stage monster fights, which I don't see them doing any more.

my overpriced budgeting app is adding the important features

• They don't even have the decency to look people in the eye - Welcome to Hell World
  The dead don't file claims. I've heard people call this the most Hell World story imaginable.
• Open and shut by David Moore - Flaming Hydra
  Over a decade later and Aaron Swartz is still one of the best examples of what technology and the internet should be.
• modernity is stupid: a rant not about politics - Phire Phoenix
  I don't read TOS or privacy policies, but I do look up the person who runs a product is and then I can make an educated guess about their business.
• Bluesky may have the juice, but we don't have to drink the Kool-Aid - fromjason
  I like this take a lot.
• AI Scams Are the Point - Edward Ongweso Jr
  America’s broken systems need AI to continue the broken systems and make new broken systems.
• 「葛飾北斎 × 初音ミク」のコラボグッズが予約受付中！ – 初音ミク公式ブログ
  Famous art fixed by putting Hatsune Miku on it! Finally!
• グッドスマイルカンパニーよりピアプロキャラクターズ「あかたんず」フィギュアが登場！ – 初音ミク公式ブログ
  Vocaloid Babies! It’s Hatsune Miku and her friends as babies.
• How Hidden Technology Transformed Bowling - Veritasium
  I went bowling a few weeks ago to take my mind off everything and it reminded me of this video a friend shared years ago about the asymmetrical weight of bowling balls.
• An Interview With Emuh Ruh at Glacier Bay Books - Yatta-Tachi
  I love the stuff Yatta-Tachi has been working on lately, and this interview with one of the most fascinating publishers in manga is amazing. I'm sad to hear I'm one of 5 or less people who bought DRM-free digital manga from them, though. People should support DRM-free digital books.
• Election Night Step 1: Turn Off the TV by Gabriel Snyder - Flaming Hydra
  Very good advice for (not) consuming the anxiety attacks like election night. Take care of yourself!
• Netflix Wiped Most of Its “Palestinian Stories” Collection — and Erased the Whole Thing in Israel - The Intercept
  Transphobia is "free speech" but the existence of a whole group of people must be censored.
• Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode - The Verge
  Imagine if Nilay was capable of holding tech CEOs accountable too.
• iOS 18.1 Includes Option to Set 'Primary' Email Address and Change iCloud Email - MacRumors
  Apple finally lets trans people remove their deadname from iCloud …but you gotta upgrade to the AI bullshit version of iOS.
• Roblox: Inflated Key Metrics For Wall Street And A Pedophile Hellscape For Kids – Hindenburg Research
  Insider trading, lying about metrics, protecting pedos, censoring generic words but not the f-slur? Check check check and check.
• Bluesky struggles to moderate child abuse material in Portuguese - Nucleo
  Bluesky responded by sending Beavis and Butt-Head out to giggle and say “uh… no?”
• Who has permission to know things? - Iris Meredith
  Data-driven corporations my ass.
• mono, Vol. 1 - Yen Press
  Apparently we're getting a new manga and anime from the creator of Laid Back Camp focused on a school's cinema and photography club. I can't wait.
• Child's Play: From Bokunatsu To Natsu-Mon - The Kaz Ayabe Interview - Nintendo Life
  I love the games this guy makes so much.
• End of the Road for Google Drive in Transmit - Panic Blog
  Similarly to IA Writer, Panic too has lost Google Drive API access because Google wants to make their partners extra cash.

That's it for now. Now I need to decide if I want to waste hours of my life figuring out which is more worthwhile: rewriting my Astro blog since they decided to break everything again or migrating to another framework entirely.

For more, follow @links@nyan.lol on Mastodon

koi #campsnap

trees #campsnap

The hardest part of all of this was Bluesky's instability. Bluesky likes to pretend that it is "decentralized" or "federated." It sure as shit isn't either of those things. Let's discuss what you get by self-hosting Bluesky: an API to a SQLite file and some SSH keys. You don't get a self-reliant server, a website, or any kind of app. So why would you want to do this? Well, let me be clear: you wouldn't. You shouldn't. Not yet, at least. Maybe not ever. If you're still willing to proceed with this, let me also point out that most Bluesky apps and integrations do not support self-hosted accounts. The only ones I have run into in the wild that do are Bluesky's official app and Robb Knight's Echofeed.

Oh, you're still here? Well then, don't let me stop you.

One step that seems consistent among everyone self-hosting a Bluesky PDS is their reliance on the venture-capital-backed front-end to Amazon's Simple Email Service, Resend. That says more about what Amazon calls simple than it does about Resend. One of the founders is the person who made the Dracula theme, so that's cool, I guess. Hook Resend up to a subdomain, I did re.melkat.blue, and then generate an API key with sending access. Note that key because we will need it for the ENV variable: smtps://resend:${API_KEY}@smtp.resend.com:465/.

With that taken care of, we can start building out a Docker app in Coolify. I pointed it at the docker image ghcr.io/bluesky-social/pds and used the tag latest because I'm a bleeding-edge rebel, Dottie. I connected the folder /pds to a local folder on my Coolify server so the data could persist. To get blob storage working so I could set an avatar and upload pictures, I did need to manually create the folder blocks at /pds/blocks.

I'm sure there's a better way to handle the variables than I've done because I store them in two places. I put them in the production environment variables and mounted a file at /pds/pds.env with the same variables. I didn't want to think too hard about this right now, and even though I'm writing this, I don't care to figure out if I can get rid of one right now. I used this file from that GitHub repo I mentioned above to generate my variables. I went with blob storage because Bluesky loves small, highly compressed images and won't serve them directly.

Below are the ENV variables. Don't forget to use the commands in the comments below to generate your keys for PDS_ADMIN_PASSWORD, PDS_PLC_ROTATION_KEY_K256_PRIVATE_KEY_HEX, and PDS_JWT_SECRET. Oh, and replace example.com with where your server will be.

PDS_HOSTNAME=example.com
PDS_BLOB_UPLOAD_LIMIT=5242880 # 5mb
PDS_ADMIN_PASSWORD= # openssl rand --hex 16
PDS_PLC_ROTATION_KEY_K256_PRIVATE_KEY_HEX= # openssl ecparam --name secp256k1 --genkey --noout --outform DER | tail --bytes=+8 | head --bytes=32 | xxd --plain --cols 32
PDS_JWT_SECRET= # openssl rand --hex 16
PDS_INVITE_REQUIRED=true
PDS_EMAIL_SMTP_URL=smtps://resend:${RESEND_API_KEY}@smtp.resend.com:465/
PDS_EMAIL_FROM_ADDRESS=admin@re.example.com
PDS_MODERATION_EMAIL_SMTP_URL=smtps://resend:${RESEND_API_KEY}@smtp.resend.com:465/
PDS_MODERATION_EMAIL_ADDRESS=admin@re.example.com
PDS_DATA_DIRECTORY=/pds
PDS_BLOBSTORE_DISK_LOCATION=/pds/blocks
PDS_DID_PLC_URL=https://plc.directory
PDS_BSKY_APP_VIEW_URL=https://api.bsky.app
PDS_BSKY_APP_VIEW_DID=did:web:api.bsky.app
PDS_REPORT_SERVICE_URL=https://mod.bsky.app
PDS_REPORT_SERVICE_DID=did:plc:ar7c4by46qjdydhdevvrndac
PDS_CRAWLERS=https://bsky.network
LOG_ENABLED=true

Notice all those centralized services we have to point to? lol. lmao.

Now, you can point your domain to your service running on Coolify. I told my DNS to point at Coolify's IP on the root @ and a wildcard subdomain *. I also told Coolify to use these domains https://melkat.blue:3000,https://melanie.melkat.blue:3000 -- the second one, melanie.melkat.blue is for the account I would create. I found I needed to do this to help get around seeing Invalid Handle on Bluesky's website. I don't think I should have to, and there most likely is a better way.

That's all you need for the server, so hit deploy and watch your logs. If all goes well, you will be ready to create your first account. Well, your first invite code to create an account. You'll want to note the admin password you generated for the PDS_ADMIN_PASSWORD variable. Get your terminal ready because we need to make an API call to your new PDS server!

curl --request POST \
  --url https://${PDS_HOSTNAME}/xrpc/com.atproto.server.createInviteCode \
  --user "admin:${PDS_ADMIN_PASSWORD}" \
  --header "Content-Type: application/json" \
  --data '{"useCount": 1}'

This should return something like this:

{
  "code": "melkat-blue-XXXXX-XXXXX"
}

You will take this code to bsky.app and select Sign up. In the first form field, click the edit button next to Hosting Provider, select Custom, and put your server there. If the server works correctly, it should ask for the invite code we previously generated.

Since the account I created was melanie.melkat.blue, I thought that was quite redundant, and I wanted to change my handle to melkat.blue. The UI from bsky.app says all I need to do is make a _atproto TXT record on my domain, which is true, but there's currently a bug with their centralized app that makes not possible when it's your server. We need to grab our admin password and run another API command with curl to get around it.

Note: the TXT record says you should put something like did=did:plc:ygq3j4yme7aivue6mcuxhwvg in there, for this command you drop the did= part and just give it the did:plc:ygq3j4yme7aivue6mcuxhwvg.

curl --request POST \
  --url https://${PDS_HOSTNAME}/xrpc/com.atproto.admin.updateAccountHandle \
  --user "admin:${PDS_ADMIN_PASSWORD}" \
  --header "Content-Type: application/json" \
  --data '{"did": "${YOUR_DID_PLC_ID}", "handle": "${PDS_HOSTNAME}"}'

At this point, I had @melkat.blue working as perfectly as I could. I feel like I spent a lot of effort on something so pointless. All of this to host a tiny sliver of my experience using Bluesky, with their lead investor Blockchain Capital, aka the alt-right dickhead Steve Bannon and friends. I'm sure it's fine.

Follow me on Mastodon.

happy saturday morning where we take a minute to roast Zendaya's actual signature for looking like an aroused dingus and sack.

I've been self-hosting things for a while now within my private network, and not only is it feasible, but it's easier than you might think with tools like Coolify and Dokploy. If that sounds too nerdy, you could even get started with PikaPods, they're great.

that's right: i get to make decisions about your body without your consent too

nobody:

blogger: here's how last night's decision influences how i write javascript

the demotivation is the point.

they want you to know who holds the power in this relationship and it’s not you, otherwise they wouldn’t have done the needless layoffs.

above #campsnap

If you’ve been following me for a while, you know I have two apps published under Girlfriend Technology. One is an app I got Apple to approve (!!!) that lets you open magnet links for torrents with Put.io, which I call Magnet Links, and another for replacing words and links with other words and links I call X to Y. They have had a pretty good reception and solved very real problems. So why haven’t I updated them lately? The long and short of it is that browsers hate extensions, and Apple doesn’t want anyone who isn’t Apple to make apps.

I wrote a while ago about how once your app is successful on iOS and macOS, the only place left to go is cross-platform, and the biggest downside is dealing with multiple app stores. Google, and therefore all Chromium browsers, are deprecating Manifest V2 for the anti-ad block Manifest V3, and Apple, being, well, Apple, they really don’t want you to make anything. So prepare for an uphill battle.

Developing browser extensions isn’t hard. Well, testing them in mobile Safari kind of is, but for the most part, it’s pretty straightforward. Submitting them to Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Mozilla is a pain. They all have different requirements and a different review process. Ironically, Mozilla and Apple are the fastest to get your updates approved, but Google and Microsoft will take weeks. It’s all a lot of work for what amounts to the same code.

So, with every platform doing everything they could to discourage me from developing Magnet Links and X to Y, I decided to focus on other things. I’m a web developer at heart, and I aim to make things for the internet. I’ve been discouraged to the point that I’m amazed I could do as much as I did.

While some of Magnet Links’ functionality still works, the Put.io feature seems to have been broken on Put.io’s side, and as of the last time I checked their documentation, I couldn’t tell why. X to Y continues to work fine on simple pages, but it can be a problem on more complex pages. I’m not retiring these extensions, but they are frozen in time until I can no longer feel the boot of big tech pressing on my skull.

I’m incredibly blessed that people found these browser extensions useful, and I still can’t believe I made it to Apple’s incredibly specific 194th top free Safari extension for iPad. I wish I had the drive to keep them going, but until the platforms get better, I don’t see that changing.

Update: Unfortunately after I posted this Apple endorsed a fascist dictator and as a result I cannot in good faith renew my Apple Developer account at this time. Appologies to my fellow Safari users out there. This shit sucks.

absolutely nothing. they weren’t directing anyone to my websites anyway because there is no money in that.

some rock #campsnap

an oregon vista #campsnap

i guess i'm going to need to issue a correction on my latest blog post but first i need to record a video

It's been a while since I last showed off my home screens. I wanted to do something different this time. Since July, I have gotten fed up with the direction of the big two computer OS people, so I moved to Arch Linux, and it’s been pretty nice. I've also started using Shareshot, for which I made a frame for ultrawide monitors and the Steam Deck.

Arch Linux with KDE Plasma

There is not much to show here unless I am actively working on something, so I will go over how I set up my taskbar. I got my "start button" as the Arch logo and three folder stacks for my home, downloads, and NextCloud folders. Stacks on KDE work like how I long gave up on macOS ever doing: letting me interact with files like they are files and not visual reputations of things. I can drill down in folders, right-click files, you know -- how it should be. Then I have two pinned apps: Konsole (terminal) and Vivaldi (browser), and then I have Apple Music, The Lounge (IRC), and Mastodon as progressive web apps running. Then, I have the "system tray" with media controls, weather, and volume controls. I just started using the Netspeed widget next to the System Monitor sensors for CPU and RAM.

iPhone

I caved and turned off tinted icons. I'm happy most developers have the new icon types in their apps. In every iOS iteration, something like this tells me how dedicated a developer is to building a good app, and Readwise Reader is not interested. They may have the app that currently meshes with me the most, but they seem uninterested in anything but AI slop. I'm using Libby to get books from my local library, Remind Me Faster to capture to-dos, Obsidian for notes, Play, and Sequel for media tracking. I'm also trying to be all-in on the "new" Reeder since they recently fixed how slow feed refreshes are. I’m currently using it for podcasts, and the lack of a proper queue to play the next new podcast when I finish an episode is annoying.

iPad

I like the new mixed widget for showing calendars and reminders together. It feels sloppy, but it's better than it was before. I've been trying to use Sequel and Up Ahead to give me something positive to look forward to, like the new Like a Dragon TV show (out now) and the new Like a Dragon Pirates game. Or The Flop House's FlopTV live events. I'm also trying out a few home screen app icons for capturing things like Remind Me Faster, Croissant for posting to one singular Mastodon account and nothing else, and GoodLinks for bookmarks.

Before I go, this month's wallpapers are from the Gradient Blur Wallpaper Pack by Oliur and Cosmic Wanders Wallpaper Pack by Shevon Salmon.

i love my wife #campsnap

hole #campsnap

two for one waterfall #campsnap

from the highway this building looks like a nipple #campsnap

it’s like a rip in the mountain #campsnap

i call this one “woman checking discord” #campsnap

ceiling no scope with my #campsnap today

i went to the japanese tea garden in #pdx today with my #campsnap

The only choice I am aware of is to follow this guide to installing Affinity apps on Linux. I did it, and it works well enough but feels fragile. It requires using a pretty old script and compiling a bespoke version of Wine. For example, when I go to export an image, it works, but then the app crashes. When I open an image, I have to navigate to my home directory from the root of my drive. I assume that part is fixable, but I need to take the time to investigate.

This whole issue came up because I wanted to make a Steam Deck frame for the iOS app Shareshot. I did it with Affinity on Linux, but it took a few tries. Affinity has some quirks on any platform that make pixel-perfect editing a challenge after coming from other apps.

I should address an elephant in the Linux room: the GNU Image Manipulation Program, but more commonly referred to as the slur its name abbreviates to. The fact that the name remains after 26 years is sad and pathetic. I worry that no one in the development community has been able to change it, and it reflects poorly on everyone involved. I haven't tried it since I was young, but even if they did fix all those deeply ingrained poor UX choices, I don't feel comfortable using it. I'd rather use ImageMagick from the command line.

As Canva bought Affinity, I have little faith in the app continuing in its current pay-once, no-AI form. If they didn't sell out, I could see it getting a proper Linux port, but I don't see that happening now.

Maybe Adobe's apps would be decent. However, as long as they charge absurdly high prices, surprise their users with contract lock-ins on their subscriptions, offer no simple way for people to cancel those subscriptions, and continue down their AI slop hellhole, that's a no-go.

When I was 13 years old, I waited over a week for my Red Hat Linux ISO file to download. I saw these nerds on TechTV talk about it, and I wanted to try it myself. I told my parents what I was doing, and they told me that my older half-brother had mentioned it. I installed it that night and quickly realized that my speakers didn't work, and I had accidentally installed it over my Windows XP installation. That was not my intention, lol. I spent the weekend reinstalling Windows and Red Hat.

I had spent years theming my Windows XP to look like Linux. I loved Everaldo Coelho's Crystal icon set. These icons were made for Linux, so I wanted to go where his art could surround me. I quickly learned I needed KDE instead of Red Hat's default Gnome. Thankfully, my brother would gift me a boxed copy of SuSE Linux. I was the happiest 13-year-old that holiday.

By the time I was 14, I had convinced my dad to let me install Linux on his work computer. I snuck "live CDs" of Linux into my mom's machine. Live CDs boot Linux off of a single CD and do not install on a hard drive, so when my mom got mad and demanded I fix her computer, I would simply eject the CD.

Content warning: Homophobia (skip five paragraphs)

I had a laptop and a Wi-Fi ExpressCard but could never get it to work. I spent months trying, but I could only use it with Windows. I had to buy a paid Linux driver to finally get it to work. I know that's against the laws of the free-libre open-source software world, but it was 2004, and Wi-Fi was magic. Just as long as Dad wasn't using the microwave to pop some popcorn. I said it was magic; I didn't say it wasn't delicate.

So, finally, success! I had Wi-Fi! I had a friend over at the time. He was a Mac guy and had one of those cool, colorful clamshell iBooks. I hugged him out of excitement. Everything was fine. My parents got a call that evening after he had left. The next thing I knew, I was being called into our living room, where my mom, my friend, and his mom were sitting.

That hug between two young teenagers was, apparently, gay. Their goal was to force me to come out in front of my mom. I don't believe my mom had any idea what they wanted to have this group sit down for, but in hindsight, the thing she should have done was tell them to get the fuck out of our house and never talk to us again.

Instead, I just sat there scared. I wasn't attracted to men, and I wouldn't say I was. I never thought there was anything wrong with being gay, which in the early 2000s was an opinion that screamed to homophobes that you were super gay. Ultimately, nothing happened. I lost a friend. I developed some trauma. I was about to start high school, and this served as a foreshadowing of how that would go.

I survived one semester of my first year of high school before having to leave for my safety due to assumptions that I was gay. Everyone was so sure I was attracted to men. Little did they know: I wasn't gay, just a lesbian.

I remember downloading Gentoo Linux. The download wasn't too long, but I had to wait over a week for it to finish compiling and installing everything. It was fine, but I eventually swapped it to Slackware. I liked it a lot, but since this in 2004 I was also wanting to play a lot of World of Warcraft which I couldn't really do well on Linux.

In 2005, since I couldn't continue attending public high school, I worked hard to save up money to get the first-generation Mac Mini. It was amazing, tiny, and kind of disappointing at first. My experience with Windows and Linux was that when you install an operating system, you have to spend about a week setting everything up to work appropriately. With the Mac, I didn't have to do that. That was great, but also boring, you know?

I've stayed with Apple computers ever since, but I switched to Windows off and on after 2016, when the Mac stopped being as fun as it was in the mid-2000s. All those Linux skills I built up worked well with OS X and at work, where I needed to SSH into Linux machines.

My wife decided to try Arch Linux last weekend. It looked neat, so I cleaned off a hard drive on my gaming machine and installed it myself. I saw what KDE had been up to on my Steam Deck, which looked impressive. I'm so tired of Windows and Mac. Microsoft and Apple are both focused on destroying the environment and forcing AI bullshit on us. It's gotten so bad that I feel like Linux is the only way I can continue using a computer for computing.

So far, it has gone well. I'm writing this from Arch Linux now! I wonder how long before I feel the urge to swap back to Windows or Mac. I'm so happy Linux has improved so much in the last twenty years—lol, well, except for setting up a printer.

No one can solve for printers.

It was the last day of 1999, and my mother surprised me with an upgrade to my Sega Genesis, a translucent lime green Nintendo 64 with Donkey Kong 64. Sorry, it was "Jungle Green." I loved Nickelodeon slime green, so this was perfect. I got to learn the DK rap. I liked Donkey Kong 64 at the time, but Donkey Kong 64 is not a good game. Looking back, I'm surprised I got as far in the game as I did. Whenever I had a friend over, I would ask them to help me progress.

At the same time, Sega struggled to get people to pay attention to their new Dreamcast. The only time I remember seeing one was at a Sears demo kiosk. Then, I never really thought about it again until I met my wife. Her favorite game is Rayman 2, and her favorite platform to play it on is the Dreamcast version. She sent me everything I needed to play it, and for a few weeks, we would video call before I went to work, and she would watch me play Rayman 2 for Dreamcast. Neither of us ever had a Dreamcast.

My wife got accepted to show off her game at the recent Portland Retro Gaming Expo. As she worked the booth, I was wandering the show floor. When I am in a big store and don't have anything specific to do, I challenge myself to find a needle in a haystack. I do this in Japanese stores where I try to find a specific book or album. I call this hard mode because I can't read Kanji. Finding my wife's favorite game for a retro console at a retro gaming expo should be doable.

Well, it almost wasn't. I wasn't looking for a specific language of the game. English or Japanese would be fine. Even at retro gaming expos, the Dreamcast is not very popular. I only found one place with a copy of Rayman 2 for Dreamcast, and it was in English. Unfortunately, it cost more than I would have liked at $54. I don't know what a reasonable price for it is. I know these people are trying to sell Pokémon Crystal for the Game Boy Color for upwards of $300. C'mon.

My wife was surprised, but I quickly realized this wasn't just a symbolic gift; she would need a Dreamcast. They aren't that expensive compared to the games. My friend Erik warned me that I might need to do a power supply mod if it overheats, and modding it is generally easy.

We only had Rayman 2. That's all my wife needs. But we got a whole Dreamcast, so what else can this thing do? Well, most Dreamcast models do not have an effective method of copy protection, and you can burn games to a CD-R. (Remember CD-R's? They're like CD-RW's but without a W.) Do I even have a CD burner? I think I have a USB Blu-ray drive that is a burner. I haven't done this in forever! Can they also burn CDs? Turns out: yes.

In the age of burning CDs, I often heard people talk about the best brand of burnable CDs being Verbatim. I never had access to those in my part of the country. But now, for less than half of a secondhand copy of Rayman 2 for Dreamcast, I could buy 100 CDs. Sounds good, right? Well, it turns out, as with everything, someone bought the Verbatim brand and turned it into shit. I swear half of these discs are visibly not functional. It's no big deal. We're happy just burning discs and seeing if they work in the Dreamcast. Now, we have a handful of other games to play.

Overall, it's fun playing a Dreamcast with my game developer wife because she can point out all the technically impressive things that it can do that not even modern consoles can do or features that were ahead of their time. I'm no expert, but I can tell the frame rate is excellent.

We aren't done yet. We have an SD card mod on the way, and my wife is on her way to 100% Rayman 2 again, but this time, it's on the actual hardware.

Photographer Jedda convinced me to try the screen-free Camp Snap Camera. It looks like a film camera I bought a while back, but without all the hassle of getting film and developing it. I really like it! When I finish taking photos I can simply plug it in to my phone and copy the photos over. I've been sharing my photos on my Pixelfed and you check out my collection of photos taken with my Camp Snap. I just learned you can install different filters, so I'm going to be insufferable with black and white photos for a while.

(not on Pixelfed? You can follow @zicklepop@nyan.pics from Mastodon!)

• take a screenshot on their phone
• print it out (in black and white, don't wanna waste ink)
• scan it (also in black and white, don't want to waste kilobytes)
• email me the PDF

Discord was where I would go when I wanted hot gossip and schadenfreude. Sometimes, I would find the rare nugget of something cool happening, but let's be honest: I was there to find the rankest nuggets. It was addictive, and I kept coming back for more. Please give me my daily garbage, yum yum. My internet food pyramid became one giant triangle of trash. I mean, it wasn't just on Discord, but if I looked on Discord, I'd be ahead of the curve. Why did I need to know about garbage before everyone else? Why do I need to know about garbage at all?

I recently tried to clean up my Discord by focusing on things that bring me joy. Those areas broke down as the European Union started going after monopolies, something the USA is too cowardly to do. Then, the generative AI bubble began to grow. The mix of these two things activated the dormant libertarians. Won't somebody think of the trillion-dollar tech companies? They have it so rough.

Discord has never really had a way to make money, but for a while, they had a simple proposition: you give us a few bucks to stay afloat, and we give you a little extra. Then they raised the price. They tried to be a game store. They tried to get into cryptocurrency scams. Now, they want you to pay for micro-transactions for branded trash. They even had a failed buyout from Microsoft. Discord's corpse would have looked great next to the taxidermy trophies of Yammer, Skype, and GroupMe. Discord looks like it'll fall into the failing ad-supported privacy-invading model of everything else as it decays.

Hell, Discord joined other major social networks in using machine learning to assign you a gender. Facebook goes as far as to assign you a race. I'm Asian, according to Facebook. I forget what gender Twitter gave me. I corrected them by writing in my gender as "fuck you." The fascinating thing about Discord is that it does this periodically, so people noticed they can track their fluctuating gender over time (GOT) according to Discord's bad assumptions. Are you a Masculine May or a Femtober Ghoul?

This shit stinks. Both my actions and Discord the company's. I can't control companies, but I can quit and clean up my vices. More and more, I am happier offline and participating less with the internet.

• Portland Retro Gaming Expo 2024: A Post-Mortem - Blog of The Enby Witch
  My wife wrote about her big day showing off her game at an event!
• BUG BALL by dapper_dinosaur
  My wife made the titular bug model in this game!
• HACHI - DONUT HOLE 2024
  I love this new version of DONUT HOLE. Very fun animation.
• Cohost: A somber, yet predictable end - Seafoam Gaming
  A very happy “that site that stole rent money from poor queer kids” is shutting down day.
• Despite Federal Protections, LGBTQ+ People Are Being Mistreated at Work - them.us
  Yup.
• Our Android App is Frozen in Carbonite - iA Writer
  All app stores suck. They burn out developers so less people can make apps.
• Don’t ever hand your phone to the cops - The Verge
  Digital IDs sound cool but you know what else is cool? Plastic cards that don’t carry your entire life inside them.
• Work is meaningless, and it almost killed my husband - Salma Alam-Naylor
  Out of all the ways to go, working should not be on the list.
• Disable Sequoia's monthly screen recording permission prompt - TinyApps
  Turning off Apple’s annoying security prompts is exactly like cheating in Animal Crossing, begging the question: is this actually protecting anybody? (no)
• gaining access to anyones browser without them even visiting a website - eva's site
  TLDR: the Arc web browser has no security, may not even know the definition of the word probably because their AI hallucinated it to them.

For more, follow @links@nyan.lol on Mastodon

i could admit i was wrong, but instead i'll just say this is my own solo-mandela effect.

These requests made me feel like I had to maintain a social media presence. Those big social media companies might have started by calling them "a place for friends," but unless your friends are brands, no, they aren't. I'm not a brand. I'm a person. If you want to keep up with me, you must look outside the ads.

I like the sentiment behind "I miss your posts," but it says, "I don't care enough to look at a different website." Here's the thing: I didn't go offline. I went elsewhere. It's the world wide web—not the four hell sites of the apocalypse. It's never been easier to keep up with me on my website. You might wind up wanting to use an app without ads, but isn't that a blessing?

"But Melanie, it's too hard!" Isn't everything the first time? What would we do if we stopped doing things because they're hard? I can't count the number of times people said microblogging sites like Twitter would never catch on because they were too obtuse. Now, people are clinging to its corpse like it will somehow save them. That complacency is how we got to this nightmare stage of capitalism. I don't have to be on Facebook. I'm sorry, I don't.

I'll continue to work on making myself more accessible, but I will do it safely and humanely, or I will not do it at all.

Open wide!

I saw my wife! #pigsquad #prge #prge2024 #campsnap

i saw a cat #campsnap

i saw a squirrel #campsnap

i don't care if it is "self" driving! ten and tuah, hands on that thang

please stop by and tell her i sent you, she fucking hates that shit 🩵

lots of pink #pdx #campsnap

i love a good #pdx sunset #campsnap

i put this on my home screen so i know which days i should get out of bed for

I have slowly seen Alfred's biggest proponents swap to that one cool new app people seem to like. I would always look at it, read about it, and then tell myself I don't want to spend $100 a year on it. Especially since the subscription includes AI. There's also a $200 per year plan with "Advanced AI, " whatever that means. It always sounded very hype-chasing and environment-killing. But I had to find something that worked since Alfred could no longer launch apps, so I figured I would try it.

It does what it needs to. I don't need to spend money on it for anything, to be honest. I installed some extensions from the "Store," and all the ones I tried have been pretty nice. However, many extensions are buggy with an "Error: Worker terminated due to reaching memory limit: JS heap out of memory" issue. The biggest upside is that all the AI bullshit can be toggled off with a checkbox. I guess I'm using this app now.

It is 2024, and the best I can hope for is a checkbox to turn off the AI garbage.

look, it's not my goal to dump on how bad the mac has become, but if you're going to keep throwing stuff like this at me it's like… what do you want?

My cat is enjoying the #campsnap camera.

terfs treat me with more respect than macOS Sequoia permission dialogues. done or move to trash? i'll just move my mac to trash, how about that?

how many cysts do you have to have removed before you're transt?

(sorry.)

• Data Piggy by fromjason
  Oink oink, the data piggies need your content.
• Cohost So White: A Comprehensive Record of the Matter of Race on Cohost by Alyaza Birze
  Cohost was anything but a nice place.
• I’m Worried The Robot in Astro Bot Isn’t Attractive Enough For Me To Enjoy
  Just don’t make the robot a woman, men wouldn’t be able to relate.
• The Moral Implications of Being a Moderately Successful Computer Scientist and a Woman by Irene Y. Zhang
  This piece cannot be shared enough.
• Substack's Nazi problem isn't going away
  The biggest "history" newsletter on Substack is by an out and proud nazi, and Substack promotes it heavily to everyone.
• Some thoughts on the YubiKey EUCLEAK Vulnerability by Terence Eden
  This isn’t a major problem today, but one to keep an eye on for sure.
• A note on estimated reading times by Baldur Bjarnason
  I’ve been at "75 minutes remaining" of this book I’ve been reading the entire time I’ve been reading it and I’m now 75% of the way through.
• Apple’s Huge “Dual Use” Face Swap App Problem Is Not Going Away from 404 Media
  Apple thinks they need that 30% revenue cut on apps that make nonconsensual porn of underage women, so they won't stop selling them.
• “Abusing you was by the book” by Nathalie Lawhead
  It sucks that the people who did this have been able to go about their careers without consequence.
• Sometimes there are just too many words by JCProbably
  Everyone wants you to move fast and not think about the consequences.
• Timing: The Legacy of Korean Comics Artist Kang Full from Yattatachi
  Korean comics (manhwa) are having a moment!
• suck my dick and balls i work for nasa: the naomi h story - Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
  Employers will look for any little reason they can find to avoid hiring someone. You know, like excitement. God forbid NASA hire someone who wanted to be there.
• ‘You are a helpful mail assistant,’ and other Apple Intelligence instructions from The Verge
  Telling your bullshit machine “Do not hallucinate” is some massive amounts of cringe.
• Inside Apple Arcade (again): late payments, stonewalled studios, terrible tech support and Vision Pro woes from Mobilegamer.biz
  I wrote about how releasing software on an app store is harder than building apps. I suppose I wasn't being harsh enough.
• Patti Harrison Is Ready to Take Control from Harpers Bazaar
  I love Patti! Some of what she said feels relatable to coding at a tech company.
• Exclusive: Taboola to sell ads for Apple from Axios
  Is this pus-filled growth infected? Find out in Apple News.
• Mozilla Welcomes Anonym: Privacy Preserving Digital Advertising
  "Privacy preserving" in that Mozilla will give their ad company privileged access to your data, I guess.

Thanks for making it through another link list! You're my favorite reader.

For more, follow @links@nyan.lol on Mastodon

I've been using Dokploy on a Raspberry Pi 5 to self-host many free tools on my Tailscale network I share with my wife and family. One of the services I spun up was Miniflux, a pretty good RSS feed reading service that keeps up with all my RSS feeds. I seamlessly exported my feeds as an OPML file from Feedbin and imported them into Miniflux. Now I have a centralized place checking the feeds and not my phone.

Miniflux provides a lot of APIs and integrations, which will come in handy. I then self-hosted RSSHub, a service that will attempt to make an RSS feed out of almost anything by using whatever means it can hack together. Thankfully, one of those is making an RSS feed out of all the entries items in your Miniflux account. So I took that feed rsshub.local/miniflux/entry/all/feed/, and I fed it to Reeder and Tapestry. I know I can write a plugin for Tapestry, but I'm not all that invested in it at this early stage of its development. I recommend going to its feed setting in Reeder's feed list and telling it to open items from it in "reader view." Now, I can use these apps without waiting forever. I still think they need the ability to pull from dedicated RSS services and not hit over 302 feeds every time I launch the app or sporadically in the background.

Is this silly? Yes. Should I use another app instead? Yeah, probably.

my cat is a shoe??

Last night, I wrote a joke on Mastodon that I thought was a funny roast of Cohost users in light of the website shutting down. It was only funny to me, so I deleted it. I understand that Cohost was of special interest to a very small and vulnerable group. That's kind of the problem, though, right? Cohost was a business, and you are a human being. Can I make it any more obvious?

This was the toot that I posted to followers only:

#HeyCohost, don't forget to ask your parents for permission before going online.

Cohost was run very poorly from the get-go by some former techies who had no business running a business. How many business people do you know that debate the morality of CSAM? How is that a debate? That was my exit. I think this moment was the beginning of the end.

But Cohost's staff had spent years cultivating an audience online of vulnerable young queer people. Young queer people form communities everywhere: Facebook, Discord, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. Cohost wasn't your rock. The friends you made along the way were.

Cohost, a website by people in their 30s, wanted to be perceived as cool to young teens, and they have very questionable views on CSAM. It is a bad look. It's worse that they spent much time begging their young, vulnerable audience for money while pocketing 90k a year.

No one was gloating to or putting down those people, but we were trying to warn you: Cohost is a sinking ship. The people who remained on Cohost put their fingers in their ears and acted like we were being mean. Websites come and go all the time. So, if Cohost was your first website to die on you, congratulations. It will happen again. And again.

Cohost lied through their teeth, claiming they would become sustainable by being a Patreon clone. Cohost blames Stripe's policies for their death, but that's silly. That's not how you operate a business. We also know that Stripe's policy changes had nothing to do with Cohost's decision to shut down.

What makes all of this worse is that Cohost grew in the death of Twitter, so we should have all known not to put our trust in platforms. The web is a vast place, and there are more than three websites. You can even have your own website, and no I'm not talking about a Linktree or Carrd. Is it hard? No. Does it cost money? Also no. You learned CSS for Cohost. You're ready for a website of your own. You can do it. I believe in you.

I've seen some Cohost users call Mastodon a "vile" place, and well, did you not see the harassment campaigns on Cohost? Probably not, because discovery on Cohost was bad. The moderators there were also very bad at moderating it, asking victims to beg their harasser's forgiveness in some documented cases. Mastodon has much better moderation tools for individuals and admins. Most people who run a server would go out of their way to defend you from attacks. I have a zero-tolerance policy with my server. Maybe it takes a minute to find your space, but you will, Mastodon or not.

But I am sorry you lost your special website.

i think my cat is a chameleon??!

i think my cat is a spy??

it’s very important to have the talk

Update: oh! OH GOD~ i just realized no nut november is not organized by squirrels

Like most people who have their own domain name, I have too many domain names. So I took one that I wasn't using and set it up with Forward Email which allows you to create email aliases that forward emails to other addresses. So I set up two aliases: read-later@ forwards to my personal address and to whatever read later services I want, and should-have-been-an-rss-feed@ for newsletters that are less important and only forwards to a few feed readers, like Feedbin. Now my newsletters go where I want them to and I only have to change things in one spot.

🚭 #pdx

i think she wants to be that meme cat that the ladies point at

she’s my electrician

I was recently thinking about what got me interested in apps and design were the many websites that featured beautiful apps. Typically, these websites were focused on apps for Apple products, but as we see Apple go down this anti-developer and anti-consumer path of a monopoly, I think it's time we focus on the great apps for the other devices in our life, so today I'm going to share some apps for Android I was not aware of until recently.

Android Originals

AntennaPod

It's a podcast app in my favorite style: minimal. Every podcast app wants to be a metaverse of nonsense and I respect those that don't.

Capy Reader for Feedbin

I've spent years looking for a good Feedbin app for Android and I think I found it. The lack of swipe gestures to mark feed items as read or starred is frustrating to my decades of muscle memory, but honestly this app is almost exactly what an RSS reader should be.

Client for Put.io

The "now draw the rest of the owl" of Put.io apps, it lets you actually manage torrents and downloads, something that Apple doesn't allow.

K-9 Mail

I suspect this app is in the process of being rebranded as Thunderbird for Android. It's easier to set up than Thunderbird on computers.

Pano Scrobbler for LastFM

While music scrobblers for Last.fm exist on iOS, they are very finicky through no fault of their own, so get this: an app that works with any music app you allow it to. Is that basic? Yes. Is it infinitely more powerful than is possible on iOS? Also yes.

Tusky for Mastodon

I was looking forward to playing with this Mastodon client more than I actually am enjoying it. I guess I just want the ability to pin custom lists to the tab bar. But hey, cute icon.

Wait, that iOS App is on Android???

If you are finding your Apple-centric apps stagnating, why not try making them available everywhere?

App in the Air

I've lived through several generations of flight tracking apps and this one is a former best of class. The UI has always been a little too cute for its own good, but I think the real thing that pushed me away was the pivot to trying to be travel agent with affiliate partnerships. But hey, it respects my lifetime subscription and still syncs with TripIt, so it gets the job done.

iA Writer

iA Writer is neat, but I moved away from it because it wanted to rely on Apple's Files app and the constantly changing APIs. I couldn't store my files where I wanted to on iOS. I don't even know how it would handle files and stuff on Android and I haven't taken the time since I primarily use other apps now.

Also, I don't know what to make of their AI-related updates. It feels like they wanted to find a middle ground between Yes AI and No AI and ugh I'm not interested in trying to figure out what I really think of all that when I can just, you know, not think of it. Why have a little AI, as a treat, when I can have no AI?

Network Analyzer Pro

Sometimes I just want to run some basic network testing commands and this app did it pretty well on iOS. I haven't purchased it for Android but it looks just like the iOS app so I assume it will be useful when I need it.

Launchers

If you aren't aware of Android launchers, these are essentially alternative home screens. On iOS they call it "Spring Board" but on Android you can replace it with whatever you want.

Niagra Launcher

Part of making Android work for me was replacing the silly UI all Android devices come with for getting around the OS. Honestly, if I could use this on iOS I probably would. This launcher works great on tiny screens, e-ink screens, and big screens alike.

FLauncher

The biggest problem with Android is the amount of bloatware that Google themselves force on you. I don't like Google, I don't use Google, I don't want Google. FLauncher is great for Android TVs because you can easily just hide all that nonsense and focus on the things you want to use. I don't know what a good TV launcher looks like, but at least this one is chill.

Installers

F-Droid

A privacy-focused alternative store for free apps. It lets you filter out apps by what they call "anti-features" like privacy risks.

Obtainium

Download apps directly from the devs, no waiting for the Google Play approval process. It's pretty smart, but the UI can be pretty hard to tell if you are selecting multiple of items from the list or not, and well, whoops I ended up uninstalling everything but the app I wanted to uninstall.

Apps You Won't Find on Google Play Store

Breezy Weather

A full featured privacy respecting free weather app.

KOReader

The most advanced reading app I have ever seen, for better or worse. This app might look overwhelming, but it will do anything. Great for e-ink devices.

That's all for now

Do you have any apps I should know about? I'd like to do this for Linux and Windows too, so if you're interested or have suggestions for apps on those platforms I would love to hear from you!

as for digital purchases, if you're buying movies you can share them across platforms with Movies Anywhere.

for everything else, start leaning towards cross platform apps. you don't have to switch to android now (it's fine!) but remain vigilant and give yourself permission to explore your options.

My goal is to keep this list updated over time with products I use that play the refer a friend game.

• Bookshop: An online bookstore that supports local independent bookstores
• Bunny: The global Content Delivery Platform that truly hops
• Ente: Use code MELANIE to get 10gb more of encrypted photo storage.
• Lemonade: America’s top-rated home and renters insurance company
• NextDNS: DNS that protects you from security threats, blocks ads and trackers
• omg.lol: Get the best internet address that you’ve ever had and more
• Proton: Secure email, cloud storage, password manager, and VPN that protects your privacy. Use my link to get 14 days of premium features for free

Everyone should have a slashpage for their burrito order. Let's make it happen.

The Burrito

I'm from San Francisco, so I expected two things that might not be the norm: a steamed tortilla and that it be double-wrapped in foil.

• Meat: Carnitas
• Beans: Refried if available, pinto if not
• Salsa: Mild Pico de Gallo
• Rice: You bet
• Extras: Avocado slices if it will take a minute before I get around to eating it, like for delivery, otherwise I would love some guacamole

NorCal burrito best burritos, end of story.

Breakfast Burrito

Hey good morning! It's hard to go wrong with a breakfast burrito. I love sausage, egg, cheese, bacon, and potatoes. Whatever checks off the most boxes is a win in my book.

Taco Bell Burrito

Hey, we all love trash. I love trash. Yum yum give me garbage. I'll take a Beefy 5-Layer Burrito with seasoned beef, beans, cheese, nacho cheese sauce, no sour cream, and potatoes.

To All The Burritos I've Loved Before

I no longer live in San Francisco, but here are some other kinds of burritos I have enjoyed from other restaurants.

• Sushirito's Sumo Crunch — a burrito made of shrimp tempura, surimi crab, cucumbers, red tempura flakes, spicy aioli, avocado spread, sushi rice, and nori
• Curry Up Now's Chicken Tikka Masala — a burrito made of Indian food. Personally, I would like to request no onions on mine but it's not a deal breaker.

It is currently hooked up to a CI action that runs every couple of hours and only pushes an update out if anything has changed since it last checked. It checks my blog, Mastodon, Pixelfed, Status.lol, Last.fm, Letterboxd, Steam, and Playstation accounts to figure out what I've been up to lately.

I ran into this when I decided to start rebuilding parts of my personal website in web components on my ongoing journey to hyper-optimize my websites. I previously mentioned building a timeline page where you could see all of my online activity across a variety of websites and services. I decided to move it from its own page to the main page, just underneath a healthy amount of scrolling. The immediate issue is how much this increased the page load. I wanted to make sure it was only rendered for people who would actually view it.

When all you have is a web component hammer, everything looks like a web component nail.

I thought this would be a good time to dig in to two things: the Intersection Observer API and the HTML template tag. The template tag means that you can continue to write code like you normally would, but the browser won't render it until the template is cloned on to the page.

<in-view>
  <template>I show up when I'm in view!</template>
</in-view>

So for my website the code looks like this:

<in-view data-rootMargin="240px">
  <template>
    <timeline-feed> </timeline-feed>
  </template>
</in-view>

The root margin attribute is roughly the size of the timeline filter buttons and the timeline header. This will give it an advantage loading the JSON Feed I use to build out the timeline. For my site, it would also be nice to have some loading states or no-JS fallbacks, but this is a pretty good start for now.

You can install it with the NPM-compatible package manager of your choice.

npm install --save @zicklepop/in-view

If you don't use a package manager with your site, you can use this snippet.

<script type="module" src="https://esm.sh/@zicklepop/in-view" defer></script>

Learn more:

• Git
• NPM
• Try out some demos

Inspired by uses.tech, I have written up my current setup. I will try to keep this post updated as things change.

Hardware

The Bedrock

• Blue Steelcase Gesture Office Chair
• Everlasting Comfort Office Foot Rest
• Office Owl Caster Wheels for Desk Chairs
• UPLIFT Clamp-On Cup Holder
• UPLIFT Bamboo Standing Desk
• UPLIFT Big Standard Keyboard Tray - Bamboo with Quick Adjust Mechanism

Computers

• iPad Pro - My main machine, I use it for everything
• Mac Studio - I use this for coding and building apps
• Custom PC - My gaming machine

The Input Club

• Keychron Q8 - A blue Alice layout with a knob with Gateron G Pro Red switches.
• Keychron M6 Wireless Mouse - Basic? Yes. Works? Also yes.

The Audio Video Club

• Alienware 34" 120Hz Ultrawide Monitor - AW3420DW - Not a fan of Alienware, but I fell in love with the ultrawide form factor and wanted something that could handle high framerates.
• Audio-Technica AT2020 XLR Microphone
• Behringer UMC204HD Audio Interface
• FiiO BTR5 Bluetooth and USB-C DAC - No headphone jack on the iOS devices anymore, so lets add it back through Bluetooth.
• Hatsune Miku Edition TASCAM VL-S3BT Speakers
• Opal C1 - This camera is pretty slick and in early beta. I hope to one day use it with Windows as well as Mac. As of this writing it runs 105°F when it's not in use, the software is lacking.
• RAZER Kiyo Camera w/ Ring Light - Not a fan of Razer, but it solved a lighting issue for me. Where I cannot use the Opal C1, I will use this camera.
• Samson SR850 Headphones with Brainwavz Cooling Gel Earpads - Long cable, amazing sound, and with the replacement earpads they are the most comfortable headphones I own. Great for all day wear. Recommended by DankPods!

Software

Multiplatform

• 1Password - Use a password manager. Use unique passwords. Use two-factor auth. Just do it, already.
• Affinity Designer - A full Illustrator experience on all of my devices, even iPad. No subscription fees.
• Affinity Photo - A full Photoshop experience on all of my devices, even iPad. No subscription fees.
• Obsidian - I need my notes to be everywhere, and a lot of note taking apps are either AI garbage or Apple-only and that's no good.
• VS Code - A fast and reliable code editor that is extendible. Runs on any platform either natively or in the web browser.

iOS

• Inspect Browser - Inspect Element for iOS, not as full featured but the best and most reliable I've found.
• Prompt 3 - A shell with SSH, Mosh, and Eternal Terminal support
• Textastic - Old reliable code editor. It's no VS Code, but it's pretty good for prototyping HTML or JavaScript.
• Working Copy - Git on iOS and it works with other apps.

macOS

• Alfred - Quickly perform tasks, find apps and files, and manage your clipboard history.
• ImageOptim - Please don't throw images up online without making sure their file size is as small as it can be without reducing image quality.
• iTerm - A terminal that I can split the views in half vertically or horizontally. I swear I don't use most of what this offers.
• Nova - A pretty good editor that handles projects quite nicely.

Customizations

• Color scheme: Dracula Pro
• Font: Cartograph

Before I start with the list, here's an OPML file for the nerds in the back. I see you. And for those that just want to see the feeds in one place, I got you too.

• A Very Good Blog by Keenan (feed)
• BinaryDigit (feed)
• Blog of The Enby Witch (feed)
• Blog Posts | Bacardi55's Web Cave (feed)
• brennan.day (feed)
• cabel.com (feed)
• Crystalline Blog (feed)
• cygnoir.net (feed)
• Dan McCoy's Special Interests (feed)
• Dhole Moments (feed)
• Ersei 'n Stuff (feed)
• Frills - Blog & experiments (feed)
• Frills - Bookmarks (feed)
• Gabriel Garrido (feed)
• Jake Archibald's blog (feed)
• JEDDACP.ME (feed)
• Josh Comeau's blog (feed)
• Julia Evans (feed)
• LewisDale.dev (feed)
• Ludicity (feed)
• Matt’s Weird Little Garden (feed)
• Mayank (feed)
• Nathan Knowler (feed)
• niqwithq (feed)
• Notes by JCProbably (feed)
• One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age (feed)
• Ordered Lists (feed)
• Own Your Web (feed)
• potch has a website (feed)
• Robb Knight • Links • JSON Feed (feed)
• Robb Knight • Posts • JSON Feed (feed)
• runtimeterror (feed)
• SC 2.4.4 (feed)
• Stefan Judis Web Development (feed)
• That HTML Blog (feed)
• The Bored Horse (feed)
• The Linkfest (feed)
• Tokyo Times (feed)
• Tyler Sticka (feed)
• Vivian Rosanthwyn (feed)
• Waxy.org (feed)
• Yatta-Tachi (feed)

Apple has made a lot of partnerships with big companies like Quantum Computer Services (AOL), Microsoft, HP, Intel, Cingular (AT&T), Epic Games, Valve, Capcom, and Ubisoft. They are all pretty one-sided in terms of who benefits. Focusing on these partnerships distracts from what has made Apple's platforms successful: the community of dedicated indie developers. But like their corporate partnerships, this relationship is not a healthy one.

People love to talk about how good Apple's hardware is and how its software ties it all together, but that doesn't feel true anymore, does it? We have M4 iPad Pros that are less capable than the PowerPC Mac was. I can run a software-emulated Windows XP virtual machine on my M2 iPad Pro and do more with it than just using iPadOS. No, it's not Apple that keeps Apple's platforms afloat, it's the indie developers.

So what does a macOS or iOS look like without indie developers? A bad time, that's what. I've been pretty deep into the Apple ecosystem since I was in high school, and somehow I went from having an iPhone to having an iPhone and a handful of Android devices. I went from having a MacBook to also having a few handheld Linux gaming machines and a Windows PC for gaming. And you know what? They're all great.

I don't know who needs to hear this but Linux, Windows, and Android are fine! And typically 1/10th the price. My Android-based VR headset was 1/10th the price of a Vision Pro. My Android phone-minus-cellular device was 1/10th the price of my iPhone. My gaming PC was... about the same price as a Mac, but it can easily run games over 60fps with ease, which no amount of money would get me from Apple.

So if the devices are better value, why do we still hold on to our Apple devices? Because that's where the dedicated indie app scene is. Apple holds them to a high standard. Remember when Apple famously allowed Uber to install spyware in their app, that they used to stalk reporters, and gave them a slap on the wrist? Indie devs don't get that kind of treatment from Apple. They have to have everything perfect when they submit their app or it will be rejected. Even then, it can still get rejected. Even then, Apple can close their account with no reason given and no way to reactivate it.

With all this in mind, what reason do indie app developers have to make their apps exclusive to Apple products? They pay for the privilege of being a selling point for Apple's hardware. They bend over backwards to hit goalposts that big tech doesn't have to hit. Not even Apple lives up to their high standards. Indie app development for Apple devices is a gamble. While it's easier to make cross-platform apps these days, it's also a huge pain to go through all those "app store" submission processes. It was harder for me to distribute my apps than it was to code them. It's a painful process that can take weeks just to release a new version, but it's worth it to me to be everywhere a user wants to be rather than to force a user to use my specific platform.

This is the first home screen post with iOS 18! You can read about my initial impressions. I stand by my remark about the tinted icons: this is silly and I'm going to use it exclusively to anger the design gods. Let's get in to it, shall we?

What's different:

• Airshow - I can't believe this is the first appearance of Airshow, the best podcast app.
• Mona - A Mastodon app you can overly customize to the extreme
• Panels - A very nice comic reader
• Prompt 3 - This app has some frustrating UX issues, but it's a pretty solid app for SSH-ing.
• Readwise Reader - It looks like Readwise has added two key things since I was using it when it came out: stability and an option to turn off the AI nonsense. I don't think the option to turn off AI goes far enough, but it has chilled a little.
• Pixelfed (beta) - My photo sharing platform of choice. Follow me!

iPad wallpaper is a blurred version of Wallaroo's Pride 2024 trans flag wallpaper. Without the blur, it is just too busy with the woven texture.

we’re scheduled for divorce hearings in two months

privileged people don’t realize they are just one brief life event away from being unhoused, disabled, or both.

I'm in private TestFlight betas of two apps that want to accomplish this. I won't get too specific about them because, well, they are betas. I'm going to speak broadly and about common approaches to this that I've seen.

So far, the apps I've played with have this wild idea that they don't need to connect to a centralized service for RSS feeds. For example, I have around 200 RSS feeds in Feedbin. What these "super apps" are asking is for me to put all of those feeds into one app. None of them have import features at this moment, so I have to do it one by one. Fine, they are betas, no big deal. I'm great at repetitive, meaningless tasks. You should hire me.

With Feedbin, I can use their service to check all of these feeds frequently on their own servers, but with these apps I have to wait for their app to use my cellular data to hit over 200 websites and then make even more requests to get things like images. This is a huge issue for three key reasons: this process is slow, this process uses a fair amount of data, and since the requests are coming from my phone, the feeds can potentially figure out information about me.

You may think it's unfair of me to put around 200 feeds in a beta feed reader, but I disagree. The point of these apps is to let you to connect to as many sources as possible. If you want to replace many apps, your app is going to have to do the heavy lifting of figuring out the best way to handle this. By not having integrations with feed reader services, you are accepting this responsibility. I don't think it's a good idea to ask my phone to do all the heavy lifting. I do know these apps are very slow because I have to wait for it to check hundreds of feeds.

There's also a redundant task being asked of me here: to track YouTube channels, everyone does that with an RSS feed, and I can choose to do it through manually categorizing it as a YouTube channel or as a generic RSS feed. The same for podcast: do I add the feed as a podcast or a RSS feed? Instead of essentially having me categorize this from the start manually, why not determine how to display the content based on the feed items? I get that some of this is to make it more visually intuitive for people who might not be into RSS, but it still feels more like I'm tagging individual feeds that could be inferred without my help.

Despite my criticisms, I do like what these RSS reading "super apps" are going for. I also worry that apps in general are moving away from doing one thing well to doing everything and none of it very well. I hope that these apps will consider letting a server do the heavy lifting.

👀

if you doom scroll in the game you doom scroll in real life

if i wanted to win an election against a fascist i would simply not demotivate my own base during an election year

I've been on Discord. I've seen hell. Everyone thinks they have to have a discord server these days. Sometimes it works out, sometimes blows up like a tesla. OH NO! You don't have enough buckets of sand to put out a fire like that.

Shoutout to a certain indie web streaming service for realizing that they probably don't need an official discord community, and shutting down theirs. I don't know what their reasoning was, but it strikes me as a very brand-safe thing to do. Community moderation is messy. Mistakes will be made. We don't know where everyone we talk to is in their lives. I hope you're having a lovely day!

Which brings me to my first point: do you really need one? Remember, this will expose you directly to internet randos, you know, like me. Do you really want to deal with them? They are randos!

Okay so you survived the "what, why?" and you still want to make a discord server, you might be tempted to create some channels. This is where I see the second biggest mistake: off-topic channels. These aren't always bad, but my educated guess is that nothing good will come out of a #vent or #politics channel. Are you brave enough to read a channel called #off-topic or #random? I'm over here like Homer Simpson in a lesbian bar: looking for the fire exits.

And finally, the final nail in the coffin: people who think they can be their own mod. Are you a ""CEO""? Get out of here! Never do your own moderation. When people criticize the "brand," it's going to hit you in the ego. You will take it personally and give people like me the urge to screen capture your bad take that you wrote, stream of consciousness, and roast your ass on Mastodon. I have dozens of followers!

At this point, I have to assume that you have made all three of these massive mistakes. I'm sorry, there's no more help for you. I gave you the best advice you could ask for, straight from the heart. Meanwhile, I logged off hours ago.

I've made it clear that I have a huge dislike of Apple's yearly update cycle for their software (and hardware, to be honest). It's bad from a software perspective because you're giving people a lot of change all at once with a high probability that something will go wrong. You're also constantly playing catch up with the rest of the world. Yes, I know there are one or two feature updates outside of the fall OS update, but it's typically features that were held back for marketing purposes.

So what features does this brand new big OS update give us? Weird tinted icons. I'm going to use them to just make brands and Jony Ive cry in their generative AI grave. We should be able to set any icon to anything we want without having to make slow and limited shortcuts, but instead we get this compromise that won't please many.

The other big addition is a minimum viable product version of Keychain that's only slightly better: Passwords. It doesn't support login items that don't have a password, that don't have a website, or custom fields. It makes a lot of assumptions about credentials that are falsehoods. It also doesn't import 1Password's export format, so if you're wanting to move between the two frustrating apps, you're exporting a CSV file.

My frustration here is also with 1Password. They've made exporting individual vaults impossible without taking advantage of Travel Mode, and even then you can't tell it not to export archived logins. So get ready to import that CSV in to a spreadsheet app and work some magic. 1Password will make no attempt to add custom fields to the export, which unless they let you put the data in the Notes field, Apple's Password app wouldn't accept either. I feel like there's an opportunity to build a shell script that makes this easier.

But let's not overlook my favorite new feature in iOS 18: the ability to remove that awful flashlight icon on the lock screen of the iPhone. Finally people will stop telling me to turn off my headlights when it accidentally activates.

Enjoy a quick intermission to tell you what's new for the watch and TV:

The big change in watchOS is the addition of a translation app and when you swipe up on the clock screen you can now see a digital clock instead of an analogue clock.

The big change in tvOS is that they updated the about screen text to say the version number of the beta you installed. Riveting.

Hey, we're back. Let's talk about the Mac.

Remember when iPads and Macs got the Continuity feature that let you share a mouse and keyboard between the devices? It never really worked outside of Apple's own mouse and keyboard. Sometimes the shift key just doesn't shift, sometimes the scroll wheel just doesn't scroll. Well, here we are years later and now we can do this between the Mac and iPhone. Every bug that's existed in Continuity since it came out still exists, but this time you can use your iPhone when the phone is locked from your Mac.

Yes I know these are betas and things are subject to change, but I don't have any new annoyances that I didn't already have with the "stable" releases. You are probably fine installing them if you want to play around with tinting app icons. That said, a future update could make me eat these words.

That's it. I know you're thinking, did I forget the iPad? No, Apple did.

hello from my cat and i

finally a capable operating system for the ipad pro

• Why I don't need to clean up my desktop and downloads folder in macOS - Stefan Judis
  I wish I was this amounts of brave, because I really like this idea.
• My Glorious Ascension To Thought Leadership — Ludicity
  “Disclaimer: This advice may not apply in the U.S, where I have heard that in many states you can be fired for so much as thinking that the boss has made a mistake at any point in their lives.”
• Meet the Queen of the Rideshare Mafia — Lauren Smiley
  The story of someone who made the gig economy work as advertised. Funny how corporations hate it when people become the success story that they made up.
• Getting Caught Working Undercover at Amazon — Oobah’s Great Amazon Heist
  Speaking of corporations getting mad at people for doing what only they are allowed to get away with.
• AI and Asbestos: the offset and trade-off models for large-scale risks are inherently harmful — Baldur Bjarnason
  This is just an excellent comparison.
• Nothing but punishment — Welcome to Hell World
  “I was gonna say welp at least we had a pretty good run but we didn't did we? It wasn't all that good at all. At least we had a run though. At least we had that.”
• On Burnout, Mental Health, And Not Being Okay — Ludicity
  Fuck it, I'll say it: I needed to read this.
• Clara's Cauldron Conundrum – itch.io
  My wife worked on this with a group of people from the Portland Indie Game Squad!
• Let’s Go Live In A Cave! Music Video - The Aquabats!
  Hashtag cavelife. I love The Aquabats!
• Why I attack — Nicholas Carlini
  Of course Glaze/Nightshade isn't actually effective at AI art poisoning. This was never going to be as easy as applying a slow and ugly Instagram filter!
• Why Vivaldi browser won’t follow the current AI trend? — Vivaldi
  Vivaldi was right about cryptocurrency and they are right about AI. I wish Mozilla held these same ethics but instead they're investing in AI and in becoming an advertising company. We need more options like Vivaldi.

Hey did you notice that my blog has a little reply link at the bottom of a post? I've made it easy for you to send me some nice words. I also made the post feed traversable with the j and k keys. That's a secret little feature for those of you who read to the end.

For more, follow @links@nyan.lol on Mastodon

wife: ok let me use the bathroom first

👀

I've been watching Dokploy for a bit now and it has been maturing pretty fast. I have it running on a Raspberry Pi 5 at home and I love how easy it's getting to deploy almost anything. It has templates for commonly used self-hosted apps, which are fun to play with. I can see getting a VPS and using this outside my local network eventually.

I really want to like Nova. It is a very nice and well-crafted editor that I think has potential. I figured I should give Nova a third chance at being my editor after moving to Portland. You got to cheer for the home team right? Well, it was going great! Until things started falling apart. It started with a sudden shift in the JavaScript community: Prettier was out and Biome was in. Nova only has Prettier support because someone was nice enough to build a Nova extension on behalf of Panic and Prettier. It hasn't been updated in over a year.

I need Astro support so I installed the Astro plugin, also made by someone nice enough to do it on behalf of Panic and Astro. This worked fine for a while. For some reason, while working on keyboard commands for my blog, Nova kept crashing every time I would open a certain file. I started purging extensions I had installed that I didn't heavily rely on trying to figure out what was happening. Well, it turned out to be the extension that lets Astro files have syntax highlighting and etc. I started reading logs to see if I could get any sort of idea as to what made this stop working all of a sudden. Not a clue, but it led me to reading the extension's code on GitHub, and then things became clearer. This extension hasn't been maintained in over two years, and Astro has changed pretty drastically a few times since then. Now I'm shocked it ever worked. I poked around to see if simply upgrading some dependencies would fix it. No luck. I know I could invest the time and effort to build my own extensions for Nova, but that's not what interests me. All this goes to show me that I'm, for better or worse, stuck with VS Code.

Open source projects aren't going to invest their time in supporting every little editor out there, and relying on really nice individual people to keep these delicate extensions up to date isn't sustainable. The best case scenario I can imagine is that editors adopt the extension format of the dominate editor, like web browser extensions have. Some editors have done exactly that, which is cool, but I imagine that isn't an easy path for a native Mac app.

A girl can dream, though.

This morning I installed Little Snitch Mini, a freemium alternative to Little Snitch. Little Snitch tells you which websites an app is sending data to. This seems like an important tool for protecting privacy and I would say everyone should have it, but it's probably a better idea to block these targets at the DNS or router level. The idea behind Little Snitch (not mini) is that you have to approve these connections as they are made. I like that idea a lot.

Little Snitch Mini, for free, shows you all the apps making network requests on your computer. With this information, I've learned two things:

1. People still use Mixpanel, lol
2. Apple should also provide privacy reports for apps, not just Safari

Apps should be forced to ask for permission to collect any data. If you want to monitor my computer when I'm not actively using your app, you need consent, and I don't recall giving it.

We all know the reason websites with apps are always nagging you to install the app: better tracking. "Limited Tracking" with Apple's App Tracking Transparency doesn't go far enough, like all of Apple's privacy "protections."

When your customers are confused and not clear on what "block" means, you are clearly up to no good. Apple may not want to step on Google and other big tech company's toes but I do. I need to break in these Doc Martens.

So what you can do today?

• Install the firewall included in 1Blocker on your iOS devices
• Check if your router has a way to block ads and trackers. My Synology router calls this feature Safe Access
• Use NextDNS and turn on one of their many blocklists
• Set up a Pi-hole if you're that kind of nerd

I have also come across some websites that allow you to test how good your current defenses are.

• Test Ad Block - Toolz
• AdBlock Tester

The most important thing is to stay vigilant, informed, and keep an eye on your network.

• it's ok to know multiple ways to do a thing.
• it's ok to not be interested in some of them.

there's no ethical consumption of code under capitalism. some of us just need healthcare.

I moved my blog to Astro early on, but I left melaniekat.com on NextJS. The more I built, the more I locked myself in to services like Vercel, the company that brings us NextJS. When I tried to migrate off of Vercel I noticed all my images were broken and even the hacks that people had come up with to make images work in NextJS when you aren't hosting on Vercel were not a solid fix.

The funny thing is, when I migrated to Astro, I was able to change the image component import from NextJS's to Astro's without having to change any properties. It was a simple change that magically made optimized images that get generated at build. The very thing that NextJS can't do out of the box.

Astro provides a lot of features that NextJS doesn't have. For instance, I don't have to use React. I can. I can also use Svelte. With Astro being the root of my project I could build pages with the code I want to use when I need it. Because I don't need React for most things, I only use React in places that it makes sense to. Astro calls these islands. When I made Pride Frame, I did it as a way to learn more Svelte. Now I can move Pride Frame off its own subdomain and add it to my Astro project. When it's time to play with another framework, I can.

I really like how Astro has typed content collections. Instead of powering my OC gallery with a big ol json file, it's now powered by a ton of markdown files using frontmatter properties, which gets type-checked with Zod. And you know what one of those types can be? Images! That's right I can have an array of optimized images that I can access from anywhere.

I took this rewrite as a chance to swap from the prettier + husky + lint-staged + eslint (+ idk a kitchen sink?) packages to Biome and lefthook. I started following Biome's development back when it was called "Rome" and fell off waiting for it to release something. Due to some bad business decisions they had to rebrand as Biome, and looks to finally be delivering on the promise of Rome. It's got three functions that currently feel the same: "check," "lint," and "format." I feel like I probably only need to use "check," but who knows how things will evolve. It's light weight enough that if I need to rip it out and swap back to prettier and it's set of dependencies I can.

Here's a challenge I ran in to with Biome: getting it to work with Svelte. It's basically the only thing I needed to configure in the ./biome.json file.

{
  "overrides": [
    {
      "include": ["*.svelte"],
      "linter": {
        "rules": {
          "style": {
            "useConst": "off"
          }
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}

Svelte component props work by exporting a let, but because it's an export, biome wants it to be a const and will forcible change it. I was playing a few rounds of whack-a-mole before I noticed why my code was changing out from under me.

Ignoring issues in Biome is kinda neat because it encourages you to explain why you're doing it.

import sanitizeHtml from "sanitize-html";

export default function FeedHTML({ html }: { html: string }) {
  return (
    <div
      // biome-ignore lint/security/noDangerouslySetInnerHtml: That's what the sanitizeHtml package is for
      dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{
        __html: sanitizeHtml(html,
          allowedTags: sanitizeHtml.defaults.allowedTags.concat(["img"]),
        }),
      }}
    />
  );
}

I imagine this would be great when reading a coworker's code and trying to figure out if the reason for ignoring a rule is silly or not.

Overall, aside from a little bit of time, it was pretty simple to move off NextJS to Astro and now I can host my site on a predictable low-cost CDN. I'm not anti-NextJS or Vercel. If a company wants to pay me to build for it I'd be happy to. Just don't ask me to foot the bill.

My wife just finished a PIGS Summer Slow Jam, a game jam, where the theme was resource management, with four others called Clara's Cauldron Conumdrum that I think you should play, but I am biased. I also recommend checking out the other games submitted, they're pretty great too!

the sky is cool

I recently picked up AppRaven at Lou from App Addict's recommendation and started making lists of the apps I use from the App Store.

My lists are a little out of date because I made it manually and I've made changes since then but if you're curious, here are those outdated lists:

• whats on my mac
• whats on my pad
• whats on my phone
• whats on my tv
• whats on my watch

Now that I had these lists I decided to go through all of them by hand and dividing them in to four lists:

• Anonymous data collected, 72 apps - Not ideal, but not deal breakers
• Personal data collected, 58 apps - Hold on, what?
• Personal data collected for Tracking Purposes, 22 apps - Oh hell no, that's bad
• No details provided, 12 apps - I guess the app hasn't been updated since 2020?

I didn't note apps that I saw did not collect any data at all. Maybe I should have. While any app I noted is on the chopping block just for purely collecting data at all, the apps I want to get rid of entirely are the ones that are explicitly telling me in these labels that they are tracking me.

For the most part, Nintendo and Game Freak appear to try and avoid tracking. Nintendo Switch Online collects personal data, but "not for tracking purposes." Remember when I said this stuff gets vague? So is this Nintendo saying that they let me log in to my account? I have an account with 1Password, but they say they only collect anonymous data about me, so I don't think that's what collecting personal data means. The wild part of the Nintendo and Game Freak apps is that Pokemon Home, a subscription service that lets me pay $15 a year to back up my caught Pokemon in the cloud, claims to be actively tracking me based on my personal data.

It's really hard to draw any solid conclusions based on these labels, but if you're telling me you are tracking me, I have to believe it's as bad as you say, and I should delete their app.

It's not surprising, but it's no less disappointing that every app from Plex claims it is personally tracking me. Or that games like Minecraft and Vampire Survivors think it's OK to invade the privacy of the kids who play them. Or that Voice Tools by DevExtras, an app to help trans women overcome voice dysphoria, is invading the privacy of a highly targeted marginalized group. Or that Countdowns from Shayes Apps, an app that counts days, needs to track me at all.

If you're a developer reading this and are like, "but we need analytics to know if people are using our app," I would tell you that you don't. The App Store already provides enough data by default, and buggy apps are better than privacy invasion. I'm begging you to aim for "no data collected." It's not worth the harm to your users and if that doesn't matter to you, it also harms your brand.

Apple has long been posterizing that they care about diversity and the environment, but their actions have never backed it up. They might put up a black and white photo of Ghandi with some clichéd text next to it, but it has only ever been about The Brand. This article from 404 Media gets in to the latest news about Apple's violations, but this isn't the first time we've heard about this. You see, it has been public knowledge that Apple has been poisoning the environment and their employees since 2021.

When I say "unsafe #workconditions," I mean physically unsafe; #dangerous chemicals; #OSHA.

You'll hear much more about this in a bit.

-- Ashley M. Gjøvik (@ashleygjovik) August 4, 2021 via Twitter

At the same time, Gjøvik was dealing with a huge amount of sexism and retaliation, as documented by The Verge in, "Apple places female engineering program manager on administrative leave after tweeting about sexism in the office". You can also read more about the retaliation she faced from Apple for trying to speak up about all of this in The Verge's other article, "Apple cares about privacy, unless you work at Apple", where it was revealed that all Apple employees had to connect their personal iCloud data to their work data, where they would be mixed. This led to Apple's lawyers collecting nude photos from their employees against their will.

A member of the legal team responded that while the lawyers did not need to access Gjøvik's photos, they did not want her to delete any messages. During an in-person meeting, Gjøvik says she told the lawyers the messages included nude photos she'd sent to a man she was dating -- a sushi chef who lived in Hawaii. Surely, those weren't relevant to the lawsuit. Could she delete them? She says the lawyers told her no.

The amount of shit Gjøvik has had to go through just for trying to do her job is absurd. She tried to make the place better through the proper channels behind closed doors and was retaliated against for doing so. She was also retaliated against for talking to the National Labor Relations Board, you know, the people you talk to when your boss is retaliating against you. Tim Cook responded to her complaint to the NLRB with a company-wide email.

People who leak confidential information do not belong here

-- Tim Cook (via Bloomberg)

My dude, she leaked that you were punishing and retaliating against her for speaking out against sexism and OSHA violations. The correct action would be to hear her out and try to make things right instead of intentionally breaking the law. This wasn't a product leak, this was a leak of a company abusing their employees.

(Tim Robinson voice) YOU CANT DO THAT

In January 2023, the NLRB found that Apple's NDAs and employee policies are unlawful, as reported by Bloomberg.

So back to the 404 Media article that is based on a Mastodon thread by Gjøvik where she mentions that the Environmental Protection Agency inspected a building in August 2023, two years after the initial report of OSHA violations, and found 19 potential violations. Two years later! At least Walter White knew to move his illegal chemical activities so his brother-in-law wouldn't catch him. Three years after it almost killed Gjøvik.

The inspection was supposed to be unannounced so EPA surprises the inspected party who has no chance to cover up issues before EPA gets inside. However city HazMat tipped off Apple & EPA was greeted by Apple's EH&S team. Note: what EPA found was AFTER Apple had time to clean up.

Ashley M. Gjøvik (@ashleygjovik) Jun 23, 2024 at 3:54PM

Apple was even tipped off to the surprise inspection. I have to wonder if they even tried to destroy any evidence, if so they did a very bad job of it. They were even inspected again in January 2024, this year. If I were being investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice for being an unfair monopoly, I'd simply not be an unfair monopoly. But if I absolutely had to be a monopoly, I'd at least try to make it less obvious, but I guess that's what the words on the photo of Ghandi meant by "Think Different."

ugh, is the sky doing an ai content fill now?

kitty likes a cold dark closet as much as the next person

yoga goat

(Tim Robinson voice) I SAID WAS

Yes, I'm late to paying attention to a common complaint of modern Next.js. As part of my current ""divestment"" of the serverless jammy stack hosting space I mentioned I was working on migrating my website melaniekat.com to Bunny's CDN. I thought it would be super easy, barely an inconvenience, and maybe it would be if I didn't mind spending a lot of money on dynamic image optimization. I don't know that I need dynamic on-the-fly image optimization though. Let's just generate that at build time or something. What a fool I was.

You see, doing a static export of Next.js gives you a build output that won't work on your average server. Without knowing the secret handshake of trailingSlash: true it outputs links like /about as /about.html.

Then there's the whole next/image thing. When you do a static export of your Next.js project by default it just breaks all the images as this is something that can only be done on Vercel's special servers. You can work around this by writing a function like ({ src }) => src but then you're just serving up huge unoptimized images. It almost feels like this function at build-time should run the image through optimization and store it somewhere and return a path to the optimized image. I'm sure it's not that simple, because reasons.

Before some asks: yes, I saw where someone made a thing called next-image-export-optimizer and that's great and all but at this point why do I want to further lock myself in to more Next.js specific tooling? I tried it, it was interesting, but I don't want to rely on someone doing their best to keep up with the whims of Vercel.

Some back story: I was already feeling the grasp of Next.js's framework lock-in. I think my person website should enable me to try new things and build things with the tools I want to use for a given thing. Using web components with Next.js was already kinda grossing me out.

My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined. Now I have to spend time doing a quick rewrite of my site in Astro. Nothing I haven't done many times before, and will probably do many times in the future.

Someone once told me the great part of front-end is the disposable nature of it: you can change frameworks and tooling pretty easily once you have the general idea of what it should do down. I tend to agree. I don't get attached to code. This makes some people uncomfortable, but software has never really been a "write once, works forever with no problems everything is fine lets go home and never look back" place. It's nice when that works out, but look at Steam's Mac game store: a graveyard of 32bit games that won't run on any Mac from the last decade. (I don't know why it still exists, shut it down if you don't care about the Mac, Valve! At a minimum, stop selling games that can't run!)

Ok, enough writing words, time to write code.

That's not a healthy way to host a website.

Is what I'm using really worth four to six figures monthly? No. Hell, a lot of my side projects aren't worth as much as I spend on my Mastodon and Pixelfed servers, and that's less than a streaming service. Anyway, this is nothing I haven't already written about before.

When I saw John Bowdre's post on going down the Bunny.net hole I got excited and started moving my static websites to it. I was casually playing with Dokploy as an alternative, and I might still for my more complicated projects, but do I need more than Bunny offers? Not really. Bunny seems pretty cheap. (and I guess I will find out shortly if that's the case or not)

I am in the process of removing features from my websites that rely on server-side rendering. For some, like this blog's search function, I have converted to using web components. I can't make use of the same Astro components for UI so it looks a little barebones in comparison, but it works fine despite needing a little bit of JavaScript.

Other features I am removing are some projects that have gotten stale, like my gif library and my mutuals club. I might bring them back, but for now I think they are safe to remove.

Something else I've been doing this year is blocking AI bots. I started by implementing Cory's AI blocking robots.txt, and then taking that list and converting it to a Next.js/Vercel compatible way to block them at the server level. And by block I mean pointing them to a 10GB file used for speed tests.

I'm not saying you should do this, but I'm not saying you shouldn't do this.

https://hil-speed.hetzner.com/10GB.bin

Oops, dropped a url. I'm sure it's fine.

When I moved my sites to Bunny.net, I wanted to preserve this feature because I'm not your free content mill. Bunny lets you block 5 user-agents manually at a time with their CDN edge rules and I needed to do this for a handful of, what they call "pull zones." So I asked around and the omg.lol community came through by pointing me in the direction of the Bunny API and I quickly coded this script to take your API key and an array of pull zone IDs and it injects the user-agents defined in Cory's robots.txt file on GitHub. I probably need to clean it up and add GUIDs to it so that I can update them in-place, but here it is.

Fuck off, thieves.

I haven't moved my main website, melaniekat.com, yet, but I'm working on it.

Because you can't trust search engine companies who are now all-in on AI, even the indie ones, not to rip off my content, and because they don't really drive traffic to websites anymore anyway, I've told my robots.txt files to just block them all. It's not worth my time to keep up with it.

This is the future big tech wants, let's give it to them.

• I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again — Ludicity
  A real engineer will always see right through this shit.
• Perplexity Is a Bullshit Machine — WiRED
  Come for the detailed report about how this company is lying, stay for the senior engineer at Condé Nast that thinks they can "stay out of it." ('it' being the AI piracy war)
• Nintendo fires Treehouse employee who was target of harassment campaign — Polygon
  From 2016 when Nintendo was bowing down to gamergate's demands
• Nintendo offers really stupid reasons why you can't play as a woman in The Legend of Zelda — The Verge
  Also this from 2016, shortly after Rapp's firing
• Perplexity AI Is Lying about Their User Agent — Robb Knight
  They are also lying about their server IPs.
• MacStories Weekly: Issue 422 (paywalled)
  I’m happy to see people in the Apple community speak out against Apple’s absolutely awful announcements this week. In short, Apple has entered the non-consensual deepfake game and the plagiarism game all at once.
• Apple Matches Worker Donations to IDF and Illegal Settlements, Employees Allege — The Intercept
  Apple Intelligence says you can have little a genocide as a treat.
• Gather your gossips — A Working Library
  A quick history of the word gossip and men's fear of women talking.
• Hurt, Confrontation, Stop, Listen, Learn, Grow, and Forgive — json.blog
  A good primer on what your reaction should be when you step in it.
• Neatnik Notes · The InclusiveWeb
  I may be mentioned in this one! It's good!
• It smelled like death — Welcome to Hell World
  As a Nickelodeon kid I thought Florida was so neat. Then every time I went there with my family for vacation I got sick. Now if I go there I'm either going to be murdered by the state or the weather. It's not worth giving them the tourism dollars.
• Neatnik Notes · The discomfort litmus test
  The importance of exploring, understanding, and growing from the things that make you uncomfortable.
• PSA: Bartender Mac App Under New Ownership, But Lack of Transparency Raises Concerns — MacRumors
  If you are using the Bartender app on Mac: run, don't walk, to uninstall it.
• ‘Like a Dragon: Yakuza’ Live Action Series Heading to Prime Video — Variety
  Please be good please be good please be good

I love the internet. I love the people on it. Feel free to share things you think I'd like with me. I appreciate a good URL.

For more, follow @links@nyan.lol on Mastodon

me: no! why would i!

Warning: Very light spoilers for the movie "I Saw the TV Glow." Keep reading only if you need convincing to see the movie or have already seen it.

Last night I watched "I Saw the TV Glow" by Jane Schoenbrun for the first time. I'm not sure my head is even done processing it, but I want to talk about how much I related to it. From growing up on the couch, to watching Nickelodeon exclusively, to discovering who I was the whole time in my late 20s.

Yes, this is an A24 horror film and I would agree that it is horror, but it doesn't have jump scares or gore. In fact, if you aren't queer I don't know that you would find it scary at all. You need to pick up on queer narratives and have empathy for them. I'm not saying this film is "difficult" but I am saying I checked a couple of boxes that I have to assume helped connect me to it.

I… I… I think that… I like TV shows.

The movie follows two kids who gather to watch The Pink Opaque. Growing up with the young adult network, I loved shows like Clarissa Explains it All, The Secret World of Alex Mack, Allen Strange, The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo, and even the Animorphs TV show. There was one show that messed me up quite a bit and I would race to change the channel every time it came on: Are You Afraid of the Dark. I don't think The Pink Opaque is supposed to be any single show, but you can definitely see the inspirations from Nickelodeon's 90's live-action shows.

I didn't really have friends who also watched these shows. When I was about to start school my family moved from a small town with Nickelodeon to a smaller town without Nickelodeon. My parents and I argue about how long it took them to restore my access to Nickelodeon by getting satellite TV. I think it took from 6 months to a year. They say it was immediate. I know that wasn't the case.

During that dark time in my life, I watched things like... The Weather Channel and Home Shopping Network. You know, for fun, like kids do. Although, once we had satellite, any little bit of rain would cause it to cut out. And because we had satellite, it meant that my classmates and I were watching a different set of TV stations.

The most important part of Nickelodeon, especially looking back, was that its goal was to teach kids to be kids. It meant teaching them that it was OK to be "weird" or "wild & crazy." It also taught me that if I dig around in a human-sized slimy nose long enough I would find the red flag and win a big prize like a Zenith TV. But most importantly, it taught me that being unique and different was something to be celebrated, to be proud of.

I had VHS tapes of Nickelodeon shows my mom would record herself or get one of her friends to record for me. I watched them all the time. My dad liked to drive a van while he worked, so he had a little 6-inch CRT TV with a built-in VHS player that he tied down to the floor behind the driver's seat. He took the middle seat out of his van and I could sit on the back seat and watch Rugrats while he drove around the state. My parents taught me time by measuring roughly 15 minute intervals as "1 Rugrats." They would tell me where we were going was "2 Rugrats" away.

Isn't that a show for girls?

I knew who I wanted to be growing up. I wanted to be like Alex Mack and go on adventures. I wanted to be able to transform in to something else like on the Animorphs. I wanted to make things on computers like Clarissa Explains It All. I never understood what the deeper thing at play here was. Well, I did, but I was told it wasn't possible to be a girl, so I put out of my mind.

At school I was weird. I was weird amongst other kids who hadn't been told being different is OK. My mom pulled me out of public school in the middle of 4th grade. Whatever friends I had made had started to fade. It was at this point too my mother let me sit down on the internet for long periods of time. I didn't need other kids who thought I was weird, I had Neopets. The website that would teach me how to make websites and led me to a career in Front-End Engineering.

My memories of being a kid are basically all Nickelodeon shows in some form. I look back fondly on them. In my late teens I found a way to revisit some of these shows through publicly available internet data. They didn't hold up to what I had felt watching them as a kid. It disappointed me quite a bit.

I know it's scary. That's part of it.

Most of the things I've mentioned have an obvious connection that a very specific type of shithead would make quickly in order to try to shame me. You see, I couldn't have the girlhood I desired, but I got to experience it through the media I consumed. Is it the same? No, but it's what I had available and it felt safe.

My parents and I both have grown a lot since I was a kid and I'm thankful for it. Growing up I would alternate which of them I felt more scared of. It wasn't a good use of either of our time. Now I want to hold on to the time I have left with both of them. I'm so happy to be where I am today.

Now then, if you need me I'll be out looking for a Fruitopia machine to feed a dollar to.

After my false start of releasing web component packages on NPM, I decided to take a portion of this website I've never mentioned is a feature here and give it it's own proper web component. Introducing the <key-down> web component.

Did you know that this blog has key commands? I added it months ago behind a custom modal system you could activate by pressing Shift+/ or ? to explain the other key commands. When I replaced the modal with the Popover API, I started tearing apart the logic for key commands too.

To quickly focus on the search box on my blog you can press /, a common method for searching on websites and Vim. To make this happen I wrap the input box with my key-down component.

The code looks like this:

<key-down
  data-key="/"
  data-shiftKey="false"
  data-action="focus"
  data-scroll="true"
>
  <input type="search" placeholder="Search for posts" />
</key-down>

You can also navigate the pagination of this blog with h and l, you know, like going left and right Vim. When I render the pagination buttons they are wrapped with the key-down component too.

<key-down data-key="h">
  <a href="{prev}" title="Newer posts"> Newer </a>
</key-down>

The non-JavaScript method for opening and closing a popover is to use a button. The button I am using right now is hidden, but it can still be wrapped in the key-down component.

<key-down data-key="?">
  <button popovertarget="key-commands" popovertargetaction="toggle">
    Toggle keyboard shortcuts
  </button>
</key-down>

I have found this makes adding dynamic keyboard shortcuts to my website incredibly easy while keeping things accessible and I hope you do too.

You can install it with the NPM-compatible package manager of your choice.

npm install --save @zicklepop/key-down

If you don't use a package manager with your website you can do a simple script import.

<script type="module" src="https://esm.sh/@zicklepop/key-down" defer></script>

Learn more:

• Git
• NPM
• Try out some demos

kinda like how when you see a product on a shelf at an apple store it's ok to grab it and walk out. it was publicly accessible, after all.

• Everything: melaniekat.com (json, rss) - A single feed to see what I'm up to around the web, combining all the sources listed below.
• Blog posts: melkat.blog (json, rss) - It's this blog!
• Photo blog: melkat.pics (json, rss) - It’s my photo blog!
• Microblog: melkat.lol (json, rss) - It’s my microblog! Mostly jokes.
• Mastodon: @zicklepop@nyan.lol (rss) - My social media of choice!
• Letterboxd: @zicklepop@letterboxd.com (rss) - What I'm watching
• Last.fm: @zicklepop@last.fm - What I'm listening to

i relate to this facial expression on a deep emotional level

You absolutely do not have to hand it to me. The 'it' being your hard earned money. But you can and I probably won't stop you. You can even set up recurring subscriptions to me for what I like to call Melanie+, for $1 a month, or if you're daring, Melanie++ for $2 a month.

By subscribing to Melanie+ or Melanie++ there are two key features you won't find from other "plus" subscription services: no ads and no subscription hikes. I will also promise you I won't use your money to produce bigoted standup specials. That's value!

• buymeacoffee
• ko-fi

Apps like Pocket and Matter want to make sure you are reading the latest hustle bro articles. They want you to follow their hand picked "creators" and not to worry about their troubling politics. I just have to trust them. Meanwhile apps like Readwise Reader, Instapaper, and Omnivore want you to read less. Just trust their AI to summarize those articles. I'm sure all those words the original author used weren't important.

The only useful feature I've seen added to read later apps in the last year or so has been natural-ish sounding text-to-speech features. They aren't perfect but they serve a purpose and help with accessibility, even if they read things like iPadOS at eye-pod-us.

But hey, at least Omnivore isn't (currently) asking for me to pay for the privilege. I don't mind paying if the app is good and respectful of my time, but I have yet to find one like that. Until then, I can only hope someone teaches these apps to just chill for a single second.

5g? no, only LoRa

i’ll be over here on my b&w reading device with no ai if you need me

❖

We're often told we can't have nice things because we're "niche" or "atypical." We're told this as they demand we buy new headphones with a shelf life as long as the lithium ion batteries that power them. Don't ask about their environmental impact.

❖

Where are the parents? You know, the ones that made you finish your vegetables before you could go outside. But in this case the vegetables are bugs. And nobody is eating their bugs. I thought someone in the infinite chain of management was supposed to be responsible.

• 🤖 Automation: Apple Shortcuts, Superkey, Rectangle Pro
• 🗄️ Backup: Backblaze
• 🔖 Bookmarks: GoodLinks
• 🌐 Browser: Safari, Vivaldi
• 📆 Calendar: iCloud Calendar
• 📷 Camera App: Obscura
• 💬 Chat: iMessage
• 🌩️ Cloud Storage: iCloud Drive, OneDrive
• 📇 Contacts: iCloud Contacts
• 👩‍💻 Editor: VS Code†, Nova
• 🖋️ Illustration: Affinity Designer, Dotgrid
• 🚀 Launcher: Alfred
• 📨 Mail Client: Apple Mail, iCloud Mail
• 🏣 Mail Server: iCloud Mail
• 🐘 Mastodon: Mona, Phanpy
• 🎞️ Media Tracking: Last.fm, Letterboxd, Play, QuietScrob
• 🎺 Music: Apple Music
• 📰 News: Apple News
• 📝 Notes: iCloud Notes, Drafts, Obsidian
• 🔐 Password Management: 1Password†‡, iCloud Passwords‡
• 💰 Personal Finance: Copilot Money†
• 🖼️ Photo Management: iCloud Photos
• 👩‍🎨 Photo Editing: Darkroom
• 🎨 Photoshopping: Affinity Photo
• 🎤 Podcasts: Airshow
• 📑 Read Later: Readwise Reader†
• 📖 RSS: Feedbin, Reeder
• 🖥️ Screen Sharing: Screens, Remote Desktop
• 🛒 Shopping Lists: iCloud Reminders
• 🐚 Terminal: iTerm†, Prompt
• ✅ To-do: iCloud Reminders

†: On thin ice for forcing AI and/or cryptocurrency features where they don't belong.

‡: On thin ice for being not being good.

🧡

💛

🌙

The current motto of tech companies is infinite growth at all costs. So the only place for them to go after being one of the best consumer apps was to go after the enterprise market. At the time they entered the enterprise market the competitors in the office were the always-has-been-always-will-be security nightmare that is LastPass, and a some very user-hostile Java apps like KeyPassX.

This wasn't a net negative, this pushed them to become platform agnostic with apps for Android, Windows, and Linux. This is super important for a password manager. If I have to use an Apple device to access my passwords, that's incredibly inconvenient. The problem is paying engineers to make native apps for all platforms is considered a waste of time and money to a corporation when you can do things like: move those engineers to work on A/B testing the smallest of features, or just lay them off and have a few people working on a single website-in-an-app solution that can run on multiple platforms, albeit poorly.

I'm a front-end engineer. I work in JavaScript and other web technologies. I love it. I think this method can be good, actually! It doesn't have to be bad, but when you approach this from rushed method of cutting jobs and cutting costs, you approach it with an attitude that will never result in a good product. So now 1Password has really slow and janky apps, but they are on all platforms so who can say if it was worth it or not?

Apps are important, but for password managers you have to be in the browsers. Fortunately for 1Password, in the last handful of years all browsers basically work the same for extension development, you just need to manage distribution. Unfortunately the big four browsers have all gotten progressively worse.

Instead of working on adding improvements and bug fixes, browsers have decided it would be best for them to work on making sure you use their parent company's other products. Microsoft Edge added cryptocurrency wallets and AI garbage. Mozilla laid off the people who worked on Firefox and turned their focus to investing in AI fads. Google Chrome focused on using your browser history to tune Google Search and other AI nonsense. Safari moves incredibly slow in a good year, but their big recent change was introducing profiles and shared tab groups, a feature they thought we needed for some reason. They all made sure extensions were buggy and more restricted than ever.

All of this combined led to the only thing in life I'm sure of: the 1Password browser extension is unusable garbage. If you try to use it to autofill it might insert your username and not the password. It might try to generate a new password in a field that wants a password you already have stored. It sometimes doesn't autofill at all, so luckily you can copy your account details from the extension, but the copy button doesn't work. Sometimes it autofills a sign up for with a username and password for you, then it offers to save it to your 1Password vault but, surprise, it didn't actually save. Sometimes, "something went wrong while loading." Whatever that means.

I don't know who to blame for all of this, it's probably a combination of all these tech companies just focusing on being terrible for short-term gains. The only way I know to use 1Password that works is to keep the app open and copy things over by hand, which is convoluted and annoying.

As I write this there are rumors that iCloud Passwords might become an actual product. In its current state it can't hold extra data about a login, it can only hold logins, and it can only be accessed in the Settings app or System Preferences. On Windows it needs you to use the terrible iCloud for Windows app and on Linux and Android it's non-existent. If Apple really wants to compete with 1Password, it needs to be everywhere.

Oh, and it needs to work.

i’m a loner, dottie

meet the neighbors

epic must have gotten tired of all the snowflake gamer bigots demands for refunds that they started putting trigger warnings when games have "Inclusive Character Customization"

you know what this accomplished? manga and web comics continued to dominate and surpass anything marvel and dc could ever imagine.and i don’t read that much western comics anymore so…

Hell, it wasn't even the first time in the last 30 days.

Hell, it wasn't even the 2nd time this year!

The provider noticed this and started raging online that I was trying to cancel them. This also came after I spent a week building open source tools for their product in my spare time for free. I deleted them. It was a major disappointment to me. I've used NPM forever now but had never come up with anything to publish on there. All of a sudden I had 4 published NPM packages. Now I have none.

The most unsettling part of this was their mentions full of cisgender white men, some I know from online, defending them, claiming I was being a jackass. I don't fault them for this, the provider didn't name me or any specifics at all, just that someone was trying to cancel them. The only thing I canceled was my account.

I don't think transphobes deserve anonymity, but I also don't want to make matters worse. They have a small mob, I have a marginalized identity. I know where I stand.

None of this brought me any joy and it took a few hours away from my Sunday. My anxiety rose when I got back to my computer and saw the posts about me and an email from the provider in my inbox. I deleted the email without reading it. I don't need the drama. The evening was full of times that I would turn to my wife and say "they are still going on about me online." I made a delicious guac.

Thankfully a few people knew enough about what was going on to defend me. That was cool of them, and I appreciate it. I kept receiving emails from the provider and I kept deleting them. To their credit, they did refund every penny I had ever given them, which I did not ask for. But c'mon, let me enjoy my guac.

You might want to ask me what they could have done differently, and I understand that urge, but that's not my responsibility. Am I supposed to make like Pee-Wee Herman in Pee-Wee's Big Adventure when all the bikers are trying to think of ways to hurt him and he says, trying to throw his voice as if it's apart of the angry biker mob, "I say we let him go," to which the bikers immediately shout, "NO!"

As David Lynch's cameo character, FBI deputy director Gordon Cole, in Twin Peaks: The Return says to the trans character on the show, "When you became Denise, I told all of your colleagues, those clown comics, to fix their hearts or die."

In theory this should be great: give the developers time to ship a solid bug-free product. In practice it means bugs that ship with the big yearly update stick around for the next year. Sure, we get the occasional minor feature release, but we don't see them in a timely fashion and they always feel like they introduce the new bugs we will have to live with.

This year alone we saw a major change to Safari: the removal of support for progressive web apps for people who are currently located in Europe. This was a huge change that Apple spent precious engineering hours on. This wasn't to help the web, this was to help Apple's monopoly and punish the European Union for trying to rein them in. When the European Union called them out on this, they then had to once again take their engineer's time to revert and pull out what, I have to assume, is geolocation DRM spaghetti code.

The Safari we got in the mean time is one that stops working multiple times a day. Sometimes pages stop loading entirely until you reboot your entire device. Sometimes extensions work only once before you have to force quit Safari to get them to work again. This is doubly odd because Apple loves to say force quitting apps on iOS doesn't do anything.

Could this time be better spent keeping up with W3C specs? Maintaining compatibility with other browsers? Shipping bug fixes? Obviously not, according to Apple.

• How social networks prey on our longing to be known by Jan Maarten
  "To be online today is to constantly walk a tight-rope between the longing to be known and the dread of being perceived."
• Engineering for Slow Internet – brr
  You mean data doesn't magically get smaller just because it's cold in Antarctica?
• Fake “Balatro Mobile” appears on the App Store - Wavelengths
  The scam is still up, even now, thanks to our friends at Apple.
• I have never seen that level of deliberate cruelty by Luke O'Neil
  "We should not have ever been made able to know how fucking stupid and evil so many random regular people are. You used to just have to kind of eyeball things big picture-wise and convince yourself it wasn't all as bad as it seems but now we can see the results come in with hourly certainty. Doesn't feel good."
• Apple Annie’s Weblog · Adding a ShareOpenly link to weblog posts.
  I use the Web Share API for share links on my blog, but the support for that feels hit or miss among different browsers and OSs. So, thanks to Apple Annie's post for getting me to use ShareOpenly as a pretty good fallback.
• When will Apple focus on Safari? by Mayank
  I didn't know that Apple broke tabbing on websites on purpose, I thought it was either a bug or user error, but no! You have to hold the option key while tabbing for it to work by default.
• How Optical Mice Came To Dominate Input Devices
  A fun history of the mouse.
• Complicated Sticks by Faster and Worse
  "Browse the web sites of Notion, Figma, or Slack—check the celebratory discourse around OpenAI, Midjourney, Ethereum, or Bitcoin—look at the promotional material for the Apple Watch, the Vision Pro, the iPad—and you won’t find any assertions more specific than abstract claims of creativity, collaboration, health, wealth, or productivity."
• If Kevin Roose Was ChatGPT With A Spray-On Beard, Could Anyone Tell? from Defector
  Uncritical eyes from tech journalists will harm a lot of people.
• Little Kitty, Big City Does Everything It Needed To Do - Aftermath
  I love this game. This is one of the best games.

For more, follow @links@nyan.lol on Mastodon

At the beginning of the year, people left Substack for places like Buttondown, Ghost, and Beehiiv in droves. Two of my favorite newsletters went to Beehiiv. Both well meaning trans-respecting individuals. Both have reported an increase in paid subscribers since leaving Substack. Last night I decided to take a peak in to what Beehiiv is and what they offer. What I learned was, to put it lightly, not great.

The front page of their site boasts that you can talk to their "Chatbot Assistant." You can easily get it to lie and make up fake features. That's just what they have on the surface. If you dig a little deeper in their "beehive academy" you can see that they will also let you have AI write your newsletter for you or generate images out of copyrighted works.

They prefaced this with a bold and absurd thing to say about yourself:

beehiv is the first newsletter platform to roll out its own suite of Al tools to help optimize and streamline your content creation. I don't know about you... but I. AM. STOKED for this.

Who are you? Why are you talking to me like this? I don't know about you… but I. AM. NOT. IMPRESSED. I think people who actually want to support and receive newsletters would prefer to not have plagiarized AI sludge thrown at their face. This is a feature you make to spam people with your brand, not to "grow" your audience.

The next thing that makes me incredibly skeptical of Beehiiv is featured heavily in their navigation bar: "Beehiiv is for Web 3 & Crypto Creators." This takes you to a page where they talk about their dedication to the financial scam industry and all the hustle bros they are partnered with. You guys know the hype on this con died years ago right? The fad now is AI sludge. Where's your "Beehiiv for Bernie Madoff" page? You must have replaced your marketing team with an AI prompt before they got around to implementing that one.

Here's one last thing that is a red flag for people wanting to use Beehiiv: they are a wanna-be ad network. Obviously, ads aren't a viable solution for web content and we can see this by looking at the state of journalism.

So who is excited for this? Oh, none other than the people at BetterHealth, the Uber-for-Therapy Privacy-For-Nobody company that got in trouble with the FTC for selling your mental health details to Facebook.

Beehiiv has established their entire company on fads, scams, and flat out harmful tactics and the only people who stand to lose here are content creators.

What's different:

• Textastic - A simple text editor that I can use to write HTML and see it previewed. I've used this app for over a decade now, geez!
• Gibberish - And a Dinosaur keeps making these bite sized app with full sized usefulness. This one is a iMessage-for-Notes app with the ability to publish them to a Gibber Blog. I used this to write The Absurd World of Children's Smart Watches
• Status.lol - I love this app made by the omg.lol community for the omg.lol community.
• Inspect - The best "inspect element" for mobile.
• Darkroom - I also got this app a decade ago, wtf! I love that commitment. To be honest I never really used it, but I've been playing a lot with…
• Obscura - I've been trying to improve my photography game, shoot some raws, and oh yeah take more photos. Obscura, as far as I can tell, doesn't want to be a photo editor, just a camera. I respect that! So when it's time to edit and tweak the photos Obscura just bounces me to Darkroom. Nice. Also has a sweet trans theme and icon.
• Copilot Money - I need to get my finances in order and this app is fine. I know making a finance app is hard, but I wish we had more good decent choices with less crypto nonsense. Use my referral code PCK8UP and get some extra months to try it out.
• Kino - A new video recording app I've been wanting to try, so I put it on the home screen as a reminder.

Wallpapers are variant 4 of the new pride wallpaper on the iPhone and iPad.

To start, we need to define the starting point on our X-axis of a timeline, as Stephen Tobolowsky would say. I will bullet-point it so I don’t spend too much time on it versus the first three years of the pandemic.

• April 2018: I started coming to terms with the fact I am a woman.
• September 11th, 2018: I started taking hormones to help with that fact.
• November 1st, 2018: I started presenting as a woman at work. Yes, the day after Halloween. The metaphor I was going for was that Halloween is over, and I will no longer wear this boy costume. Instead, some coworkers just thought I didn’t know that Halloween was over.
• November 2019: I go on medical leave at work for a month due to extreme stress and burnout.
• January 2020: My dad comes to San Francisco for my 30th birthday.

Okay, so now we’re up to the year 2020. Whenever I see a January and February 2020 date, I instinctively say, “Moments before disaster.” We were so naive then—and young—much younger then. I wasn’t thinking too much about COVID-19 until February. Closer to the end of February, I followed it closely: where it was, who had it, etc.

On March 2nd, 2020, I remember reading online that Steve Woz, once cool guy turned crypto loser/scammer, started bragging online that he and his wife were "Patient Zero" and that they were the ones who brought COVID-19 to the United States. I don’t know why anyone would want to brag about this, claim this, and expect to not be instantly hated for it. I don’t know if it’s true; that seems like a big if, but the sheer fact that you would want to claim this is weird.

On March 5th, I read that COVID-19 had officially entered San Francisco, so I left work immediately before lunch. I got groceries and supplies. I wasn’t hoarding but ensuring I could last a few weeks or however long this would take. (lol)

I lived in a roughly 400-square-foot studio apartment in the Dogpatch of San Francisco. Just me and my cat. If you don’t know the Dogpatch, there’s not much there. A giant basketball stadium just opened a few blocks from me. There are some pricey restaurants, but it didn’t have a grocery store or pharmacy. I was using Amazon Fresh for groceries ugh, Amazon, and PillPack for my pills. Amazon acquired them after I started using them, also, ugh. Where’s government intervention when you need it? This would be a question we would have about basically everything very shortly.

I started buying N95 masks and nitrile gloves when I needed to go downstairs in my apartment building. I wasn’t messing around. When packages arrived, I would let them sit for a few days before opening them, just to be safe.

My coworkers wouldn’t start working from home until another week later. My employer’s chief people officer (a 7 figure method of saying head of human resources) at the time started sending out weekly announcements on Sunday nights. These emails were the most deranged things I have ever read. One of the first ones that they sent included the most damning thing I’ve ever heard from a company:

Don't ask what (COMPANY NAME) can do for you. Ask what you can do for (COMPANY NAME)

They would then cut everyone’s pay by around 20%, despite having just been purchased by a company for billions of dollars, which they had previously told us during company-wide meetings was a very evil company. They had just purchased a huge new office building outside of the city where I wanted to work, increasing my commute time by hours each way.

Because I was in the early days of my transition, I had found community online in Discord servers, and I had met so many great trans and nonbinary people all around the world. This was helpful because you quickly feel the people in your offline world pull away when you come out. Either because they are scared of queer people or because they do not have the patience for your anxiety from discovering your new lens to view the world.

I’m being harder on myself than I would be towards other trans people because I know I made a lot of mistakes, and I’m not trying to dismiss my accountability. Managing anxiety is a skill I am always learning. After all, as the great game changer Sam Reich says, “the only way to begin is by beginning.”

Through this online community, I met someone who would randomly message me one day to ask if I was dating anyone. I said no, and they took this as an opportunity to introduce me to a Polish game developer. It was May, and I had been stuck at home for two whole months straight without leaving, and it didn’t seem like that would change anytime soon. So, I humored this person and got to know a Polish game developer.

We started video calling a lot, and this was new to me. In the “moments before disaster,” two of my younger friends wanted to FaceTime me, and I found that incredibly awkward. Why would I want to be on video camera? I worried this might indicate an age gap between me and people slightly younger than me. But in this time of extreme isolation, it was comforting.

So when my job cut my pay and started being glib about their financial outlook in the wake of this global pandemic, I had some emotional support. I don’t know why my job was so glib about things. They weren’t reliant on anything in the physical world. Some tech companies were using this as an excuse to start doing mass layoffs, though, which was concerning, and it would only get worse, and hey, look where we are today: things are still artificially bad. So, I started looking for work elsewhere.

I started a new job in July 2020. It was similar, except they were optimistic about things. They sent their employees the occasional care package and gave them monthly work-from-home stipends, which I used to pay my internet bill. I didn’t take a single vacation day for almost two years.

My Polish game developer friend turned into an internet girlfriend in September 2020. I was nervous because we had never met, and this could be anything. I was very conservative with my expectations.

The next year we would start getting vaccines. They were very hard to come by. They were limited to people who needed them the most but didn’t want to get them because of some conspiracy theories spread by the worst people. Meanwhile, the people who wanted them, like me, couldn’t get them, and the unused vaccines were going to waste because they have a very short shelf life. In May of 2021, I would finally have a chance to get a vaccine. I would have to take a $100 Lyft ride to an Oakland arena’s parking lot, over an hour away. I suited up with my mask and nitrile gloves. It was time to leave the apartment. I would have to do this again a month later to get the second dose. Just as far and just as expensive.

In 2021, companies tried to force the idea that the pandemic was over. It wasn’t, but we got a lot of reports of companies like Apple firing disabled workers who had, before the pandemic, been allowed to work from home, but after the pandemic, started firing them for not returning to an office they had never been asked to come to before. The employees who did come in were spreading COVID around. You know, the same as they do this very day.

It was that May before I saw my family again in person. People I knew were leaving the San Francisco area. People called this “byte flight,” I called it a betrayal of my favorite city in the United States, San Francisco. I was loyal, so I stayed put with my expensive rent in a tiny studio apartment in an expensive city.

Since I was fully vaccinated and my internet girlfriend and I were only growing closer, I decided to finally take a vacation: two weeks in Poland over Halloween! Do I have a thing for Halloween? I don’t know! But I figured this would be a fun excuse to see a country I’d never visit otherwise. I also had a backup plan in case something went wrong and I needed to have my own accommodations. I knew where all the nearest hotels were. Trusting someone you met online is one thing, but flying a 14-hour flight to a city in Poland during a horrible pandemic was also a risk, and I didn’t want to potentially hurt anyone. I wore a super tight N95 mask that pressed its metal nose-fitting piece into my skin the whole way. I’m taking this as seriously as possible at a time when I really shouldn’t be traveling at all.

I had a good time in Poland. I got to see where my internet girlfriend lived, finally kissed her, and visited Warsaw as a little trip within a trip. I did get sick, but it wasn’t COVID. Just another one of my silly sinus infections, thankfully.

The year 2022 started out uneventful. My internet girlfriend quit her job and took another at a bigger game development studio in London. She went through getting a VISA to the newly Brexit-ed country and then sleeping on a coworker’s couch while trying to find a flat. I was also planning to visit her again for Halloween. She caught COVID a few weeks before my arrival because her new employer made her enter a crowded office daily.

Thankfully, she didn’t have COVID anymore when I got there, but she was suffering from the effects of long COVID and had developed a cold. I once again got sick while visiting her. I caught the cold and spent my vacation in London combatting it.

I tried to visit an urgent care while there. I had spent the previous weeks studying the British healthcare system to help my internet girlfriend. Learning another country’s healthcare system is bad enough, let alone having to do it while sick. I learned that I don’t want to hear British people complain about the American healthcare system.

I arrived at some Catholic-sounding doctor’s office. I waited hours in a waiting room with tons of screaming kids. I hear the wait could have been longer, but I finally got called back to speak with some medical professional. He was incredibly unfriendly. I hadn’t shaved in a few days, but because my passport had a gender marker with the letter F, he was obviously taking the piss out of this American trans woman. For example, I was asked repeatedly about my periods. I didn’t feel safe. He kept telling me that there was no medicine he could give me. Typically, when I get sick for long periods, the only thing that helps is, unfortunately, antibiotics. According to this guy, that would only make me sicker. He dismissed me, and I walked out. I don’t know if I was supposed to pay, but given the experience, I got out of there as fast as possible.

I flew home after being sick in the UK for two weeks. I was still sick. It was another 11-hour flight with an uncomfortable N95 mask and another sinus infection. When I got home, I got on a video call with a doctor who prescribed me antibiotics! As soon as I got the prescription filled, I started feeling better.

All that said, the trip was good. I got to spend time with my internet girlfriend, and while I knew it was in her plan, I didn’t know that one night, while we were both sick, she would propose to me. I said yes in between blowing chunks out of my nose. It was very romantic.

I should say that while I was in the UK, my employer had decided it was the perfect time to have the company’s first mass layoffs: the start of the 2022 holiday season. I asked my manager if my team was affected, and they said they didn’t know, but if I still had access to Slack in an hour, that would be a good sign. They never announced who was laid off, so I would find out over the next six months that people I needed to contact were marked as “deactivated” in Slack.

It’s now 2023, and we’re starting to see the effects of the layoffs. Layoffs are a net negative all around. They send a message to every employee: “You’re next” and “Don’t bother trying too hard. We’ll have layoffs again real soon.” Many of my coworkers would quit over the next few months. Sometimes, you’re just happy to get to say goodbye.

I decided to make 2023 a big year for me after having a huge bout of depression in the wake of my employer’s self-sabotaging and the sudden realization that I was 33 and I had spent the entirety of my 30s inside my 400-square-foot studio apartment. I started taking daily walks through the neighborhood. During this time, a new park along the San Francisco Bay had opened in my neighborhood. They even made a little beach for it! It’s a nice park. Go visit Crane Cove Park if you’re in the Dogpatch.

It’s not my story to tell, but my internet girlfriend suddenly wasn’t tied to the continent of Europe. We considered this a good time to start planning a wedding at San Francisco’s city hall. Since December 19th, 2023, I’ve been able to call my internet girlfriend my wife. I think that’s a pretty good conclusion to three years of intense isolation, but thanks to her, it definitely wasn’t a time of loneliness.

This morning I decided to log in to my Verizon account to look for ways to, uh, ultimately increase my bill. In doing so I saw that Verizon sold a Disney watch for kids. My first reaction was "lol, what." Then I became obsessed with the reviews for a Verizon product on a Verizon website. Obviously these reviews go through some sort of censorship right? But they are so bad!

They uploaded the world's smallest product pictures, but we can see that the keyboard on this thing is just the left side of a keyboard.

These devices remind me of the touch screen phones Verizon released in the wake of the original iPhone. Verizon hasn't learned much about hardware design or the effects of ewaste on the environment. These devices apparently have a very short lifespan and break often, despite being geared towards kids.

The Verizon Care "smart watch" is interesting because all the reviews talk about being misled on if this device has fall detection (it does not) but ultimately seems like it's geared to be a modern Life Alert-like device.

I went to see if The Wirecutter has reviewed these and found that they call the one for kids "The Best Smartwatches for Kids" -- the other one they recommend is an Apple Watch SE, which does cost $100 more. The promotion of this Verizon smart watch for kids is pretty bad and not a great look for The Wirecutter.

Whenever I find a good Wikipedia page I always read the "Talk" tab to see the Wikipedia editor drama behind the article I just read. The equivalent of this on The Wirecutter is the "Other products we tested" section.

This brings us to the brick on a bracelet known as the T-Mobile smart watch for kids. T-Mobile, like Verizon, also has reviews. They're all bad. The device becomes ewaste in no time too. That's not the interesting part. The best part of the T-Mobile reviews is that you can post photos!

And once again we HAVE to assume T-Mobile is heavily moderating these. Which is all the more puzzling that this review is available for us to see. I'm glad it does because it's horrifying! Like, at what point do you pull or recall a product? Your own website tells me that kids are being burned by your bad product that you didn't really extend any effort on nor care about.

Even more damning was the review under it showing that the lithium ion batteries on multiple watches are expanding and cracking the plastic that is tightly strapped to a child's wrist.

Last night I was watching a Little Joel video about smartphone drama where the disgraced Linus Tech Tips reviews a new phone and says it's on par with 10 year old smartphones. Our Joel comes to the absolutely correct conclusion: if the new phone is the same thing as a 10 year old phone, why not save the environment the trouble and just buy the already-produced old phone. Why should we waste materials on buying new ewaste when there's perfectly fine ewaste already available?

So let's save your kid the embarrassment of having some uncool and pointless plastic on their wrist: just go buy a cheap old used Apple Watch. If it needs it, replace the battery. Everything will be fine. Lord knows Apple has produced more of these things than the world needs. Especially with it being apart of their yearly product update cycle despite the Apple Watch ultimately being the same device it was a decade ago when it was first released.

i adopted this cat 9 years ago and i’m so glad to know her

I can't believe it's come to this but I have spun up my own search engine with SearXNG. I love self-hosting things inside my private Tailscale network that my wife and I have access to. I don't know that I'd love it if I had to debug and constantly do maintenance on it, to be honest. That's why my time self-hosting an Invidious server ended after a week.

SearXNG isn't an indexing engine, but a "meta" one. Think early 2000's Dogpile.com. Which, is basically what all the alternatives to the big two are doing to some extent. Instead of focusing on its own index, it focuses on preserving privacy at every step of the way. Sometimes to an annoying degree, but I get it.

But here's the thing: did you know it's not that easy to configure your own browser's default search engines anymore? It's never really been an option for Safari, but Firefox! should! not! be! this! difficult! I guess when all your money comes from an anticompetitive default search deal with Google, you can't be making it too easy. (and they need that money to focus on AI trash!)

Instead of letting me customize a search engine URL I had to install an extension called "Add custom search engine." If you're not already annoyed, you will be when you hear about how it works: It generates a payload, stores it to Mozilla's pastebin and then reads it back to the browser.

For Safari on Mac, iPhone, and iPad I knew I would have to jump through some silly hoops, it's kinda Apple's whole thing: use our products, play silly games. Luckily this silly game is just a $3 browser extension called xSearch. Not to be confused with the developer's other app xEngine which I still cannot tell the difference between, maybe just $1?

Anyway, time will tell how this works out for me.

P.S. Never use Kagi.

oh hello down there

help i lost my cat can you help me find her

This means that when you send a message to someone you have verified, you will get a little check mark next to their name, and if it doesn't match, you will get a warning that this message might not be authentic.

Turning it on is pretty easy:

• Go to Settings, tap on your iCloud account, scroll to the bottom and select "Contact Key Verification"
• Turn on "Verification in iMesssage"

You might want to make a note of your public key by copying it and putting it somewhere you can refer to later. You can always go back and copy it later. For example, if you share your personal contact card with people from iCloud, you can paste your public key into the "verification code" section when you edit your personal contact so they will have it when you share your card.

Now, when you are in an iMessage chat, if you tap on the name and picture of the person you are messaging at the top of the app and scroll to the bottom of the list that pops up, you will see a section called "Advance Message Security". If it says "Verification Off," link them to this blog post. Otherwise, you can exchange keys, which will add their public key to the verification code section of their contact card in your address book. Don't forget to make sure that the keys that show up match what you and the other person expect.

If you use omg.lol, you can add your public key to the Keys section of the dashboard for your omg.lol address. Now when you put {imessage-key} in your web page it will insert a link to your public key. For example, here's where mine links to.

More Resources

• About iMessage Contact Key Verification - Apple's support document on this
• Contact Key Verification shortcut - Opens the settings app directly to Contact Key Verification using the deep link prefs:root=APPLE_ACCOUNT&path=TRANSPARENCY

oregon's alright i guess

kitty pryde protects my computers from cyber attacks

Cut to this week when Google announced that they were getting rid of web search. Now when you search, it will make up some random bullshit with "AI." But once again, people have started creating convoluted guides and hacks to keep using Google to search the web.

Are we not tired yet? Just like how nobody needs Twitter, nobody needs Google. A better web does exist.

my sneaky sys admin

portland #pdx

pretty day in portland

Fast forward to late 2022, and something happened in San Francisco that suddenly made it necessary to bring back my Mastodon server. DigitalOcean made the setup a little easier this time, but I still had to do a lot of manual work. Manual upgrades were also hit or miss if something went wrong. It also cost more than I thought it should.

After almost a year, I migrated to Masto.host. They made it super easy and it's been a pleasure. There's someone in charge who knows what they're doing and it was cheaper than doing it myself. I am very happy with it.

I've been keeping an eye on Pixelfed since 2018. I've kept an eye on the lack of documentation. I've tried numerous ways to self-host it and there's always some incompatibility between something. The furthest I could get was to get it to work with either profile pictures or posting pictures, but not both.

That was until this year when I found available managed hosting for Pixelfed. I had been waiting for Spacehost to launch but I guess I got impatient. So I went with Elestio. It's weird. I created an account and then I had to get manually approved to spin up a service. The way they handle billing is that you have to pay for credits up front. But hey, it actually spun up a Pixelfed server that worked!

Maybe I don't know what "managed" means, but I started having problems. The server they put me on wasn't cheap and it wasn't fast. Every week I would get Docker image upgrade logs where it was clearly failing to upgrade for a variety of reasons. For one, it didn't have the proper authentication. But the bigger problem is that they had to build a new Docker image for each new version of Pixelfed. I don't think they're used to people using them to host Pixelfed because they've never updated that Docker image. I got them to do it once by contacting them via email. When I asked them again, I had to join a Discord server where I was told they would update the image. They never did.

Last week I got the email I had been waiting for: Spacehost was open for business. So I figured I'd give it a shot and see if I could migrate from Elestio, and I'm happy to report that it worked! The server is faster than ever and I'm really happy with the results.

Now to figure out if I can get my money out of Elestio's gross credits system. (Update: they did, thanks Elestio!)

waking up to the existential dread

bedtime

neighborhood rose

this cat is serving

Such as:

• There is a ban on grape jelly that every grocery store is responsible for upholding. No idea why, but if you like PB&J you're going to need to find a back alley dealer.
• Coffee shops are just a collection of "homemade" flavored syrups. I keep trying them because, you know, what if it's good! It hasn't been, but what if! They also like Red Bulls and "coffee sodas" that they will also squirt some syrups in.
• Cars can in fact stop for pedestrians! Every driver in San Francisco learned to drive by playing GTA. Gotta get the high score on the city's leaderboard.

Let me also preface this with: nothing is without criticism, and I am pretty quick to critique things I like. As a child of the 90's and the early internet I've been exposed to a lot and I've spent my adult life trying to be better. I hate that "death of the author" nonsense. That's not how the creative process works. This list is just as much apart of me as the media listed here is the people who made it.

I also don't like to discriminate between types of work. Just because something is digital doesn't make it worse than something that is physical. Just because a book has visual art doesn't mean it is better or worse than a book consisting entirely of prose. So if you're going to be upset that I mixed anime and classic American sitcoms or books with comics and manga I don't know what to tell you. I also mixed Japanese arcade games with ""regular"" games. Get mad, nerds.

Music

Growing up I was big in to Blink-182 and other punk bands (no, i will not prefix it with 'pop' nor will I suffix it with 'rock') and that led me to all the different kinds of ska music. Third-wave best wave. I love how 100 gecs incorporates all of that in to their hyper pop. I feel like I'm hearing something totally new, but that feels familiar.

Feel free to follow me on Last.fm

• 100 gecs
• Bandits of the Acoustic Revolution
• Ben Kweller
• Blink-182
• Coconut Records
• Hatsune Miku
• Jack White
• Kyary Pamyu Pamyu
• Less Than Jake
• Phantom Planet
• Reel Big Fish
• Streetlight Manifesto
• The Aquabats
• The Dead Weather
• The Raconteurs
• The White Stripes
• Toh Kay

TV and Film

Growing up I watched a lot of Nickelodeon and TV Land, which played 50's through 80's shows at the time. I got heavily in to anime in my mid 20's. I knew about anime as a teen, but it wasn't something that I could just "get in to" like it is now.

I'm on Letterboxd, so give me a follow.

• A Place Further Than the Universe
• Adam Ruins Everything
• Archer
• Arrested Development
• Avatar: The Last Airbender
• Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure
• Billy on the Street
• Bob's Burgers
• Bored to Death
• Breaking Bad
• Brick
• Cheers
• Deadwood
• Dropout.tv
• Erased
• Frasier
• Gabriel DropOut
• Girls' Last Tour
• Good Mythical Morning
• Hinamatsuri
• I Love Lucy
• I Think You Should Leave
• Joe Pera Talks With You
• John From Cincinnati
• Justified
• Key and Peele
• Laid-Back Camp
• MacGyver
• Mad Men
• Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid
• Pee-wee's Big Adventure
• Pop Team Epic
• Repo Man
• Rocko's Modern Life
• Ryan George
• Sanford and Son
• Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
• Smosh
• Spirited Away
• The Big Lebowski
• The Big Sleep
• The Brother's Bloom
• The Jeffersons
• The Simpsons
• Three's Company
• Tim and Eric
• Tokyo Vice
• Twin Peaks
• Your Name
• ZOMBIE LAND SAGA

Games

When I think about my history with gaming there was the early 90s where I played one game per gaming device. On Sega Genesis it was Sonic the Hedgehog, on Game Boy it was Links Awakening. Then Pokémon dropped and that was all I wanted to play until I got hooked on the internet.

You can become my friend on PlayStation, Steam, Switch, and Xbox. You can find me on such games as Final Fantasty XIV and Puzzmo.

• Animal Crossing
• Final Fantasy XIV
• Ghostwire: Tokyo
• Groove Coaster
• Hatsune Miku: Project Diva
• Judgment
• Life is Strange
• Like a Dragon (f.k.a. Yakuza)
• Maimai
• Monkey Island
• Neopets
• Picross
• Puzzmo
• Pokémon
• Sam & Max
• Sound Voltex
• Splatoon

Reads

This section feels abnormally small for something I love to do, so let's say I'm still working on it. I didn't know much about comics growing up so that was something I fell into in my early 20's, and manga in my mid 20's. I read books off and on as a kid. I loved The Hobbit so much, then I got in to Lord of the Rings but my school stopped me from getting to read to the end of The Two Towers. It was the 90's and early 00's and satanic panic was still popular where I grew up.

• A Confederacy of Dunces
• A Silent Voice
• Inside Mari
• My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness
• Princess Jellyfish
• Ring
• The Big Sleep
• The Dark Tower
• X-Men

Locations

My dream growing up was to live in San Francisco and when I was 22 I was fortunate enough to take the plunge. I was scraping by OK, but I didn't get to really go on my own trips until I was 27 and visiting Japan changed my life. Cliche? Yeah probably. But do I truly believe this? Oh yeah.

After 12 years in San Francisco I've just decided to move to Portland. It's new to me, but my wife and I are loving it.

• Chiyoda, Tokyo
• Portland, OR
• San Francisco, CA
• Toshima, Tokyo

Food

Growing up I was a very picky eater. Luckily moving to San Francisco meant I had to break that habit and try new things and now I will eat just about anything. I'm not a wasabi person. I try but after a while my sinuses start to hurt. I don't hate spicy foods, but my pathetic stomach does. I hate your guts, stomach.

• Bibimbop
• Burritos
• Chai Lattes
• Japanese Curry
• Mac & Cheese
• Pizza
• Ramen
• Sushi
• Sparkling Water
• Taco Bell
• Unagi

I don't want to be customer support

Companies hate providing support without some sort of friction. This friction will lead to customers finding anyone who will listen, which is totally fair. They also don't want to pay people to provide support. When I was apartment hunting I started getting text messages that behaved like they were being written by real people from some of these properties. In the middle of the night. They were obviously the extremely problematic and trendy chat bots. I expect this to lead to more customers trying to find any way possible to get a human to help them. Good. Exploit whatever it takes to get the help you need.

I am not a target

Scammers love to target employees of a company in hopes of manipulating them either in to gaining information or access. Well, jokes on them I don't know anything and I hate having access to sensitive things.

Businesses also love to make decisions that are, to put it lightly, controversial. When this happens they don't really ask their employees because they know most of them would say "could we not?" This leads to customers saying "could you not?" Employees probably agree with the customer and have raised these concerns themselves but…

"I think maybe there is no borderline between countries now because we all live in the same country, it's called capitalism -- I think that's the reason." -- Bong Joon-ho (Parasite director)

This isn't to say customers shouldn't complain and raise a stink. I appreciate the stink. We need more stink.

I am my own person

I don't want people to think of me as belonging to a corporation or somehow connected. When people think of me, I want them to think of, well, me. I would rather someone think "oh there's blue hair and pronouns" than "hey it's that person who worked for some billion dollar company." One of those descriptors is about me, the other is free marketing for a corporation who isn't paying me to be a mascot. Unrelated, if you want to pay me to be your mascot here's my Ko-fi page.

So what is the point of all of this? I think maybe it's about how I know I might seem more attractive to potential employers if they looked at my website and saw something they might find impressive, "Ooo she worked for (company)!" I would rather just avoid the negatives that come with that and the dehumanization of myself, "Eww she worked for (company)!"

I would like to be your friend and not a "internet personality brand."

Oh and if you would like to hire me as an incredibly talented remote front-end engineer, say hey. I just moved to a relatively less expensive city so I guess that means you can pay me next to nothing to do the same work I've done for over a decade in the most expensive city America has to offer!

Here's a list off the top of my head:

• Doom (1993)
• Doom (2016)
• Fallout 3*
• Fallout 4
• Half-Life*
• Half-Life 2*
• Marathon
• Mirrors Edge*
• Oblivion*
• Skyrim*
• Wolfenstein: Youngblood
• …any VR game after 15 minutes
• not a game but any simulator ride (like Back to the Future: The Ride or it's replacement The Simpsons Ride)

Asterisks (*) denote that I did finish the game, at great physical expense to myself. Some of these I just pushed through telling myself that one long headache was better than a bunch of small ones. I don't know if that logic is sound. Some I did play in chunks of "how long until I start feeling sick." I don't know that I would put in that effort anymore, though.

We can clearly see there are two developers/publishers here who have a track record for making me sick: Valve and Bethesda (including their subsidiaries like id Software and Machine Games). They have been making games for a long time! Why are they like this so much that they are dedicated to whatever it is they are doing specifically to make people motion sick after decades? I don't know. I wish it was a bigger deal. How a game as big as some of these can come out and the media does not report that they too have these issues is odd.

Something I appreciate about some VR game stores is that they list (dis)comfort levels but unfortunately anything but "comfortable" is a rating I cannot tolerate.

I run a few self-hosted services and I wanted to provide a portal that only people on my network could reach. I use Tailscale and NextDNS to accomplish this, but that's probably a post for another time.

The page itself is just a single html file that loads up TailwindCSS and is composed of three web components: app-list, status-dots, and current-date-time.

App-list takes an array of JavaScript objects and generates the grid of emoji icon'd apps.

The config for these looks like this:

const config = [
  {
    name: "blue",
    href: "https://blue.example.com/",
    icon: "🩵",
  },
  {
    name: "pink",
    href: "https://pink.example.com/",
    icon: "🩷",
  },
  {
    name: "white",
    href: "https://white.example.com",
    icon: "🤍",
  },
]

Status-dots might be less apparent what it's doing, but if you look at the menu bar in the top right you see five white dots. These are made out of Uptime Kuma's status badges. Basically, if Uptime Kuma detects an outage the badge color will change from white to red. It doesn't auto-refresh but maybe it should!

Their config looks like this and is made up of the Uptime Kuma monitor ID and a name

const statuses = [
  {
    id: 1,
    name: "intranet",
  },
  {
    id: 2,
    name: "external",
  },
]

And the final web component that this is made up of is current-date-time. This is just cosmetic to match the aesthetic, but it is functional.

I took some advice I was reading about what makes a good web component: sometime simple that compliments already present elements, so it is used like this:

<current-date-time>
  <time></time>
</current-date-time>

The web component takes the time element and fills it out appropriately the way you are supposed to use the time element.

<current-date-time>
  <time datetime="2024-05-10T04:49:38.994Z">
    9:49 PM Thu May 9
  </time>
</current-date-time>

I don't think this is perfect yet, but it's been fun to build something where all the JavaScript comes from web components.

• Inclusive Design
  Hey Nova has a lot of tips to make design inclusive for people with ADHD. I worked on what people call “Growth” teams and the first rule of that is make people feel like they are “almost done” from the get go. It’s obviously manipulative but it’s also just flat out harmful.
• Facebook’s AI Spam Isn’t the ‘Dead Internet’: It’s the Zombie Internet
  I wonder if this is the start of making it look like people use their failed Horizon "metaverse" app they rebranded the company around?
• We need more calm companies
  I like this article but I disagree that layoffs are inevitable. You may need to let someone go, but laying off groups of people sounds like scapegoating management's bad decisions. Maybe they should be the first to go.
• 9 signs your frontend code has quality issues that affect your users | Angelika.me
  100% valid accessibility concerns I don't want to see in a pull request.
• Bill Gates, Man United and 20 other sites that ban linking to them
  I didn’t ask permission to link to this, oops
• A Towering Acquisition
  I really wish I knew this was in San Francisco before I moved. Nakagin Capsule Tower was one of the most stunning buildings you could see while entering Tokyo and I was puzzled why I didn't see it last year when I was in Japan. It is sad to hear it wasn't holding up well and needed to be demolished.
• Apple Removes Nonconsensual AI Nude Apps Following 404 Media Investigation
  Uhh so what is an Apple-controlled App Store supposed to protect against if not apps like this?
• The Man Who Killed Google Search
  Spoiler: it’s the same man who killed Yahoo! Search, lol
• Welcome to Chokeville
  No one told me that Josh Fireland's Chokeville is back. I can't wait to dig in to this.
• Netflix is bringing back piracy
  When each streaming service wants me and my parents to manage our own expensive accounts for their complicated apps, what choice do consumers have?
• The Meat Grinder — Keenan
  I'm late to this article, but it's an insightful look in to how things changed with the fruit company over time.
• EchoFeed
  I'm excited to see EchoFeed launched! I'm using it for @melkat to share things that I write online.

For more, follow @links@nyan.lol on Mastodon

i think my cat might be a nimby 😾

previously Amazon did this, but now movies I bought from Microsoft were taken away from me within 48 hours of my buying them. the lesson here is do not purchase movies legitmately.

no new apple products until this really old OS X bug where tooltips stay showing on your mac and never go away is fixed.

mail: here’s a bill for $14,000

nevermind.

Apps you see:

• Obsidian
• Discord
• YouTube
• ShellFish
• Screens
• Remote Desktop
• Drafts
• GoodLinks
• Omnivore
• Reeder (beta)
• Reeder
• Play
• 1Password
• Kindle

Wallpapers by Andy Carolan

literally hanging out

where’s kitty

kitty got a bigger bed

goodbye san francisco

After my last trip, I bought what might be one of my favorite routers ever, let alone a travel router, the GL-iNet's Beryl AX (GL-MT3000). One of the killer features for me was that, unlike my collection of tiny TP-Link travel routers, was that it has built-in Wireguard and Tailscale support. I've written before about using Tailscale's Mullvad integration for added security on public Wi-Fi networks, but what about when your router is connected to someone else's network?

The web interface for GL-iNet's Tailscale configuration leaves a lot to be desired and I am currently in a hotel room with my iPad. So I loaded up the admin web page with the Inspect Browser for iOS so I could take a look at the list of IP addresses it populates the dropdown box with. This gave me an array of about 430 IP addresses. These addresses are not labeled anywhere online that I could find, so I ran one of them at random through the app Net Analyzer and it was able to tell me that 100.102.95.55 has a PTR record pointing at a de-fra-wg-008.mullvad.ts.net address. That's helpful! Now I know which Mullvad server this is, and can visually see that it's a Wireguard (wg) server in Frankfurt (fra), Germany (de) server, which we can confirm against Mullvad's server list. So now I just need to go through all 430 or so IP addresses. So I wrote a shell script to do just that. Oh, and I need a way to run that shell command on my iPad. For this I used iSH which has File.app integration which means I can use any app on my iPad to write and edit files directly to the app's file system.

I took all of these IP addresses and saved it to a file in iSH at /root/ips.txt. I don't know if these IP addresses are the same for everyone, but I think they might be, so I have published them here.

I wrote a shell script to loop through each IP address, run nslookup, and output the results by saving the following script to bulk-nslookup.sh in iSH's /root directory:

#!/bin/bash

if [ $# -ne 1 ]; then
    echo "Usage: $0 <file>"
    exit 1
fi

input_file="$1"

if [ ! -f "$input_file" ]; then
    echo "File not found: $input_file"
    exit 1
fi

while IFS= read -r ip_address; do
    echo "Performing nslookup for $ip_address"
    nslookup "$ip_address"
    echo "-----"
done < "$input_file"

This script is available as a paste

It could probably be cleaned up and whatnot, but I really just wanted to see if this would work Now all I had to do was make the script executable and log the output to a file.

chmod a+x bulk-nslookup.sh
sh bulk-nslookup.sh ips.txt > out.log

And then check the file out.log I was looking for an IP address in the Pacific Northwest, so I looked for a hostname with sea in it. For your convenience, I've published this mapping of IP addresses to Mullvad hostnames. Then all I had to do was look for the corresponding IP address in our list of IP addresses in the awful dropdown menu of the GL-iNet router web interface. I love tedious tasks! You don't have to do this part, we'll set it from an SSH connection at the end. Yes, we'll need to do some SSH later.

Unfortunately, that's not all you need to do to make a Mullvad exit node to work with your Beryl travel router. You need to expose some subnet routes to Tailscale. Another great feature of this travel router is that it runs OpenWRT which is an open source Linux-based router OS. Fortunately, I wasn't the first person to do this.

I now had to go to the router's Advanced Settings inside of System Settings to get the URL to LuCI, the OpenWRT's standard web user interface. Once in there we need to go to the Network dropdown menu and select Firewall. In the section called Zones we need to hit Add. Let's call this zone tailscale, set Input, Output, and Forward to accept and check the boxes next to Masquerading and MSS Clamping and before saving let's go to the Advanced Settings tab and hit the dropdown next to Covered devices and check the box next to Ethernet Adapter: "tailscale0". Now we can hit save.

Back to the list of zones, we will hit Edit on the line for lan and add our new zone tailscale to Allow forward to destination zones and Allow forward from source zones. Hit save, go back to our list of zones and add lan and wan to Allow forward to destination zones. Then add lan to Allow forward from source zones. Hit save, then in our list of zones hit Save & Apply.

For this next bit we need to enable SSH on the router. From LuCI, go to the System dropdown menu at the top, go to Administrative and select the SSH Access tab. I just hit Save & Apply here, but if you want to configure it a special way, be my guest. I used the app Blink to SSH into the router, for me it was as simple as running ssh root@192.168.8.1 and typing in the router's password. Remember when we first started out we were trying to find the right IP address in that drop-down list? Well, it turns out you can just use it here and save yourself the tedious task, more on that at the end, so keep your SSH connection open. I ran the command tailscale up --advertise-exit-node --advertise-routes=192.168.2.0/24 --accept-dns=false --accept-routes --exit-node-allow-lan-access. I swear we're almost done.

Now go to the Tailscale Admin website, find the machine for your router and Edit Route Settings and check the boxes next to 192.168.2.0/24 and Use as exit note. Back in our SSH connection we just need to run: tailscale up --advertise-exit-node --advertise-routes=192.168.2.0/24 --accept-dns=false --accept-routes --exit-node-allow-lan-access --exit-node={EXIT-NODE-IP} replacing {EXIT-NODE-IP} with the IP address we found at the beginning of this post, when we were all much younger than we are here at the end of this post.

And that's it! You can check your connection on Mullvad's website and see that you're connected, assuming you're not also using iCloud Private Relay.

attempting to make a single feed of everything i post online. not for the public, but for my therapist. (via)

and then I foolishly followed it up with

ok i did it. it's only available as a jsonfeed because this is only for the real sickos. and my therapist. (via)

which may or may not have been what inspired me to write about the frustrations of working with RSS feeds.

It takes a collection of my posts from:

• melkat.blog - my blog
• ocs - when I add new art to my oc gallery
• @zicklepop@nyan.lol - my mastodon posts
• @links@nyan.lol - my mastodon account where i post interesting links
• @zicklepop@nyan.pics - my pixelfed photos
• status.lol - status posts
• Letterboxd - movies that i have watched
• Last.fm - weekly wrap-ups of my listening history

And that's it. I don't really do anything else in public anymore, but I imagine I would add more if I did. This is super dorky, but a fun weekend project. You can find the JSON feed at feed.melaniekat.com/feed.json

I also wanted to make a visual representation of the feed. I don't know how to fit it in with the main content of my website yet, but you can see it at melaniekat.com as I continue to tweak it.

Working with JSON is just so much more straightforward than working with XML. It's easier to make a JSON feed. It's easier to read a JSON feed.

To underline my point to get the latest feed item in XML it would look roughly like this:

import { XMLParser } from 'fast-xml-parser'
const parser = new XMLParser({
  ignoreAttributes: false,
})
const parsedXML = parser.parse(xmlAsString, {})
if (parsedXML?.feed?.entry) {
  // If the feed is Atom
  console.log(parsedXML.feed.entry[0])
} else if (parsedXML?.rss?.channel?.item) {
  // If the feed is RSS
  console.log(parsedXML.rss.channel.item[0])
}

But with JSON Feed it's only:

console.log(myJsonFeed.items[0])

It's time to move on: no new RSS feeds in 2024

Update, July 2024: I apologize, that last line was a little much.

When one talks about leaving San Francisco it's usually got some gross undertones of hating the unhoused or made up crime statistics. Sure our mayor isn't great but what else is new.

I saw an opportunity for something new and I'm taking it.

I imagine when you start a new project in Final Draft it automatically inserts that the main character will be played by Chris Pratt. Most people remember to change this before turning in their work, but like a college english professor, you can clearly see when someone leaves in the placeholder text.

I enjoy the creative (and wild) choices that the '93 film made. Maybe the '23 film could have been improved by making any choice at all.

homer: ☝️it doesn’t snow here yet

Yesterday I migrated all my bookmarks from Anybox to GoodLinks. I bought GoodLinks when it first came out but I didn't understand it. Was it a read later app or was it a bookmarking app? I got hung up on that. Anybox was the logical place for me to put my links as it archived the articles, saved PDF copies of websites, and supported all kinds of urls like bookmarklets and deeplinks. I was worried about moving my stuff over, because the internet is in its very nature both ephemeral and forever. I kept my Anybox data, since it's just stored on iCloud, same as GoodLinks, so if GoodLinks didn't get something I could go back to Anybox to check its archived copy.

I also changed my podcast app from Airshow, which I love, to Apple's Podcasts, which I do not love. It's built in and supports transcriptions now which is really cool. It will also recommend me a racist and homophobic podcasts, so that's obviously not ideal. I don't know if I will keep using Apple's Podcasts app, but it's so easy to just transfer my data back and forth. Especially when I only listen to two podcasts.

Swapping out apps can be fun, it gives me a different perspective and shows me what my options are.

mac is a good and reliable computer

pink kitty

• I generally upgrade my iPad Pro every 2 releases as it's my main computer
• I get a new Apple Watch if my current one is broken as the Apple Watch hasn't changed significantly since it came out almost a decade ago
• I use the iPhone Upgrade Program since it gives me the latest camera for half the price of buying the iPhone to own. This helps me avoid all the planned obsolescence pitfalls
• I buy Macs when Apple forces me to because macOS stops running on my hardware
• I ignorantly buy every release of the Apple TV thinking this will be the one that actually improves something. They're relatively cheap though, and I do use them pretty heavily
• I don't buy Apple products that have been out for a while. I feel like that's asking for a world of pain with whatever whiplash decision might be made with the latest model of something