Microblog

I try not to complain about apps too much because software is hard, etc, but Apple Music, the app, is so bad.

• It’s clunker than Spotify, which is saying something because Spotify is an Electron app.
• For years iTunes and then Music has been plagued with the whole randomly-skips-songs bug.
• The UI is inconsistent to the point where it’s not always clear whether you’re searching your library or the AM catalog.
• Various UI is horrible—just now the app took focus away from the search input three times whilst I was typing in it (wtf)

Guess it’s back to Spotify for me. It’s a damn shame because iTunes on Windows XP was my favorite app and the reason I eventually became a Mac user in 2006.

This might not be useful to anyone else but my SSH key on my web host, NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, recently quit working. I first noticed it when my deployments on DeployHQ were failing. Long story short, it seems that OpenSSH recently invalidated certain (weaker) RSA keys. I made a personal note about how to create a custom keypair and upload it to DeployHQ.

I wanted to share the note with someone so I published it. I haven’t shared this yet but I recently created a system for publishing my plain text notes to an 11ty site. I wrote the code in a very this-is-just-for-me manner (home-cooked you might say). Maybe eventually I will cleanup the code and release it. Plenty of apps have this note-publishing functionality but I like the idea of my notes being on my own website that I control.

I’m thinking of doing GitHub Game Off again this year. Web game idea—an idle game where you control a money printer and the goal is to print more money in order to buy upgrades for your money printer.

Come to think of it, this game probably already exists (I mean other than the IRL “game”).

This UI is a hot mess:

Got hit with an annoying yellow alert screaming at me as well as an obnoxious subscription modal that has a lot of weird shit happening within.

For starters it’s extremely disruptive. The design is chaotic (evil). And what kind of pricing choice is this? I can choose $1.99 a month or, inexplicably, $290 a year. You have to click around and read the gray print to realize it’s a 3-month offer.

No way I’m paying for Bloomberg though because, among other reasons, The Big Hack.

I started using Craft toward the end of last week when a coworker shared it with me. After playing with it over the weekend I am very quickly becoming a superfan.

• As a designer I’m impressed with the beautiful, snappy UI.
• As a developer I’m impressed with the control over data and ability to export to many formats.
• As a user with a pretty severe mobility impairment, I appreciate the first-class support for working in a mouse-oriented manner or keyboard-oriented manner, depending on which is easier in the moment (referring to the Mac version).

Two ideas I live by:

• People are weird.
• Everything is complicated.

I have been writing CSS for 15+ years but I only recently started using user styles via the Stylus browser extension. I don’t know why I haven’t done this sooner. It’s really an amazing perk of the web. Don’t like something about the way a website looks? Change it!

Playing Universe Sandbox inevitably ends with dropping Sagittarius A in the solar system just to see what happens. Spoiler: everything gets eaten.

I constantly have theme music from various Mario games stuck in my head. I blame the Stream Doctors.

I’m fascinated by this book, The Top 10 Games You Can Play in Your Head, By Yourself: Second Edition. Yes, this is a real book that you can actually purchase.

The original was 14 volumes published in the late 1980s and early 1990s by an author writing under the name J. Theophrastus Bartholomew. I don’t know how widely it was distributed originally, but at some point it went out of print. It was discovered at a yard sale in 2014 in Minnesota by Sam Gorski and D.F. Lovett. They were able to contact the original publisher to get a list of Bartholomew’s ten favorite games and the rights to an unpublished volume.

As far as I can tell, we don’t know the identity of the original author. But after reading this¹, I’m salivating for more content from him. I heard that another book may be coming out. We’ll see.

The games themselves aren’t really games like you would imagine. They are more like creative prompts for you to imagine your own story. It’s an intriguing concept. I’ve struggled with it in the few attempts that I tried it (I’ve only tried Space), but I’m planning to try again because the concept is so fascinating to me.

If you know anyone who likes role-playing games, storytelling games, or who are just particularly imaginative, you might consider recommending this book to them.

Sometimes I think to myself, “I wish Simplenote had [feature].” Then when I play around with a note app with lots of features I think, “Why can’t it be nice and simple like Simplenote?” Ugh… why am I like this?

I bought a computer that connects one computer to another computer. https://tinypilotkvm.com/

I’m essentially using this as an accessibility tool. It will let me operate other computers without having to install all of the software and hardware I need for accessibility.

There are two types of people:

• People who acknowledge that Nacho Cheese is the best Doritos flavor
• People who are wrong

I created a dummy async function (JS) to use when testing out ideas. I love to pop open CodeRunner and mess around with different patterns and syntax and having a ready-to-go async function available is really handy.

function doingStuff(stuff = 'stuff', ms = 2000) {
  return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
    setTimeout(() => resolve(stuff), ms);
  });
}

I set up my site’s WordPress theme to automatically strip all CSS styles on April 9th in celebration of CSS Naked Day.

The point of the silly exercise is to celebrate semantic HTML and web standards. The idea is that if your website’s HTML is well-written then your website should still be generally usable—even without CSS styling. I’m sure my site isn’t perfect, so let me know if you find anything completely broken.

I really dislike this trend of web services that are only available via mobile app (ie, don’t offer a web version). I’m not really able to access my phone easily so I’m all-in on desktop and web apps. I’m not saying companies shouldn’t go mobile app only. I’m just personally annoyed by it.

Update for Minimal Character Sheet. You can now choose to make your character sheet publicly available as a read-only version. https://minimalcharactersheet.com

Launched d20 v3 today! After about 2 years in the making it’s finally out. Here’s the “official” tweet.

https://twitter.com/blakewatson/status/1361340608384753664

Get it here: https://d20app.me/

Hey Nova users! I made a color scheme for you. Tomorrow Night Eighties, based on the Base16 Tomorrow Scheme “eighties” variant. Here’s a Nova link: nova://extension/?id=blakewatson.TomorrowNightEighties&name=Tomorrow%20Night%20Eighties

I added CoinMarketCap to my A Fine Start page so I can ratchet up my anxiety level in one click.

Whenever I want dark mode on a website that doesn’t have it, I use the Stylus extension to add this CSS, which works surprisingly well:

html {
    filter: invert(0.85) hue-rotate(180deg);
}

Nova by Panic is so buttery smooth. Been using it for work (and play) for a few days. Fast as lightning. I hit a rough edge or two but no showstoppers.

I always misspell the word “habit” by putting 2 Bs. But I just thought of a mnemonic device to help me remember: You can put a B in habit, but don’t make it a habbit.

Not too bad for a WordPress site.

d20’s icon evolution…

I didn’t think I was going to like macOS Big Sur but I’m kind of into it.

I’ll be releasing d20 v3 very soon. Here’s a sneak peak. Big new features: 1) you can group your presets, 2) you can roll attacks and damage at the same time. 🗡 🏹 🔥

Oldie from a few years ago… this is article about what football will look like in the future is a mental trip you will not see coming. https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football

If you need a last minute gift for the developer in your life, check out these programming zines by @b0rk. Or you can just buy them all for yourself, which is what I did 😄. https://wizardzines.com/

PSA: If you are trying to capture a website or social media post for proof, don’t screenshot it. Images can be altered so no one can really trust that it’s accurate. If it is public, grab the URL and archive it with @waybackmachine.