Microblog

If everything worked correctly, this status should show up at https://blakewatson.com/microblog.

bw.status.lol/63b9dd9a6c8ae

Playing around with the statuslog webhook and API (this is a test lol).

bw.status.lol/63b9a64d65c66

I’m out of coffee. It was nice knowing all of you.

bw.status.lol/63b99ccacfc94

I just bought an omg.lol address so I could see how far off base the haters on Hacker News were. They all over there like: WhY DoN'T YoU JuSt gEt yOuR OwN DoMaIn??

bw.status.lol/63b7aa4a1d56d

*tap tap* is this thing on?

social.lol/@bw/109640267363319881

Cracks knuckles Chrome Manifest V3 here we go…

I started holiday vacation today and I have a plan drawn up to catch up on side projects. I’m calling it Holiday Sprint 2022.

I started with some quick updates to my DIY Pinboard replacement and managed to knock out the whole backlog!

I don’t mind holding and listening to silly music. I get it. Customer service is swamped. But I hate the recurring message telling me how important I am every 10 seconds.

I had to switch over to iA Writer for NaNoWriMo. I love Scrivener and Ulysses but if you give me unbridled font choices, I will never get any writing done.

Yesterday, instead of writing on my NaNoWriMo novel, I wrote an article about the font I was using. Inexplicably, it hit the #1 spot on Hacker News and stayed there for hours. This is the most traffic my dusty little corner of the web has seen in a while.

SMA Simulator you can use with no tech required!

First, find a comfortable place to sit down.

Next, reposition yourself so that you’re almost comfortable, but not.

Don’t move for 4-6 hours.

Repeat until you’re ready to exit the simulation.

(I jest, but like low key for real tho 😅)

If I could drive my wheelchair at an optimistic 7 mph directly toward the moon, I would arrive there in about 3.9 years. 🌕👨‍🦼

Mac app icons used to be dope before they made everyone use the same shape.

So this is a pretty cool app that can take a cloud folder and turn into a website. Publishing a post by dropping a file into a folder is just about as low-friction as it gets. https://blot.im

World War Z-Index #CSSMovies

This might be the most consistent thing I’ve ever done.

I’m working on a side project where I am trying out some new guiding principles:

• It’s just for me. Don’t worry about making it scale or work for anyone else.
• Use the most low-tech approach that is practical.
• No build step.
• Use only CSS named colors.

In my experience, a good test to gauge someone’s character is whether they’re the kind of person who would “make a scene” in a restaurant. Legitimate complaints? Fine, but those should be rare—and discreet. If it’s a drama for the other patrons to watch… nope.

Just sayin’.

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.