Microblog

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.

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.