Category: Snac

Oh yeah, so much new stuff that I’d love to use, b…

Oh yeah, so much new stuff that I’d love to use, but my “keep everything backward compatible” training won’t let me use for the default case of normal view on a light theme.

So I find myself still relying on the cascade and overriding instead of variables, and not really being able to use calculations. Though now that I think about it, I should be able to set a sort-of-ok explicit value in the default default stylesheet and override it with a calculated value in a media query for screen…
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Oh yeah, quote boosting is such a weird mess of im

Oh yeah, quote boosting is such a weird mess of implementations and conventions and lack of implementations…

And link preview is one of those things that should be simple, but ends up not being.

I should see how Akkoma’s quote boosts show up on other platforms.

I’m just glad that blockquotes are finally supported on Mastodon. That was IMO the biggest issue with their HTML sanitizer. Lists, bold and italics, and code blocks are nice, but blockquotes and formatted links are really bad to strip out!
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I keep going back and forth on whether/how to foll

I keep going back and forth on whether/how to follow news sites via email, RSS or Fediverse. I like being able to boost an article directly, but just following one prolific site can crowd out everything else. Same with RSS and the “show all unread” view. Email’s good for bundling posts into digests (if it’s even offered), especially if you filter them into a separate inbox, but it takes longer to skim the headlines at a glance, and it’s still easy for 8 issues of whatever to pile up with nothing obvious in the inbox list but “XYZ issue 12” or the headline to one story to tell you what’s in each.
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On one hand, I like the idea of keeping all the pr

On one hand, I like the idea of keeping all the private health data on the device instead of in the cloud. On the other hand, there should always be a way to sync/export it, and there so rarely is.

But after getting burned by the Pebble sale to FitBit, and then by the FitBit sale to Google…hell with it, I don’t really need a smartwatch.
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Ah, that’s why I’m getting duplicate photos

Ah, that’s why I’m getting duplicate photos in my Nextcloud auto-upload folder.

When I delete a photo on my phone using Google Photos, it gets renamed as .trashed_blahblahblah…which Nextcloud sees as a new file, and uploads it again. 🤦

(This is separate from the desktop sync client, which in my experience works just fine!)

Going to have to try out some other gallery apps. I want to get off of Google Photos eventually anyway.
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“Sway” too long

Spent way too long last night trying to get #Sway set up on my #PineTab2 because:

1. The Arch dependencies for some of the optional components were broken (wmenu requires dmenu, but the package didn’t say so).
2. The Arch documentation for Sway is out of date and sends you to AUR for just about everything.
3. The documents I found didn’t make it clear that key bindings are the only way to launch things unless you explicitly add some other kind of launcher that’s not in the sample config. Or what to expect when changing the menu config. Or what the menus are supposed to look like.
4. Because of the broken dependencies, even when I tried to use the keybinds, they failed silently. For a while I wasn’t even sure it was reading my config file.

And now I’m like…why did I go to all that trouble? All I wanted was to make sure I had all the prerequisites to run a basic Wayland session on something lighter than Plasma. I’m just going to switch back to LXQt.

I miss the days when #Linux seemed to actually run deterministically. When I could see what was breaking easily and fix it easily.

I don’t miss all the extra fiddling and trial and error just to get something functional.

Sure, I like tinkering. When I want to. I don’t like to have to.
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Tried to POSSE a recent photo

Tried to POSSE a recent photo post on my blog to Bluesky and Flickr signage using the Syndication Links plugin and its built-in support for brid.gy.

It failed to reach Flickr because it went through as a note rather than a photo, and the Bluesky autopost only included the title and raw URL…and the URL wasn’t clickable.

For Flickr, it could just be that I didn’t include the u-photo class on the image.
https://brid.gy/about#picture

I’m going to add that and retry.

And then take a look at whether it’s the plugin or the service that’s setting the content.
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(next day)

Looks like I exceeded the retry limits or something. I’ll try again with my next photo post. And try to remember to check some logs tonight.

I’ve been running this on a Raspberry Pi 3b for a

I’ve been running this on a Raspberry Pi 3b for a couple of years now — it was easier to install than Plex, doesn’t try to upsell me to a subscription when I listen to my own locally-hosted library, and runs fine over the LAN. The Jellyfin desktop apps work pretty well on Mac, Windows and Linux.

I only use it for audio, not video, so I don’t know if the Pi 3b and its relatively slow processor and network throughput would be enough to handle video. I reviewed it on my website a while back in case anyone’s interested: https://hyperborea.org/reviews/software/jellyfin/

#SelfHosted
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And the most basic: Don’t park in the charging space…

And the most basic: Don’t park in the charging space if you’re not going to charge your car. Even if your car is electric.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to look for another charger because someone had parked in front of one without even plugging in.

Even if they had been charging earlier…if you can unplug it when you’re done, you can move the car too.
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I’m experimenting on my tech tips articles with

I’m experimenting on my tech tips articles with #ShareOpenly, a web app that acts as an intermediate layer between sites that want a share button and newer social media sites like #Mastodon instances.

The author describes it here: https://werd.io/2024/share-openly.

Basically:
1. The publisher links to Share Openly with the URL and title or description of the page to share.
2. The reader clicks on it and tells SO what site they want to share on (pre-filled or type in a hostname, with the manually added ones remembered).
3. SO opens that site’s post form with the text pre-filled and ready to go.

It knows where to find the posting forms for several kinds of server software, and you can add a <link rel="share_url".../> template to your site to tell it where to look. I may do this for my Postmarks site.

But not everything has a post form that can be pre-filled. Heck, not everything has a front-end to begin with. So I can’t just put that link tag on my #GoToSocial instance and point to the post form, because there isn’t one. And it doesn’t look like Elk or Semaphore have a way to pre-fill a post either.

sigh Sometimes I really wish #WebIntents had taken off.

Anyway, here’s an article on my site with “Share This Page” linking to the webapp
https://hyperborea.org/tech-tips/finish-by-scheduling/
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I don’t doubt the physics

I don’t doubt the physics of getting people there. Or at least objects with comparable mass to people.

I doubt he has anything resembling a workable plan for keeping large numbers of people alive for long periods of time on Mars.
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Relevant: https://www.acityonmars.com/ looks into a lot of the engineering, biological, economic, social, political and legal issues involved in actually trying to build a settlement with actual people on another planet. And the recurring theme, over and over as they talked to experts in each field, was that the research is either too early or too sparse to be usable yet (or in some cases, just not being done).

(My review of the book: https://hyperborea.org/reviews/books/city-on-mars/ )
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I think we might have had an Itanium box at Unitech

I think we might have had an Itanium box at Unitech, but then we had something like 15-20 various HP, Sun and other commercial Unix systems running different OS versions for building and QA. Though the IBM PowerPC was the last major box we added. Generally we all developed on Windows and would telnet into whatever arch/OS combo we needed. I do remember we had “the Vista box” and a couple other Windows workstations that were shared on an as-needed basis, and if we did have an Itanium, it would have been one of those.

Virtualization makes things so much easier!
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