Asides

Fake COVID testing sites (at least one chain, anyway) appear to be a multilevel marketing …

Fake COVID testing sites (at least one chain, anyway) appear to be a multilevel marketing fraud, not a data harvesting fraud. (As Schneier points out, there are much easier ways to harvest data.)
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/01/are-fake-covid-testing-sites-harvesting-data.html

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This looks helpful: someone compiled a list of where the #Fairphone 4’s network bands overlap …

This looks helpful: someone compiled a list of where the #Fairphone 4’s network bands overlap with various US carriers, so if you manage somehow to get one across the pond, you have an idea of how likely it is to work on your carrier!

https://www.kimovil.com/en/frequency-checker/US/fairphone-4

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While messing around with IndieWeb, I’ve decided I want to build a consolidated PESOS gallery

While messing around with #IndieWeb, I’ve decided I want to build a consolidated #PESOS gallery of my photos at Instagram, Twitter, Mastodon, Pixelfed etc. I’ve got current archives for all (including from a dead Pixelfed instance).

Specs:
* Gallery, individual, and tag galleries
* Include captions and descriptions (I can add descriptions to the old photos)
* Links to wherever it’s posted (may be several sites)
* Light page code. I’d rather things load quickly than act fancy.
1/3

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I’ve made a prototype in #WordPress so far, and it looks nice, and I already know how to automate new posts using IFTTT. But it feels heavy. And of course it’s one more instance to increase my attack surface & maintenance.

I’m going to give #Eleventy a shot next. I’ve worked with it before, and I can optimize the templates however I want. The image plugin can generate different sizes, thumbnails, etc. The main drawback: I haven’t researched ways to automatically import to 11ty yet.
2/3

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Long-term I’d like to add #POSSE (selectively) to make it easier to cross-post. I had a set of 3 photos yesterday that I wanted to post to Flickr, Pixelfed, my blog, and my gemlog, and while it was mostly copying and pasting, it was also time-consuming.

Some of the stuff @stringerblog and @dansup have been talking about kind of overlap with this space.

Portfolio – an upcoming Pixelfed feature that allows users to create their own portfolio website that best represents them and their work…

3/4

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Oh yeah, Flickr…the way I use it is different enough that I don’t want include my zillions of photos in this project. I might try a more full-featured gallery like Piwigo at some point. It’s less linear and more collection-based. But for photos I’ve cross-posted, I would like to link to it same as I would to Pixelfed or wherever, and it would be nice to include it in the outgoing posts once I get that up and running.

And I do like the idea of just federating the photos out directly!

4/5

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OK, this got way more complicated and should’ve been a blog post.

So: building a personal #IndieWeb capable gallery of my sociallly-shared photos from various sources, keeping it light, pulling in new posts automatically (#PESOS) and eventually posting on my gallery and auto-posting it to Pixelfed/Twitter/Flickr/etc. (#POSSE) on a per-photo basis. Probably using #eleventy.

Anyone have any recommendations on tools that might be better than WP/11ty, or that would work well with this workflow?

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Ooh, I could also generate a Gemini gallery! I remember @FiXato came up with some ideas on how to format one. I’d probably want to break it into categories or do it by tag or something

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I wonder how much storage this will end up taking up. I probably won’t need to use S3 (finally started setting things up on DigitalOcean instead of AWS!) for this gallery unless I really want to CDN the images. By the time they’re scaled for whatever social network, it doesn’t take up any more space than by blog storage.

If I ever make my own Flickr mirror, though, that’s going to have to be a consideration!

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COVID, weird

It turns out the person I caught it from also tested negative for Covid during their illness…and then came down with actual Covid after they recovered. Fortunately they seem to be on the mend from that now too.

That means (a) whatever I caught from them wasn’t Covid and (b) we haven’t been around them in long enough that we don’t have to worry about it having been a Covid exposure too.

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COVID, confused

All three of our tests came back negative. So I don’t know what I have, but apparently it’s not COVID.

(One false negative, sure, but 3? Not likely.)

—

And now the kid’s mad that he has to go back to school on Monday because we haven’t tripped the COVID isolation protocol after all.

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I’m kind of disappointed, weirdly enough. I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop for almost 2 years and thought it finally had, and dropped in a way that would do minimal damage to the 3 of us.

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On the plus side, if it really isn’t COVID, I probably won’t need to isolate for the full 10 days, just until my symptoms clear up.

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I probably should isolate as if it was covid, just to be sure.
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Possibilities:
1. It’s not COVID, it’s something else. Even though the symptoms match and it’s massively surging in this area
2. I’m the only one who caught it and mine was a false negative.
3. They both caught it and have already cleared it out to the point of testing negative, and mine was a false negative.
4. All 3 tests are false negatives.

I’m really not sure which is most likely.

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Covid, food: Tonight’s dinner taste test

Tonight’s dinner taste test

Garlic: yes. Roasted potatoes: barely. Roasted radishes: delayed taste. Kale: yes. Carrots: no. Bell peppers & onions: kind of. Soy sauce: yes

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And dessert test.

Maple cream cookie: Similar to the chocolate chip cookie yesterday, where it initially didn’t taste sweet at all until after a few seconds of chewing. And fortunately I can still taste maple!

A 60% cocoa Ghirardelli square tastes like a 72%.

A mint-filled square tastes more intensely minty.

A sea salt caramel square tastes like salty chocolate.

covid, spice cabinet

So this is interesting. I can smell most of the dried herbs fine – oregano, thyme, dill, cloves. Rosemary is kind of faint, but I can pick it up.

Garlic is intense.

I can smell cinnamon but not nutmeg, which is odd.

And here’s the really weird one: paprika, ancho, black pepper, cayenne and ginger all smell subtly off from normal. Like when you get a chile that’s normally spicy but isn’t, and you can still taste the flavor but it doesn’t have the bite you expect.

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I also tried tasting a few sauces.

Ketchup and mustard tasted more sour than usual. Plain yellow mustard was too intensely sour.

Teriyaki tasted a little more like sweet & sour sauce.

Gochujang & caramel were both a little bit off, but I couldn’t quite place how.

Chocolate syrup was interesting, because I could pick up the chocolate taste before the sweetness, so it started out tasting like darker chocolate.

Covid, food: Weirdest thing is the taste/smell impact…

Got what is so far a mild case of what’s almost certainly covid, mostly fatigue & runny nose (yay boosters!).

Weirdest thing is the taste/smell impact. It hasn’t gone out completely, it’s more like taking an audio equalizer and readjusting the sliders so that some frequencies are barely audible while others are still normal. Umami’s solid, sour’s a bit blunted, sweetness is even fainter. At least food still tastes like food so far.

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And some of the fainter tastes do kick in after a while. I tried a chocolate chip cookie, and at first it was like eating a cracker or plain biscotti, but after a few seconds of chewing I could taste the chocolate.

—

And yes, I have considered experimenting with the spice cabinet…

I confused the iNaturalist identification AI with some random snapshots

I confused the #iNaturalist identification #ai with some random snapshots from a trip up into the mountains a few years back.

Normally it’s pretty good at narrowing things down to a family or genus. In this case, I was aiming for scenery and family snapshots at the time, so they weren’t exactly ideal for plant IDs even cropped.

It’s on the level of “A flock of sheep on a hill” for an empty landscape. I wanted to ask it how many giraffes were in the picture!

I confused the #iNaturalist identification #ai with some random snapshots from a trip up into ...

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