2025-01-28 21:44:41
With the news that Pebble is coming back I dug out my Pebble Steel to see if it still worked.
After fiddling around with the terrible charging cable, getting stuck in a loop for a while, it finally booted and I was able to set the watch face to the Relay one I made a decade ago.
Sadly when I disconnect the charger, it turns off. I guess it needs a new battery but I don't have the energy or the time to do that so back into storage it goes.
2025-01-28 03:49:31
I have a Pixelfed account. I don't post much, but it's there. I like having a dedicated place to post photos. I like seeing other people's photos. Let me start by saying that Dan, the maintainer of Pixelfed, has always been very helpful when I've asked him about various ActivityPub-related things. He knows his shit when it comes to the AP spec. This post is a collection of concerns I've had over the past few months about Pixelfed and the way it's longevity.
Dan, to quote Mel, "posting like a Founder (derogatory)", was not a fun thing to witness.
The Pixelfed Kickstarter says they want to be "the first Fediverse app with a billion people". Dream big by all means but this is chaotic. We've seen what happens with billion-people social networks - federation isn't going to solve this.
In Mel's post she noticed that the project account posted about a new data export feature available that day. It wasn't, and still isn't, available. The export that is available doesn't actually include your images, it's just JSON with the URLs to the files. Not an ideal export for anyone without technical knowledge.
As it turns out Pixelfed.social runs the latest commit from the repo, which means the format is different to the release version so the code Mel put together only works for other Pixelfed servers. Handily, Posty supports both formats. It's worth noting the version on Pixelfed.social isn't the full HTML version that was posted about, just a new format.
Finally this overview of Dan's "hostility towards FOSS maintainers and the ecosystem at large" is a really uncomfortable read and doesn't bode well for the future of the project.
All of this combined makes me not want to use Pixelfed so I'm going to be converting my export to note posts for here instead and deleting my Pixelfed account.
2025-01-21 21:12:00
I asked for recommendations for mechanical pencils in the Relay and omg.lol Discords and here’s what was recommended:
Some more recommendations came in after I tooted this post:
2025-01-15 22:18:04
I was tagged by Kyle and B to do this so here it is.
Why Did You Start Blogging In The First Place?
Initially I thought I'd be some hot take blogger getting posts retweeted by loads of people and be popular or something. We all wanted to be Gruber back then.
More recently I'm blogging for me. It's recipes, technical posts, things I've solved, ideas I've had. Basically instructions for anything I, or someone else, might want to do.
What Platform Are You Using The Manage Your Blog, And Why Do You Use It?
My site is built with Eleventy. In theory, that means it's just a bunch of markdown files. In practice, it's markdown files, JSON files, javascript files, plus my custom CMS. I use it because it gives me the flexibility to make my site do exactly what I want.
Have You Blogged On Other Platforms Before?
I started on hosted Wordpress many years ago, then self-hosted Wordpress, then Jekyll, then Hugo, then Hexo, and now Eleventy.
How Do You Write Your Posts?
Usually I write a draft in Obsidian then copy it over into VSCode and publish. For shorter posts, or my notes, I write those directly into the CMS which pushes them to the GitHub repository. I wrote more in depth about this here.
When Do You Feel Most Inspired To Write?
There are two main times I feel inspired:
Do You Normally Publish Immediately After Writing, Or Do You Let It Simmer?
I rarely let them simmer, I just send them out into the world so the typos can reveal themselves.
What’s Your Favorite Post On Your Blog?
The sensible answer is 7622 - why I spell my name with two Bs but this sleep-deprived ramble about the fruits of Hey Bear is definitely up there.
Any Future Plans For the Blog?
I have a list longer than you can imagine but next up is some more work on transient slash pages.
Who Will Participate Next?
2025-01-15 07:00:00
This is the first in a new series of posts to populate my /now page with a blog post. A moment in time. What I'm doing now. A record of what I was doing.
Thanks to Nic this was really easy to do because I could copy what he does:
I'm on paternity leave for another week or so with Baby Knight 2. Everything is twice as hard with a toddler around.
I'm dipping my toe into bullet journaling and it's going...fine? It's probably a little bit early to tell. What I do know is that my recomendations on YouTube are ruined and I bought new pens.
My wife and I are watching the last two seasons of Young Sheldon. After that, she's agreed to watch The Last of Us with me. I've been dying to rewatch it.
I haven't got a yearly theme but if I did have one it would be something like "The Year of Being Whelmed"[1]. I want to stop be overwhelmed by the millions of choices of movies/tv shows/books/games/whatever and make a concious effort to choose a thing. I don't have time to do everything, especially with two kids now. If I'm not sure of something, dump it, it doesn't need to be on the list.
You know what, fuck it, I do have a yearly theme. It's that.
You can do that in Europe ⤾
2025-01-14 06:11:53
A couple of weeks ago Chris said this about slash pages:
I think it makes more sense to me to write about what I carry around right now and if I did it again later, it doesn’t have to replace what I’ve written before
Slash Pages is a site I maintain that is a "guide to common pages you can add to your website". So /uses, /now, and so on. Chris' quote above was about /edc but it applies to all of them. It was also discussed on episode 647 of ShopTalk.
My post on automating my /now page was very popular and I am proud of what I managed to do but I've been thinking for a while it's very impersonal. It's data. It's not a page written by me in any meaningful way.
Leon had some similar thoughts on this with an idea for each blog post being a section of a page but rendered as one. The end goal for him, and me, is that the new additions get syndicated via RSS, POSSE, and so forth. I like the idea of redirecting /now to the latest post tagged as now so one could see the latest version of what I'm doing now.
For a /now page, this makes a lot of sense - on a regular schedule I can add a new post about what I'm up to and update things as required but when thinking about my /uses page, what does an update to that look like? Assuming a short /uses page like this:
- MacBook Pro
- AirPods Max
- iPhone 14 ProThe first blog post is easy, it would include all of that but if I change my phone to a 16 Pro do I duplicate the whole thing but update just that one line? If I just post a diff of what's changed then there isn't a single place to see everything I've used.
I'm going to start with my /now page while I mull over how to handle some others.
