2026-05-02 06:10:06
I use Railway to host a few of my projects, and while they have a nice desktop interface in the browser, their mobile UI isn't so hot, and I wanted to make something t help me monitor things like my cost and deployments on my phone with ease. I have already made a menu bar app for the Mac that shows my cost, but an iPhone app seemed like the next logical step.
As More Birchtree members know, I was a little distracted this week, and I distracted myself by making a new app for myself. This new app is more ambitious than the last one, and it replicates more of the Railway experience, from showing deployments as they happen, to monitoring metrics, to yes, keeping an eye on cost.
I even built a widget I can leave on my home screen to monitor spending through the month!
Releaseable? Sure. Will I? Probably not. There's no money to be made on this, it's really made for me and me only, and the effort needed to maintain and add things like a privacy policy to this thing isn't worth it to me. Still, it'll bring me value constantly, and that's the beauty of these little micro apps.
2026-05-01 20:41:35
2026-04-28 06:54:16
Jimmy Kimmel on Thursday last week in a skit on his show:
And of course, our first lady, Melania, is here. Look at-- so beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow. You know, Melania's birthday is on Sunday. That's right. She's planning to celebrate at home the same way she always does, looking out a window and whispering, what have I done? As you're all aware, Melania is a movie star now. Her documentary had a score of 10% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is a website named after her husband's testicles. And I want to congratulate you, Madam First Lady, on your huge accomplishment, the world's first motionless picture. And that-- oh, by the way, before we go any further, Melania, this is Donald. Donald, this is Melania. That was my impression of Jeffrey Epstein. Pretty good, right?
Melania Trump had this reasonable response:
Enough is enough. It is time for ABC to take a stand. How many times will ABC’s leadership enable Kimmel’s atrocious behavior at the expense of our community.
I see we’ve reached our seasonal “Republicans call for comedians to be silenced” and it’s somehow once again about the bad boy of comedy…checks notes…double checks notes…Jimmy Kimmel.
2026-04-27 07:30:15
PBS News has a quote from the very intelligent RFK Jr.: Fact-checking RFK Jr.'s claim there's more than one way to calculate a percentage decrease
Kennedy said, "President Trump has a different way of calculating percentages. There's two ways of calculating percentages. If you have a $600 drug and you reduce it to $10, that's a 600% reduction."
He's of course saying this because the president said this, and in this government, the president can never make any mistakes. Therefore, this must be correct.
Or as someone else famously put it:
In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it.
2026-04-26 19:00:16
2026-04-24 05:50:42
I neglected to mention it in the announcement post, but another thing I'm really excited about with Quick Reads is that it's the first app I've made so far that requires users to sign in. I decided if I was going to do it, I was going to do it the right way, so I've implemented what I think is a pretty good system.
The headline here is that Quick Reads is 100% password-free. This is convenient for users because there's nothing to forget, and it's even more convenient for me as I have no password data to secure. When you sign up for Quick Reads, you simply need to provide your email address. Assuming you pass the CAPTCHA, I'll send an email to that address with a magic link for you to sign in for the first time. From there, you'll just stay logged in effectively forever, but if you ever want to log into a different device or another browser, you just key in your same email address, and I'll send you another magic link.
However, sometimes magic links are annoying, so I bucked up and I figured out how to do passkeys, and it turns out it's really not that hard. So after you get signed into your account and sign up for a free trial, you can go into settings and create a passkey. You can create multiple passkeys, and you can name them, and from then on you can just use your passkey to sign in to the web interface.
What I personally find exciting about this is that one of my frustrations with passkeys in general is that they are a technology that was pitched as an alternative to passwords, and a lot of their benefits only apply if the password is taken out of the equation. However, I'm yet to find a single service that lets me rely entirely on a passkey. There's always a password in the mix. I guess one of the benefits of having a purely greenfield solution is that I was able to omit passwords from day one and create the passkey future many people dream of.