One gadget I forgot to mention in yesterday’s post was the TRMNL. Externally, it’s a small e-paper (7.5-inch) display in a minimal frame that can be mounted on a vertical surface or left to stand on a desk or table. It’s very lightweight, and can go weeks or months between charges (depending on how often you set the screen to refresh.) Internally (though you don’t really need to know anything about this as an end user) it’s an ESP32-based computer that can refresh itself over the internet and provide ambient information based on plugins that you can configure on the TRMNL website.
I haven’t written any plugins myself yet, but the documentation for doing so is available and seems pretty straightforward. Plugins are built in a Ruby-based templating system.
I haven’t felt much like blogging lately, as living in a kakistocracy headed by a craven, malignant sub-moron tends to sap one’s will to live. Any discussion of gestures widely would just devolve into pointless screaming, so I’ll move on.
I’ve been gathering gadgets, as one does. I’ve been enjoying, among other things, my Airpods Max, PSVR 2, Playstation Portal,and Meta Quest 3s.
The revival of my beloved Everton under the stewardship of David Moyes has been a boon over the last few months. I’ll be taking Jake to see them in Chicago during the summer, though if I’m being honest he’s much more excited about the train voyage than the game.
Speaking of Jake, we assembled his first Raspberry Pi over the weekend. He’s excited to use it for Mathematica (via X) and maybe other stuff, as the idea of owning a headless server is a new concept for him.
I have to think that my life on the severed floor is satisfactory, as I haven’t emerged at the end of my workdays with any unexplained wounds.
I’m currently writing this at a new Yemeni coffee shop near home. Thumbs up on the mufawar.
I’ll try to post updates more regularly, as long as the idiots don’t kill us all.
To be quite clear, this was a problem that a lot of people recognized early on. Even under the “stewardship” of the prior regime, the inconsistent and lax moderation allowed parts of the service to thrive as a hive of wretched scum and villainy. The arrival of the world’s most divorced man turned a gradual disintegration into a powerdive. I, personally, had stuck around for a couple of reasons:
Having joined in 2006, as user number 3700-something, I’d been around a lot longer than that insufferable shithead, and the way he’d been mismanaging it since convincing some of the world’s worst people to financially back the takeover made me feel I had a good chance of outlasting his ownership.
I’m part of a few online fellowships (notably, the online fandom of Everton Football Club) that had never managed to herd their respective cats into migrating to another space.
It’s easy to say now that the “last straw” for many people was the very prominent role Musk and the site played in possibly fucking U.S. democracy for decades in the 2024 election cycle, but in reality the real prompt was the good old network effects — Xitter became sufficiently bad and the barrier to alternatives became sufficiently low so that a large cohort could move en masse.
The big winner appears to have been Bluesky. Mere months ago, it seemed that their exceptionally slow rollout had ceded all momentum to Meta’s Threads. The problem with Threads, though (at least for me) was the general Meta ick that the service exudes. The timeline is loaded with algorithmic spoo and engagement bait, and it just doesn’t feel like a place to have an intelligent conversation about anything.
Like a lot of geeks, I’d established a presence in the Fediverse (a/k/a Mastodon) early on, but it’s become clear that the non-geeks were never going to follow us over there in sufficient numbers for network effects to take hold. It was going to need to be something that felt more like Twitter from a UI and onboarding standpoint.
Over the past week, I’ve watched as Everton FC fans have migrated to Bluesky, seemingly in the blink of an eye. Anecdotally, it seems the same thing has happened among all sorts of online interest groups. Critical mass happened faster than I could have imagined.
Today is the 30th birthday of Dave Winer’s Scripting News. I’m raising a glass to a guy who’s always had a singular voice and has been a pioneer of so many things taken for granted nowadays — web syndication, podcasting, and (of course) blogging. My first encounter happened decades ago when I network grunt who’d inherited responsibility for keeping the technical side of a technical publishing operational. Winer’s Userland produced a scripting environment, Frontier, that was pretty useful when it came to keeping a bunch of Macintoshes running back in the Classic days.
Over the years, he’s always been a curious mind, and more importantly a doer when it came to designing the plumbing that allowed individual voices to communicate on the net.
One cool thing about building your blog with a static site generator and hosting it on a janky old Raspberry Pi is that the dominant blog hosting platform can reveal itself as being run by a nutcase and you don’t need to care at all.
So, a few months on, it’s clear that I’ve decided not to think about things too heavily. I’ll post occasionally, and I’m not going to throw any real engineering at maintaining a blog. I’m happy to maintain a few static pages and leave it at that.
We didn’t get any peaches this year (boo!) but we did have a bunch of tomatoes, including some cool heirloom ones. Thanks to being busy, we ended up simmering our pasta sauce way longer than we planned (almost 24 hours, in fact.). This was a pretty happy accident, though, because it came out great — it has the most wonderfully rounded, sweet flavor we’ve ever managed, without even a hint of acidity.
It really should be easier and cheaper for individuals to get S/MIME certificates. You should be able to get them at the DMV or post office. Makes a lot more sense than regulating uteruses.
I ordered a couple of mugs from Forever Everton and brewed up the last of my initial Trade Coffee order. Delicious stuff. Note: the coffee link up there will get you 30% off — yeah, I get a site credit, but really I’m just happy to show off the mug.
Did a bit of a “treat yo self” because Jacob’s iPad was out of space — gave him my 3rd-gen Air and got the current (M2) model. Thought (seriously) about the 13-inch model but ultimately decided on portability. Went high-end on the keyboard and Pencil. Pretty pleased so far.
Back in prehistory, I maintained a radio station on a long-lost streaming radio platform, Live365. (Note — there is a business operating under that name currently, but it bears no real resemblence to the service that operated there previously.)
The idea was pretty simple — I programmed the station according to my own whims, which meant that it wasn’t formatted by genre. I listen to a crazy amount of music, and I’m not particularly bothered about using genre to set moods. If I feel like hearing free jazz next to ambient country, English punk, Detroit techno, Mississippi blues, and Swedish organ music, then that’s what I’m going to do.
All that preamble is here to say that I’ve resurrected the idea as a streaming playlist. Generally speaking, I’ll update a 25-song freeform playlist once a week on Apple Music and Spotify. I’d love it if you’d take a listen.
