Screenshots
- s3-browse: a TUI tool for browsing S3 buckets. This didn’t go beyond simply listing the files of a directory.
- scorepeer: An attempt to make a collection of online score-cards much like the Finska one I built.
- withenv: Preconfigure the environment for a command with the values of an
.envfile (there must be something out there that does this already). - About 3 aborted attempts to make a wiki-style site using Hugo (one called “Techknow Space” which I though was pretty cleaver).
-
Or possibly a Peertube client. ↩︎
That Which Didn't Make The Cut
I did a bit of a clean-up of my projects folder yesterday, clearing out all the ideas that never made it off the ground. I’d figured it’d be good to write a few words about each one before erasing them from my hard drive for good.
I suppose the healthiest thing to do would be to just let them go. But what can I say? Should a time come in the future where I wish to revisit them, it’d be better to have something written down than not. It wouldn’t be the first time I wished this was so.
Anyway, here are the ones that were removed today. I don’t have dates of when these were made or abandoned, but it’s likely somewhere between 2022 and 2024.
Interlaced
This was an idea for a YouTube client1 that would’ve used YouTube’s RSS feeds to track subscriptions. The idea came about during a time when I got frustrated with YouTube’s ads. I think it was an election year and I was seeing some distasteful political ads that really turned me off. This would’ve been a mobile app, most likely built using Flutter, and possibly with a server component to get this working with Chromecast, although I had no idea how that would work.
This never got beyond the UI mock-up stage, mainly because the prospect of working on something this large seemed daunting. Probably just as well, as YouTube solved the ads problem for me, with the release of YouTube Premium.
Red Crest
I thought I could build my own blogging engine and this is probably the closest I got (well, in recent years). This project began as an alternative frontend for Dave Winer’s Drummer, rendering posts that would be saved in OPML. But it eventually grew into something of it’s own with the introduction of authoring features.
I got pretty far on that front, allowing draft posts and possibly even scheduled posts (or at least the mechanics for scheduled posts). One feature I did like was the ability to make private posts. These would be interleaved with the public ones once I logged in, giving me something of a hybrid between a blogging CMS and a private journal. It was also possible to get these posts via a private RSS feed. I haven’t really seen a CMS do something quite like this. I know of some that allow posts to be visible to certain cohorts of readers, but nothing for just the blog author.
In the end, it all got a bit much. I started preparing the screen for uploading and managing media, I decided it wasn’t worth the effort. After all, there were so many other blogging CMS’s already out there that did 90% of what I wanted.
Reno
As in “Renovation”. Not much to say about this one, other than it being an attempt to make a Pipe Dreams clone. I think I was exploring a Go-based game library and I wanted to build something relatively simple. This didn’t really go any further that what you see here.
SLog
Short for “Structured Log”. This was a tool for reading JSON log messages, like the ones produce by zerolog. It’s always difficult to read these in a regular text editor, and to be able to list them in a table made sense to me. This one was built for the terminal but I did make a few other attempts building something for this; one using a web-based GUI tool, and another as a native MacOS app. None of these went very far — turns out there’s a lot of tedious code involved — but this version was probably the furthest along before I stopped work.
Despite appearing on this list, I think I’ll keep this one around. The coding might be tedious, but I still have need something like this, and spending the time to build this properly might be worth it one day.
Miscellany
Here are all the others that didn’t even get to the point that warranted a screenshot or a paragraph of text:
I’m sure there’ll be more projects down the line that would receive the same treatment as these, so expect similar posts in the future.
I’m not a fan of the changes Google made to their Weather app. It assumes you’re interested in saving every location you search for as a favourite, which is not how I use search. And horizontal scrolling for the 10 day forecast? With no date?
No, sorry. This is a step backwards in design.
Exploring Godot to see if I could use it to make a card game. I got this far:
Yep, I’m on a roll. 😄
Might need to work through a couple Godot tutorials first, just so that I understand the basics.
I plan to integrate UCL into another tool at work, so I spent last night improving it’s use as a REPL. Added support for onboard help and setting up custom type printing, which is useful for displaying tables of data. I started working on the tool today and it’s already feeling great.
If there’s one thing I’d like to see added to Go for 2025, it’s type parameter support on methods. It’s still not possible to do something like this:
Which is a real shame, as I’ve got some ideas on how I could use these. Building something like Java streams, for example.
Some more work on that feed reader app. You know how I said that I wanted to hold off looking at appearances? Well, I abandoned that approach when I installed the app on my phone and tried viewing a few articles. And oof! There’s work to be done there.
First, it’s slow. Very slow. It’s taking a good second or two to pull feeds and entries from Feedbin. I was expecting this, and I’ve got a few plans on how to speed this up. But the biggest concern is the janky list scrolling. I mean, I wasn’t expecting the buttery smoothness of iPhone list scrolling, but I expected Flutter to be better than what I was experiencing. I’m hoping that it’s just because I was running a debug build, but part of me fears that Flutter is just not optimised for smooth list scrolling, favouring ease of development and a common runtime. I rather not change frameworks now, especially after spending an evening dealing with all the build issues, but I don’t want to live with this for ever.
But speed is not the biggest issue. The biggest offender was the feed reader view. The embedded web-view was only lightly styled, and it felt like it. The margins were all off, and I didn’t like the default font or colours. It made reading the article a bad experience to a surprising degree. I’ve dealt with rushed or poorly designed UIs in the past, but I didn’t have much tolerance for this. Not sure why this is, but I suspect it’s because I’ve been using feed readers that put some effort into the design of their reader screen.
In any case, a couple of evenings ago, I decided to put some effort into the styling. I replace the body text font with Noto Sans and the fixed-font with Ubuntu Mono. I dropped the font-size a little to 1.05 em (it was previously 1.1 em, with felt a little big, and 1.0 em felt a little small). I bought the margins in a little. And I styled the block-quote, figure, and pre elements to an appearance that, despite being a little overused, felt quite modern.
The results look much better, at least to my eye (and my emulator). Here are some side-to-side comparison shots of the changes (left side is the unstyled version, while the right side has the new styling changes):
I still need to actually install this on my phone and try it out. I’m wondering whether I should do so after a bit more work syncing the read status with Feedbin. That’s a feature that’s keeping me on Feedbin’s PWA for now.
Spent the last few evenings continuing work on a Flutter-based RSS feed reader. This project is now further along then my previous attempts at doing this. I’m at the point where feeds and feeds items are being fetch from Feedbin and displayed in a list view:
The aesthetics are taking a bit of a back seat in favour of functionality for now; I haven’t even changed the default accent colour. But the infrastructure is there: tapping a feed will bring up the entries for that feed. This is using named routes for navigation, and cubits for state management. It’s a bit more work upfront, but it does make for a neater codebase.
The biggest challenge so far was getting the actual reader view working. I hoping to use the webview plugin, but when I tried adding it, I ran into a bunch of Gradle errors. These were either class version errors or dependency errors, depending on what I tried to fix it (I didn’t get screenshots, sorry). I eventually stumbled upon this Flutter Gradle plugin migration guide, and following this, along with upgrading Java to OpenJDK 25, got Gradle working again.
But I was still getting build errors. The first couple were Gradle plugins com.android.application and org.jetbrains.kotlin.android that needed to be updated. Easy stuff. And then I got this error message:
Execution failed for task ':webview_flutter_android:compileDebugJavaWithJavac'.
> Could not resolve all files for configuration ':webview_flutter_android:androidJdkImage'.
> Failed to transform core-for-system-modules.jar to match attributes {artifactType=_internal_android_jdk_image, org.gradle.libraryelements=jar, org.gradle.usage=java-runtime}.
> Execution failed for JdkImageTransform: /Users/leonmika/Library/Android/sdk/platforms/android-34/core-for-system-modules.jar.
> Error while executing process /Users/leonmika/Applications/Android Studio.app/Contents/jbr/Contents/Home/bin/jlink with arguments {--module-path /Users/leonmika/.gradle/caches/8.10.2/transforms/575ccd1a7426c0be21d9fe3a81898be3-05a021da-a1a7-409f-a30a-bba769b57371/transformed/output/temp/jmod --add-modules java.base --output /Users/leonmika/.gradle/caches/8.10.2/transforms/575ccd1a7426c0be21d9fe3a81898be3-05a021da-a1a7-409f-a30a-bba769b57371/transformed/output/jdkImage --disable-plugin system-modules}
Running a web search on the error revealed this Stack Overflow answer, which resolve it. There were still a few complaints about the the NDK version but after all that, the app finally launched with the web-viewer.
I still need to actually render the entry, plus style the HTML a bit. The immediate goal after this, once the reader view, is getting this on my phone to start playing with it. It’s just barebones for now, but I find that the sooner I can start using a project myself, the more likely I am to keep at it.
Oh, it turns out it’s an older style of referencing targets and is no longer supposed to be used. That’s a shame.
Upgraded my work laptop to Sequoia. “Love” the experience that this new version provides, especially the mouse-and-patience exercise I get in the morning. 👎
<img src=“https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/25293/2024/cleanshot-2024-11-26-at-07.30.252x.png" width=“600” height=“541” alt=“Three permission requests stacked up, with the top one displayed asking if an app called “Obsidian” can find devices on local networks, with options to “Don’t Allow” or “Allow”.">
Now this is cool: Hetzner has opened up a region in Singapore. The tyranny of distance is starting to abate.
Now that my 1Password subdomain woes with Android Vivaldi has been tamed, it’s time to turn my attention to Safari:
Building out the meta elements of Cyber Burger, including the “menu du jour” a.k.a. the main menu. I’ve used food-service terms for the menu items to maintain the theme, but there is a button to switch them over to more conventional names should it be too unclear.
Title design this morning. Trying to get as close as I can to the Cyberspace Raceway font as my pixel art skills will allow for.
I finished my experiment with htmgo, building the worlds most inefficient world clock. It uses HTMX swapping to get the time from the server every second.
It’s an interesting framework. Not sure it’s fully ready yet (you can’t change the bind port, for example) but might be useful in the future.
I was poking around Dave Winer’s Software Snacks — a brilliant name for those — and I stumbled across Little Card Editor. Decided to give it a try.
I don’t use Wordpress so this war between Matt Mullenweg and WP Engine is little more than #internet-drama to fuel my amusement. But Matt’s recent actions in this battle have started dragging users into the crossfire, and this is something I absolutely do not like. First by the blocking access to the plugin directory for those using WP Engine, and now by adding childish, your-with-me-or-agents-me UI elements on the wordpress.org login page:
Granted, this looks to be a login form for plugins and forums, not actual blogs. But even so, Matt, is this necessary? You may have had a reason for going after WP Engine for some reason. I have no idea what those reasons are, and quite frankly, I no longer care. You start making changes to things in service of your war, I loose all respect for you.
I may not use Wordpress, but I do use software that’s now owned by Automattic, like Pocketcasts, and seeing this makes me uneasy. What’s to say that these won’t be used in a similar way in the future?
Edit: Part of me wonders now whether this checkbox was added in jest. No evidence to support that apart from seeing various posts on Mastodon (I don’t have evidence to support that it wasn’t added in jest). If so, then I am a fool for taking the bait and getting worked up about this. It is an indication of how vicious this fight looks to me though, where adding such a checkbox would seem like a genuine escalation.
I’ve spent the last week working on a small puzzle game called Coasters, where you presented with two images and a clue, and you need to guess the word or phrase. One puzzle a day, sort of like Wordle. I’ve got 10 puzzles ready to go and I may add more but no promises. Check it out if you like.
I enjoyed reading Kev Quirk’s post about building a simple journal. I’m still using Day One, but I am still thinking of moving off it. So I was inspired to build a prototype similar to Kev’s, just to see if something similar works for me. Built using Go instead of PHP, but it also uses Simple CSS.
Reddit’s decision to allow only Google to index their site will probably mean I’ll be seeing them far less often than I do — which is almost never anyway, and generally from the results of a search. So I’m recording this screenshot, which I call “Reddit in the results”, for posterity.
Edit: Turns out Ecosia sources some of their index from Google, so these Reddit links will likely remain in my searches. I guess that makes this post unnecessary. I’m going to keep it up though, for posterity of my unnecessary effort to post for posterity. 😄
Mark the date. First successful CI/CD run of a Go project running on my own Forgejo instance, running in Hetzner. 🙌
