After following a few Mastodon users, the Micro.blog timeline is beginning to feel like my main social feed. I’m being really conservative in who I follow though. The anxiety that came from consuming Twitter’s timeline is one that I rather not recreate here.
RSS And Tumblr's Quote-Style Posts
Tumblr needs to improve how they generate RSS items. Quote-style posts — in which the post consists of a quote from someone else, followed by a reply by the blog author — show up in my RSS reader with titles consisting of the “quote part” of the post. If the quote is more than just a handful of words, the title dominates the actual body of the item. An example:
I don’t know why Tumblr is generating RSS items this way. I can only imagine that it’s something to do with the mistaken belief that RSS items require titles. But even if that’s the case, has it not cross their minds just how ugly these posts would look in a feed-reader if the quote is more than a sentence long? Could they have done something like truncate the title? Or is it not a priority to them?
In any case, if they do decided to fix this, may I suggest simply adding the quote part within a <blockquote> at the start of the RSS item, while leaving the title unset.
An arguably better reading experience for your RSS audience. Or at the very least, it would look closer to what the post would look like in Tumblr itself.
A Mac with everything you’d want in 1995.
A fully loaded version of System 9 running in your browser. Posted here because I found myself opening and playing around with this over the last few days.
(via. podiboq in the Hemispheric Views Discord)
It’s debatable whether or not frequently posting here has improved my writing. I suspect not so much, given that I mainly write micro-posts here. But I have found myself speaking more clearly than I use to, and I’m wondering if posting here has help that in some small way.
Ok, I’m probably the only person that feels this way, but I not a fan of all the “yearly wrapped” things that apps like Spotify and now Pocketcasts are offering. To me it just shows how much of your listening behaviour that’s being tracked (the degree to which I’m concerned about this varies from app to app). Besides, I’m not sure how much I’d like to know about my revealed listening preferences. I think I’d like to leave some room for “mystery” (read, personal denial) in that domain. 🙂
Playing around with location services in a Flutter app. Pretty straight forward getting something up and working, which is something I like about Flutter, but I wish Dart was a better language. I mean it’s fine, but it’s not a language I can fall in love with.
The weather has been cycling between summer and winter all week. A few days ago it was 33°C and I had the AC on. Today it’s max 18°C and I’ve got the heater on. For someone still recovering from Covid-19, the weather’s not doing any favours.
Two things occurred to me after reading the Stratechery weekly article about ChatGPT.
First, it might be a good time to read Gödel, Escher, Bach again. From my last read of it — which was ages ago — I do remember something about how a (theoretical at the time) advanced AI systems would not have the same level of determinism as a traditional computer. The conversation may feel natural, but it may include factual inaccuracies. This was a theme that seems to run through from the weekly article as well.
Second, I wish I did better at AI in university. It was the only subject that I almost failed at. At the time, once I got over my disappointment, I sort of waved it away with the expectation that AI would not be a predominant part of the software development industry during my career. How wrong I was. 😬
Made a telemedicine call for the first time last night (I caught Covid-19 and developed an ear infection) and I’m quite impressed by how pain-free the whole thing was. Doctor called up, asked a few diagnostic questions, and sent through a perscription via SMS. Whole think took a few minutes.
I wonder if it would work for perscription renewals as well.
And after one last 15 hour flight, I’m back home. And I get to stay home for more than a week. After almost a month living out of my suitcase, I’ve been looking forward to this.
Went on a tour to see the Hoover Dam this morning. What an impressive feat of engineering.
Equally impressive was the bridge where the first shot was taken.
The amusing — and quite frankly, obvious — thing about everyone moving to Mastodon and the Fediverse is that it demonstrates that you don’t need to include a frickin’ blockchain to every system designed to be “distributed.”
🎵 Twenty Four Hours from Café Del Chillia
Effectively intermission music but I have found myself liking it. I do, however, think that with just a few tweaks it could be much better. Changing the base line so that it no longer clashes with the melody, for example.
Follow up to this post about Kindle books that are only available in the US. Apparently it’s not enough to just be in the US, with a suitable IP address. I think you’ll need an actual US postal address. What a shame. This is not a problem with real books. 😞
I think there’s safety in saying that this year’s Microblogvember was tough, what with all the travelling and inability to come up with something decent for the prompt. While it was fun, I think I need the break. Until next year. 👋 #mbnov
I usually eat two or three cans of tuna for lunch a week. And yet, I still don’t really consider myself a fish eater. Why? What needs to change before I can tell myself that yes, I eat fish? Do I have to eat actual fish? Must I eat fish for dinner? What are the rules here? #mbnov
Flight home from the US is next week. I’m hoping for an uneventful trip. The news is not cooperating though. 😏
I use to be quite religious in putting two spaces after a full stop. The only exception was when I’m writing on Micro.blog, since it keeps the character count down. But now, I’ve been noticing this trend extend to other time I need to write in a web browser. #mbnov
Dynamo-Browse Running With iSH
Bit of a fun one today. After thinking about how one could go about setting up a small dev environment on the iPad, I remembered that I actually had iSH installed. I’ve had for a while but I’ve never really used it since I never installed tools that would be particularly useful. Thinking about what tools I could install, I was curious as to whether Dynamo-Browse could run on it. I guess if Dynamo-Browse was a simple CLI tool that does something and produces some output, it wouldn’t be to difficult to achieve this. But I don’t think I’d be exaggerating if I said Dynamo-Browse is a bit more sophisticated than your run-of-the-mill CLI tool. Part of this is finding out not only whether building it was possible, but whether it will run well.
Answering the first question involves determining which build settings to use to actually produce a binary that worked. Dynamo-Browse is a Go app, and Go has some pretty decent cross-compiling facilities so I had no doubt that such settings existed. My first thought was a Darwin ARM binary since that’s the OS and architecture of the iPad. But one of the features of iSH is that it actually converts the binary through a JIT before it runs it. And it turns out, after poking around a few of the included binaries using file, that iSH expects binaries to be ELF 32-bit Linux binaries.
Thus, setting GOOS to linux and GOARCH to 386 will produced a binary that would run in iSH:
GOOS=linux GOARCH=386 go build -o dynamo-browse-linux ./cmd/dynamo-browse/
After uploading it to the iPad using Airdrop and launching in in iSH, success!
So, is runs; but does is run well? Well, sadly no. Loading and scanning the table worked okay, but doing anything in the UI was an exercise in frustration. It takes about two seconds for the key press to be recognised and to move the selected row up or down. I’m not sure what the cause of this is but I suspect it’s the screen redrawing logic. There’s a lot of string manipulation involved which is not the most memory efficient. I’m wondering if building the app using TinyGo would improve things.
But even so, I’m reasonably impress that this worked at all. Whether it will mean that I’ll be using iSH more often for random tools I build remains to be seen, but at least the possibility is there.
Update: While watching a re:Invent session on how a company moved from Intel to ARM, they mentioned a massive hit to performance around a function that calculates the rune length of a Unicode character. This is something that this application is constantly doing in order to layout the elements on the screen. So I’m wondering if this utility function could be the cause of the slowdown.
Update 2: Ok, after thinking about this more, I think the last update makes no sense. For one thing, the binary iSH is running is an Intel one, and although iSH is interpreting it, I can’t imagine the slowdowns here are a result of the compiled binary. For another, both Intel and ARM (M1) builds of Dynamo-Browse work perfectly well on desktops and laptops (at least on MacOS systems). So the reason for the slowdown must be something else.
I heard the best way to get motivated to do something is to say to yourself “do it for five minutes and if it isn’t working out, you can stop.” I’ve tried it and it works. Sure, you may stop, but usually you’ll just carry on with the task. #mbnov