Okay, so apparently I held out for exactly 1 hour and 15 minutes, as I’ve just opened a Bluesky account1. The reason is that some old Twitter accounts have moved over there instead of Mastodon. I get a lot of enjoyment from those accounts and it’s good to see them still posting.
I do wonder where they moved their old Twitter archive. A tweet of theirs I linked to as a shortcode broke this blog for a time when they deactivated their Twitter account. I do hope they either POSSE or PESOS with a domain they control so I can fix it (they’re so close: they’re using a domain for their handle, all they need to do is setup a website).
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All posts on Bluesky and Mastodon go through here first so you don’t need to follow me there if you follow me anywhere else. ↩︎
Wondering if I should open a Bluesky account. Do I need another service to look at every day? Am I desparate enough for “moar reederz” to set up another POSSE channel? It’s tempting. Will hold off for now, but who knows how long I’ll be able to maintain my willpower.
Someone at work found this blog. Apparently they found a link to it on LinkedIn. Probably should get that fixed. 😜
(Hi, K.K. 👋)
Behind the MAS.
I was not expecting tense to be a stumbling block with writing design proposals that’ll eventually become documentation. I’ve been catching myself writing in the future tense — “this service will do this” — instead of the present tense — “this service does this.” This is probably a habit I formed while writing design proposals to be reviewed, only to leave them be forgotten once they’re approved.
I’m trying to avoid that here, and although the use of present tense instead of future tense might seem like a small thing, I think it’s a very important one. Once the design is approved and realised, what will be will eventually become what is, and I want to make sure the reader gets that, and keeps it up to that when the design changes. Using the wrong tense here would just signal to the reader that the document is just a proposal and is no longer relevant. And when that happens, it’ll never get looked at again.
🔗 How to deactivate your X account
Finally got around to deleting my Twitter account. I’ve seen others do likewise, yet many say they’re “deleting” their account and the only option in Twitter’s Settings is “deactivate”. So I was unsure if they were one and the same. Looks like they are.
So, walking from the station to the only cafe that’s open to pick up a coffee before my train arrives is about a 5 minute round trip. This assumes the barista is ready and there are no customers in front. So, let’s say it’s safe to go when the earlier train has just left the station.
It’s such a romantic idea to think that they’ll always be a customer or product manager available to me to answer all my business rules questions. Would love that to actually be the case. 😕⁉️
I’ll never understand Go developers who insist on using pointers to represent a lack of something, where a zero value would work just as well. Better even, as you wouldn’t need to dereference things or worry about nil-pointer panics. Remember, don’t fear the zero value.
It only just occurred to me that I can turn off “Use ⌘+Scroll to Zoom Page” in Vivaldi to compensate for the Magic Mouse’s incessant need to scroll while I’m trying to Cmd+Click a link.
I still dislike the mouse, but hopefully with this off, the urge to throw it out the window will be diminished.
Cropping A "Horizontal" PocketCast Clip To An Actual Horizontal Video
Finally fixed the issue I was having with my ffmpeg incantation to crop a PocketCast clip. When I was uploading the clip to Micro.blog, the video wasn’t showing up. The audio was fine, but all I got for the visuals was a blank void1.
For those that are unaware, clips from PocketCast are always generated as vertical videos. You can change how the artwork is presented between vertical, horizontal, or square; but that doesn’t change the dimensions of the video itself. It just centers it in a vertical video geared towards TikTok, or whatever the equivalent clones are.
This, I did not care for. So I wanted to find a way to crop the videos to dimensions I find more reasonable (read: horizontal).
Here’s the ffmpeg command I’m using to do so. This takes a video of the “horizontal” PocketCast clip type and basically does a crop at the centre to produce a video with the 16:9 aspect ratio. This post shows how the cropped video turns out.
ffmpeg -i <in-file> \
-vf "crop=iw:iw*9/16:(iw-ow)/2:(ih-oh)/2, scale=640:360" \
-vcodec libx264 -c:a copy <out-file>
Anyway, back to the issue I was having. I suspect the cause was that the crop was producing a video with an uneven width. When I upload the cropped video to Micro.blog, I’ve saw in the logs that Micro.blog was downscaling video to a height of 360. This was using a version of the command that didn’t have the scale filter, and the original clip was 1920 x 1080. If you downscale it while maintaining the original 15:9 aspect ratio, the new dimensions should be 640 x 360. But for some reason, the actual width of the cropped video was 639 instead.
I’m not sure if this was the actual problem. I had no trouble playing the odd-width video in QuickTime. The only hint I had that this might be a problem was when I tried downscaling in ffmpeg myself, and ffmpeg threw up an error complaining that the width was not divisible by two. After forcing the video size to 640 x 360, and uploading it to Micro.blog, the video started coming through again. So there might be something there.
Anyway, it’s working now. And with everything involving ffmpeg, once you get something working, you never touch it again. 😄
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Not that there’s much to see. It’s just the podcast artwork. Not even a rendered scrubber. ↩︎
This might be a good one for me to return to from time to time.
Also, hat tip to the “postrolls” which led me to the previously linked item. I’ve been enjoying these two over the last few days:
I’ll post any more that I find. 🔗
Love this post by Mike Grindle, especially this line:
To me, it shows what happens when you regularly write, publish, share and hyperlink into the void that is the web: the void speaks back.
Similar things happen to me from time to time, and when I find it, it’s always a bit of a thrill. I don’t expect the ripples that are the posts on this site to reflect back, but it’s wonderful when they do.
Removing personal identifying information from logs is a laudable goal, but it does make troubleshooting issues in prod rather difficult.
A recurring element of my dreams is an unmaintained railway line. The infrastructure is falling apart, yet it’s still an important connection and trains occasionally do use it. I usually approach it at level crossings and in past dreams I’ve not once saw a train. Last night, I almost got hit by one.
If anyone’s interested in the history of Melbourne transport, I can recommend this YouTube channel. He has a few videos on the “forgotten freeways” — freeways planned in the 1960’s that never got built — that I found quite interesting. 📺
Every single dog I’ve met is an optimist. Not once have I seen a dog around someone with food, and that dog be like, “no point begging for that. That food ain’t coming my way.”
I also decided to put the documentation “on-board”, as opposed to putting it on the web. Yes, it breaks from what was typical during the 8-bit gaming period, but I’ve got the space, and it makes adding illustrations easier.
Also forces me to keep it brief, which is no bad thing.
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.
