Entries Tagged - "development"

Aug 07 2024Timewaste Tracker for Reddit & Youtube

It is incredibly easy to waste time. It is particularly sinister that certain corporations are dedicated to distracting me and wasting my time, when it is in fact a limited resource.

I do not need to be spending on Reddit or Youtube, being sucked down random rabbit holes of wholy useless information.

However, blocking them outright is not effective, as often useful information is gated on Reddit, so I’ll disable my blocker then get distracted.

Feb 05 2024Using Tailscale in builds.sr.ht

Using Tailscale inside your builds on sr.ht are a little trickier then you might expect, since it’s done in a way thats counter to how Tailscale outlines the process of using it in CI inside their own docs. I had to learn this the hard way trying to get my own .builds.yml configured for this very blog, as the server it’s hosted on can only be accessed outside of HTTPS via the tailnet, and am now able to pass this knowledge onto you.

Nov 20 2023French Republican Calendar Tools

I believe that in all facets of life, anything taken for granted should be examined. For me, this includes how I think about and interface with time. Since beginning research into this topic a few years ago, the French Republican Calendar has continued to fascinate and delight me, so much so to the point that I use decimal time and the republican calendar as my default method of tracking time in my personal life.

Oct 12 2023Laundry & The Responsibility of Search Engines

I’d like to take you on a journey through the world of scams, laundry, and search engines.

In 2016, Foldimate, a California based startup, showed the world a laundry folding robot - it was the size of a washing machine, with a slot in the top for garments that would be mechanically folded and then passed down into a tidy stack at the bottom.

I watched Foldimate with great interest, for you see, of all the daily chores of life that one must accomplish, folding laundry is the one I hate the most, put off the longest, and have tried to - mostly failing - hack my way out of for decades. I was (and honestly still am) the primary target market of this, frankly, very silly machine.

Aug 22 2023The Death of the Search Engine

In the early days of Google and Yahoo the best hack for getting your website to the top of rankings was Keyword Stuffing. You’d make the font blend in with the background and jam in as many relevant (or in many cases completely irrelevant, depending on your intent) keywords as you possibly could. Your users couldn’t see them, but search engines could, and they’d push you up the rankings, since with so many keywords the website in question must be super relevant to what you’re looking for.

Jul 26 2023Webmentions for Deno

This is a straightforward webmention sending and endpoint discovery implementation. It has a single external dependency, which is Deno DOM. It uses this library to find the webmention endpoint within a page.

Mar 30 2023Super Simple One Time Passwords for Deno

SSTOTP is as simple as it gets for a TOTP implementation. The libary can do the following:

1. Generate TOTP Secrets
2. Generate TOTP Tokens
3. Validate TOTP Tokens

Tokens are valid for 30 seconds, and a step tolerance of two is implemented to account for clock skew.

It has a single standard library dependency, which is base32.

At this time, it is considered feature complete. Generating otpauth:// QR codes is left as an exercise to the reader.

Jan 24 2023Fun with Hyperlocal Data

I’ve been drawn to the idea of having many tiny sensors around my home intermittently collecting data points about all sorts of things - the Lumen measurement of our bedroom at night, the noise of the street below us, the AQI of our kitchen.

This was mostly a pipedream until Pimoroni came out with a series of wireless monitors with all sorts of sensors that use a Raspberry Pi PICO to send the data to an endpoint of your choosing.

Nov 15 2022Mastodon Is Too Heavy for Its Own Good

💀 Warning: This Article Is Poorly Written

With the ongoing collapse of Twitter, there has been a lot of talk about the Fediverse, and primarily Mastodon, which in spite of it probably not wanting to be, is the flagship in the ActivityPub fleet.

I want to preface this by saying that I think Mastodon is really great software from the user side. It’s a very powerful tool and deserves all the credit it gets for it’s UI, it’s filtering features, and it’s very in-depth profile settings.

Aug 18 2022Kaarten - A Paper Journal Supplement

Kaarten is a simple, portable digital system to keep track of your bibliography for your analog notes.

Zettlekasten means “note box”, and is a method for organizing all your thoughts in an organized, retrievable way. If you find such solutions too heavy, try Kaarten - our “deck of cards”.

Methodology

Consider a paper notebook as a write-once, read-often database.

Paper space is limited, so it is pertinent to utilize much of the notebook for frequently referenced information - things like your appointments, thought summaries, or perhaps notes on topics or books you find interesting.

Jun 13 2022Permashortlinks & Cloudflare Webworkers

I’ve been investigating more deeply about Indieweb, namely their idea of a permashortlink - put succinctly, it is inevitable that shortlinking providers will either

1. Fold, or
2. Deprecate underused links.

This means that relying on them - and they are awfully convenient - is a net negative to the longevity of any web content you produce - and we’ve already seen it happen.

The Indieweb solution to this deprecation problem is, of course - to roll your own. Reading the wiki about this raises the same problem I have with a lot of Indieweb content - it’s a wiki clearly written by developers. I don’t think it’s actionable for the average web content consumer - even if they were gunhoe about running their own blog - to roll any of the permashortlink solutions mentioned on the wiki by themselves.

Feb 24 2021The ListenBrainz Widget



A big feature I wanted on this blog was the ability for people to see what music I was listening to right now; and you can see the finished results on the header of this page.

This blog is written in Hugo, which means unlike traditional blog engines, it renders the pages server-side, flat file - no database. These posts are actual MD files.