Updates and thoughts from the wide world of Cthos.
The title pretty much says it all! I've got a Novella (really, it's five short stories in a novella format that are directly related to one another) out now at The Arcanist: The Weight of a Torch . Three of the stories are available on the Arcanist's website if you'd like to get a feel for the Dark Fantasy vibe. If it's your jam I'd love honest reviews on Goodreads or the Amazon page.
Shutterstock #2041259501 and Asahi Logo Over on Mastodon I mentioned, offhand, that I'd been daily driving (meaning, using daily but not as my primary machine) Asahi on a Macbook Air M2 (15") and some folks were curious what kind of experience I was getting with it. So, instead of making a giant thread, I figured I should blog about it instead given just how behind I am on blogging. Plus, most of…
So, I've been watching a bunch of folks whom otherwise have reasonable takes about LLMs who, under very specific circumstances, have extremely weird takes about how much an LLM is helping them do a thing, and their internal justifications for them. This isn't about anyone specific; for each of these points, I've seen variations of these from more than one person in every case. But they're…
Shutterstock #1956259915 In an ongoing series of my disappointment with this AI bubble, Mozilla has gone all-in on the AI Hype Train . Their thesis is dodgy, it's basically the "if we don't build AI into our browser, the evil big corporations will be left unchecked". Right. Okay. It's worth noting that this extends on their idea of "Responsible AI" from a white paper they published in 2020. 😈 If…
breakermaximus @ Shutterstock #1832963167 😈 While this is a post about Big tech, it's also an indictment of privately run social commons in general. So, prep for that. This is a cross-site blog post, the other half is on Cthonic Studios . I'm sure you've noticed the trend, if you're even marginally online. Facebook is flooded with Generative AI bots, vying for views and clicks of the few human…
A garbage fire seemed like an appropriate cover image. konstantinos69 @ Shutterstock #1442040206 This is going to be a rant. It'll hopefully be very short, but no promises. Since LLMs became a thing it feels like all the firms that are shoving them into everything have completely given up on the veneer that “asking the customer if they want a thing” is something they should even consider. I'm not…
😈 Don't mind the messy desk... Turns out Universal Blue Aurora works great on a Chuwi Minibook X, with only minor issues! But, let’s back up - what’s a Chuwi Minibook X, and why did you get one and put Linux on it? Introducing the Chuwi Minibook X Permalink to “Introducing the Chuwi Minibook X” # The Minibook X is a very small laptop with a hinged touchscreen display that’s reiminiscent of…
Welcome to the last post in my end-of-2024 Auth series. This post covers the "other" stuff that I didn't cover in the previous 4 posts. It's mostly just the fun wrap up post to hit some things you probably won't need to know about but might want to know more about. The Other Stuff! Permalink to “The Other Stuff!” # So, here's the list: OIDC/OAuth other flows (M2M and Device Pin) Certificate/Ticket…
I'm apparently obliged to tell you: The passkey icon is a trademark of FIDO Alliance, Inc Here we are again! This time we're going to talk about one of my favorite subsets of this topic: Passkeys. You should mentally prepare yourself for this, it's going to be a lot of information and a fair amount of it is dense. I'll be using information from my other post on Passkeys so you don't need to read…
Right! Welcome back to the third post in the Authentication Post series and this time we're going to talk about single sign on (SSO) and other federated identity protocols. I'll try to keep this post under the word count of the previous two, but like many auth things… this could be a lengthy topic. SSO: Why and History Permalink to “SSO: Why and History” # In the previous posts in the series we…
Welcome to part 2 of the rambling journey through how to do authentication systems yourself (or at least understand how they work). This time it's an extension of part 1, where we learned how to do Username and Password Authentication . It's a topic that's pretty closely attached to that "now that I can log users in, what can I do to make their account resistant to nefarious multidimensional…
Hello and welcome to the first part of a multipart post series where I'll dig through the depths of authentication knowledge and share all of that with you, including some deep lore of how we got from the early days of the internet to today (though, I'm a millennial, so I wasn't exactly a web professional back then. Neopets all the way). 😈 This guide is targeted primarily at web developers who…
Design by me, affinity designer. I spent 4 minutes on it. I'll do better next time. Hey there friends, I've decided to do something outside of my normal one-off posts and talk about something near and dear to me. Authentication. What can I say, it's a passion . What's the point of this series? Permalink to “What's the point of this series?” # I was inspired to write this series by Mayank on…
Shutterstock #2298461049 by One Photo I've been blogging a lot the last couple of weeks across both 11ty and Ghost, and it's no secret that I really like Ghost's authoring experience. I'd love to replicate that in a static site, and get a little closer to functionality parity, but I'm still searching for a great way to do this. 😈 Sidebar, I love everything about that stock photo. Not only is it a…
I've always wanted to travel the slow way across the country, taking a train somewhere overnight. Watching the scenery go by the window when I'm in no particular hurry to get anywhere. I had the opportunity to do just that this past week riding on the Amtrak Coast Starlight down to LA to visit the in-laws. Obstensibly, I can call this a research trip, as my in-progress TTRPG Nix Noctis (working…
I run two separate blogs which I post to regularly (well, for this blog semi-regularly): This site ( https://alextheward.com ) and my TTRPG / LLC blog Cthonic Studios . AlextheWard is running 11ty hosted on Netlify while Cthonic Studios is running Ghost hosted on a VPS that I rent from one of several hosting providers. 😈 Really, I use Hetzner for a lot of things, but I've also got stuff floating…
As the world hurtles more towards shoving Generative AI into absolutely everything to make investors happy, I've been looking more into hardware sustainability and the viability of running things for longer (especially if they don't try to bake generative AI right into the operating system). Something that's been chewing at the back of my brain for a while is the 11" Macbook Air. The form factor…
About 10 years ago, I got up on a stage to give a lightning talk about self-driving cars. If you want to relive that person I was, it’s still up on Youtube (and my talks page, so I can’t be accused of hiding stuff). Here’s an embed: Now, the idealistic person I was in that talk made a fair number of points that I still generally believe: Dedicating a ton of space to cars that are not in active use…
This is a follow-up post to Putting Bluefin on a Surface Go In my quest to put Linux on absolutely everything that used to run Windows that I can, I’ve already moved my Framework 13 over to Bazzite, my Surface Go to Aurora, and now the Aya Neo Air over to ChimeraOS. Things are going well-ish. So, for the Air, there are a couple of options - I could have tried to put Bazzite on it but so far no one…
tl;dr I’m no longer recommending Proton services to anyone and have moved off to other services. Right, so up until recently I was a happy Proton customer at the annual unlimited tier. They were missing some convenience features and the integration of a document editor into the Drive product was pretty great. That is, until they decided to shove an LLM into their core product and upend their…
Right, so here we are again, just another step in my journey to find a way to opt out of all the “shove generative AI into everything” trend in my personal life. In my last post on the Apple Intelligence announcement, I ended on a note of “well, I guess I’ll just not upgrade”. That’s a viable strategy for a while (which I intend to make use of for as long as I can), but in the long term it might…
So, since Microsoft decided to shove AI into everything , destroying what little trust I had left in them in the process, I’ve been giving Linux another go! Now, disclaimers first, I’m still primarily in the Apple ecosystem. All my Cthonic Studios work is done on Macs (and this is partly for software reasons, which I’ll get into in a future post), and I have some Windows Gaming Handhelds (also…
Update June 17th, 2024 - Ed Zitron has a pretty great take on this where in he argues that the ChatGPT integration is a mere footnote and it doesn't seem like Apple thinks it's going to be useful. Well here we are again. Yet another giant company has decided to put Generative AI front and center, embedding it inside the operating system. I'm starting to think this is the most cursed timeline…
80's Child @ Shutterstock #1235192320 …and you should disable it. Or not buy a Copilot+ PC. I’m going to cite every source I’ve got on this, the story out of Microsoft is changing and being “clarified” as this goes on, so I’ll do my best to keep this updated and as accurate as possible. Update - October 15th, 2024 : It's baaaack. Microsoft details security/privacy overhaul for Windows Recall ahead…
The International Symposium on Making Web Sites Real good is now over and I watched it live. All of the talks are watchable up on Youtube . Overall I really enjoyed all of the talks, especially the ones that made me think a lot more about what the internet is about. The whole conference is well worth watching, but I'm just going to call out a few big highlights that I especially enjoyed. Here's…
Owlie Productions @ Shutterstock #2372381633 Update 7-13-24 : The tl;dr of this post is "You shouldn't use these, it's not worth it", in case that's unclear. What happens when you get an extreme “GenAI Skeptic” and shove him in front of an LLM coding assistant? This, turns out. This is a follow up on my last post, which was an epic rant about Generative AI . In that, I mentioned that while I’m…
Lidiia Lohinova @ Shutterstock #2425460383 Also known as the “Plausible Sentence Generator” and “Art Approximator” This post is only about Generative AI. There are plenty of other Machine Learning models, and some of them are really useful, we’re not talking about those today. I feel like every single day I see some new startup or post about how Generative AI is the future of everything and how…
Andrey Suslov @ Shutterstock #1199480788 We've got a problem decades in the making Permalink to “We've got a problem decades in the making” # Not too long ago Anil Dash wrote a piece for Rolling Stone titled “The Internet Is About To Get Weird Again” and it’s been living rent free in my mind ever since I read it. As the weeks drag on, more and more content is being slurped up by the big tech…
Kit8.net @ Shutterstock #1498637465 The other day, a friend asked me a complicated question wrapped in what seems like a simple question: “How long would it take to make some simple mini-games that you could slap on a web page?” My answer, as many seasoned developers will be familiar with (and of course it’s coming out of the architect’s mouth) was “It depends on the game and the developer. I…
Update: 04-26-24 - whooboy, so apparently I've missed some marketing nonsense around Passkeys. At some point, someone decided that Passkey === Resident Key and that apparently stuck? I wasn't aware of that, but I'm gonna link to a technical blog here where you can read more about the chaos. As a result, this means the information below is a little...weird? Like, it's all still accurate except…
I've made a new review about the Asus ROG Ally over in the reviews section, but due to an artifact of how I set up the RSS feed, you won't know about it unless I make a stub here. So! Here's the stub.
So! The time has come once again to rework the blog. I'll be doing a lot more writing in a couple of different places. First off, for what I'll be working on professionally, head on over to this Cthonic Studios Post where I outline several of the TTRPG and Software projects I'll be doing in 2024 (I'm super excited about all of this). Cthonicstudios.com is where I'll be doing all of my…
tl;dr - If you're most people, get a Steam Deck. If you've got similar use cases to me Ayaneo 2 might be for you. I don't think I've ever posted about this before, but I wanted to take a bit of time to talk about one of my pretty-obvious hobbies. Despite having way too many side projects, and working too many hours in the week, I still like to try and find some time to play video games. After…
Just a quick note for the blog that I've added a self-hosted copy of Plausible analytics. Privacy friendly, only going to me to understand visitor statistics. Installation was simple, and I'll keep y'all apprised on how well it goes.
So I've added 3 new earbuds to my Earbuds Review Page : Anker Soundcore Space A40, Anker Soundcore VR P10, and Apple Airpods Pro v2. I've finally also written the write-ups for the other buds on the list that were missing. Hope the info in there is useful for you. As always, the thoughts in there are my opinions, and they're all super subjective so your mileage may vary.
I've fallen down a super deep Fediverse rabbit hole. It feels kinda like for the first time I can play around with stuff and not have my Extra Life videos just living on Twitch or Youtube. As a result, I've put up my own PeerTube instance up on vid.cthos.dev and am slowly moving the Extra Life videos there. They're going to stay up on Youtube as well, but here's a much better place to move things.…
So thanks to the RSS Plugin for 11ty I now have these posts available via RSS! The feed is linked in the footer and is available at /feed.xml . I intend to do the same thing to the reviews page just as soon as I finish up my headphone reviews page. Which I'll definitely do, one of these days....
Today I'm happy to reveal something I've been working on for the past month or so: an Icon Pack specifically for Old School Revival RPGs! This is something I've wanted to learn how to do for a while now, and I've been working on another OSR type project (which I'm hoping to reveal soon) and found myself looking for icon packs that I could use for dungeon maps. There were several candidates, but I…
I ran across something while working on updating Stencil tests to use puppeteer, and figured I'd put it down to paper while I'm thinking about it. In order to run puppeteer tests, a browser needs to be present. Now, you could probably install headless chrome in the linux subsystem (and also install a window manager because evidently puppeteer needs that in order to do some of the tests) - but that…
Hey there! Long time no see. I've been super busy doing stuff that isn't working on my personal site that I've not had any time to update it whatsoever. But since it's the holiday season and I have some time, I figured I'd rewrite it in Eleventy . Turns out it was super easy to convert from Metalsmith to Eleventy, thanks to the static blog starter. It did a huge amount of the work for me. Over the…
So! I've not actually posted about this, but I've launched a small iOS app GW2 Assistant . Since then, we've had some issues with the local cache never clearing and the app not updating data. Because of those issues and the fact that Ionic 3 is hitting beta shelves, I'm in the process of completely rewriting the whole thing. This time, we're using redux to pass information around and persist - and…
Metalsmith Rework Permalink to “Metalsmith Rework” # I recently got the bug to try something new and run my site using a static site generator instead of Drupal. There are several reasons: I wasn't really using any of the features of Drupal, and having a static site committed somewhere made more sense. I've been writing more and more JS things, and since PHP is my day job I thought it'd be nice to…
What's all this then? Permalink to “What's all this then?” # I had a bit of free time this afternoon, and decided I should take a moment to talk about one of my favorite things: Markdown. In the post, I'd like to talk about what I've been using Markdown for and a few of the services and tools I've been looking at and using. Hopefully it'll be useful! Markdown is awesome Permalink to “Markdown is…
So it has been a while since I first talked about creating amandaharlin_v2 , and I figured it was time for an update.I originally spun up _v2 on Digital Ocean (which is what is hosting this blog), and everything worked out pretty well. However, this left some things to be desired, as I was the only one in control of the server, and since I wasn't using any kind of node process manager. If irc…
Today while I was talking in #techlahoma, the topic of chatbots came up. Being something of a chat bot connoisseur, I (with @amandaharlin 's blessing) have set out to tell you how to get your very own hubot up and running on IRC. First, let's talk briefly about my chat bot history. I've written a Python chat bot from scratch to connect with an XMPP server. His name was kittenbot, and he was…
I recently decided to get an IRC server up and running to see how complicated it would be compared to installing ejabberd. After looking through some of the packages available on Ubuntu through the standard repositories. I wanted to have Nickserv and Chanserv running, so I was hoping to get something with services included. Originally, I tried ircd2, but I didn't find a decent services package…
So, I was working on getting a particular view which rattles off a list of categories working to link off to another view that has a Contextual Filter on said category field to list off all matching content items with said value in the field. Similar to Taxonomy terms, but being linked from a select dropdown. I was using the output as link option, with a replacement filter to put the value of the…
Just a very quick note, as I had to do a bit of hunting to find where the heck Aegir was generating my virtualhosts for all of the domains I was managing through it. By default it is located in /var/aegir/config/server_master/apache/vhost.d/ , where that server_master part might change depending on what host you're modifying (if you're in a complex hosting situation, for example). This comes in…
Yesterday, during a conversation with my coworkers on how Dependency Injection works with the Service Locator pattern , we were talking through what would happen with cyclical dependencies. Basically, what would happen if you told a Service locator to load a dependency for one class, and that class had a dependency for the class that was originally calling the Service Locator. This would cause an…
My last post was about using ab and jmeter to get some performance benchmarks on a website. Now, I figure I should probably mention how to profile your application to look for memory leaks, bad calls, and what portion of the code is taking the most amount of time. First thing to do is get xdebug installed. There are several ways to go about this, the easiest being using a package manager to do the…