From trash we came, to trash we shall return
Being able to migrate our data freely between open platforms is all well and good in theory, but when every service uses its own opinionated data format, it can feel like the option might as well not even be there. What good is all this data if no two sites speak the same language? Well, here's one translation. I don't figure the number of people in need of this guide is very large, but if you're…
⚠️ This blog is moving! In the future it will be available at https://mattbee.zone/blog . The feed is located at https://mattbee.zone/rss.xml . Please update your bookmarks and subscriptions appropriately. As of May 1 2025, posts will cease syndication here. Most of my creative energy for the past few days has gone into my website . I'm really happy with how it's coming along. My goal was a design…
⚠️ This blog is moving! In the future it will be available at https://mattbee.zone/blog . The feed is located at https://mattbee.zone/rss.xml . Please update your bookmarks and subscriptions appropriately. Posts will syndicate here until further notice. Learning about bash and working on whirltube has got me feeling the programming itch again, and I'm not sure what to do with it. Part of me wants…
⚠️ This blog is moving! In the future it will be available at https://mattbee.zone/blog . The feed is located at https://mattbee.zone/rss.xml . Please update your bookmarks and subscriptions appropriately. Posts will syndicate here until further notice. Today on my lunch break 5K, 1 I decided to stop at a gas station, one of a small handful of stores within a 30-minute radius of work, to get…
Getting a new computer at work has made me realize the extent to which I've lost my ability to focus. When I had to wait seconds or minutes for every action to complete, it was real easy to futz around on my phone while I waited. I couldn't get into a flow state anyway, so I didn't have a good reason not to. Now that I have a computer that works, I've realized just how dependent my brain had…
At the risk of sounding entitled, I'm pretty disappointed that a video I've been anticipating for two years is about L.A. Noire . My favorite ABRs are the deep dives into Japanese games I'm totally unfamiliar with, and Action Button takes on the classics. They're not my favorite, but it can also be interesting to see his perspective on the state of modern games. L.A. Noire came out in 2011, which…
Whirltube is the successor to voda ( v ideo o n d emand a ssistant), a QB64 program I made to interface with youtube-dl on Windows. I was correct about bash syntax being annoying--double brackets? Mandatory white space? Weird equality symbols? "fi"? Ugh --but I made a program. #!/usr/bin/env bash #requires: yt-dlp, ffmpeg, VLC ans = 0 while [[ $ans -lt 1 || $ans -gt 3 ]] ; do clear echo "whirltube…
Update to Can't Work : shortly after that post, I sent my boss an email explaining the situation and asking if they could get me a new computer (the worst they can say is no) or, barring that, change the scheduled Windows Defender scan to happen in the evenings, when it can't interrupt my work. I didn't think the former would happen, but I figured the latter was a sensible request that would make…
Sorry, didn't want to write about linux again but I've been thinking about the last post . After I slept on it, I realized it was not up to my standards of accuracy. First, I made a lot of assertions about what the "average computer user" wants, and I realized crumble-to-dustedly that my assumptions are at least 10 or 15 years out of date. What the average computer user wants in 2025 is phones and…
My Linux rant has generated more feedback than anything I've written here. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, it's a subject a lot of people in my circles feel passionately about. What is a little surprising is how civil everyone's been: my approach to linux is a bit, shall we say, unorthodox, and I expected some heated comments about my intelligence and perceived naïvete; with one or two…