Mattie writes about whatever the heck is on their mind.
Impact Certain dye template expressions would result in execution of arbitrary code. This issue was discovered and fixed by dye's author, and is not known to be exploited. Patches The issue has been patched in version 1.1.1 . Workarounds Do not insert untrusted content into dye template expressions, or do not use dye template expressions. Discussion dye's template support, which debuted in version…
I have not been writing much lately, it's true. It's almost been a full month since I talked about dumping e-Reader cards ! Truth is, I haven't had a lot to say, and/or the thoughts aren't coming together right. But I have been reading. So let me share some stuff with you! Here's a juicy one to start out: Epistemological Fault Lines Between Human and Artificial Intelligence . If you take away…
I discovered something really cool while prepping for the 4-e demo that I'm planning to do at the office this week, and it has totally derailed me from prepping for said demo. It turns out, an issue buried in a project to make an open-source cartridge reader has a reference to a piece of Game Boy Advance homebrew I didn't know existed. It's called "Flash Dumper v6", and it dumps e-Reader cards.…
Is my last post seriously also about 4-e . Well, this one is too now. I made the first few versions of 4-e in text mode because, well, it was a utility. And it was easy to get monospaced text on the screen with Tonc's Text Engine . And it worked ok! But I really did want something a little nicer. So I took some inspiration from the backs of my e-Reader Mario cards and made a new version, learning…
I have been working some more on 4-e , my Game Boy Advance homebrew program that takes the place of an e-Reader (and printing cards for an e-Reader) for Super Mario Advance 4 . 4-e last saw three rapid releases in the middle of 2024, and since then it hasn't really been touched. But, in the near future, I'm planning on doing a lunch at work and talking about building it, so it's been back in my…
I just read another post about someone who's slowly slipping into losing their passion and mourning it and the whole bit. One of the things they said that stood out to me, riiiiight at the end, was The web interface of this blog is vibe coded and I have 0 regrets, I’m not into web dev, especially with the trajectory that it has taken. I just want it to look nice and work at an acceptable rate… So…
Been dusting off 4-e , my Game Boy Advance homebrew program to emulate a Nintendo e-Reader specifically for Super Mario Advance 4 (a.k.a. the GBA version of Super Mario 3), because I want to give some of the programmers I work with a tour through it at lunch maybe next week. It's literally 500-odd lines of code. I could explain every line if I wanted to. But the experience of building it was much…
Of course I'm following the discourse about agents generating software and how it's suddenly really good and programmers are doomed and what not now. Software is my literal job. But also, the chatter keeps butting up against my craft , filling the spaces I used to use to practice it. Maybe it's a programming nerd form of doomscrolling. Anyway, one thing I've read has been sticking with me…
When you set up Fastmail on macOS Mail (colloquially known as "Mail.app"), you can go two ways: Download a configuration profile. Manually configure IMAP and SMTP. I go the second route because it lets me then edit my list of email addresses. I maintain [counting] four now that all go to the same place, so this is important for not confusing some senders. On one Mac, though, this wasn't working…
I mean, sort of. It's running 11ty . And I'll probably talk about 11ty a bit. Starting now. As threatened , I have converted my site to 11ty. I looked at eleventy-base-blog . I learned a bunch, but eventually decided I just wanted this site to be my own. The editing process is marvelous, I say as I write this post. I just hit command + S and viola! My live preview updates. I started this post just…
I know better than to announce a date for this, but like I talked about last week , I have decided to move from Listed to 11ty . In the background, I've been doing a lot of work on this. I posted a sneak peak the other day. I have a big meta post in the works for how this went (and it is so much nicer to write it in vi than in the Standard Notes editor), but there's one really important thing I do…
Like many people in my circles, I recently read Nolan Lawson's We mourn our craft . And I just want to say I am not ready to mourn. The long arc from hobbyist and back again I have been programming since I was five years old. Like a number of kids my age, my parents bought me a home computer—a TI-99/4A , in my case. We got a handful of cartridges for it with games; Parsec is the one I really…
Lucky you. You get two blog posts today. (It's okay. This one is shorter than the other one . And it's meta, so you can ignore it if you hate that shit.) I've been thinking about leaving Listed , the blogging service that comes with Standard Notes . (Now "powered by Proton ". Mo has left. But Proton seems to be working on it, at least.) I've been playing around a bit with 11ty lately, as it's…
I cleaned off a (large) space and moved my Sony PS-LX310BT turntable to my desk yesterday. Previously, I had been listening to it through the soundbar on the entertainment center in my office here. I used the hardwired analog line out and it worked pretty well. It would have been nice to have better speakers, sure. But the whole thing did an alright job. There was no room on top of the…
Have you ever been on Amazon and read a review that said "Amazon Vine Customer Review of Free Product"? Well, one of the customers was me. A couple years back, I picked up some really badly molded replacement styli for one of my Nintendo game systems, and wrote a scathing review, as you do. (There's a reason why so many products have around 5-10% one-star reviews, after all.) And a little box…
I've learned a lot of tricks since the first time I took my Nintendo Switch Pro Controller apart and taped it up to improve its shitty d-pad. Since then, I've cracked open the shells of probably another dozen controllers to tape off contact pads or try to raise pivot points. I've invested many hours in one particular bad pad attached to a popular, if controversially expensive, portable system .…
I dragged my feet until the last day to download all my purchased Kindle books , but I did do it, and validated that yep, with the serial number from my Paperwhite Signature , I can decrypt them in Calibre with DeDRM_tools . Cool. My partner had already jumped ship to Kobo , because they had an ancient Kindle that wasn't getting updates anymore. (They love their Libra, by the way. Buttons !) But…
Since my last post on the subject , I have received confirmation from Apple Accessibility Support that iOS 18.1 has indeed removed the feature to use your audiogram with Headphone Accommodations with not just the AirPods Pro 1 and Lightning AirPods Max that I own, but in fact all models. This feature existed right up through iOS 18.0.1. They have asked me if I'd like to submit feedback that will…
iOS 18.1, and the "clinical grade hearing aid" transformation of AirPods Pro 2 , are just around the corner, but as of today, not yet officially released. For years now, though, I've been able to tune my first-generation AirPods Pro and my Lightning AirPods Max to the hearing test results I got from my audiologist. This allows me to hear music and phone calls in a way that compensates for…
In light of how AirPods Pro 2 (I guess they're "2" now, now "2nd Generation") are about to be "clinical grade hearing aids" , it's worth digging a little bit into the history of the thing. AirPods have been doing some really nice things for those of us with hearing loss for some time. I wrote about it two and half years ago, in fact! In short, we've been able to take the hearing tests from our…
I think it was 2022. 2021? My family doesn't celebrate Christmas in December because it's too difficult to get people together in December. In January, we're all recovering. So we usually end up doing something in February, usually. Whatever year. A white elephant exchange is common. In that year, I ended up taking home the Running Press Bob Ross bobblehead . "Deluxe Mega Kit!" the shiny silver…
gbfs-web has been fixed (and updated a little!). It was my fault, not Chrome's. Chrome wasn't actually shuffling the files around while assembling the Blob that eventually became the ROM with the attached GBFS file—rather, I failed to notice (even though I swear I checked this at least once) that the directory entries were doing a Spiderman and pointing at the wrong files all over the place. The…
Back in June, I wrote a little bit about how I use an old Nintendo DS to dump GBA ROMs as well as dump and restore the save files. I also teased that I had a magical solution using TFTP to use WiFi instead of doing endless SD swaps. Well, thing is, it's not magical. It's actually some of the most imperfect software I've ever worked on, and that's why I haven't released it for fifteen years . I…
Content warning: grief. Also note: if you've been around the fediverse since before 2021, you may have a personal connection to this grief. Of all the half-written or half-formed pieces I've had floating around in recent memory, parts of this particular one have dwelt in that limbo state the longest, I think. I was never quite sure what to say. I just… felt. But on a recent morning's commute, I…
It (currently) says right on my "about me" page that I'm a Muppets nerd, and that is accurate. I grew up with The Muppet Show . I watched the first three Muppet movies over and over and over again as I was growing up. It was a toss-up between Caper and Manhattan for favorite. My uncontested favorite Disney World attraction remains Muppet★Vision 3D . I had a Fozzie plush in my crib and a Kermit…
The Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS homebrew scenes are amazing . Full stop. One of the stars of that particular galaxy I leveraged for 4-e was Damian Yerrick 's GBFS , a set of tools that pack files up into an archive that can then be concatenated onto the end of a ROM, and a library to compile into that ROM that can work with those files. 4-e uses this to let you attach your own set of e-Card…
Super Mario Advance 4 is more than Super Mario Bros. 3 . When this final game of the Super Mario Advance series launched, it of course had Bros. 3 for its main draw. But it also went all-in on Nintendo’s e-Reader , a special cartridge with an optical scanner that could read specially-encoded data on cards that Nintendo distributed. Nintendo published over a hundred cards for Advance 4 . These…
I try not to think too hard about how old the Game Boy Advance is. Back in its heyday, I bought many games for it (the Super Mario Advance series, the Golden Sun series, Rhythm Heaven , anything The Legend of Zelda …) I also dabbled a bit in third-party devices to copy the games’ saves and restore them, as well as copy the games’ ROMs themselves to play them on computers or experiment with them.…
In this post: My experience with the d-pad How I save time and risk opening up my Pocket, including how to avoid having to detach the infamous display cable The solution I used and why it works for me And, as usual, plenty of story time But first! I’m gonna talk about how I take apart my device here. If you do that and you break your stuff, you get to keep both pieces. More clearly: I take…
This post is spoiler-free, as best I can make it. That said, the time to read it might be when you've wrapped up chapter 7 of Xenoblade 2. Last night, I finished Xenoblade 2 . I left a bunch of quests undone, which is a very different place than I'd ended up with Xenoblade . I am not gonna fire it up to find out, but probably 95% of what that game offered me to do, I did. 2 was a different animal.…
With Nintendo shutting down online play for Wii U and 3DS in about a month, and given that I had just finished the absolutely fantastic Xenoblade: Definitive Edition on my Switch, I recently dusted off the ol' Wii U and unsealed (!) the copy of Xenoblade X I had bought way back in… well, looks like 2015, I guess, since I bought the limited edition? It took me four tries to get through the original…
Every year around this time, my ability to enjoy the arrival of spring is severely impacted by the fact that I'm struggling to adjust my circadian rhythm to what we all know is the worst idea we've ever had as a society— daylight saving time , or DST. So, this year, I'm gonna try opting out. I think it's rather telling that I had a plan to do this a few months ago. Then had this persistent…
I got super interested in colorimeters a year or so ago. I have had this 2009 Panasonic plasma TV since, well, 2009. And I've always loved it and it's still going strong. Except it was always kinda enthusiastic about the red. This particular TV gave you no color controls save the "color" (saturation) and "tint" (hue) controls that were basically holdovers from the CRT era. So I was never really…
Do you really qualify as "trans"? Please take this quiz. Does your gender ever misalign with what people proclaimed you were when you were born? If you answered "yes" to question 1, then you qualify! If you wish to call yourself transgender, then congratulations! Here's your membership card. You might not want to show it at the border crossing into Florida. But I really do get the question. It's a…
📢 Update! You can download all of Made in Heights' releases at Kelsey's site . Yes, download MP3s. It's worth it! I was in the car the other day, trying to think of what I wanted to listen to. After revisiting CHVRCHES’ “The Bones of What You Believe” , I found myself in the mood to dig out an old favorite. I've been an Apple Music subscriber since the beginning, when it was mostly famous for…
I recently wrote a new shell library called portable-color . Its job is to colorize shell output, but be much more respectful of the environment it's being executed in than just jamming ANSI color codes (now ECMA-48 ; see "SGR") into stdout. I'll talk more about portable-color itself on another day. Today, what I wanted to do was figure out how to actually install a shell library on my system. You…
It's been a good while since "HD" was acceptable for computer monitors. Thing is, operating system people seem to have not really caught up to this idea. Not even Apple, whose "Retina" branding for HiDPI monitors is dangerously close to becoming generic like Kleenex is for facial tissues. (Who calls them "facial tissues", anyway?) I've also been running Ubuntu Desktop for some things lately, and…
I had been tracking the macOS public beta on my M2 MacBook Pro for a little while in the hopes they were fixing a particularly painful issue with Linux Rosetta support . Because I've experienced some serious pain before running a beta as my daily driver, I opted to run the beta in a partition and leave my production macOS alone. This worked pretty well for a time, but then I decided to clean it…
I've been working on a little project for a few evenings now: folding my old domain and old blog into this one. The old blog was built with a static site generator called Felix Felicis (yeah, it makes me wince now , too). I got to write posts in Markdown , then run a Python program to build all the HTML that I'd then rsync on over to my OpenBSD server hosting zigg.com. Honestly, I might even still…
I recently upgraded my nearly-five-year-old MacBook Pro with one of the shiny new M2-based ones . (I do work with these, so the company I work for contributes toward their cost.) Prior to that, I had the 2018 MacBook Pro. That was the one that had the best version of the worst keyboard . Not content with that, it had another controversy swirling around it—apart from a headphone jack, it only had…
One of my essential macOS apps is George Brocklehurst's Choosy . I maintain Safari as my personal browser (it's convenient, particularly cross-device, and Advanced Data Protection now covers bookmarks too !) and Chrome as my work browser. What Choosy does for me is inject a quick step after clicking links that prompts me to pick one or the other. We also use Miro quite a bit at work, both…
While hunting for white elephant gifts, I came across something really neat. A company called ULUZE (what is with the myriad company name concotions from online sellers?) makes a combination 3x3 cube and LEGO knockoff I had to get for myself. ULUZE's Magic Cube, a 3x3 Rubik's-like cube with LEGO-knockoff 2x2 plates for faces. It's been rearranged so the faces are in checkboard patterns. Okay, so,…
Last August, I wrote a post over at Atomic Spin on calling macOS APIs in Automator workflows . My impetus was to control the amount of space iCloud Drive was taking up on my Macs with smaller disks. I don't know how many people actually read that post, because nobody seemed to notice I didn't actually need to write a Swift script to accomplish the task at hand. Because brctl exists. (Mind you, I'm…
I realized that I have been using the figcaption HTML element incorrectly, when I originally added the photo of a Nazi book burning to my post about Twitter and the pink lists . I was trying something like the following, to get text to land below my images: ! [ An image. ]( http://example.com/image.jpeg ) < figcaption > A caption. </ figcaption > This isn't using figcaption correctly, though. And…
That was an interesting journey. I'd never really invested the time in creating my own really complicated iOS Shortcut from scratch before. The limited debugging options and figuring out how it all worked, step by step by step, reminded me a bit of my early days programming as a kid, bewildered but steadily figuring it out. Okay, but to back up for a minute: my goal was to teach Siri how to record…
I went smart garage door shopping a little while ago. After looking around at the options, I settled on the Chamberlain Smart Garage Control . But wait, Mattie! You're deep, and I mean deep , into the Apple ecosystem. This ain't a HomeKit deal. And I'm in it for good reason. I mean, I was chomping at the bit for my HomePods to get upgraded to audioOS 16.2 so that I could get into Advanced Data…
We live under capitalism, so of course there are eleventy billion ways to play a song, many of which are hoping to get you to commit to subscription fees. All hail the subscription economy! I'm the Apple Music type of consumer, owing in part to my stack of Apple stuff but also because I can upload music to it that isn't in the catalog. (Streaming rights being what they are, this has turned out to…
Content warning: religious hate of queer people, queer self-hatred. Some of this has been a long time coming. Parts can be found in several drafts hiding out in my private notes. Until today, I've been too afraid to say what I need to say. But something I came across gave me a nudge. This poem from Jay Hulme has been making the rounds. (Jay wrote about this , if you're interested in more.) Jesus…
Please enjoy my first shot at embedding images in my Listed blog. The complete set of LEGO Muppet minifigures. I did this using a iOS Shortcut I created, Upload to Imgur . There are other Upload to Imgur Shortcuts, but this one is mine. And this one resizes the image width to 2048px before uploading. I am not 100% convinced I want to stick with Imgur, but for now, it works out. And maybe I can get…
Content warning: violence against queer people in history. Like many people, I've been watching the implosion of Twitter under Space Karen with a mixture of dark humor, relief (that I left when I did), and horror. As time goes on and the likelihood that the company continues to be a going concern rapidly approach nil, the horror is growing. I started looking around for a couple options to try to…