Recent content on An Untitled Blog
In the month of April my car was in the shop three times. It was supposed to be one trip (O2 sensor, emissions, tires), but it wound up being divided into three because of some unavailability on my part and the mechanics’, combined with a slight delay on parts I ordered. Anyway, I got it back and figured I’d be done with that stuff for a bit. Within 24 hours I was jacking it up to see…
Something dawned on me when researching EV trade offs: while more efficient on fuel than gasoline cars, batteries work best between 60-80F (15.6-26.7C), and experience degraded performance below 40F/4.5C or above 85F/29.5C. You know what else works best between 40F and 90F? Me on my motorcycle or ebike. The best times to use an EV also happen to be the times I’d enjoy being on two wheels instead…
In April my car was in the shop three times. It was supposed to be one trip (O2 sensor, evap leak, & tires), but it wound up being divided into three because of some unavailability on my part and the mechanic’s, combined with a delayed shipment. Anyway, I got it back and figured I’d be done with that stuff for a bit. Within 24 hours I was jacking it up to see if a wheel bearing was bad, and…
I’ve written a lot of longer blog posts lately, time to get back into the classic “Nate talks about the thing he just read about and finds neat.” So, without further ado, I just read about NMail (github) - and I think it’s neat. In fact, I think it’s actually one of the most interesting decentralized communication tools I’ve seen in a while. Email is still king…
Update 3/14/2026: I’ve updated the post to reflect that porting Nomadic Identities to Activity Pub is still ongoing. Shoutout to silverpill@mitra.social. Also, less than 24 hours posting this, BlueSky CEO Jay Grabber has stepped down from her roll. A change in leadership may change the state of the platform, which may cause this post to be somewhat inaccurate in the future. Hello, I’m…
Originally, I was drafting this in September, planning on dedicating it to Windows 10 Home becoming EOL. I also figured I’d share a meme that contained something along the following: Instead, however, it’s early 2026, and I feel like a dedication to RAM prices would be a more fitting start: Memes aside, the lightweight laptop - what I’m typing this post on - has a whopping total of 2 GB of ram (1.
So, I guess there goes 2025. I’m a bit late on the wrap up post, though as much as I’d like to blame a cold I’ve been dealing with for a while (lol I wrote that several days ago when drafting, and I’ve still just now gotten around to posting my finished draft), it’s mostly just laziness. All things considered, it’s been a pretty eventful year for myself - namely that I left my job and…
In 2023 Robb Knight started the defaults trend, covering what people used as their default apps for specific purposes. I did a 2023 version, and while I mentioned planning to do a late 2024 version in my 2024 year end wrap up post, I never wound up getting to it. I’ve got a 2025 edition of my default apps below, with changes in bold. PC Tablet Phone Mail Client Proton Web N/A Proton App Mail…
As is customary on my microblogging posts, let’s get us started with an original meme. Also, if you’d like to read my previous Microblogging Protocols compared posts, you can read v1 here and v2 here. It’s been a little over a year since I made my updated microblogging protocols comparison. Since then a few things have happened, and my previous could use some trimming. In the…
Can you tell the difference between the two images above? At first glance, probably not. If you look at them side by side long enough, at least in fullscreen on an HD display, you might notice a little bit of a difference. In one the sky looks an ever so slightly darker shade, and if you look close enough, color shades seem to change in a more blocky structure instead of a more smooth transition.
I was thinking about making a personal update, then saw a post on Joelchrono’s blog about the 10 useless facts about me challenge, so I thought I’d combine both of those into one post. Fairly recently, I left my job to relocate back to my home state of New York, and have been looking for work more locally. I kind of expected work to be a bit hard to come by, and planned accordingly, but that still…
A based design that makes a web that’s true ICANNs and NATs embrace shall be no more Behind a Pi or in the cloud for you We use that tool be I2P or Tor Come join a world of speech that can flow free The words by truths of math they shall be bound A power built right in that’s DHT Identity by key pairs holds its ground IPFS a poggers web design
POV: You’re a professional dev watching me talk about vibe coding: Your browser does not support the video tag. I’m not exactly a stranger to using AI code, parts of nipy-bridge like the part that handles posts based on size was written by Chat GPT via Duck.AI, and I regularly use a Mixtral-Dolphin written bash script to convert files with avifenc. Recently, however, I came across…
This is another one of my posts that’s effectively a few posts crammed together on related topics. Long story short, I started looking into handheld consoles a couple of months back, but in doing so picked up a handheld style controller for mobile instead. I’ve really enjoyed that style of gameing, so I wound up circling back and pre-ordering a handheld from Retroid. In addition to…
Update: Everything worked in hugo’s test environment, but I guess local images in sliders breaks everything for who knows why once I actually published the post. I’m just going to replace some sliders with lists of images you can click on. Before upgrading my phone I heard the Pixel 8a referred to as the “most boring phone ever,” and that seems like a good description of…
Another wild and wacky year is wrapping up, and with it the customary year end wrap up/retrospective. This year I posted a total of 11 posts1, two being update/revised posts and nine standalone posts. My longest post (by far) was my revised microblogging comparison post at 15,411 words2 3, and my shortest was my pickles/sauerkraut recipe post at 722 words (the only post under 1k words). My average…
Like a lot of my posts, this kind of kept growing. Going over my photos I kept finding a bunch of favorites I wanted to share outside just using ones for effects, so now I’ve got a photos page if you want to check them out. You might have played around with AI image generation, getting a little hit of dopamine whenever you get something that looks visually pleasing without actually putting…
Update Oct. 21st: The transcription portion of the post has been updated, what I originally mistook as issues with how the data was formatted was an issue with too many tokens in the transcript I wanted transcribed. At this point we all know how LLMs can generate text, and I’m guessing that everybody reading this knows some relatively lightweight libre LLMs can be installed and run locally.…
In my post about EDC I rambled on about hats for a bit, and a couple weeks ago I decided to try making one myself. I didn’t initially plan on writing a blog post explaining how I did it; however, after having trouble finding a printable pattern, I wound up just winging it, and I figured I’d put my process out there.1 Fur hats are way warmer than just about anything else, and even…
Update: September 20th, 2024: I was incorrect regarding AT’s (BlueSky) inability to fully delete things, the protocol DOES support fully deleting posts from the user’s repo and I’ve updated the post to reflect that. Read more. Big thanks to Ryan for providing the info. Also, on a less important update (in regards to this post’s accuracy) - in keeping tradition with the…
Dropdown: Random notes from drafting Alright, it is April 2nd and I’m typing out the first couple of characters in this document which I can already guess is going to be another long post. I already have tons of posts that I expected to be medium length which ballooned out, so given I know ahead of time it’ll be long who knows how long it will be. Err, well, editing me and you the…
This is sort of a successor to Firefox: A Brink of Their Own Making that I published ~6 months ago, followed by me rambling on about different browsers that I’ve used or decided to check out for this post. This follow-up was largely spurred on by two different things: Manifest v2’s phasing out in standard Chromium and Firefox getting worse. Further, after writing a whole lot and then…
Okay, so I’m not actually sure I would consider myself a data hoarder, but I thought the title was pretty eye catching, and archival is close enough to data hoarding to only be moderately clickbaity. (I actually think I’ve got a pretty well organized and reasonably trimmed home directory). Anyway, I thought I would go over a couple of related topics, specifically my backup strategy,…
What you are reading now is the fourth iteration of this post, which has gone through multiple revisions and re-considerations. It might feel a bit fragmented, but my aim is to provide a comprehensive post covering two related topics. The first part will discuss my experimentation with local LLMs (large language models), and the second will explore my personal philosophy and conclusions on AI.…
I’ve made three long posts about decentralized social media, followed by making a client that works on decentralized social media, so I’ll call all that good for now and talk about making some pickles and sourkraut. And not just canned cucumbers and cabbage, but the actual fermented stuff, which is surprisingly easy to make. So, the lazy way to make Sourkraut: Boil some water on the…
So after two very long posts, one complaining about web browsers and one comparing the three big non-centralized social media protocols, I thought about writing two shorter posts about random things (hats and making sour krout specifically). However, between then and now stuffs happened and I thought I would make an anthology post with three different mini topics I wanted to share. I made a client…
Note: This post is out of date, here’s a more up to date version Update August 5th 2024 I have some good and bad news regarding this post. First, I made two mistakes. AT crawlers are not in fact crawlers, they are called relays. Also, shared inboxes are actually part of the Activity Pub W3C standard as apposed to hacky additions to the protocol by third party servers. I was wrong about…
It is (or was at least) a new year and I thought I would reflect on my 2023 posts and talk about what kind of content I follow. I originally thought about doing this on Dec 31st, but I tend to work pretty slowly on posts so here I am whenever this actually gets finished and goes live. Since June I posted a total of thirteen posts, two of which were more generic updates (a quick first post and a…
Update August 5th 2024 I have been made aware that Firefox for Android no longer includes Google Analytics as part of their app telemetry. It appears it was removed in v80.1.13. At the time I posted this the Exodus page I linked to did list Google Analytics, but according to the page now they updated the page on July 15th and likely removed the tracker information on that date.
Chances are if you’re here it’s through an RSS feed (or an RSS feed bridged to something else), so I probably don’t need to do too much of an introduction. Here’s a quick rundown if you’re unfamiliar. However, today I wanted to talk about RSS (as well as three other means of following content), how I’ve benefited from it, and a small project I started. Just…
I have recently been re-dipping my toes into Nostr (tried it a while back just to experiment with it but never really stuck around), and so far it’s become my preferred microblogging platform. There’s a handful of reasons surrounding that, both in the protocol itself and what’s being built up around it, and I think it has a lot of promise that merits its very quick growth. Today…
This is my second post about searching for a tablet, and a follow-up review of the device I mentioned purchasing in the last post (an MS Surface Go tablet). Aside from the fact I just find it relaxing to write about things that interest or affect me, I hope that this would be useful if you’re considering buying an MS Surface tablet (to run either Win/Linux), or if you’re purchasing a…
Update 11/25: I was made aware that Signal has some proprietary anti-spam code and added the TLDR. A More Technical TLDR I never know how much jargon I should include or how much I should explain, and as long as I’m writing I’m enjoying myself meaning I’ve been all over the place. But here’s a shortened version for those familiar with encryption. A vanilla implementation of…
I ran across a neat trend of sharing your default apps, and a collection of posts doing so. It’s made some interesting reads and I thought I would join in and post my own favorites. My Devices I have three different devices: a PC running Debian, a tablet I just got setup running Debian and a Waydroid container, and a phone running the Graphene fork of Android. PC Tablet Phone 📨 Mail Client…
TLDR, for those looking for less of a novel I did a lot of looking and found a few different options if you’re looking for a tablet and have similar preferences as me. There are custom ROMs for some tablets, though they are somewhat limited in which devices are supported (as well as sometimes limits on features or time in which security updates come in). There’s also the ability to cut…
11/03/2023 Update: I fixed some grammar, and Google just announced they’re going to stop the implementation of WEI (hopefully permanently, but they may just be trying to outwait bad publicity and anti-trust actions - only time will tell). If you read my first post here you probably got the idea I have strong feelings about recent versions of Windows, and you wouldn’t be wrong.…
I count myself lucky to live in a pretty stable and safe part of the world. The last three years or so might have been slightly less so, but still in the scheme of things I certainly haven’t seen the worst of it. But hey, this year is as good of any to think about useful ways to utilize your electronics, specifically your phone, if the power goes out or something similar happens.
TLDR Even though it’s only been three months since I created my blog here, I’m going to change the domain from www.mecca1.net to nate.mecca1.net instead. Nothing’s should break, www.mecca1.net will forward to nate.mecca1.net for now. Still, if you’re following me through RSS or you have my site bookmarked it might be worth swapping out the URL. Longer Update My domain…
IPFS, an acronym for “InterPlanetary File System”, is a way to deliver files that takes a different approach to HTTP. As I mentioned in my very first post, I originally considered hosting my entire site/blog on it, and while I decided against it for reasons I mentioned there and reasons I’ll get into later here; I am working on something that may involve me sharing files here,…
I never have had a good track record with massive changes to Windows, starting with Windows 8 which was entirely unusable in my case. It wasn’t just the mobile-style graphics and the bloat, but also the fact I couldn’t get more than a couple of days before the installation would break. This went on for a while as I tried to figure out why it was breaking, and I probably went through dozens…
I think I’m going to start a blog here. I got this domain with some DNS records just collecting dust, and have an interest in writing stuff casually. I figure I’ll write about projects I work on or opinions about things in my field whenever something interests me enough to talk about it. I probably won’t write too much about myself personally though, if you’re reading this…