Pawfed
I’m a generally a fan of anything fediverse, but Pawfed looks like it might be my favorite thing, tracking animal welfare locations using OpenStreetMap and social media reports. I’ve started adding cat cafes (featuring adoptions).
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SpamBuddy
I found IconBuddy convenient for finding icons and downloading them in the desired size, but after a while I became concerned that the advertised open source license didn’t always match what I found on the original icon repo, which is something I don’t want to be careless about. Plus the site brags about crediting the original icon providers which isn’t something to brag about,…
New Year, New Resume
I abandoned my frankenstein resume site built with deno, fedify, and modified resume-json schema (I had a vision of a fediverse portfolio site) and went retro, starting from scratch with a Gauche Scheme script converting the JSON to basic HTML ( Gauche has some nice JSON and HTML support) and styling with basic CSS. The key word is basic, going back to basics!
Back on Itch.io
I’m a fan of itch.io but left in a huff a while ago because the forum was polluted with juvenile (in at least one case literally, I think one of the offenders was a teenager) racist and homophobic posts, so whenever I checked the Latest feed it was an entire thread of “Why is this site 99% gay” and dozens of “Re: Why is this site 99% gay”. A moderator apologized to me…
Buy HyperBowl, Because I'm Not Selling Anything Else
A neat feature of the Blowfish theme I’m using for these websites is the built-in Buy Me a Coffee widget. It works (someone kindly donated fifty dollars recently), but if you want chip in for my expenses (e.g. my annual Apple developer renewal fee which alas contributes to Apple’s political bribery slush fund i.e. Tim Cook’s salary) and have a Steam account, I recommend buying…
Turning European
My static sites on render.com have been dropping offline one by one, well actually one then a whole bunch. Seems to be some SSL thing but it’s easier to just move than debug and a good reason to try something else (especially since render started requiring me to add a credit card even for free hosting).
What I'm Using
Last year was a huge disappointment outside of anything I’ve done or failed to do, so I don’t feel like a doing a year in review. But I’m fairly satisified with my IT setup right now, which has at least a decreasing entanglement with Vichy Tech .
Money for Nothing, Apps for Free
This hurts me more than it hurts them, but I’m making my apps on the App Store free rather than contribute to Tim Cook’s salary. I still have a $.99 income stream on Steam, so come on, Steamers!
On Codeberg
Eagle-eyed readers of this blog may notice the Codeberg icon on this site. A social media acquaintance from a few years ago told me he was moving from GitHub to Gitlab because of owner Microsoft’s practices, and finally, what with Copilot and Microsoft’s AI head talking about fair use like a teen operating a pirate site, I’m packing up my bags, starting with the open source…
On Deno
If you’ve been wondering why this blog hasn’t been updated since December (probably not), it’s because it got into an unupdateable state on render.com, maybe because I crammed too many assets (photos) into it.
Bookwyrm
As part of my move to the Fediverse, I joined bookwyrm as my goodreads replacement. It basically works the same, with the exception of being on the fediverse and not owned by Amazon. It’s a bit more work finding books, the search is spotty and often you’ll have to choose an edition to import or select among variations of the same book, but it does the job, you can track the books…
Test2Treat
Well, I had a good run, but covid caught up with me. Tested positive after getting a sore throat (and after running through the entire lot of free federal inteliswabs - four test kits is not enough). I called the local urgent care center, which advised me to isolate for five days and mask for another five, but then I saw test2treat , an NIH/UMass funded study on telemedicine which offers free…
Weller Book Works
Salt Lake City is a great bookstore city, with half a dozen nice indie bookstores. I didn’t know that when I moved here, but I did make sure there was one good bookstore and that was Weller Book Works , which has the nicest bookshelf layout.
Downtown Midvale
I’m still figuring out the freeways around Salt Lake City, so when I assumed the left lane would merge onto the interstate, instead it dumped me into Midvale. I parked downtown, checked out the street art, and stopped at Tres Gatos Coffee.
Kissinger
With the passing of Kissinger, I just want to note that I made a note of his war crimes in my dim sum app
Grateful for Kdrama
Just posted this on a “What are you grateful to k-dramas for?” thread on Dramabeans I’m grateful k-drama was there via Hulu and Dramafever (RIP) when I stopped paying for cable to save money.
Fedicat on Testflight
Fedicat is now on Testflight . Still plenty to work on (like notifications) but I think it browses nice.
HTML2Markdown
After the latest tweak to the not-really HTML parser in my fediverse app (it does use the SwiftSoup HTML parser but just to extract plain text and relies on a bunch of pre and post-processing hacks to look OK), I decided it was time to have a real HTML-to-markdown converter.
Logan's Run for Something
It’s nice they’re funding progressive campaigns, but my first impression of Run for Something some years ago was that it oozed Bay Area tech millennial self-adulation, going on and on about supporting young, diverse (excluding the not young), and progressive (as long as you’re young) candidates. They had some fine print specifying an age limit (I think it was 35) and a weak…
Navajo Hogan
I already miss the food scene in South Salt Lake. Aside from the Chinatown area there is a diversity of food - Indian, Latin American, and even Native American. At Navajo Hogan ( hogan is “home”), you can get a Navajo taco, which is a frybread with fixins. And even learn a few words from reading the restroom signs ( hastiin is “man”).
Rules
Rules are more easily accepted, even found interesting if there’s a story to tell, if there’s an explanation.
Vegas Is Too Slow
I still have an office in Las Vegas which I’m working on closing down. One reason, besides the fact that I moved, is the pathetic broadband speed, similar to that of my last apartment there, which is more than 200x slower than the fiber connection in my new apartment near Salt Lake City.
Life Elevated
One thing you may notice if you’re in Utah is all the license plates virtue signalling the American flag and In God We Trust (adopted by our founding fathers in 1956). I registered my car recently, so I had the opportunity to combat the spread of theocracy by selecting one of the atheist plates.
A SwiftUI Router
One update I made to Talk Dim Sum this year was to add a custom router so I can escape the NavigationLink straightjacket. My router is just a simple stack. @ Observable public class Router < T : Equatable > { public var path : [ T ] = [] public init () { } public func push ( _ route : T ) { path . append ( route ) } public func pushNew ( _ route : T ) { if path . last != route { push ( route ) } }…
Simple SwiftData
I spent the past week updating my Swift code to the latest and greatest. In some cases it didn’t simplify much ( Observable ), but I was able to remove a bunch of SQLite.swift code and replace it with just a few lines of SwiftData .
The King's English
The Salt Lake City area has a wealth of bookstores. After discovering Weller Books, I thought I was done, but then I found Legendarium, then Under the Umbrella, then Marissa’s, and I finally got around to checking out The King’s English after being reminded by news of a bomb threat (this city doesn’t deserve all these bookstores).
It's Crowdin, not Crowdout
You can check in your translations, but you can never leave.
Paging with TootSDK
Whenever you have a feed, you need successive queries to obtain older (and newer) items. The Mastodon API takes and returns descriptors for each page of results, but the return is a link header in the response.
Sundance Books and Music
One of the first things I look for when checking out a new place is an indie bookstore, and I was surprised to find it in this impressive house in midtown Reno, Sundance Books and Music .
The Tree of Utah
While driving through the Salt Lake Desert , I saw this thing in the middle of nowhere, along I80. I did a web search (I didn’t google, I duckduckgoed) on salt lake art, and discovered this is the Tree of Utah .
Oh Mai Street Art
I have an easy neighborhood walk to Oh Mai Sandwich Kitchen but only on my last trek did I notice the street art out front.
The ACLU Lack of Privacy Statement
I don’t agree with every single position the ACLU takes but I feel they do good and important work, so I sent them a small donation a while back, only to have them spend all of it on postage requesting more donations.
Flex
The latest in the series of predatory product offers for renters who are hard up, promoted by my apartment complex: We are providing a new perk available to our residents through a company called Flex. This program allows you to split your rent into two payments without any late charges. We are excited to get you more information as we roll out this new initiative. Please see the attached files…
One More Noodle House
The Salt Lake area doesn’t have the breadth of Chinese restaurants that Vegas has, but there’s one place that I’ll miss if I leave, and that’s One More Noodle House in the Chinatown Supermarket plaza.
Sugar House
A nice thing about Salt Lake City is neighborhoods (coming from a city that is somewhat neighborhood-deprived). Once nice neighborhood I found somewhat accidentally but now visit on a regularly is Sugar House . It has undergone a recent gentrification, with new buildings sporting a fake historical look housing a Whole Foods, Barnes and Noble, and Panda Express, but still, it is a nice walkable…
Blended Ratings
I was about to leave a one-star review on apartments.com for an apartment complex that ripped me off, and I was not alone as someone beat me to it, yet somehow the final rating is 4.9 out of 5, even though the average review rating is 1.0 (and would have been reinforced if my review submission hadn’t errored out).
Talk Dim Sum on the Web
The Talk Dim Sum dishes are now viewable on talkdimsum.com , with some scripting in Lisp to convert the JSON data to markdown files for Hugo. It’s a breeze with Gauche Scheme ’s JSON and regexp support. It doesn’t have all the other data, like the phrases and restaurant lists, and if you want to hear or practice saying the words, you’ll still need the app.
Birds and LLamas
Say Utah and Mormons come to mind, but there are a number of Hindu temples in Salt Lake City and a big one south of the city in Spanish Fork, featuring a gift shop, restaurant, llamas, and birds wandering around. It’s worth a turn-off as you pass by on the interstate.
My Liberation Notes
I’m watching the lovely kdrama My Liberation Notes, from the writer of one of my favorites, My Ajusshi. My Liberation Notes is a slow, moody show, even more than My Ajusshi. My favorite part is the Liberation Club, a group of introverts pressured by HR to join a club and socialize with their coworkers. I can relate. So they enact that old joke about a club of introverts and actually form…
Heat
I was thinking I’m glad not to be in Las Vegas this week, it’s like Death Valley out there! Then I looked at the temp in Death Valley.
Techless Vegas
One thing that surprised me in Salt Lake City is the ubiquity of fiber. Every apartment I looked at had fiber connections (and made them a mandatory add-on part of the lease, so keep that in mind when you’re checking out the rents here).
Central Book Exchange
The Salt Lake City area has proven to be an unexpected bounty of bookstores. One that I found accidently while exploring the Sugar House area is Central Book Exchange .
Dim Sum Books
I’ve updated this list of Chinese food cookbooks (or recipe books - one of them is about boba drinks) that I recommend in my Talk Dim Sum app with a couple of new ones that I really like: My Shanghai and The Woks of Life Cookbook.
Burros in Beatty
The wide open spaces of Nevada are not the most visually exciting (like the white sands of New Mexico), but there are surprises, like this herd of wild burros hanging out in the big rig parking lot across the two-lane highway from a casino in Beatty. It’s a pretty small casino, but it has a nightclub, so I guess Beatty isn’t too boring.
The International Car Forest of the Last Church
On my latest visit to Vegas I decided to loop back up I95 so I can visit the International Car Forest of the Last Church in Goldfield. While I was there someone drove up and told me the artist is a 90-year old woman who single-handedly “plants” these cars.
Haven Coffee
When I go on road trips I search google maps for coffee shops on the way. That’s my idea of a rest area. Between Las Vegas and Salt Lake City the pickings are slim, but there are some at strategic locations, such as Haven Coffee in Nephi (otherwise known for rodeos ). It’s a charming spot with a deck overlooking a water wheel and next to a park. I try to stop there on every trip up and…
The Vitalant Bot
Bots don’t take holidays, so on this July Fourth I got a robocall from Vitalant, which oddly was followed by a customer satisfaction survey. I was giving blood on a regular basis for a while, mostly at participating comic cons, but then there was some kind of reorg under the Vitalant brand and I started receiving calls to donate (from out of state), then a pause after I asked them to remove…
Marissa's Books
I really like living near a bookstore, although it’s not so great for my wallet. I’ve mentioned some of the cool bookstores in the Salt Lake City area such as Legendarium , but my current neighborhood money sink is Marissa’s Books , which is about a mile away. So, close enough to walk to and conveniently catty corner to a nice coffee shop where I can read my latest haul.
RentPlus Is a Minus
It’s not just big tech, everyone’s selling your info. Like apartments, I don’t see why I have to pay rent when moving and cleaning companies are giving them kickbacks. This being rent day at my new apartment, I just noticed after staring closely at the rent itemization that I’m getting charged monthly for RentPlus which I apparently was automatically signed up for in my…
Low Octane
One thing I noticed when driving across the border from Nevada to Utah (besides the sudden predominance of white people when you arrive in St. George ) is the change in octane offerings at the fuel pump.