Recent Posts
Anyone who rides the PATCO with any regularity will be familiar with the schedule PDFs they post on their website. When all you want to know is "what time will the next PATCO be here?", it's always been kind of a pain to pull up whatever the current schedule is, find your station, and scan down to see the list of times. It's a very dense table with a bunch of informational banners at the bottom.…
I've just set up a new blog aggregator for folks in my local community. It's called Planet Haddon ! I've been getting back into blogging over the last couple years, and I've enjoyed discovering and following other small blogs during that time. It turns out that the small web is actually quite big , in absolute terms. At the same time, I've met a bunch of neighbors with similar interests since…
I just had a realization on a walk this morning that feels obvious in hindsight, but that I figured I should write down somewhere. I've been thinking about object-capability messaging apps for a while now, and something that's been bugging me is: how do you represent messages such that you can safely embed a capability in a message? And I feel a little bit silly having not really internalized the…
I've settled on a bit of a peculiar everyday setup, driven by my choice of devices and some of my particular needs. At the encouragement of some internet friends, I figured I'd write something up to go through what I use, in case others find it interesting or useful. As a note, this genre of posts on the web can at times encourage consumerism, and I'd like to be mindful of that. So right up front,…
Well, I didn't get as much done this week as I'd hoped, but here's where things ended up. I spent most of the (somewhat limited) spare time I had to work on projects in the last week on understanding both the architecture of the mandy prototype and ActivityPub itself. I like to write tests to check my understanding of how things work, so I got started on adding a test for the unmarshaller . That's…
It's the first day of March December Adventure (really the second day, but I was busy yesterday), and my goal for this week is to learn more about how Jessica Tallon's Mandy prototype works so that hopefully I can start contributing to it . This blog series is probably going to be a bit of a rambly stream-of-consciousness as a result as I try to reason about it. (Sorry not sorry.) There's a TODO…
This is a vision of a future that could be - one among many. August 1, 2040 I wake up from a good night's sleep to a gentle alarm from my pocket computer sitting across the room. Yawning, I get out of bed and turn off the alarm. I'm a programmer, fresh out of college. There was a time when some said we wouldn't need programmers anymore and that AI would do all the work. That turned out not to work…
I've been meaning to write up a post on how I manage my Guix System configurations for a while, because I've hit on a solution that feels kinda nice, inspired by how folks do things in NixOS. In the NixOS world, there's a tool called nixos-generate-config that automatically creates both a configuration.nix and a hardware-configuration.nix for you. The idea is that the hardware-specific bits (like…
I had a realization the other day that, on almost every email in my inbox, my mail client has a "show external images" option. Most email I receive references externally loaded images via HTML. There are good reasons for this (not needing to send a copy of an image in every email on a newsletter) as well as nefarious reasons (the remote server can track where/when you load the image). So most mail…
I've gotten some work done towards supporting persistence in guile-horton over the last week or so, but I've hit a bit of a roadblock. Writing this up in part to explain what I've been working on and in part to think through it some more. To support persistence, I need to switch all the actors in the system over to use the define-actor macro. The admin actor was previously using selfish-spawn ,…
I've got tags for all my blog posts, and tag-specific RSS feeds, but until now those tags/feeds haven't actually been visible unless you constructed the URL. So finally fixing that: now there's a list of tags at the top of each post, with a link to the tag-specific feed. This isn't quite the ultimate behavior I was looking for - ultimately I'd like those links to go to human-readable tag-specific…
Starting December Adventure off with a little meta this year (and a bit late, whoops!). Since setting up this blog, it's always felt like a little too much friction to start a new blog post. It's not too bad, but it does involve creating a file in the posts directory with a given name, manually typing out the timestamp. I'm always writing my blog posts in emacs anyway, and emacs is the most…
Despite my last post, I got frustrated enough with my smartphone usage recently that as of today I'm using a flip phone. We'll see how long this lasts but so far I'm actually enjoying it. But a sort of follow-up on my recent post, I suppose. I'm both a smartphone addict (which has me interested in using my phone less) and interested in convergence (which has me interested in using my phone more,…
I'll admit it, I'm a smartphone addict. I've tried, as best I can, to avoid using the big adtech social media platforms in the last few years. But even a web browser is enough to suck me in several times a day for hours in total. A while back, I bought a dumbphone - a Nokia 2780 Flip, to be exact. It's essentially a modern version of the flip phones many of us had back in the early 2000s. You get…
Couple videos and webpages that I've watched/read recently! I should probably come up with a way to format these separately from my other blog posts if I do this more frequently, but I've fallen off blogging in general for a bit at this pont. Gotta get back to it! Shifter - The real reason kids don't bike to school (and 5 ways to fix it) Great video about the trend towards (North American) kids…
This week, Google announced that it would start blocking the installation of Android apps unless the developer has registered themselves with Google . If you know me, you won't be surprised that I find this highly disappointing. It's a deeply held belief of mine that if you own a device, you should be the one ultimately in control of it. Even free software isn't practically enough to make this a…
Matrix has gotten a lot of bad publicity lately. Some of it I agree with, some of it I don't. And I've been around the Matrix community for long enough that I truly do believe that the Matrix team has good intentions, so I don't really want to add fuel to the fire. But unfortunately, I was also targeted by the same spam wave that Terence Eden was targeted by, and it was frustrating enough that I…
I got a little burst of inspiration recently and threw some rough experiments together over the course of a few evenings. Juliana Sims over at the Spritely Institute has been working on porting the Shepherd to Goblins , and I've been excited about that for a while. To quote Juli: But just changing the internal details of the program isn't particularly interesting, and Goblins promises to let us do…
A couple updates on the gobs-of-machines work from a while back! The smaller update of the two: I've renamed what I was calling "provisioners" to "providers". This is a bit of an attempt to align my terminology with that of other tools like Terraform . Ultimately when deploying real instances I'll need something to install/configure the hob-server component on the new machine, and it might make…
Have you ever actually convinced someone of something on social media? I think I may have, once or twice, but it's by far not the most common outcome. I've been thinking a lot lately about the importance of shared context in communication. It's a lot more difficult to get a point across when the person you're talking to can't relate it directly to their own prior experience. I've experienced this…