Notes

I’m stuck at home with a nasty cold, but at least I have some good blogs to read!

I’m reading josh.work’s notes about watching Frozen with his 3 year old daughter, and this bit stood out to me:

“Elsa creates a sentient snow monster that tries, plausibly, to kill the other party. The whole movie could be her doing cool stuff for the entire town, as an inventor/creator/artist/advocate/engineer. Eden [the 3 year old] has me skip the snow monstor part. Also there’s a part where soldiers attack Elsa in her tower, we skip that part. Wild to make a kids movie and inject war into it.”

I feel this so hard. So much of our culture, and thus our stories, glorifies violence and competition. I’m tired of those stories.

I want the story where Elsa used her magic to make her sister smile and it was a good thing, and she goes on to make the whole town smile too.

Let’s write more of those stories.

As the American government falls into dictatorship, I’m struck by the fact that most Americans already spend most of their waking hours under the boot of a tyrant: their boss at work.

Why shouldn’t Trump have control over independent agencies? You wouldn’t expect, say, Google, to have an independent department inside of it that didn’t report up to the CEO. That’d be crazy.

The idea of running the government like a company, with a boss at the top with full executive power doesn’t feel scary: to most Americans it’s business as usual.

We need to remind people that this isn’t normal, and that it certainly isn’t democracy.

This is my first time really invested in the Superbowl. Am I doing it right?

Reading Michael Deforge’s “Birds of Maine” this morning!

Only at the beginning so far, but I think it’s going to be a fun look at the absurdities of capitalism.

Starring really weird looking birds! And fungal computers! And the universal worm!

I use pandoc heavily for my blog generator, converting the markdown files I write my content in to the HTML or Mastonified text that I actually upload.

It works great, but my generator script was running it against dozens of files everytime I changed anything, and my site was taking on the order of ~5 seconds to re-generate.

May not seem like a lot, but it used to be run pretty instantaneously, and the delay was starting to make writing new blog posts frustrating.

Solution? I added a cache of the pandoc-ed content! Generation times are back to instant!

Hurray for caching! :D

Watched this great video about breaking out of the skinner box that is our phones:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNOol5OTasw

Going to try to do some of the things HGModernism talks about here, such as setting a timer to ask myself some questions after 5 mins of scrolling.

“How did this 5 mins make me feel?” “Was this a good use of my time?”

We’ll see how it goes!

TIL that Chrome has a great built in Node JS profiler.

You can connect the Chrome debugger to your Node code, and get Performance metrics just like you can with a website!

See https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/performance/nodejs for full instructions.

One tip is that you need to add a timeout before the code you want to profile, so that you have time to hit the Record button in the DevTools “Performance” tab.

This helped me narrow down what had been making my blog generation scripts run slower. It’s a nice debugging experience!

Tip for sorting lists using CSS!

If your list is initially sorted, you can reverse it by using display: flex and setting the flex-direction attribute to column or column-reverse.

For example:

ol {
    display: flex;

    /* flips the order */
    flex-direction: column-reverse;
}

Then you write a little bit of Javascript to change the flex-direction when the user selects a dropdown option and voilà, sorting!

Now my /notes page can be viewed with the oldest notes at the top 🤗.

And now I’ve gone down a rabbit-hole about the <link> rel attribute!

Turns out, in 2006 whatwg added a “feed” type to the rel attribute, which would be used like this:

<link rel="feed" href="/feed" title="Articles">

This was from an era when tech companies, to different degrees, were actually supporting RSS.

For example, Firefox and IE had a feature called “RSS Autodiscovery” where they would show a little button when a site had a feed. When clicked, the site’s feed would get added to the user’s RSS reader, which was built-in to the browser.

The intent of the rel = "feed" syntax was to allow Autodiscovery of <link>s that were syndication feeds, but that had non-obvious MIME types.

From whatwg’s blog post announcing the feature:

“For example, hAtom uses regular HTML with the MIME type text/html, yet may still be used as a syndication feed format.”

Alas, it never got widely adopted, maybe partially because rel="alternate" worked fine, and maybe because Chrome never implemented Autodiscovery. Whatwg removed it in 2009, only three years later.

Still, it’s an interesting glimpse into a past not so very long ago where RSS got serious attention in the Web Standards space.

I long for the world where RSS stayed in the mainstream, instead of being buried by the enshittified, algorithm-driven, profit-mad social media feeds we’re all addicted to now.

But, hey, if we try hard enough, maybe we can still make that world. Maybe they tried to bury RSS, not knowing it was an indieweb seed :)

I was just reading Taliesyn Walker’s post about RSS and TIL that you can add a <link> element to your website that points to your RSS feed!

It looks like this:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="<your rss link here>" />

This allows RSS readers (and search engines) to more easily find your feed. Neat!

Tonight’s full moon reflected off the windows of the Renewal Presbyterian Church in West Philly.

I’m not a fan of organized religion, but I do like the old buildings…

My heart goes out to the people in Los Angeles right now.

I lived in Ventura County for a few years in my childhood, and still have friends in the area – fortunately nobody I know has been harmed or lost their housing.

Having lived in Colorado for most of my adult life, I know how scary wildfires can be – and having them happen in an area as dense as LA is terrifying.

Mutual Aid Los Angeles Network is making a list of all the on-the-ground organizations that need help right now. If you’re wanting to donate, or are in the area and want to drop off supplies, it’s a good place to look.

Stay safe everybody.

I got an Instant Pot for Christmas and have been enjoying learning how to use it!

I’ve found it a bit intimidating to not be able to look at the food as it’s cooking, but following recipe instructions has worked for me so far.

It took 28 minutes total to cook this spaghetti squash, which includes the 10 mins it takes the pot to pressurize. It probably would’ve taken something like 50 minutes total with my oven.

Big fan so far!

I’ve been having a blast playing Tactical Breach Wizards!

I’ll write up a full blog post once I’ve finished, but for now I’ll just say that it’s the funniest game I’ve played recently, beating out the very funny Thank Goodness You’re Here.

The writing in this game just never misses! 🤌

I recently learned about the Chrome Dev Tools “Capture node screenshot” button. It’s super handy for demos of new UI features, or for writing a retrospective doc.

From the Elements pane, find the HTML element you want to take a picture of, and right click it. You should see the “Capture node screenshot” option.

Click that, and bam, you’ve got a .png of your HTML element!

I declare 2025 to be my year of the POSSE: Post (on) Own Site Syndicate Elsewhere!

This is the first note in my website’s /notes section, which if all goes well, should be simultaneously published to Mastodon.

My goal with these notes is to share little snippets, probably mostly coding related, that are too small to write up as a full blog post.

Not every note will be published to Mastodon, nor will every toot I make become a note – just the things I want to preserve or easily find later.

These /notes were inspired by @dbushell@fosstodon.org ’s microblog, go check out his website it’s great!