Notes

I forgot the code to my old lockbox and the technique described in this youtube video did the trick to get it open!

Happy I got it open, but now I’m thinking I might need to get a more secure lockbox 😬

Why didn’t anybody tell me that One Piece was good!?

I’m reading the manga now (just about through the Chopper introduction arc), and man, I think this would’ve been a much better series to have read when I was a teenager than Naruto or Bleach.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved those shows, but One Piece feels like it’s exploring more meaningful real-world themes than the average shonen, even though it seems wackier on the surface.

I bought some small NFC stickers. Going to make so much NFC art.

Here’s my first out in the wild:

http://ragman.net/scrap/hyperleaf

We can see natural beauty all around us, even in the most concrete-filled environments.

I hope you all have the opportunity to try and find it.

Amazon was already giving over Ring camera footage to the cops, but now they’re going to partner with Flock, a company that makes AI-powered surveillance cameras for ICE:

https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/16/amazons-ring-to-partner-with-flock-a-network-of-ai-cameras-used-by-ice-feds-and-police/

I remember when CCTV cameras became commonplace, especially in the UK, and people were rightfully freaking out about the privacy implications of the government having a camera on every streetcorner.

With Ring and Flock, ICE (and Amazon employees) now have access to many many more cameras, which they are using to invade our privacy and terrorize our neighborhoods.

If you have a Ring camera, I implore you to take it down.

I move my keyboard for one second…

Weird Web October 2025 is happening!

https://weirdweboctober.website/

I had a blast last year, making a new weird website (most) every day in October. It was super fun to see what everybody else made – we all had the same theme, but came up with such different ideas!

Can’t wait to see how it turns out this year. See you all on October 1st! :)

TIL that the Mastodon Statuses API (the one you call to make new posts) counts the length of the spoiler_text towards your 500 character limit.

I wish the error message (“Text character limit of 500 exceeded”) was more explicit. It took me ages to figure out why my 470 character post was causing this.

This behavior is clearer in the Mastodon UI itself, where the character number ticks down as you type in the Content Warning textbox.

I’ve started a project of making a small web-based game using the Go programming language, and I’m having a surprisingly hard time wrapping my head around it!

I’ve used Go before, but it was always for really straightforward API stuff (receive request, maybe update database, return response), and I never took the time to learn the language properly.

I’m using more of the language now, and keep shooting myself in the foot with it! Goroutines and channels are really cool, but using a language where asynchronicity is core part of the design is breaking my brain a bit.

For example, I accidentally called a function that waits on a timer without wrapping it in a goroutine, and in doing so, blocked all outgoing websocket messages for my player. It wasn’t immediately clear to me that the function was blocking, and so it took me a while to figure out what was going on.

I’ve been programming “inside my wheelhouse” with the same similar-ish languages (Javascript, Java, Python etc) for so long that I’m not used to making so many mistakes while coding!

Here’s hoping it gets easier as I build up intuition for it :)

Behold, the current Chrome browser experience now that they’ve fully upgraded to Manifest 3 (killing adblockers).

SMBC definitely gets some of the blame here too – I bet people have been reading it without an adblocker for years, and this experience is SMBC’s choice.

But more broadly, this is the internet that Google has incentivised, and thus, created.

I’m so angry. The web should be better than this.

Reading this HackerOne report really made me feel the harm being caused by the endless stream of AI slop.

This marks the first time (that I know of…) where I’ve come across a bug report online and didn’t immediately flag it as AI. I was a bit confused while reading the code, but was just skimming it, and it all seemed plausible. But then I get to the comments, and people are saying that the repro code doesn’t cause a crash as expected, that the code in question actually works fine, and I realize: damn, I got got.

I don’t know how long it took @bagder@mastodon.social and team to test this, and I don’t know how many of these they get per day (at least 18 reported so far: https://gist.github.com/bagder/07f7581f6e3d78ef37dfbfc81fd1d1cd), but, god, what a waste of time.

Any input form with a potential reward is being spammed with convincing sounding nonsense, from bug bounties, to every student’s homework assignments, to the Clarkesworld Magazine: https://neil-clarke.com/how-ai-submissions-have-changed-our-submissions-process/.

The root problem is wealth inequality of course: everybody needs money, most people don’t have enough of it, and AI slop is a low effort way to get it.

Until the day we solve capitalism though, we gotta wade through the muck.

Keep up the good work, badger et al, I hope you’re figuring out ways to keep your sanity intact!

I thought I didn’t like cannolis, but Holy Cannoli proved me wrong! Definitely give them a try if you’re in the area!

https://www.instagram.com/holycannolicafe/?hl=en

By default, your phone encodes your GPS location into any photos you take inside of the image’s EXIF metadata.

If you then share that image (on Mastodon for example), people will be able to tell where you were when you took that photo.

You can use websites like https://everestpipkin.github.io/image-scrubber/ to read and erase an image’s data – ctrl+f for “GPS” to see if your photo is storing it.

Here’s a set of example metadata:

On Android, you can prevent your phone’s Camera app from recording this information by going into the settings and turning off the “Save location” toggle.

Take control of your data! :)

It can be tricky to test Javascript code on mobile when you’re using Web APIs that require a secure (HTTPS) context, e.g. the DeviceOrientationAbsolute event.

If my webserver is serving on localhost:8080, my usual method to test on mobile is to just go to my laptop’s IP address + port in my phone’s browser, e.g. http://192.168.1.153:8080.

But on my phone, this isn’t a localhost address and it isn’t https, so it’s not secure, and the API doesn’t work.

ngrok is a SAAS way to solve this, but I just learned an easy work-around.

Go to chrome://flags in Chrome on your phone (also works in Brave) and search for a flag called “Insecure origins treated as secure”.

If you enter your computers’s ip address+port combination into the textbox, enable the flag, and then restart your browser, your context will now be marked as secure, and your JS APIs will work!

(A word of warning: don’t do this for real websites, security contexts are important!)

Hopefully this will save someone a headache down the line!

As I write this, a quarter of Clark Park has been privatized for the long weekend – fenced off by Parks on Tap.

The previously public area is now only open to people 21+ with a government issued ID, or the family members of such (source). You also have to sign up online, giving away your PII to (I assume) be sold to data-brokers.

Now, credit where it’s due, the organizers have also installed some positive infrastructure in their private space: most notably a porta-potty. The installation of a public bathroom in Clark Park has been stalled for over a year, so they needed to bring one with them. Don’t worry though, they’ll be removing it on Tuesday.

I’m all for having a beer in the park, but this isn’t the way. We need actual public infrastructure, not money making schemes. We need parks, not fences.

For my part, I’m enjoying my time in the public Dog Bowl, listening to the man playing violin nearby, and watching kids and dogs chase a soccer ball around with no private company to stop them.

Here’s a fun SVG trick I just learned. If you set the fill or stroke properties to currentColor using CSS, your SVG will be the color of the text around it.

svg, svg path {
    fill: currentColor;
    stroke: currentColor;
}

This is great for auto-changing light and dark modes because it means you don’t need multiple images – the SVG will just change color appropriately.

Note, that this only works for inline SVGs, it doesn’t work with an <img> tag. Thanks to @freeplay for the reminder!

Change your computer’s Dark Mode setting, or use my /settings page, and watch the sun change colors!

Reblogging this article from Dylan Beattie, I think it hits the nail on the head about the fundamental flaw of this vibe coding nonsense.

(Not to mention all the bad externalities of LLMs in general, like environmental damage, bigoted biases, etc.)

I just watched a clip of the Zoro/Mihawk fight scene from the new live action show.

It felt so slow and fake, compared to the same scene in an actual cartoon.

The anime managed to convey more emotion and context in half the runtime.

Live action remakes: not for me!

Spotted on my walk yesterday. When will the wokeness end, even the beer bottles in the bushes are non-alcoholic! /s

This is day three of my girlfriend acting as CVS’s secretary while trying to get her migraine perscriptions filled.

Her neurologist sent the prescription to CVS, the normal CVS pharmacy tried to fill it, but it turns out they can’t – only a specialist CVS pharmacy in Center City can.

She’s now spent multiple hours calling the two pharamacies (again, both CVS) to get the first one to send the order over to the second.

The pharmacies won’t communicate between themselves, because they don’t give a shit.

So their customers have to do it for them. While suffering from migraines. Because they don’t have their meds.

I recently posted about how Chrome disabled uBlock Origin, the adblocker extension I use.

I switched to Brave on my Desktop and Android, but have kept using Chrome on my laptop, since I have way too many tabs open…

I went to this forum post, and oh my god it was the worst ad hell I’ve seen in a long time.

By turning off this Chrome extension (fOr sEcUrItY), Google has made so many people’s lives so much more annoying.

I don’t know why I love this post from @j3s@merveilles.town so much.

Something about declaring a sentence a poem – except who am I to say it’s not?

10/10

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!