cuibonobo

A few months ago I ordered a wildly cheap Bluetooth thermal printer from AliExpress and got it to print on the iOS app, but I wasn't satisfied with the designs and options on the app and have wanted to create my own prints ever since.

I've been poking at NaitLee/Cat-Printer for the past week to try to get it to generate images with Pillow instead of having to rely on the web app and I finally got it working!

I hadn't touched my site in a few months and suddenly I couldn't build it at all... Svelte Kit was completely falling over and upgrading to the latest version had so many API changes that it may as well have been a rewrite. I think this all happened because at some point I upgraded my version of Node, but: wow.

I briefly looked at Eleventy but, while it's fairly capable, I was going to have to do a lot of custom stuff to get it to look at my data. My needs are so simple (and yet so specific!), that it didn't seem worth it.

Instead, I'm now using mostly string literals and Mustache.

Custom all the way, baby! 😎

I got new hearing aids! I first realized I needed them about a year ago but I had been waiting on the new FDA rules that allowed them to be sold over the counter. (I wouldn't be able to afford them otherwise.) I'm very impressed with them so far, and I can stream music directly into my ears!

Wageningen University has an incredible collection of root system drawings that's worth checking out. I'm super envious of whoever it is that gets to make accurate and scientifically-useful drawings of plant roots for a living.

ANSIWAVE BBS is a retro-futuristic BBS written in Nim. BBS is a little before my time (my first foray into computer networking was on AOL), but the project caught my attention because all posts on the bulletin board start on an 80x80-character square. ASCII characters are used as a primitive for both drawings and text, which I thought was really innovative.

I think the modern internet needs a similar 'encapsulated' format that is easy to render but isn't as scriptable as HTML. The 'story' format used by Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, etc. seems like what the industry is converging towards, but each social media network implements it differently (and with varying degrees of ephemerality).

There was some Calendly discourse recently that put the fragile egos of VC bros on display, but aside from all that it is a shame that there is no 'open' protocol for getting on someone's calendar. And Calendly doesn't support CalDAV either! For shame.

My site now has an RSS feed! Despite the death murder of Google Reader I still keep up with a lot of blogs and I want to keep the protocol alive.

I installed the Write Good Linter on my Visual Studio Code and it looks like I over-use adverbs. I wish it also suggested alternatives, so I'll have to keep OneLook close at hand.

The thing my health insurance had been threatening finally happened and my PCP fell "out of network". I spent an hour and a half calling new doctors to see who is accepting patients.

*Obama voice*: "If you like your doctor you can keep 'em!"

I just tried Tailscale from my work laptop at the office to RDP into my PC at home and it worked like magic. No more port forwarding or brittle router settings! At some point I'd like to have my own identity server but as-is this technology is killer.

I recently discovered that draw.io will export an "Editable PNG" that embeds the entire diagram into the zTxt section of the PNG and I'm still geeking out about it. The diagram isn't immediately readable though... It has been Base64 encoded and deflated so that it doesn't take up as much space on the image. You can use TweakPNG to view the zTxt section in the PNG and this draw.io convert tool.

I've been reading The Grapes of Wrath but it has taken me forever to get through it because you just know that the family's fortunes are going to get worse and worse and worse. The sheer dread of it is holding me back.

I've managed to more or less make it a habit to tinker with something on my website every day. I've got it to where I can easily edit posts from the command-line, which I'm pretty excited about.

I went in to the office for work today and it always surprises me how tired I'm always surprised at how much it takes out of me. I'm still sitting in a chair and looking at a computer for 8 hours, but at home I don't feel like I've been hit by a bus at the end of the day.

I did that thing on my laptop where you update your BIOS but forget to write down your BitLocker key... On a previous machine I was able to recoveer from this by installing the exact BIOS that I had before the upgrade, but I didn't write that down either. Extreme fail.

Luckily I had transferred important stuff to my desktop long ago and only used my laptop for browsing. (And I do keep the BitLocker keys and triple backups for my desktop.)

Still. What a pain.

I just got a letter from my health insurance company saying that the hospital system that I've been using may fall "out of network" soon if the two parties can't reach some mutually beneficial agreement. Is this what being free to choose your own doctor feels like?

I made a CLI that automatically generates post front-matter. Now writing on here won't be quite so tedious.

Today I bought a bunch of camping stuff and installed Unreal Engine 4 on my PC. Extremely on brand.

Published my new site to my domain via Cloudflare Pages. Obviously there's still a lot of stuff that needs to get done (like figuring out how to not have to write the created date manually), but I'm really happy that it exists.

Disgusted and delighted that my tactic actually worked. Figure out what you want to express first and the how will work itself out.

I'm trying something radical (for me) and writing the posts on my new website before I've figured out how it's going to work. My previous attempts had all gotten bogged down in over-engineering and snobbery. At the very least I'll have a place for my thoughts even if the site doesn't actually work (yet).