Feeling pretty darn great

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So yeah the last um… two months have seen my fibromyalgia getting worse and worse, and my sleep getting worse and worse, and my pain getting worse and worse, and me just plain feeling like garbage and falling apart and constantly falling asleep throughout the day.

I still haven’t heard back from last week’s in-lab sleep study, but finally I decided enough was enough and two days ago stopped using my CPAP.

Two days ago I thought I might have to cancel all my weekend plans. Today, however, I felt absolutely fantastic, and did those plans and then some. And I still feel fine.

I am pretty sure the CPAP has been doing more harm than good, and I need to make the sleep doctor understand that while one metric (AHI) was going down, it’s only because the more important metric (amount of actual sleep managed) went down moreso.

Like, yeah, I wasn’t suffocating in my sleep, because I wasn’t sleeping.

Anyway. Tomorrow I will probably stream the iPhone battery replacement at, say, 2 PM PDT; if you want to see me possibly destroy the only phone I have which works properly, follow my twitch channel and “ring that bell,” as all the YouTubers say.

And I hope that with this newfound state of feeling pretty okay I’ll be able to start making music and comics (and therefore streaming!) more regularly again.

🔄 Medium tedium

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Reposted: Medium tedium

Watts Martin writes:

There’s a lot of reasons people are down on Medium, Ev Williams' ongoing whatever-the-hell-it-is. It’s a platform! It’s a publication! It’s a platform for publications! It’s a clean, clutter-free reading experience, except for all the clutter!

There have been a few great stories written about this; my favorites are reporter Laura Hazard Owen’s “The long, complicated, and extremely frustrating history of Medium” and acerbic typographer Matthew Butterick’s “The Billionaire’s Typewriter.” (He occasionally updates this, most recently linking to Owen’s article.) Butterick critiques Medium’s design from an ethical standpoint, which turns out to be bang on point with Medium’s ultimate underlying problem:

Medium thinks it’s a brand.

The rest of the entry is very much worth reading, and is a great description of all the things I hate about Medium and why I wrote Publ and insist on hosting my own blog instead. And I’m sure is why there are so many other self-hosted blog engines available and getting stronger these days.

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Be a critter

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Lately I’ve been having fun designing critter leggings. Today my plaid ones arrived and they came out really cute! I’ve tweaked the design a bit (probably hecking something up) but they’re really adorable and comfy and I highly recommend Threadless leggings.

I’ve also made a few other designs, such as this graphics joke (primarily the leggings and backpack) and I’m probably going to make a whole bunch of cute animal bottoms for folks to wear.

Any suggestions for favorite species to include would be quite welcome!

Also, if you visit Threadless via my referral link, you get a coupon for $10 off!

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iPhone grrrr

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Okay, so, here’s the error which caused me to downgrade to my iPhone 6s:

The iPhone "Ruby" cannot be synced. There are too many open files currently.

This was only happening on the XR, though (not on my iPod Touch, iPod Classic, or either iPad), and my iPhone 6S was working just fine.

Today I was actually pretty pleased with using the iPhone 6S and generally liking it better than the XR for the reasons I thought I would – it’s smaller, lighter, less obtrusive, and frankly less annoying to deal with overall. So I decided I’d buy a new battery for it and try my hand at that, since it doesn’t seem all that hard after all (and all of the battery cases I could find had critical problems like being too big or heavy or having connector failure or catching on fire).

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iPhone Regress

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So, a few months ago I upgraded to an iPhone XR, which I thought was pretty okay, but there’s been an accumulation of issues with it that have me back on my old iPhone 6S for a bit. I dunno if I’ll stick with this or what, but so far I’m liking the 6S tradeoffs better.

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Memories

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Much has been written about how Electron apps take a lot of memory; after all, each one is running its own instance of a web browser, and pulling in all of the overwhelming amounts of support code that implies. Slack can easily end up taking over 1GB of RAM, and Discord usually takes a few hundred as well. As someone who used to use IRC back in the 90s, when a single task taking even 1 MB of RAM was considered a lot, this feels rather horrifying:

Activity Monitor showing memory usage for Slack and Discord

On my iMac, with 24GB of RAM, that means that chat apps – doing the equivalent of an IRC client (granted, with a bit more visual stuff, but not that much) – are taking about 6% of my RAM!

But come to think of it, back in the mid 90s, when a typical computer had 8MB, an IRC client probably took around 400KB of RAM, which is also 6%. So have things really grown proportionally in that way?

Well, I’ve figured out a way of getting these chat apps to take half as much of my total RAM overall, but first, let’s talk about my personal history of memory usage.

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Re: Intermediate auth service

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Jacky:

Oh yeah my plan for the indieauth profile service was to also provide h-card and (optional) micropub endpoints. :) I wrote more about that on one of my Subl-related blog posts (which I’m short on spoons to find at the moment).

So I’ve been thinking about this more and more. Having an intermediate service that lets people log in from a silo is excellent for the case you’ve ((@fluffy@queer.party)[https://queer.party/@fluffy]) mentioned. I think I got too far with this and was wondering if they’d use this to do replies, likes and the whole range of responses one could do from their own site.

Having the intermediate service be log-in-able via a silo would certainly be an option but what I was suggesting was actually having an intermediate service where you can also log in with a username/password or whatever. Like, it could be a “silo.” Like, have it as a bootstrap for people getting into IndieWeb without needing to self-host anything.

What I meant by “provide MicroPub endpoints” was me being overly terse and just saying that on the profile you set up on the profile service you could also link your profile to arbitrarily many other services (hosted by others), including MicroPub, as well as authority sources for RelMeAuth or whatever. Basically, a little catch-all tool to fix the bit that I feel is currently missing from the IndieWeb experience for someone who doesn’t have/want to self-host anything.

Incidentally, this is the blog entry I mentioned in that thread where I kind of rambled about this stuff. Also since then I’ve come to realize that there’s no real reason to integrate Pushl directly into Publ since now it does a lot more stuff and more generically than what is suitable for putting into the Publ side of things. (That said, you absolutely can use the same pipenv/venv for both Pushl and Publ, which is how I have things set up on the dayjob website. But that’s getting off in the weeds of minutiae.)

Also, it seems that both of our respective Markdown implementations have gotten confused by the parentheses around the queer.party link. Neat.

Sending ActivityPub backfills

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For folks following this site via ActivityPub, I need to run a WebMention backfill which is going to look quite spammy (one post per five seconds when it gets going). Feel free to mute or unfollow; I promise this will end eventually and then things should be sensible for a while.

The process should take around three hours. I’ll post from my main Mastodon account when it’s theoretically safe to follow again.

Not that I expect anyone to really follow this site via ActivityPub anyway! So far this experiment has proven to me what I’d already suspected – ActivityPub isn’t really a great replacement to RSS/Atom.

More ActivityPub testing

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Okay so it looks like re-pinging of existing content to fed.brid.gy doesn’t cause it to reappear again, although it’s still a bit of a UX disaster how backfilled toots show up (namely as a gigantic flood to every follower’s timeline). I think that’s more of a Mastodon UX problem than ActivityPub or fed.brid.gy though, and it’s probably a necessary evil based on what happens when a Mastodon sidekiq queue gets backlogged or whatever. Not to mention even in a things-are-current context, the nature of how Pushl works means it’ll probably still cause stuff to get missed.

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Haha, oops

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Looks like fed.brid.gy will happily re-ping itself for already-ingested content, and it also shows up on your timeline as a flood of current items with whatever random dates are in place.

That seems… suboptimal.