busybee fluffy rambles

Last night a couple of my projects got messed up by a bad interaction between Nextcloud and the macOS auto-save mechanism. In particular, I was working on a couple of projects that were stored in Nextcloud, and due to the way that they both work, macOS kept on seeing Nextcloud as having changed the files, so it would save out a backup copy, and then Nextcloud would see macOS as having changed the files, so it would issue a sync. At one point things got out of sync and led to a bunch of conflicts, which then in turn resulted in things getting into a very weird state where many of the files were just plain not syncing, and others were replaced with older versions.

I think to complicate matters, one of the projects may have also been open on my machine at home, judging by how the Logic project file had been spammed/overwritten with backup versions that reflected the project state before I left home, so while all my recordings were still present, they weren’t on my timeline at all. Nope, I just managed (after a lot of finagling) to get my VPN back home working, and Logic wasn’t open at all. This was purely a problem with sync between my laptop and the server, with no remote meddling taking place.

Fortunately they were just rough recordings that I was planning on replacing anyway, but if I’d lost some actual work I’d have been rather upset.

Presumably this would happen with any filesystem-based sync mechanism (such as Dropbox or Google Drive). So, if you’re going to work on bundle-style projects from apps which use macOS version management (such as Logic, Final Cut Pro, and probably a bunch of others), it’s best to move or copy them outside of your sync folder when you work on them, and only move/copy them back in when you want the saved version to actually synchronize to your other computers.

I’ve done a bunch of refactoring/simplification on my website templates. I think everything still works but if you see something funky, please let me know.

There’s also a lot more I need to fix, especially redoing the CSS to be cleaner and on the comics subsection (which has an entirely different set of templates that aren’t built on HTML5 semantic containers at all), but that can definitely wait.

(I also really want to redo novembeat at some point since I have a better idea of how to structure it now, but that also will wait.)

Fluffy, I’m curious if you have time to do us all the kindness to deliver a 15-20 minute keynote on the topic of your choosing for the upcoming IndieWebCamp East 2020 on Saturday, November 14, 2020 some time between 10 and 11 am Eastern? Given the online nature of the camp it will take place via Zoom to an international audience and, as usual, will be recorded for posterity.

Oh, wow, thank you for the invitation, but I’ll have to decline, as the timing doesn’t really work for me, between traveling that week and also being in Pacific time.

I could possibly record something in advance instead, if that’s okay, although I’m spread a bit thin right now and I don’t think I could commit to that either.

Nortriptyline helps me with pain and brain stuff but it also has been making my blood pressure steadily go up. These problems I’m having are a repeat of why I tried getting off of it the last time around. Constant dizziness and headaches and tinnitus and feeling like crap.

I appreciate how much it helps me with my anxiety and my insomnia and pain, but I need something else.

Manuel Matuzović shares a thought-provoking experiment: the sample page accompanying his article “Accessible to some” has been optimized for screenreader software only, making it a hellish experience for users using the visual interface with a mouse.

The example website would be a clever illustration, except that it doesn’t actually work with VoiceOver on macOS (on Safari it just reads the visible text, and while Firefox does a bit better it stops after reading the first chunk of text and doesn’t proceed), nor with the built-in screen reader in macOS Safari.

Using aria labels to override the text is a poor approach to making plain text documents screen-readable; a better approach would have been to do all of the obnoxious stuff purely through CSS, which would also allow this page to work in, say, lynx | say or the like.