More fun with encodings

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On a Slack I’m on, there was a conversation wondering why so many websites disallow passwords with spaces, punctuation, “special” characters, and so on; shouldn’t they all be hashing the passwords rather than storing them in plain text anyway?

Yes, they should, but that’s not where the problem is. Once again, encodings become a problem.

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Backslide

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So, whatever positive effect I’ve gotten from the nortriptyline isn’t enough to make up for my current baseline pain levels. At least I’m able to get out of bed again (unlike a week ago) but holy moly do I fall into agonizing pain after not doing a whole lot. This weekend I wasn’t even capable of doing my usual 3-to-5 miles of walking a day, and I’m thinking tomorrow I might end up having to take a bus or even a Lyft to work. Very frustrating.

Also, lately I’ve noticed that the extra weight of my iPad in my purse is taking its toll on me. I should probably switch back to using my backpack as my main conveyance; it’s heavier but at least it’s symmetrical and puts the stress on my back rather than my shoulder and neck.

On the plus side, I’ve finally gotten my CPAP working well enough for me. I ended up finding a decent video on how to adjust the nasal pillows and those have turned out to be much more comfortable, given a second chance. The face mask ends up being too disruptive for a bunch of reasons (the slightest movement makes it leak around the sides and I have no way of scratching my nose without hecking the fit up) and I somehow managed to lose the nasal mask (which was nearly as bad as the full mask anyway) so the fact that I’ve gotten the one I’m “supposed” to be using to work reliably and comfortably is nice.

I still feel like it disrupts my sleep somewhat, though. I hope that’s just a matter of something I Need to get used to. Hopefully I’ll eventually start getting reliable deep sleep on it once I’ve fully acclimated.

Anyway. Being up this late and typing a blog post isn’t exactly helping. But I figured an update was in order.

Encodings are the worst

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These past few weeks I seem to keep on running into issues where things have been really bad about handling character encodings.

Back in the day, encodings were an absolute nightmare. You had different 8-bit encodings for every language, each with a bunch of different ISO standards; a very commonly-used one is ISO-8859-1, aka Latin-1, which is basically the characters needed to render all of English and most of several Romance languages (although a bunch of stuff is missing), plus a little extra stuff for math, scientific notation (µ), and German (ß), as well as a bunch of miscellani which were generally useful.

Unfortunately, a lot of Internet standards decided to default to that, including HTML.

Note: There are some updates based on feedback at the very bottom.

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Shout-out to Lending Club!

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A couple weeks ago I started getting 2FA emails from Lending Club (an online peer-to-peer broker for loans and investments thereof). 2FA is of course a good thing, but less good is when the 2FA emails are addressed to my dead name, rather than my current, legal name.

So, I forwarded it along with a complaint about what was wrong, and fully expected to be brushed off like most companies do. However, they actually responded amazingly, with an explanation of the problem, an apology for it, and a commitment to fix it!

To all the other companies I’ve experienced this issue with: this is the right way to respond.

Thank you for your patience while I took a deeper look into your inquiry. Please know that I was able to find out the reason why the emails you are receiving use your previous name when your current name listed on your account is [current name].

When our engineering team set up the notification emails for our two factor authentication security feature, the source that they used to pull investor data from was the credit reports at the time of account creation, rather than the name listed on the account currently. I do apologize for this and please know that your case has been escalated to our engineering team in the hopes of fixing this issue.

Ongoing stuff

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So, Friday I took a day off from my day job to go out to Quincy, WA to visit the Quincy Valley Historical Society and Museum, a farming museum which the AR startup is doing an app for. It was an interesting trip and I learned some stuff, although mostly we were there to guide the filming of greenscreen footage that’s going to be part of the app.

Quincy reminds me a lot of Las Cruces, where I spent a total of 8 years as a college and graduate student, only it’s even smaller and there’s no university.

Anyway, Friday night I didn’t sleep particularly well, then Saturday we drove back and after a brief nap I went to a local Twitch streamer meetup and met a bunch of people. Which was a good time and I made a bunch of contacts, but unfortunately the combination of that with the previous day meant I was already pretty much at my spoons limit.

Then Sunday, because of the dumpster fire that is Daylight Saving Time, all those dirty spoons got thrown into my garbage disposal.

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Places to follow my content

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For folks who were following me on Patreon and don’t have an RSS reader, here are some alternate ways of following me:

  • All my stuff gets automatically posted to Twitter, Tumblr, and Mastodon, although that’s not ideal because updates are really easy to miss on those places
  • You can use IFTTT or Blogtrottr to get posts delivered by email (here’s a tutorial on IFTTT)
  • There’s also the #site-updates channel on my Discord (which is also a fun place to hang out anyway)

But of course your life is a lot easier in general by just using a feed reader like feedly, The Old Reader, or Newsblur. Or if you have your own web hosting that can run PHP, you might consider running your own private Feed on Feeds instance!

Tag-reply posts?

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In response to my tagging announcement, Marty McGuire writes:

This could be a use case for tag-reply posts!

Brid.gy supports this for tagging people in Flickr posts, as well as adding labels to GitHub issues.

(wow I really have got to write some sort of reply-to post importer… hand-converting that to Markdown was way more work than it should have been!)

I’m not quite sure I understand the use case that’s being called for, here. Publ tags are “tags” in the Tumblr sense, where they’re used to filter and organize posts, like being able to limit things to rants or whatever; I get the feeling that this is confusion over multiple uses of the word “tag,” like how on Twitter/Facebook/Flickr/etc. “tagging” means signaling to someone that they should read a post (akin to “Tag! You’re it!”). Think Technorati tags from way back when, or Atom categories, which are most akin to hashtags on Twitter and Facebook.

I think a tag-as-in-notification thing would be implemented in Publ the same way I implement in-reply-to and so on – I have a corresponding header in the entry file and my template generates an invisible <a class="u-in-reply-to" href="..."> in the post body. The relevant bit in my entry template is:

{% for type in ('like-of', 'in-reply-to', 'repost-of', 'bookmark-of', 'mention-of', 'rsvp') %}
    {% for link in entry.get_all(type) %}
        <a href="{{link}}" class="u-{{type}}"></a>
    {% endfor %}
{% endfor %}

So in that sense Publ already supports that at the template level; I can simply add tag-of to the list of microformat types. Or am I completely misunderstanding what is being suggested?

In which I finally stop using Patreon

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So, hey, Patreon is a pretty popular site for funding the creative people you follow. A lot of people rely on Patreon as their primary source of income. More power to them if they do; it’s where everyone goes to do that sort of thing and it’s really enabled a lot of people to do what they love for a living.

But I just removed all my pledges and also my creator account. It’s not one thing in isolation that led me to do this, but a culmination of a lot of things (some big, some small) that had been frustrating and upsetting to me.

(Want to know where I’m accepting donations these days without reading a long missive? I’m on Ko-Fi for one-time donations and Liberapay for ongoing contributions.)

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Site updates!

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So hey, Publ now has a tagging system, so I’ve updated my site to show tags in a lot of places. I’m not sure if I should make some sort of tag explorer view or if it’s okay to just pivot between tags within a category listing. Insight or ideas would be most welcome.

What I want to do at some point is tag all of my comics with subject matter and characters, but that seems like a lot of work. I wonder if there’s a way to outsource that to other folks which doesn’t involve opening up my git repo to the world. Maybe I’ll build a simple tool which lets people suggest tags for entries which don’t have tags. Iunno.

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Treatment progress

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On the nortriptyline front, I’m up to 20mg/day and it’s feeling fine. It hasn’t solved my fibromyalgia forever (and after a day of typing and whatnot I’m still in pain, and my pressure points are still indicative of fibro) but it’s helping me a lot all the same. An unsurprising-but-nice thing is that it’s also vastly reduced my anxiety, which isn’t too surprising since that’s one of the on-label uses of this medication that I’m technically taking off-label. Does that count as a side-effect?

On the CPAP front, I’ve switched back to the nasal mask and it’s actually working pretty okay for me. I think the machine has finally learned to reduce its pressure because I’m a lot more comfortable throughout the night, although I still end up waking up at around 4 AM and taking it off so I can scratch my nose. Still, I’m generally feeling a lot more refreshed in the morning. I just need to get in the habit of putting it back on after I wake up and take care of the itching.

Also my cats have gotten used to it, which is nice.