Re: Why Publ won’t support magic auth links

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In response to a Publ blog post, Kicks Condor writes:

One question, though—could the Atom feed list rel alternate versions of the feed? (That would have type application/atom+xml?) It also seems like rel self could have the non-authenticated version of the feed. It doesn’t make sense for credentials to be in that URL. These are possibly naive suggestions—apologies, if so. Again, fantastic write-up!

The problem is that it’s up to the sharing news reader to know which URL to use for the sharing, and there’s no way to control what URL the reader happens to use. I know that Feed On Feeds will use the URL for the actual subscription (since that’s the only source URL it tracks in the first place), and who knows what other readers with sharing features will do!

And changing the rel="self" URL has a different problem – some readers (again, such as Feed On Feeds) treat that as the canonical URL and will update their subscriptions to point to that URL instead, so setting rel="self" to the unauthenticated feed means most users will be unable to remain logged in.

Basically, it’s a tricky issue that has no right answer with the Atom spec as it currently exists. So if some other mechanism has to be designed, it might as well be done in a safe, unambiguous way from the beginning. If some other use case for magic auth links comes up I’ll reconsider implementing them, but at least for friends-only subscription access, the privacy risks are simply not worth it.

Gah

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Why didn’t anyone tell me that the previous blog post was posted as a very-broken comics post

Diagnostic process

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Today was a travel day to Portland, for Retro Game Expo. So of course just as the train was ready to take off was when my HMO decided to call me to do the ADHD diagnostic intake. I asked if I could just call back later when I wasn’t likely to lose coverage in 3 minutes, and eventually I got the phone number to call.

So, when I got to Portland I called the number, where they immediately put me on hold for 30 minutes. After which they asked me what I was calling about, and when I said I was calling about getting my ADHD screening, they put me on hold for another 15 minutes. Not a great start.

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ADHD

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So, this post about signs of undiagnosed ADHD showed up on one of my fibro communities and so much of it seemed PRETTY FAMILIAR, and I also found out that fibromyalgia and ADHD are highly comorbid, and then I was realizing that I stopped being able to focus on work and Getting Stuff Done when I had to go cold turkey on caffeine when my panic disorder started in 2011, and, wellp.

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Using Firefox as my primary browser

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For a while my browser usage has been Safari as my primary and Firefox as my backup (for the rare site that didn’t work in Safari, usually due to the “modern” web being terrible), mostly because it gave me good integration with the iCloud Keychain as well as a few nice little handoff things (migrating sessions between computers/my phone, autofilling SMS OTP keys, etc.).

However, ever since the most recent Safari update, I’ve been finding it to be incredibly unstable or troublesome in a lot of ways (like entering a URL causing it to not actually load said URL, or feedback just plain being lost), and of course the recent loss of the 1Password 6 extension has made it less pleasant as well. (I have reasons for not wanting to upgrade to 1Password 7, but that’s a whole other rant.) Also, as nice as the iCloud Keychain is, Safari’s password autofill has always had problems on a lot of sites, and the fact I had to run it side-by-side with 1Password to get my passwords available on Windows machines was getting pretty annoying.

So, I decided to actually try Firefox as my full-time browser on macOS, and so far I’m liking it.

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Stop it with the zero-calorie sweeteners

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I love my Sodastream carbonator. But I don’t like how all of its soda syrups have “50% less sugar” by them replacing it with Stevia or sucralose. Yesterday at Target I saw that they had a new line of syrups that claimed to be made of just fruit juice, and I looked at the ingredients, and didn’t see anything problematic, so I bought some.

Just now I made a cup of soda with it, and at the first sip realized that they’d snuck Stevia in. I looked at the ingredients again, and there was at the very end, steviol glycosides – the distilled essence of what makes Stevia Stevia.

So, that’s $10 down the drain, literally.

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waffling

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Just an incredibly dorky ramble I posted on a Slack chat, which I am saving here for posterity.

okay so someone put the idea of getting a waffle fry cutter in my head (not naming names, as it was in a private channel) and I went to Bed Bath and Beyond to buy one only to find that the BB&B herre closed down sometime, and so I went to Target and found that they had, like, no knives or cutters anymore. I’m not gonna spend $100 on one at Sur La Table so I guess Amazon is my best bet. Anyone have any suggestions on waffle fry cutters there?

Rippled knife is okay, mandolin-style slicer would be better. In the latter case, it’d be great if it’s a good mandolin on its own too.

I already have a decent flat-blade mandolin cutter but I wouldn’t mind an upgrade in that department either.

or I mean I guess I could just buy pre-made frozen waffle fries too, honestly that’s probably a better deal

From a TCO standpoint anyway

Frozen waffle fries are about $2/pound and potatoes are about $1/pound. Waffle cutters seem to be $10-20 depending on style so that means needing to make at least 10 pounds of waffle fries before it pays off.

But think of all the other things I could waffle cut!

Like, I dunno, carrots or cucumbers or something

Jicama

Also I could experiment with the geometry of doing waffle cuts at angles other than 90°

Imagine equilateral triangle waffles

Or with some extra work, penrose tilings

the possibilities are endless. or at least finite-but-unbounded

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Upcoming shows!

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I will be tabling at two upcoming shows in the Pacific Northwest area:

  1. On October 20, I’ll be showing CATcher at the Portland Indie Game Squad “indie arcade” booth at Retro Gaming Expo, alongside a bunch of other indie games. Come check us out at table 3500 in the arcade (right by the concessions)!
  2. On November 16 and 17 I’ll be running my own vendor table at GeekGirlCon, where I’ll be selling comics, pins, prints, and possibly some other stuff. I’ll be at table 101, right in the corner nearest the escalators; see this handy map!

How the heck I can listen to music the way I want to

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Okay, after posting my rant, someone on a Slack I’m on pointed me to Smart Shuffle, an alternate player for iOS which plays music the way I want to listen to it. (Thanks, Roman!)

I also signed up for iTunes Match, which provides the only part of Apple Music I care about (while also costing way less). And it seems to be doing a good job of pre-populating my device with music, and Smart Shuffle is able to play from iCloud while I’m on wifi and then automatically switch to stuff that’s locally cached when I’m not on it, so hopefully that makes for a reasonably seamless experience.

I guess with the vast quantity of music I have at this point I don’t really care about play stats for excluding stuff I’ve heard recently since I have so much of it that it’s less likely for duplication to happen like that.

The iPhone does have a setting for how much music to prefetch but as far as I can tell there’s no way to tell it which playlists/songs/whatever to prioritize; as far as I can tell it intends to focus on stuff that I listen to already, which is pretty much the opposite of what I want.

I suppose that if I care incredibly deeply about having proper randomness available on my phone I could just get a 512GB iPhone when I inevitably upgrade. I guess that’s a decision I can make next time I’m in Portland (which is in just two weeks).

One annoyance with iTunes Match so far is that it refuses to cloud-upload songs which it sees as duplicates. Fortunately its duplicate detection seems to be a lot better than in the bad old days of just matching artist and title, but unfortunately it still means that if you have an artist who has released multiple close-enough-to-each-other versions of the same song on different albums, or has released a best-of compilation, you’ll only get one rendition of it and it won’t appear in all the albums, and you can’t even choose which one is the canonical album placement. Kind of annoying. But less annoying than all the other things iTunes annoys me with, I guess.