busybee

Recently Techmoan released a video on setting up a record player, including a bit on calibrating the anti-skate functionality. He used a proper calibration record, “How To Give Yourself A Stereo Check-Out” by Decca Records. This is a fine way to go, if you can find it, but finding it for less than an asinine amount of money can be difficult in the US (your options are way better if you live in Europe or the UK, though).

There are other anti-skate calibration records out there, but they tend to be a bit expensive for what amounts to a blank vinyl record.

Of course you can buy a blank vinyl record for a lot less.

But what’s even cheaper?

Right now I’m sitting bored in a waiting room, so I decided to give CodeAnywhere a shot as a means of editing entries directly on my site, since that’s a use case I’ve mentioned as a possibility for the future.

Here are some of my observations as I run across them while writing this entry.

So, thinking about things more, the “profile URL” scheme doesn’t make sense for pure OAuth endpoints like Twitter, Facebook, etc. I’m thinking the API should provide two discovery mechanisms: one for profile-type (OpenID, IndieAuth/RelMeAuth, Mastodon), and one for SSO-type (OAuth).

So, I’ve started yet another web programming project, a generic authentication wrapper library for Python. Because I need something like this for Publ and just want to do it once.

A frequent thing that people want to do in making games or interactive applications is to shuffle a list. One common and intuitive approach that people take is to simply sort the list, but use a random number generator as the comparison operation. (For example, this is what’s recommended in Fuzzball’s MPI documentation, and it is a common answer that comes up on programming forums as well.)

This way is very, very wrong.

I am finally enrolled in Kaiser Permanente’s transgender healthcare program. (Why I didn’t get enrolled when I first signed up for it is a mystery, but whatever.) Today I finally received my insurance form for submitting reimbursement claims for my hair removal.

It gave me a diagnostic code of F649 with an explanation of “Uncomfortable with one’s gender.”

This is… not great phrasing.

So because I’m starting the new job next week I figured it was time to get myself back on a compatible sleep schedule. In the past I’ve always done this by taking a dose of melatonin before bed to ease myself into going to bed early, and then try to continue to go to bed at a regular time every night. That usually works for about three days.

What I’m doing this time is attacking it from the other end: I have set my smart bed and Apple Watch to both wake me up at 8:00 every morning, both only on weekdays. The smart bed’s alarm comes through my phone (which charges on my nightstand) and happens during a shallow sleep phase during the half hour or so before the actual alarm time. This usually wakes me up effectively.

The Apple Watch charger, however, lives on the bookshelf across the room, and the Nightstand Mode alarm turns out to be the right combination of pleasant enough to not be jarring and annoying enough to get me up to turn it off.

So I’ve been talking about distributed social stuff a lot lately, especially Publ (my publishing engine, which runs this site, in case you are new here), and also ecosystem stuff for things like private entries and other things that have been pinging around in my head for a while.

A thing I keep on mentioning is Subl, but generally only talking about it tangentially without actually going into detail with what it even is. So, I guess I should talk about that at some point.

Now that I’ve had a chance to think about this more than what was afforded by a quick response fired off between songs at a karaoke bar, I feel like expanding more on the details that I’d only implied (and probably badly) from the previous post. So, here’s how I think things could look.

I’ve been ranting about ActivityPub vs. RSS/Atom a lot lately, and I think I’ve proven to myself (and maybe a few others) that for fully-public content feeds, Atom (combined with WebSub and WebMention) is superior to ActivityPub; it’s simpler to implement, works with many more hosting environments and configurations, it generally scales better (and handles scaling failures better), and it’s modular and allows for much eaiser migrations between hosting setups and so on.

But one thing ActivityPub supports which Atom does not is the notion of private content. The way it does support this is a bit hamfisted (in that ActivityPub publishers choose to only push content to endpoints which have a trusted user, and endpoints only forward that content over to the trusted users, albeit in a not-very-trustable way). It doesn’t inherently support the ability to backfill older content (or make it otherwise browseable) to someone who is granted friends-only access after-the-fact, though, and it has many scaling and security implications in how this works (since it requires push to be reliable and requires the recipient’s storage of said push notifications to also be reliable).

I’ve put a lot of thought into how to add friends-only stuff to Atom on and off over the years; my previous blog (which used Movable Type for publishing and phpBB for comments) actually had an ad-hoc implementation which worked sort of okay; people could authenticate with my site’s forum, and people in a trusted friend group would see private content. On the public feed, if their reader were logged into the forum (via cookie sharing etc.) it would see the private content in the feed, otherwise it would see placeholders saying “THis is a friends-only entry, please visit the site to read it.” It worked okay but it was never great.

Anyway, I think I have finally come up with an auth approach that works with Atom and offers a… well, least-bad solution all around, which scales better and more reliably than ActivityPub while working with WebSub and existing/legacy feed readers.

As part of testing my WebSub changes for FoF, I decided to switch to a WebSub hub for myself that provides some subscriber analytics and so on. One neat thing about how WebSub works is that the “hub” layer is completely modular and it really doesn’t matter at all which one you use, and if the one you use has problems you can switch to another one just by changing the URL in your feed and all subscribers will eventually seamlessly migrate (at their next normal polling interval); if anyone even notices a problem it will just be that they don’t receive a push update during that polling interval. (Which, let’s be honest, is incredibly unlikely for most RSS feeds.)

Anyway, because of these new analytics, as well as information I gathered from my new WebSub-supporting reader, I now know a bit more about the state of WebSub.

Update: A lot more supporting readers have shown up in my stats in the two years since I published this article! Please see this entry for a list.

Two years ago when I decided to go indie I had a few motivations behind it. Part of it was that I needed to work on my own thing for a while, but most of it was just that I needed to get the heck out of the tech industry; everything in that industry is so toxic and based around everyone being “passionate” about doing everything for a company with an incredibly asymmetric relationship. I was working myself to death (often literally) and putting myself deeper into intractible chronic pain, which never felt like it was enough and employers kept on demanding more and more, while being less interested in my own physical and mental health.

So I went indie, because I had a bunch of projects I wanted to work on, such as Publ and my games. And I thought I’d be able to make a little niche for myself making music for other peoples' games as well.

Well, it turns out that I’m my own worst boss. When I’m working on my own projects I get just as passionate, obsessed, and self-injurious as ever, and I also managed to burn myself out on all that. And when it came to working for others, well, I had a hard time finding people I wanted to work with who would be able to give me anything approaching a steady income. I was also feeling impostor syndrome like crazy, like what right do I have to be trying to do this when I (feel like I) can’t even get everything done?

Lately most of my social networking has been via Mastodon, which is basically an open source, semi-distributed equivalent to Twitter. When I first joined a few years ago I got an account on the flagship instance, but not much later ended up switching to queer.party. Unfortunately, queer.party has had several scaling issues – similar to a lot of the other small instances – and while it hasn’t gone down entirely, it’s so backlogged that it’s gotten to be pretty much useless.

On Mastodon there’s a general feeling that anyone with a mastodon.social address isn’t savvy because they don’t “get” Mastodon, that the whole point to it is that it’s distributed and you don’t have to be on a single central instance and so on. But the problem is that most of the instances – and there’s quite a lot of them – aren’t run in a way that can be expected to scale over time.

Most instances are maintained as a spare-time thing by someone, but instance management is more and more becoming a full-time job. I am incredibly grateful that Maffsie is willing to run the instance even on that basis, don’t get me wrong! But all the same I’d like to be on an instance where it doesn’t regularly go down or have massive backlogs (7 hours, at present) or random weird federation problems.

The problem with Mastodon in this case is that any Mastodon instance, regardless of the user count (or a user limit), will continue to grow without bounds for as long as it’s being used, and as the ActivityPub network grows, the amount of stuff that every instance needs to keep track of will grow too.

Brad Leone recently did an episode on fermented garlic miso, and in it there was an aside of starting up a black garlic experiment. Recently he finished an episode on the black garlic itself, but the initial episode was enough to plant a seed in my mind of doing a bunch of black garlic myself.

His technique involves placing the garlic into a sealed bag and that into a dehydrator at around 130ºF/55ºC. However, my dehydrator tends to be both very loud and high on power consumption, so I decided to try using my sous vide circulator instead.

So last Thursday I flew to San Francisco to visit my brother, sister-in-law, and nephew.

I was kind of thinking about skipping this last week because the previous few sessions were feeling not very useful for me, but I ended up going anyway and I’m glad that I did.

Also, I’m not sure if I mentioned this before but if you’re in Seattle, these workshops are available to you whether you’re a Kaiser Permanente member or not! There’s more information about that on their living well classes, including online versions (and they also have additional online resources).

Main topics today:

• Working with healthcare providers
• Weight management (ugh, but don’t worry)
• Looking forward

Oops, I forgot to post these earlier while the session was fresh in my mind. I’m going to have to work a lot harder to decipher my handwriting this time around.

This was the 5th week. Next week is the last one. I’m kind of glad to see it ending. Sigh.

Topics covered this week:

• Medications
• Depression management
• Physical activity
• Mind management

Okay, so, I dropped peewee because of bad behavior on the part of the core maintainer. And then yesterday word got around that SQLite has a… rather tone-deaf but well-meaning CoC that is a bit off-putting. Plenty of people have written about the problems with this CoC itself so it’s not worth me adding my own hot takes on it, and I’m choosing to take Dr. Hipp at his word that he is being sincere about it being a moral framework for working with others and that he doesn’t mean it as a joke (despite the fact that he doesn’t seem to mind the people who are championing it as a “parody of social justice outrage culture” or complaining about the contributor covenant CoC with phrases like “purple-headed feminist” okay argh I’m ranting tangentially, focus).

(I should also mention that the timing of this going around was only a coincidence vis-a-vis my de-ORMing Publ musing. I actually wrote that article several days earlier and started thinking about it over a month ago, and considered rescheduling its publication because I didn’t want people thinking these things were related!)

When I was replacing peewee with PonyORM, I was evaluating a few options, including moving away from an ORM entirely and simply storing the metadata in indexed tables in memory. This would have also helped to solve a couple of minor annoying design issues (such as improper encapsulation of the actual content state into the application instance), but I ended up not doing this.

A big reason why is that there don’t actually seem to be any useful in-memory indexed table libraries for Python. Or many other languages.

This week’s topics were on healthy eating, communication, and problem solving.

It’s been nearly two years since I decided to quit my job and go full-time indie. Now I’m thinking of just going back into the world of gainful full-time employment.

I’ve been pretty busy with Publ and Pushl lately, mostly doing stuff to get Webmention support to a place where I’m happy with it (most of Publ’s recent improvements have been with the goal of making Pushl work better with it, although the side effect has been to also improve its cacheability which is a win for everyone).

Anyway, what’s cool about this is I’m already receiving a handful of natural webmentions, in particular on the ActivityPub rant which tells me that a lot of people are looking into ActivityPub for various reasons. (All of the webmentions thus far have been indications of folks “favoriting” it, which I choose to interpret as people agreeing with it.)

While getting this support in (and using IndieWebify.Me to verify my h-card/h-entry markup among other things) I learned about fed.brid.gy, which is a service that will convert webmentions into ActivityPub activity, for sites which configure a couple of request routes. Obviously I’m going to add direct support for that (in a way which will apparently be compatible, conveniently enough).

Anyway, this blog entry is mostly a test of that, because adding the redirection rule was pretty simple.

Week 3’s curriculum covered the Moving Easy Program (a simple but effective stretching and minor strength training regimen), pacing and planning, treatment evaluation, and decision making strategies (both for treatment seeking and for other aspects of life).

Last week’s action plan was to do 10 minutes of yoga in the morning, 4 times. I was mostly successful, but only did it 3 times, as today I slept in from having to work late last night (doing a final build of the iOS app for Borealis).

Throughout today’s session we also got some useful affirmations that I can put onto my affirmation board:

• Practice makes progress
• You choose
• Are you choosing pain?

This week was a lot more comprehensive than the first week, and it feels like a lot more happened in about the same amount of time.

The major areas of focus were: problem-solving, dealing with difficult emotions (especially useful for me right now), physical activity, relaxation techniques, and dealing with fatigue.

I’ve been building Publ with IndieWeb principles in mind. One of the things I’m playing with right now is adding in very basic support for WebMention.

A few months ago I signed up for the “Living Well with Chronic Pain” workshop that’s put on a few times a year by my HMO. It’s a six-week course that meets once a week. I figure it would be helpful to share the key insights from each session here, since I know a lot of my followers have similar issues and would like to benefit as well.

The textbook for the workshop is Living a Healthy Life with Chronic Pain (affiliate link). It also comes with a pain-management exercise audiobook on CD.

So, my trusty Presonus Firestudio Project is starting to give up the ghost, and it looks like the new macOS Mojave won’t support it anyway. And it’s my last bit of Firewire hardware so I’d might as well come limping along into the USB era, right?

UPDATE: It looks like I still have some time with this 10-year-old interface. Phew.

Inspired by a conversation I had last night, and not all of these are covered by the more well-known lists.

Hey guess what!

I added a new feature to Publ! It lets you wrap text closely around images that are floated, via a CSS attribute which is pretty widely-supported but kind of annoying to deal with. Which is to say that Publ itself isn’t really doing all that much work here but it was easy to add some plumbing into it to make the browser able to do all the work for you. (So far the only entries on my site using this function are this one and the GRS article which I updated to use it a little bit.)

It’s kind of neat, so please check it out.

So, today my ActivityPub rant made the front page of Hacker News. I’m happy to say that as far as I can tell, Publ didn’t fall over at all, not even during the initial surge of activity (or at least, Apache never recorded any gateway failures or the like).

I mean, it isn’t too surprising, considering that pretty much any “hot” page or asset is going to live in an in-process cache and require basically no processing at all, but it’s still cool to see.

So, for those who haven’t seen the news, Linus Torvalds has apologized for his community behavior and is taking steps to be more professional and empathic.

I am very glad to see this change from him, and I really hope that he’s able to take this opportunity to grow and set a new example to the F/OSS community, making it a more welcoming, friendly place.

So, I’ve been trying to find some nice dress shoes. I have pretty big feet for someone of my height and gender, so local shoe stores never actually have anything in my size in a style that I like. So, for this I still use Amazon, since I still have Prime for the next month or so anyway. (I do not plan on renewing after this year.)

One thing that Amazon keeps on pushing is Prime Wardrobe (affiliate link), where they heavily advertise that with a Prime membership you can now try-before-you-buy and have 7 days to decide which things to keep. Which is already a bit silly because with normal Prime you already have something like 30 days to return a thing you don’t want.

Of all the streamers I follow on Twitch, my favorite by far is Orcastraw (Kaitlyn). She maintains an amazing community of chill, accepting people, and has the most positive (and well-moderated) Twitch chat I’ve ever seen. She first came to my attention when she was the first to run Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild at Games Done Quick, and she had the BotW Any% world record for around a month shortly after that (and even a year later her record-setting run is still 6th place overall). Her attitude is what even got me interested in watching Twitch regularly, running my own occasional stream, and even becoming more confident in my own gender presentation. Basically, she’s pretty neat and is worth watching if you’re into this sort of thing.

Recently she started making streaming her main source of income, meaning that her livelihood depends primarily on viewer donations. As part of her September donation drive, she offered an incentive: at the $250 mark she would do an all-Koroks run of BotW.

From the recently announced changes to Twitch prime, people are, understandably, upset about Twitch changing their monetization strategy, and are, predictably, wondering about the possibility of making a federated live-streaming platform.

The good news is that all of the stuff necessary to make federated live streaming happen already exist and wouldn’t be even all that hard to build.

The bad news is that it’ll probably be expensive to do well.

Here are some useful resources for dealing with anxiety; some of these work better than others. Feel free to try different things out, or suggesting other things in the comments!

This is an augmented reality work; please install the ARt Portal application and select the “Lusio 2018” exhibition.

For the best results, please ensure your sound is turned on; headphones are recommended.

Most use cases of ActivityPub would be better off as Atom or RSS feeds.

This past weekend I participated in Kobe-Kon, also known as Kobekon, Kobe Konvention, Kobe Convention, and Kobekon Seattle. It takes place in Everett, WA.

Kobe-Kon is primarily an anime convention, but the Seattle Indies got a room for indie development outreach and games demonstration, and wanting to participate I got a table to show off my games Refactor and CATcher. Fellow exhibitors were Laughing Manatee Games, djbeardo, Ashley Rivas, Masha and Dustin Soodak, cloverfirefly, kz, and the Buoyancy team.

Because of the experiences I had I felt it would be helpful to other people to provide a write-up for future reference.

Lately my sleep has been pretty much garbage, and I probably need a sleep study. But sleep studies are expensive and a lot of hassle to maybe find out nothing’s actually wrong, so in the meantime I got a sleep tracker kit.

There has been yet another explosion of discourse over on Trans Twitter as a result of a couple of prominent people talking about their beliefs regarding dysphoria and what it means to be “really” trans.

The term “transmed” has come about, as an attempt at a more “gentle” form of what many folks call “truscum,” namely that you must feel dysphoria to be Really Trans, and that the end goal absolutely must be a “proper” transition, which is such an incredibly reductive, prescriptive, and invalidating set of concepts that it does much more harm than good to people who are already having difficulty questioning themselves and need support and compassion to figure out where they stand and what they need.

The problem with discussing dysphoria is that it’s such an ineffable, subjective concept that it’s impossible for two people to even agree on what it is – hell, it’s difficult for one person to agree on what it is – and it can also refer to so many things, many of which overshadow each other and behave in confusing ways, and thus how can any objective criterion be formed based on what essentially comes down to what someone’s feeling?

Note: While reading this you may be tempted to give me advice on things to help with chronic pain or wrist problems. Believe me when I say I have almost certainly heard it before, and I am not interested in advice; I simply want to help spread understanding.

I have, since my late teenage years, had chronic pain in both wrists, a result of heavy computer use that started when I was very young. I was fascinated by computers and absolutely determined to become an expert at everything that could be done on them; this drive led me to many spans of overworking as I tried to do everything I could in as short a time as I could. This obsessiveness combined with poor ergonomic practices led to a slow buildup of nerve adhesions and chronic tendinitis.

While nearly anyone who has heard of anything regarding transgender issues has heard of the more “traditional” GRS for AMAB people (used to construct a neovagina and labia from existing penile/scrotal tissues), this procedure does not cover the bases for every AMAB person. In particular, a growing number of non-binary-identified people — in particular, ones with a neutrois identity — are much more interested in simply eschewing their external genitalia entirely.

Although controversial, there are now a few surgeons who will, under the right circumstances, provide this sort of surgery. In January of 2017 I had this procedure done with Dr. Peter Davis in Palo Alto.

Disclaimer

This is a thing that I did because it was right for me, and I knew very well that it was what I needed. I am providing this information as a helpful resource for those who need it. There isn’t any one right way to be trans or nonbinary, and what’s right for me isn’t necessarily right for anyone else.

Updates

2020-04-16: I have added some frequently-asked questions to the FAQ section. Please check that before posting a comment! Thanks.

2020-12-12: Updated the surgeon list.

2021-05-26: Added some updates regarding post-operative care.

2022-09-01: Added some notes on pronouns, cleaned up some awkward phrasing, and updated some stuff regarding my long-term healing.

2022-09-09: Added some information about AFAB-to-neutrois (aka FtN) practitioners.

2023-01-09: As noted in the comments, there’s some pretty big news: WPATH 8 recently released, and this comes with a whole bunch of new guidelines for these surgeries! Hopefully this article will soon be a relic of the past, and general information is much more freely available to all who want it. Thanks to reader WheelyCurious for bringing this to my attention!

A lot has been written about the impending buyout of GitHub by Microsoft. As a regular user of the former and not much of a user of the latter, people would probably expect me to be against this happening, but my feelings on it are largely positive.

And this comes from someone who used to refer to them as “M$!” (All I can say is I’ve grown a lot since the 90s.)

Wow, another silly meta update about this new site, go figure. I should probably come up with something more substantial to say, but this is pretty much all I have to talk about right now.

This feels like the end of an era, after I spent so long recommending them and trying to make the best of their services even over the last few years.

RIP, my Dreamhost hosting plan (June 2007—June 2018).

So, some issues have become apparent while this new site has been up for a day or so.

So, this is my first new blog entry on my brand new website, my first (relatively) clean start since the last accretion disc began in early 2003. I realize that the current blog template has none of the old template’s charm; don’t worry, I’ll be bringing the plaid look back eventually.

Here are some ruminations, brought on by me spending all evening going through my old blog trying to find things worth saving. There were a few useful articles here and there, which I have more fully-integrated into the rest of my site, but I’m finding that most of my old “blog content” is just not worth the hassle of preserving.

This article was originally written for the Publ blog. I have reproduced a slightly modified version here so that it hopefully finds a wider audience.

Whenever I build a piece of software for the web, almost invariably somebody asks why I’m not using PHP to do it. While much has been written on this subject from a standpoint of what’s wrong with the language (and with which I agree quite a lot!), that isn’t, to me, the core of the problem with PHP on the web.

So, I want to talk a bit about some of the more fundamental issues with PHP, which actually goes back well before PHP even existed and is intractably linked with the way PHP applications themselves are installed and run.

(I will be glossing over a lot of details here.)

Photos in and around Astoria, OR, centered around the iLLuMiNART festival

Change is in the air.

A few people have asked me to write up a review of my Keyboard.io Model 01 now that I’ve had it for a little while. Here are my thoughts.

First, some backstory. I have used computers my whole life, and ever since the age of 19 I’ve had quite a bit of trouble with chronic wrist pain. This has only gotten worse over the past 20 years. I have tried all sorts of keyboards, from various mechanical keyboards such as from Filco (affiliate link), to ergonomist-recommended split keyboards such as the Kinesis Freestyle (affiliate link), all the way to incredibly exotic weird-as-heck things like the Datahand and ErgoDox. All of them had pluses and minuses, but ultimately none of them really let me escape the orbit of horrible wrist pain; almost universally, their design flaws would end up ultimately making it worse than it was before and I’d end up going back to a more-traditional Filco 10keyless (affiliate link).