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.