From anderegg.ca
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November has sucked so far. One upside of the terrible nonsense is that more people are fleeing X. Many are choosing Bluesky. I’ve seen a bunch of takes about this recently, but I keep seeing things I disagree with. I figure that’s a good enough excuse to write more about this weird-assed social network.
#tech #media #blusky #compsci #jgshare #neither #Mastodon #federated #fediverse #atprotocol
2h ago
From anderegg.ca
0 0
It’s been a couple of weeks since I last wrote about WordPress. Stuff’s been happening in the background, but I’ve been trying to ignore it. This morning I read a story that bothered me enough to require another round of therapy-by-blog-post.
on Nov 1
From anderegg.ca
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I missed the date on this, but it’s been over two years since Elon Musk walked into Twitter HQ with a sink. Today I looked back at some conversations I had at the time. There were a lot of feelings.
on Oct 30
From anderegg.ca
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This morning I saw a Bluesky post from Andy Baio mentioning that Too Many Cooks was released 10 years ago.
on Oct 30
From anderegg.ca
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It’s super late at night on Thanksgiving weekend in Canada. I shouldn’t be thinking about weird internet drama, but here we are.
on Oct 24
From anderegg.ca
Thoughts on the recent migration from X to Bluesky
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A flood of users left X and moved to Bluesky over the weekend. I’ve written a bunch of times in the past about Bluesky, and have gone from grumpy frustration to general acceptance of the service. I’m happy that people are moving away from X, and I think Bluesky is a reasonable replacement. That...
on Oct 21
From anderegg.ca
WordPress, drama, leadership, and the web
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The WordPress saga continues. Theo Browne has a great video overview of things up to October 14. Since I last wrote about this there was more back-and-forth between David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) and Matt Mullenweg. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not a fan of DHH, but I agree with his takes on...
on Oct 18
From anderegg.ca
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A couple of days ago, I saw this Mastodon post from Casey Liss. I had previously used GitHub Codespaces when working with a client, but it was a bit much. It relies on VMs that run on GitHub servers to give you a VS Code instance. Those VMs take a while to spin up and you have a limited number...
on Oct 18
From anderegg.ca
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Look, I’m just about as tired of writing about WordPress drama as you are of reading it. That said, I think this stuff needs to be documented because it’s so off-the-wall bonkers. Also, it probably shouldn’t be surprising that drama about blogging software has gotten bloggers to blog about it.
on Oct 16
From anderegg.ca
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Molly White, who I first learned of because of Web3 is Going Just Great, posted an excellent article: “Fighting for our web”.
on Oct 9
From anderegg.ca
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The WordPress drama has not dried up. Since I wrote last, Matt Mullenweg has done a number of interviews, WP Engine sued Automattic, the structure of the WordPress organization has become clearer, and over 150 employees left Automattic in a buy-out deal. Now it seems Mullenweg is going after a...
on Oct 6
From anderegg.ca
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I wrote about the WordPress vs. WP Engine drama a couple of days ago, but it’s still taking up space in my head. For better or worse, WordPress powers about half of the web. I care deeply about the web, and I think it’s being harmed by this nonsense.
on Sep 28
From anderegg.ca
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The WordPress world received a massive dose of drama over the last week. Before I get to my thoughts, here’s a rough timeline of recent events.
on Sep 26
From anderegg.ca
The Games Behind Your Government’s Next War
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The Games Behind Your Government’s Next War is a fascinating look into government funded gaming by the folks at People Make Games.
on Sep 8
From anderegg.ca
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Earlier this week my city councillor, Waye Mason, put out the latest edition of his newsletter. In it, he included a link to a video tour of the Power House.
on Jul 10
From anderegg.ca
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I just saw this Mastodon post from Melissa Elliott pointing to the BBC Rewind Sound Effects archive. It’s a collection of 33,066 miscellaneous sounds from the BBC’s back catalogue. There’s an astonishingly plain language Licensing page that mentions that the sounds can be freely used for...
on Jun 26
From anderegg.ca
Follow-up on templating structured data
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When I waffled about template-based XML, I mentioned that I discussed my issue with a friend. That friend, Mike Burke, wrote a follow-up post: On generating structured data from templates. It has several examples that demostrate the sorts of trouble you can get into when sticking data into a...
on Jun 26
From anderegg.ca
A Look Into Cara — Maybe Host Your Own Art
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Cara is a social media app aimed at artists that’s grown by more than 600,000 users in the past week. I just learned about it today, but it’s been around since at least the beginning of 2023. Its key features are that it won’t host AI content yet, and it tries to dissuade scrapers from indexing...
on Jun 22
From anderegg.ca
Recall: What the Heck, Microsoft?
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When Microsoft first announced their new Recall feature, I was intrigued. I had heard about a similar project, Rewind, discussed on ATP back in 2022 and it sounded like it would be genuinely useful.
on Jun 5
From anderegg.ca
c90adventures - Willy is Back!
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I really enjoyed following the adventures of Willy the mini-Jeep last year. Ed March, who runs the c90adventures channel, decided to buy a cheap motorized mini-Jeep, modify it heavily, and then drive it on a long journey over some treacherous trails. I stuck around because of Ed’s sense of...
on Jun 4
From anderegg.ca
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I was a bit late joining the WeblogPoMo train, having only announced I was doing it on the 2nd. I was hesitant because I wasn’t sure if I wanted to commit. Before starting, I assumed I’d have to skip some days — but I didn’t! Because of a post on the last day of April (and including this post),...
on May 31
From anderegg.ca
Python for Data Analysis — An Open Access Data Science Book
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When I was starting to do more serious data work, I picked up a copy of the first edition of Python for Data Analysis. I really liked the book, and it helped me get familiar with pandas.
on May 30
From anderegg.ca
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I really loved Steve Jackson’s Fighting Fantasy series of books back in the 90s. They were like the Choose Your Own Adventure books, but with RPG elements like an inventory system and dice-driven combat.
on May 29
From anderegg.ca
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I decided to blow up the sidebar. I promise this wasn’t a way to get two easy posts in May.
on May 28
From anderegg.ca
Trying Out the Sidebar Nav Lifestyle
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Today, instead of writing something for real, I decided to play around with my site navigation. You should now see a sidebar on larger displays, and a modified horizontal nav layout on smaller screens. I’m really not happy with it yet, but I need to move on!
on May 27
From anderegg.ca
Congratulations, Charles Leclerc!
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The 2024 Monaco Grand Prix got off to an insane start. There were three incidents on the first lap — each would have been race-defining in any other year. Then things settled into a rhythm, with only a minor blip of interest for the remaining laps. I was still glued to my screen in tense...
on May 26
From anderegg.ca
The Pen Addict: Beta Type-R Review
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Earlier this week, The Pen Addict posted a review of the Mad Science Pen Company Beta Type-R.
on May 25
From anderegg.ca
On Template-Based Feed Generation
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A couple of days ago, I was demoralized by a minor Jekyll issue. I was thinking about generating a single Atom feed from two content types. Turns out the plugin provided by GitHub Pages can’t do this directly.
on May 24
From anderegg.ca
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Yesterday, the Bluesky team announced that direct messages (DMs) were now available in first-party clients. I thought I’d dig into this to see if I could figure out how this worked.
on May 23
From anderegg.ca
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I use tags in Bear to save links and quick notes for reference. A few of them are ideas for work-related things or future project ideas, but most are just cool things I want to keep track of. I’ve been thinking for a while: why keep those locked in Bear? I really like how many other sites,...
on May 22
From anderegg.ca
Travelling for the Enjoyment of Others
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I started watching Jet Lag: The Game early last year after seeing a friend recommend it. By this point there had already been four “seasons”, and I devoured them. Happily, the fifth season wasn’t far off, and I’ve continued to enjoy the series as it aired since then.
on May 21
From anderegg.ca
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In Canada we celebrate Victoria Day, which is kind of a strange holiday. It’s in honour of Queen Victoria, who was Canada’s monarch during the time of Canadian Confederation. Her birthday was May 24th, but the holiday is celebrated on the last Monday before May 25th, so it moves around.
on May 20
From anderegg.ca
What’s Up with Mastodon and “Referer” Headers?
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One thing that’s helped me keep up with blogging this month is seeing my web analytics numbers go up. I maybe check my analytics too often, but at least it’s a good motivator to be productive.
on May 19
From anderegg.ca
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I can’t remember when I first heard of Prof. Michael Geist, but I’ve been following his work since at least the late-2000s. I got to meet him at a CIRA mixer event held on the evening after the 2015 directors meeting in Halifax. He’s extremely sharp, and was also a very pleasant person to chat with.
on May 18
From anderegg.ca
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In 2009, I was working with a group of friends at a small software agency. We had a cheap office in downtown Halifax. The building was not in great shape, but the offices were well below market price because the place kept threatening to be turned into condos.
on May 17
From anderegg.ca
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Weblog Posting Month seems to be actually working out! I’ve published 15 posts to this site in May so far. That’s 16 consecutive days of posting, seeing as the TikTok ban post went out on the last day of April. This is a lot more than I’m used to posting! I thought it would be worthwhile to...
on May 16
From anderegg.ca
AtogaCreative and the Algorithm
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I’m not an algorithmically driven feed kinda person, but I’ve mostly given up fighting with YouTube on this. Their recommendations are quite good most of the time, and they at least provide RSS feeds for channel pages.
on May 15
From anderegg.ca
A Fix for the Amazon S3 Issue and Some More Website Thoughts
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Yesterday I saw that there was an update about the Amazon S3 issue that had scared me away from the service. Great news! I don’t mind paying for storage and legitimate access — especially when it’s so very cheap. I was just skittish about being charged for unauthorized people trying to target my...
on May 14
From anderegg.ca
How I Write for the Web — Jekyll and GitHub Pages
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This shows what kind of nerd I am, but the first thing I want to know when I stumble on someone’s website is: what tools/systems do they use? I usually check out the “about” section, but I’ll also look for telltale signs in the source. I have a blurb about this in my about section now, but I...
on May 13
From anderegg.ca
Katie Mack and John Green Discuss the Universe
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A while back, Jason Kottke linked to the first episode in this YouTube series where Dr. Katie Mack and John Green chat about the universe. I’d read Dr. Mack’s book, The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) and really enjoyed it. She’s an excellent writer, and made some heady concepts...
on May 12
From anderegg.ca
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As I’ve been posting for Weblog Posting Month, I’ve been pushing out everything to Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads. Not that I ever stopped thinking about the new world of short-form social media services, but it’s been on my mind more because of this. There are a few folks I’d like to keep up...
on May 10
From anderegg.ca
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Little Kitty, Big City is a game I’ve been following for what feels like forever now. It’s finally released, and is also available on Game Pass! I played a couple hours of it so far on Xbox Series X, and I’m really enjoying things so far.
on May 9
From anderegg.ca
Naming Things is Hard (Game Genre Edition)
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Stuart Brown (aka Ahoy) 1 released What genre is DOOM? on YouTube recently. It’s a great video and I recommend checking it out. His point seems mostly tongue-in-cheek, but about halfway through the video I thought he was going in a completely different direction. Originally “XboxAhoy”, I’ve been...
on May 8
From anderegg.ca
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Apple had their iPad “event” this morning. They’ve really perfected the art of getting nerds like me to watch an infomercial! I’m looking to upgrade an iPad, so this one definitely had my interest.
on May 7
From anderegg.ca
Graphing Calculator and Grapher
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Catching up on my RSS feeds this morning, I came across the article “Graphing Calculator and Grapher” from Howard Oakley on The Eclectic Light Company.
on May 6
From anderegg.ca
Brains, Fingers, and Crabs — Modes of Software Developer Operation
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In the late 2000s, some friends and I started a small software development agency. It didn’t last very long because we were more interested in building things than making money, but it was quite a fun time.
on May 5
From anderegg.ca
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I’m a huge fan of video series where a competent professional shows off their craft in a calm and informative way. The YouTube algorithm seems to have figured this out, and recently served up a series about rebinding an early edition of Dune.
on May 4
From anderegg.ca
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Here’s a neat project from my friend Andrew Burke: Bloomsday Halifax, which takes place in Halifax, Nova Scotia on Sunday June 16, 2024.
on May 3
From anderegg.ca
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I didn’t write about it yesterday, but I decided to try my hand at Weblog Posting Month this year. I was on the fence about this, as I’m not sure I can post something every day… but what the heck, I’ll give it a shot!
on May 2