From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - Hosting Bluesky with Coolify
0 6
I recently spun up my own Bluesky PDS server on Coolify. It's fairly easy compared to all the documentation Bluesky put out. It's also a lot less than you would have ever imagined. Before digging into what I did, I want to say thanks to Brandon at krrd.ing, Rafael Eyng's blog, and this GitHub...
on Thu, 2AM
From melkat.blog
0 0
I haven't known what to say in the last week, you know, due to (gestures wildly). I still don't. The internet right now can leave you feeling powerless. So, I have decided to take back some of that power. I'm self-hosting my own GitHub with Gitea at melkat.dev and I'm self-hosting my own...
on Nov 16
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - Arrested Development
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If you’ve been following me for a while, you know I have two apps published under Girlfriend Technology. One is an app I got Apple to approve (!!!) that lets you open magnet links for torrents with Put.io, which I call Magnet Links, and another for replacing words and links with other words and...
on Nov 2
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - Here's Some Links, Oct 30, 2024
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It's the spookiest time of year, you know, election season. Please be kind to yourself and try to have fun offline. I will be throwing my phone in the Willamette river, see if you can find it. I did get you some links, and like… three of them are relatively good news. Sorry about the others.
on Oct 31
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - October Home Screens
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It's been a while since I last showed off my home screens. I wanted to do something different this time. Since July, I have gotten fed up with the direction of the big two computer OS people, so I moved to Arch Linux, and it’s been pretty nice. I've also started using Shareshot, for which I made...
on Oct 28
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - A Great (Image) Manipulator
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Well, I found a stumbling block on Linux. So much of what I do requires some sort of image editing and manipulation. I would use Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer, and Paint.net on Windows. On iOS and Mac, I use the same Affinity apps and Pixelmator. The options for Linux aren't great. There's...
on Oct 18
From melkat.blog
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When I was 13 years old, I waited over a week for my Red Hat Linux ISO file to download. I saw these nerds on TechTV talk about it, and I wanted to try it myself. I told my parents what I was doing, and they told me that my older half-brother had mentioned it. I installed it that night and...
on Oct 16
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - Dreamcast Adventure (2024)
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It was the last day of 1999, and my mother surprised me with an upgrade to my Sega Genesis, a translucent lime green Nintendo 64 with Donkey Kong 64. Sorry, it was "Jungle Green." I loved Nickelodeon slime green, so this was perfect. I got to learn the DK rap. I liked Donkey Kong 64 at the time,...
on Oct 9
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - Camp Snap Camera
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Photographer Jedda convinced me to try the screen-free Camp Snap Camera. It looks like a film camera I bought a while back, but without all the hassle of getting film and developing it. I really like it! When I finish taking photos I can simply plug it in to my phone and copy the photos over....
on Oct 9
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - Here's Some Links, Oct 5, 2024
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Welcome back to Here's Some Links. I feel like I just did one of these, but the links keep coming so here we are again. This time around we got some cool stuff my wife worked on, a remade Hatsune Miku music video, more Cohost criticism, why your favorite mobile app stops getting updates, and...
on Oct 6
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - Everywhere I Want To Be
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Social media companies want you to post more but only want to show ads. What's the point of posting if no one sees it? To train their AIs and target you with more ads? People often told me they wish I used one of the big evil tech company's social media apps more often so they could keep up with...
on Oct 2
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - At least I can uncheck AI
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I've used Alfred since January 2011, and I've bought the lifetime license every time they made a new one. I am a Legendary Mega Powerpack supporter, whatever that means. I have used this app heavily and have seen no point in stopping. Though Alfred hasn't been considered "cool" for a while now,...
on Sep 20
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - Here's Some Links, Sep 13, 2024
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I got some links for you on this lovely Friday the 13th. This one contains commentary on capitalism, why Cohost was never that great a place, checking in on Substack's nazi problem a year later, stories about trans women in aerospace and comedy, and some satire on genderless video game robots....
on Sep 14
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - Add an RSS Sync Service to New Reeder
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The new version of Reeder has decided to do something radical: not sync with dedicated RSS services. Previously, I wrote about why this is a problem in a post called RSS Reader Super Apps. I subscribe to 302 RSS feeds, and when I imported them into the new Reeder and The Iconfactory's upcoming...
on Sep 14
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - Cohost, A Cautionary Tale
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Last night, I wrote a joke on Mastodon that I thought was a funny roast of Cohost users in light of the website shutting down. It was only funny to me, so I deleted it. I understand that Cohost was of special interest to a very small and vulnerable group. That's kind of the problem, though,...
on Sep 11
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - Email Newsletters Wherever
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Every day there is a new read later app, despite most of them being the same. I started my paid email newsletter journey by using my Feedbin address as my login address, but that never sat right with me, so I changed it to my primary email address and then set up my email to forward emails from...
on Sep 3
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - hi there! please enjoy my blog of things i think are interesting
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hi there! please enjoy my blog of things i think are interesting
on Aug 29
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - Great Android Apps
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I was recently thinking about what got me interested in apps and design were the many websites that featured beautiful apps. Typically, these websites were focused on apps for Apple products, but as we see Apple go down this anti-developer and anti-consumer path of a monopoly, I think it's time...
on Aug 28
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - Hot Deals in Your Area
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The following are affiliate and referral links that benefit me. They are all services that I use and feel good enough about to recommend. So if you too need to use one of these things, why not support me in the process?
on Aug 16
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - What Am I Doing Now?
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I'm a fan of omg.lol and what Neatnik does in general, so my now page is located over there in omg.lol's now.garden.
on Aug 14
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - in-view, A Web Component for Loading In View
0 1
In Astro, when you use a UI framework you have the ability to only load the island of JavaScript when it becomes [in view of the browser window](https://docs.astro.build/en/reference/directives-reference/
on Aug 13
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - Vivi's Experience with Covid
0 1
In The First Three Years I mentioned I was interested in hearing other people's pandemic experiences. My wife has wrote about her experience with COVID and trying to adjust to a new country.
on Aug 11
From melkat.blog
0 0
Inspired by uses.tech, I have written up my current setup. I will try to keep this post updated as things change.
on Aug 2
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - Indie Devs, Not Apple, Made iOS and macOS a Success
0 1
Apple has made a lot of partnerships with big companies like Quantum Computer Services (AOL), Microsoft, HP, Intel, Cingular (AT&T), Epic Games, Valve, Capcom, and Ubisoft. They are all pretty one-sided in terms of who benefits. Focusing on these partnerships distracts from what has made Apple's...
on Jul 30
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - July Home Screens
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This is the first home screen post with iOS 18! You can read about my initial impressions. I stand by my remark about the tinted icons: this is silly and I'm going to use it exclusively to anger the design gods. Let's get in to it, shall we?
on Jul 28
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - RSS Reader Super Apps
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In the wake of the death of social media, it seems that some of the best app developers have decided to make RSS reader "super apps." A "super app" is a fancy marketing term for a single app that does pretty much everything. A lot of financial technology companies want to be "super apps" so they...
on Jul 22
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - You Might Not Need a Discord Server
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I have some thoughts on your average community discord. I'm not talking about any specific communities here, but of the idea as a whole. Seriously, I am NOT talking about you.
on Jul 17
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - First Impressions of iOS 18 and The Gang
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I've made it clear that I have a huge dislike of Apple's yearly update cycle for their software (and hardware, to be honest). It's bad from a software perspective because you're giving people a lot of change all at once with a high probability that something will go wrong. You're also constantly...
on Jul 17
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - Here's Some Links, Jul 11, 2024
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What are you reading? Hopefully you're reading some things that are a little more uplifting than what I have been, but if you look closely at this list you'll find a fun music video from The Aquabats and a free video game. That's something! And hey, I got you covered if you like seeing small...
on Jul 12
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - Trying to Like Nova
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I really want to like Nova. It is a very nice and well-crafted editor that I think has potential. I figured I should give Nova a third chance at being my editor after moving to Portland. You got to cheer for the home team right? Well, it was going great! Until things started falling apart. It...
on Jul 8
From melkat.blog
0 1
I feel like I've been putting off building a public blogroll for a while. Part of what has helped me to just do it is this post from Keenan about getting rid of their blogroll. I sympathized with it quite a bit. Blogrolls are inherently messy, but so am I. I decided to approach this by just...
on Jul 6
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - Apple's Privacy Protections Aren't Enough
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In Safari, there's a feature that was heavily touted at launch called Privacy Reports. The idea is that Apple will protect you from trackers on the internet. In typical Apple fashion, it's not as straight forward as that, because of course it's not. I don't even think it blocks trackers, it just...
on Jul 6
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - Duopolies Are Just Monopolies
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We need more options in life than evil versus slightly less evil. At best, we have two options for any given thing, and any attempt to add more options is met with "why aren't you supporting slightly less evil!" That's not a good motivator. This year alone, the number of times I've seen slightly...
on Jul 2
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - Dejamming the Front-End
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I've mentioned a few times about my exodus from services like Vercel and Netlify because of things like their unreasonable pricing strategies.
on Jul 1
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - Portland Indie Game Squad
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My wife just finished a PIGS Summer Slow Jam, a game jam, where the theme was resource management, with four others called Clara's Cauldron Conumdrum that I think you should play, but I am biased. I also recommend checking out the other games submitted, they're pretty great too!
on Jun 30
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - My App Privacy Checkup
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It was late 2020 when Apple started enforcing privacy nutrition labels on apps. At the time, your usual suspects bemoaned this change. It did have some issues that haven't been resolved around the vagueness of what these labels mean. Apple left it up for interpretation and self-reporting. So how...
on Jun 28
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - Escape from Next.js
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It's always good to check in with what the current export strategy is for any given framework, app, or service. It's also good to keep an eye on it over time. There was a time where Next.js had some good principals and allowed you to deploy your project anywhere.
on Jun 26
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - Unsafe Pricing at Any Scale
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I'm exiting the "serverless" Jamstack hosting space. It's served me well and I've been able to build fun websites utilizing them. I mean, automatic deploys, branch-based staging instances, and server-side rendering are all excellent things that I think everyone should have access to. The problem...
on Jun 26
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - Here's Some Links, Jun 19, 2024
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This roundup is a good one and a deep one. We got some (actually) good reports on the great "AI" con and it's piracy of everything, some thoughts on inclusivity, a Mac app to avoid, and hopefully some good news about an adaptation of the best video game.
on Jun 26
From melkat.blog
0 0
Warning: Very light spoilers for the movie "I Saw the TV Glow." Keep reading only if you need convincing to see the movie or have already seen it.
on Jun 25
From melkat.blog
0 0
Apple has long been posterizing that they care about diversity and the environment, but their actions have never backed it up. They might put up a black and white photo of Ghandi with some clichéd text next to it, but it has only ever been about The Brand. This article from 404 Media gets in to...
on Jun 25
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - key-down, A Web Component for Key Commands
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After my false start of releasing web component packages on NPM, I decided to take a portion of this website I've never mentioned is a feature here and give it it's own proper web component. Introducing the `<key-down>` web component.
on Jun 25
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - Where to Follow Me
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If you want to keep up with what I am up to, here's the where and how. If you aren't currently using a JSON or RSS feed reader, I highly recommend Feedbin and Reeder. I've been using feeds since before smartphones were a thing. Feeds are great because you can keep up with many parts of the...
on Jun 25
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - Bless This Mess (Me) with Money
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If you find yourself with spare money, please consider giving it to Trans Lifeline or someone directly who is using the hashtag TransCrowdFund. It is always a scary time for queer people all over the world and you have the power to make a big difference in someone's life.
on Jun 24
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - Read Later Apps Have No Chill
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Read later apps started as a way to have a distraction-free reading experience. Today many of them want to be yet another feed of never ending content. They want you to be distracted while they shovel "content" at you.
on Jun 24
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - Three Stories From A Bubble
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Becoming a teen is to learn to worship brands. You had tried them out before, but those were just kid brands. Now it's time to develop some lifelong problems as a victim of consumerism.
on Jun 24
From melkat.blog
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I've avoided making a slashpage for my default apps for a while because my ideal goal is to not need very many apps. My other goals are: avoid subscriptions, avoid ads, and avoid scammy fads. And honestly, I want to avoid hardware lock-in with apps that only run on one OS, but I've failed at...
on Jun 23
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - What happened to 1Password?
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For nearly 20 years, 1Password has been a favorite among people on their Apple devices. It's probably one of the most important applications one can have. It's what a password manager should be: secure, platform agnostic, and reliable. Well, it was at one time reliable.
on Jun 23
From melkat.blog
melkat.blog - Not my first time, not my last
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On Sunday I dropped an indie web service provider for not seeing eye to eye on if trans and nonbinary people deserve to be visible in the world. I did it fairly quietly and without making a big deal out of it. What is there to debate about my identity? Nothing. I'll take my content and go. It...
on Jun 6