#dev
Links, July 2023
I increasingly hate computers and the world inside them that my brain is trapped inside of. That said, here are some things about computers. Let's be practical, with another resource to get you to stop screwing up shell scripting. Once you've figured that out, why don't you train an AI homunculus to reflect your own neuroses back at you, and start a conversation? It's time for a vibe shift. The unfortunate truth is that the digital world is the real world is the digital world. Culture and reality do not reside cleanly in a single realm; they slosh back and...
Building a computer
I was a real life, buck-toothed nerd when I was a child. I liked video games, didn't play outside enough. I spent a lot of time playing around on a computer. But I never built one. As an adult, I pay for the convenience of not having to be in one place to do computer things. I have been subscribed to Dropbox, iCloud, and many TV and movie streaming services over the years. Those are becoming less and less of a good deal, and the geeky voice at the back of mind is saying louder and louder: why not do...
Taking down Goodreads
London, United Kingdom
TL;DR I'm switching from Goodreads to Oku. Sign up here (referral code). I got rid of most of my social media accounts. The remaining ones are really services I use to track something I do myself that I share with others: Strava (running and cycling), Duolingo (learning languages), and Goodreads (reading). Of these, the one that I have always been dying to replace is Goodreads. The website and the native app are both terrible, it's owned by Amazon, and the means to get your reading data out of it and into something else are being made increasingly difficult. But for...
Accessible Buzzfeed
This article was originally published on the BuzzFeed Tech Blog Last month, external accessibility experts certified buzzfeed.com as compliant with the best accessibility practices for the web. That simple statement, ripped straight from the headlines of a boilerplate internal email, does not do justice to the two-year process that brought us to that point. Nor does it embody what the achievement means to our team, especially myself, on a personal level. In 2004, I watched my grandad build a remote control plane from scratch in his garage. I sat cross-legged at his feet on the grubby floor, ten years old....
Names, Legal Names, and Fractally Deferred Responsibility
— Names, Legal Names, and Fractally Deferred Responsibility, Nora Codes
Getting off of Netlify
I wanted to quickly follow up to my recent post about personal infrastructure with some updates I made this week. I got a warning last week that I was almost at the limit for my allocation of "build minutes" on Netlify. Upon investigation, I found that my personal website had been building too often and for too long on Netlify, and that soon they would start charging me for the overages. Looking at the logs and running the build locally I saw that the vast majority of the build time was down to preprocessing the many images in the "Photo"...
How this site works
Note: There's a follow up to this because I've since made more changes to the infrastructure of the site. Read more. I’ve been slowly moving over to self-hosting more services and trying to balance that with personal convenience. This post is a quick summary of the current setup I have running to do the following: My website is built on Hugo, a static suite builder written in Go. I like that all the content on my website can be markdown files with some front-matter, any extra data can be in simple JSON files, and the template system is very simple....