Qubyte Codes

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Iโ€™d do a year in review but it'd be mostly about trans stuff and all the people (the supreme court, the government, rich authors, etc.) who can fuck off.

Or maybe itโ€™d be about the surprising joy of being fully myself. Because itโ€™s not like the aforementioned cowards and the genital obsessed made the slightest dent in my progress.

Plus I didn't leave the country this year because I was getting my passport updated, and also I was too preoccupied with side projects. I did learn Java though (after trying not to for years).

I had a 2010 MacBook Air in a cupboard in my office. I was still using it up until a couple of years ago, and the hardware is still good. My kid needs a machine for homework, so I put Linux on it and it actually feels fast again. He loves it!

I got my ears pierced. Just the lobes (my first piercings, very vanilla). The technician described the pain as โ€œspicyโ€. Then she described the other ear as โ€œspicierโ€. Apparently itโ€™s an adrenaline thing. Anyway, a minor victory in an otherwise fucking appalling week but Iโ€™m still chalking it up.

Iโ€™ve spoken with one or two people I know who are mostly supportive of trans rights, but expressed one of the usual tropes as a point of concern. Such moments elicit immediate anger from me, and Iโ€™m not sorry. Iโ€™m just so tired of supposed allies falling for that shit. Iโ€™m not here to talk you through it.

Once again in The Botanist in Brighton. One of my favourite occasional haunts. Iโ€™m in a new pair of heeled shoes and my feet are killing me, so I guess itโ€™s time to read a book.

A latte in a fancy black textured ceramic cup with no handle. My hand is touching the cup and blue varnish is on my long thumb nail. Behind my hand are row plants sharing the bar, and behind the bar is a window to the road.

Iโ€™m challenging myself to walk 100k steps this week. I have about 15000 to do today, and Iโ€™m half way through that, so Iโ€™m taking a coffee break. Portland Coffee in Kemptown, Brighton is super chill. Look at that stained glass, too.

A photo taken inside the cafe, from the back, looking toward the front. Itโ€™s sunny outside and whitewashed walls can be seen opposite, giving it a Mediterranean feel. Above the door is a stained glass window depicting a seagull standing on pebbles, with the sea an a windmill behind. Paintings for sale are on the wall to the right. People sitting by the window are chatting.

My partner treated me to a couple of days stay in the Tokyo Station Hotel for my birthday. Weโ€™re in the south dome, and I can see the gates and folk come and go from up here. I donโ€™t know how they did it, but itโ€™s totally silent here. Absolutely no station noise at all!

The view from a room in the south dome of the Tokyo Station Hotel. Itโ€™s a few stories above the concourse, where people can be seen entering the automated gates. Ticket machines can also be seen.

A couple of weeks ago I took part in an unofficially record breaking (number of participants) hackathon, with around 6000 others as part of a work summit.

A large display hanging by from a conference hall ceiling. It wraps around on itself into a tube, so the image can horizontally scroll around on itself. The screen reads โ€œWeโ€™ve (unofficially) broken the world recordโ€.

Iโ€™m in a queue for swag in the summer evening sun at a company event and the person in front of me says something including โ€œโ‚ฌ500โ€. It took every ounce of strength not to shout โ€œYOU WONT SEE PENNY ONE FROM ME YOU SLAGโ€ in a cockney accent. Nobody would get the reference and I would definitely be fired.

Over recent years thereโ€™s been a growing population of rooks to complement the jackdaws, magpies, and crows in my neighbourhood(and very occasionally a jay in the nearby cemetery). I think the rooks are my favourite though. Theyโ€™re extra shaggy and have interesting calls.

A rook perched in a telegraph line, seen from below and to the side. Its distinctive featherless white face and shaggy plumage leave no doubt that itโ€™s a rook! Behind it is a cloudless blue sky.

Good grief. Appleโ€™s big integration of generative machine learning models into the OS is impressive, but the energy overhead is going to be staggering. I wonder if itโ€™ll all be powered by renewablesโ€ฆ #wwdc

I got a Keychron K3 Pro through work and I absolutely adore it. Itโ€™s a joy to type with and sounds satisfying without being too noisy. It came with linear switches, which I donโ€™t usually use.

A picture of an ANSI layout ten key-less wireless keyboard. The keys are grey and dark grey, except for the return, backspace, and escape keys which are grass green. The return key is labelled โ€œship itโ€, the backspace โ€œsimplifyโ€, and the escape has the Shopify bag logo on it.

After a year and a half working on Scala 2 applications, I've gone from enamoured to jaded. It's proof that smart people can design extremely stupid things.

Oh, you want an example?

Try 0L until Instant.now.

It's a range, right? It's the interval of long integers, containing the numbers , so it's completely expressible as a pair of longs.

BUT NOT TO SCALA. Scala is like fuck you there aren't enough regular ints to make this long int range.

So, so stupid.

In 2009 I moved to Japan for my first postdoc position. I was still living like a student, so I got a room in a foreigner house. When I moved in, I didn't know what to expect and my Japanese was basically non-existent. Fortunately for me, everyone living there at that time spoke English as a second language. Unfortunately for them, Estuary English is a really odd accent and to them I was just a weird guy drinking tea in a bathrobe making very English noises. Eventually I realised and adapted.

I was gonna blog about my time co-organising and attending IndieWebCamp Brighton 2024, but instead I've spent the evening debugging and fixing the webmention dispatcher I 100% perfectly authored and broke at some point.

Hello #IndieWeb enthusiasts. Iโ€™m holding an unofficial Homebrew Website Club at the Lord Nelson Inn near Brighton station tomorrow evening. Iโ€™ll be there around 17:30, wrapping up around 20:00. #ffconf folk most welcome!

Iโ€™ll post more information when Iโ€™ve found a spot, but if you look for a balding dude with a beard and a dubious waxed moustache the odds are good that youโ€™ll find me.

Unexpected upside to having a mouse problem in the neighbourhoodโ€ฆ a falcon just perched on our garden wall! Unfortunately I wasnโ€™t fast enough to snap a photo of it.

This talk on documentation here at #BrightonRuby by Kaitlyn Tierney is gold. Iโ€™ll definitely use some of these tips for my personal site.

Iโ€™m tantalisingly close to replacing LaTeX statically rendered to SVG with MathJax with presentational MathML. Itโ€™s bulkier to write, but not difficult. Browser rendering (chrome seems quirkiest) isnโ€™t quite there yet though.

Iโ€™ve been trying to get a photo of our local rook for months. It doesnโ€™t stay put for long, and the light is usually all wrong. Finally I got this while eating breakfast just now.

A picture of a rook perched on a house roof. The sky is clear. The white face of the rook is obvious.

Iโ€™m on a BA flight, somewhere over the Bearing Sea, and BA have decided to enable free streaming of the coronation over Wi-Fi. Also they gave me a packet of Eton Mess flavour popcorn.

A small packet of Eton Mess popcorn. The design sports a union flag.

The one issue I have with my iOS shortcuts flow for posting images to my personal site (and by extension mastodon) is that the input box for alt text appears over the image Iโ€™m posting, so I have to remember what the image looks like. Not a problem on a tablet or larger device because I can do it side by side, but I mainly do it from my phone since itโ€™s also my camera.

Yesterday I visited the Hikawa Maru in Yokohama. Itโ€™s a museum now, but started life in the โ€˜30s as a luxury liner. I recommend it. Anyway, I took this photo at 12:05. Five minutes earlier the horn went off next to my head and I nearly shit myself.

Not a whistle.

A photograph of a brass lever with a few rotary setting. The detailing on the housing shows one of the labels to be โ€œsilentโ€. A sign above the lever reads: โ€œWhen the ship was in active service, turning this lever could sound a whistle. At present, too, a whistle is blown every day at noon.โ€

I love it when I find a good spot for a coffee. This one has it all. Fairly calm and quiet. Close to the museums in Ueno, so some foot traffic for people watching. Trees. Shade.

The view from the patio of a cafe. In front is a quiet road, and on the other side green trees and some pedestrians walking by an old brick wall. Itโ€™s a sunny day, but the photo is taken from the shade of an awning.

Now Iโ€™m in the Hitachino Nest Brew Lab in the converted Manseibashi Station arches. Itโ€™s full of is Western Folk and blasting English pop music from ten years ago but itโ€™s still pretty good in here. Ironically I was at the actual brewery in Ibaraki yesterday.

The sign board above the bar of the Manseibashi Hitachino Nest Brew Lab. the signs are hand drawn in black and backlit on a white board.

Next up, Kanda Matsuya. This is a highly regarded soba restaurant which I walked past every weekday for two and a half years and never got around to trying. Very tasty.

The ceiling lamp of the restaurant. Itโ€™s large and rectangular, dominating the ceiling. Itโ€™s composed of a square, dark wooden lattice and white paper reminiscent of traditional Japanese sliding doors. Some patrons can be seen below.

I'm on my own in Tokyo for a few days (back from the countryside). I arrived early this afternoon, and I'm allowing myself just the remaining hours of today to visit old haunts.

I might allow myself a bit more time though, toward the end. While most of my time is set aside for some site-seeing of things I missed back when I lived here, I think it's important to just do nothing in a place to really take it in.

It's been a few years since I was last in Japan, and my phone now supports Suica for travel and low value purchases. It's really, really good. My only complaint is that if I want to use my watch the readers are all on the wrong side of the train turnstiles.

Last time I visited Japan (about four years ago!) mobile data was kind of a pain in the ass. I would rent a little mobile wifi hotspot. This time it looks like eSIMs are so well supported that I'm just going to use my phone.

That doesn't sound like a lot but it'll be huge. It means my partner and I can always be connected, even when we're off doing different things. Those hotspots run hot too (I guess the clue is in the name), so I always had to plug them into a battery, which meant I had to carry a bag (not enough pockets for all the things). This way I'll be able to enjoy my time there as if I live there again.

Ever since I figured out how to build monochrome (black and white or any other pair of colours) PNGs Iโ€™ve been thinking about hiding secret messages in the unused bitsโ€ฆ

Monochrome PNGs have a bit depth of 1 (when encoded efficiently), which means that each pixel only needs one bit. Each row of the image is an integer number of octets though, so when the number of pixels in a row isnโ€™t divisible by 8 you get some unused padding bits at the end.

I should probably make some sequence diagrams. My setup is a bit of a Rube Goldberg machine, but it's surprisingly robust and really convenient to use. For example, sharing photos happens right in the iOS photos app because shortcuts integrates into sharesheets. #indieweb

I'm really enjoying my POSSE setup. I publish to my micropub endpoint using my own iOS shortcuts for photos or study sessions (as events). For plain notes and bookmarks I typically use Omnibear.

The micropub endpoint pushes to a repository on GitHub, and an Actions workflow picks them up and syndicates photos, notes, and bookmarks to Mastodon. The workflow is fast enough that stuff frequently reaches Mastodon before Netlify has finished building my site. #indieweb

An example of a more pragmatic approach to image uploads, for example, is the mastodon API. You still have to use a separate multipart request for an image, but the description (alt) text accompanies the image as an additional field. I think you can probably use the same image (and by extension its alt text) for multiple posts if you want. This fits because alt text is descriptive, so it shouldn't depend on the context the image is used in. #indieweb

I get why microformats documents came to look like this. It comes from their roots as data embedded in HTML. But it's not very pragmatic. Why would a document have more than one name or content? Why would photo (singular) be used for a plural field. It's all out of whack. #indieweb.

I love the #indieweb, but the aforementioned micropub thing isn't the only friction. JSON encoded microformats-2 documents are just plain weird. Everything is an array for some reason. Unnecessarily complex to consume. We can surely do better...

One pain in the ass thing about micropub is that there's no way to send photos and content together in a single request and include alt text. It can only be done with a multipart request to a media endpoint for the photo and a JSON request to the regular endpoint. Why not allow both in a multipart request? #indieweb

I'm vain, so I have one domain for my personal site, and another for shortlinks. The personal site generates a text file, which the build of the shortlinks site uses when it builds.

I had Netlify set up to trigger a build of the shortlinks site after the personal site builds, but most triggers were redundant (I don't have them for notes etc.).

I decided to replace the hook with a build plugin. https://github.com/qubyte/qubyte-codes/blob/main/plugins/update-shortlinks/index.js

I've run out of time to publish it this year (still 2022 here for almost an hour), but I have a full year of language study sessions (special micropub posts with durations in) to crunch the numbers for. Should make for a few interesting plots!

I designed and built a keyboard! This is build for my comfort (despite how it looks). I designed it from the PCB and plates up! It uses kailh choc switches for a low profile, and a QWERTY variant of Miryoku to minimize finger and thumb movement.

The FG-11 split keyboard. Each side has 23 keys. The keys for the fingers are layed out in five columns or three rows on each side. The second and third column from the inside are one key higher further from the typist than the other columns, to suit where my middle and ring fingers sit. There are three thumb keys on each side, arranged along a diagonal. The PCB of each side can be seen peaking out on the inside edge, and the controller can be seen on the left hand. A ribbon cable connects the two sides from PCB to PCB. The plates are stainless steel and key caps white.

GitHub sent me a one-time donation as part of their thank you to OS contributors to software GitHub uses (who have their sponsors dashboard set up). I originally set it up in hope that someone would send me the occasional buck or two for a coffee. That never happened (at least not yet), but $550 as a one off makes up for it!

I'm using Safari for personal use these days. I wanted to use omnibear for micropub stuff, so I compiled the JS (a normal build step for it), and then ran the command below. The only change I had to make was to add a description to the manifest.

xcrun safari-web-extension-converter /path/to/my/extension/

In Safari, the Allow Unsigned Extensions option must be checked. Xcode generates a wrapper application for omnibear. After booting it, you can quit it and go to Safari -> Preferences -> Extensions to enable the extension. I'm posting this note using it!

I finally caved in and ordered myself parts for an ortholinear keyboard. I've gone with a Preonic through Drop, and paired it with Holy Panda X switches. The wait means it'll be a nice birthday present for myself!

I guess the reason for rolling my own webmention receiver is that I don't want to rely on services I don't manage or pay for. Now, an argument could be made that I'm putting everything on Netlify, so my eggs are all in their basket. My counter to that is that the functions I'm writing fairly portable. All I'd have to do is wrap the functions in a little server. So, the important part is to own the logic! Of course, there's also the fun part of reading a spec and implementing it.

This afternoon I'm playing with webmentions again. I've decided to implement my own endpoint and migrate away from webmention.io (which is fine, I just want to build my own).

First concert since December 2019. Back then it was seeing Devin Townsend. This time it was seeingโ€ฆ Devin Townsend. This time was stripped back and very tight. They played some songs I never thought Iโ€™d see live, like Dynamics and Almost Again. We got upgraded to a box in The Royal Albert Hall too.

Devin Townsend and Co. on the stage at The Royal Albert hall, as seen from the Second level circle.

The sourdough starter is finally ready to use! It seemed to go a bit dormant, so I fed it some rye flour and it seems to have done the trick! The rubber band marks where the top was at its last feed six and a half hours ago.

My sourdough starter in a jar. A rubber band marks where the top was, and it has doubled in volume. Bubbles can be seen in it.

After a day Iโ€™m supposed to discard half the sourdough and feed the remainder. This is the discard, and itโ€™s already showing some signs of activity!

A discarded portion of the sourdough starter. Bubbles can be seen on the surface.

I began a sourdough starter yesterday. Due to a lack of whole wheat flour I used 50:50 very strong white flour and buckwheat flour. Iโ€™m hoping the latter will donate the yeast!

The beginnings of a sourdough starter in a jar.

Want: Recipes to label their ingredients in groups, so I can keep them together in the same bowls and save on washing up. Also good for knowing when things need to be ready.

From yesterday: Vegan buckwheat pancakes with caramelised banana, chai spiced coconut cream, coconut chips, and cacao nibs. Eaten at Black Mocha in Brighton.

Vegan buckwheat pancakes with caramelised banana, chai spiced coconut cream, coconut chips, and cacao nibs.

Reminder for later... Paths are predicable enough in my setup that I can improve the netlify config to apply headers only to HTML by batching routes with wildcards.

I'm not a huge webpack fan, but I'm wondering if I might change my own mind my porting my static site generator to it. As it stands my generator tries to be as efficient as it can be, but only for a single shot compilation. It doesn't cache artefacts. It looks like webpack, with a custom loader and plugins, might provide the necessary mechanics to make incremental builds while writing a blog post much faster.

Originally I was going to do a sort of dark-battenberg theme for dark mode on my blog, but now I'm rethinking. Since more and more devices are beginning to use OLED screens, I want dark mode to mean "mostly completely black" to save some energy on those devices.

I wrote a while back about how promises and event emitters in Node.js can play badly together. Since then, Node and JS have changed enough that I should write a follow up post.

I have a real completionist streak to me, which is a lot of fun as it interacts with IndieWeb stuff like microformats. The next thing on my radar is WebSub. I'm keen to implement both the hub and publisher in one as a glitch.

Next up, Iโ€™m considering micropub for posting full article entries. Hosting an editor and managing storage for drafts is a bigger task, but I can increment on that. Posts would be in markdown though. I wonder if thatโ€™s considered bad...

I think I'll work on putting some of the sharing stuff at the bottom of each post into a

element at the next homebrew website club. That might mean splitting the webmention stuff up from sharing links. I'm not sure yet...

Itโ€™s possible using sed, jq, and date to read timestamps from scheduled posts and git mv and push them. This would be superior to the current Contents API approach because the content of the post will be properly attributed. Itโ€™s also lighter and agnostic with respect to git hosting.

The command to get a time stamp will be something like: sed -n โ€˜/^---$/,/^---$/pโ€™ < post.md | sed โ€˜1d;$dโ€™ | jq โ€˜.datetimeโ€™ | date -f -

Now Iโ€™ve got a handle on the GitHub contents API, itโ€™s tempting to build an editor into my blog. Could be a rabbit hole though...

Another possible set of articles I could write is on tips for writing kubernetes configuration files. I've accumulated a number of them over the last few years.

Homebrew Website Club is this Thursday, so I need to either think of a blog post I want to write, or think of an enhancement to my blog. Iโ€™d quite like to integrate an editor, but thatโ€™s a big task. Something smaller, or an enhancement to an existing feature might have more impact...

All micropub client implementations appear to be a bit lacking (none seem to support a media endpoint very well). I'm considering making my own client and embedding it in my blog...

I've come to refer to my preferrred way of creating microservices as "calving". Start with a monolith, and move bits into microservices where the coupling is weak (like a big iceberg calving off a smaller iceberg).

I implemented #indieweb notes on my blog using a Netlify function and the GitHub content API. I'm using Keith J Grant's omnibear browser extension (in FireFox) to post. Not much to see yet, and it's a very basic implementation, but not bad for a couple of hours of work.

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