I don't know how many reasons you need to ditch Plex: the horrible app redesign, the multiple security flaws, or the push in to the wonderful world of advertising. Plex has made it pretty clear over the last five years: they don't care about their users, they want to chase venture capital.
This year I've been running Jellyfin alongside my Plex server. I didn't force any of my friends and family to jump over to it. Running both side by side is possible, but their latest security issue meant I would have to help my parents reconnect Plex, so I set them up with Jellyfin and Plex just in case there was something they missed about Plex.
I've had an Apple Watch since they first came out, and I've worn it daily ever since. I started taking it off in the afternoon because I felt like it was wearing out its welcome on my wrist. It's tight, sweaty, and heavy. I also think it is damaging my wrist.
I've tried a wide variety of bands. Currently, I'm using the 2024 Pride loop. I like it because it's easy to put on. I don't have to worry about fastening it to the wrong notch in the band and feeling off all day. Maybe that's the problem? I'm wearing it wrong? Oh, fuck off. We're not entertaining that kind of argument again. Jobs is dead. Let him decompose.
I've been having a fun time with a new little music journal app, Crucial Tracks. It's a really neat concept that has, on occasion, gotten me to get quite personal and quite wordy. I didn't expect to find myself writing about, or in a lot of cases, around, music.
Music is so intimate and our tastes in which are so diverse and unique to each and every one of us. "Do you like music?" has always been such a bullshit question and it implies that if you don't like their music you don't like any music. The idea of writing about it never hit me as something I would want to do. But here I am: collecting and sharing the good bits I have ended up writing over on Crucial Tracks with very little editing.
There are a lot of great points in this article from Federico Viticci. It highlights a lot of stuff I've noticed over the iPad's life. I moved to using an iPad Pro as my main computer in 2017 and I think after 8 years of getting by and making that work as best it could, it's time to call it: my $2,000 M2 iPad Pro is easily replaceable with a $100 refurbished laptop that is more capable in every way.
I will say, that the secret to using an iPad as a primary computer is the expensive and shockingly heavy keyboard and touchpad case. Together it is thicker and heavier than a similarly sized MacBook Pro. And yet it is still too top-heavy to prevent it from falling over onto it's back like a turtle.
I started building a Bluesky-to-JSONFeed app because I find Bluesky too annoying to use. These days it is trying to force me to see trending topics from the whole of Bluesky. They let you dismiss it, but then they shove it back in front of your face without respecting your preference. Typical big tech bullshit. "Hey want to hide this? You can, but if you refresh it will be there again." Literal buttons that don't do anything. The illusion of choice.
I've recently moved my photos to melkat.pics and my social media posts to melkat.lol. Like this blog, they too are collections of markdown files with feeds and syndication to platforms like Mastodon. The IndieWeb term for this is POSSE. I use Robb Knight's Echofeed to syndicate posts automatically. Now the question is: why?
Well, I want to own my content in full. This comes partially from playing with data export tools like those included with Pixelfed and Bluesky where they give you your data in obtuse formats that not even an engineer could be satisfied with. I've previously written about how Pixelfed doesn't even export your photos. I've since seen what Bluesky does: they give you a .CAR file and tell you to write some GO code to get your data out of it. Now I write in my own plain text Markdown files and avoid all of that garbage.
I grew up online and the effects of which I’m still discovering. Something tough to identify is when I’m being harassed. In the last week, I’ve been verbally harassed on Mastodon and sexually harassed by text message. In each case, it took me an embarrassing amount of time to figure this out.
I don't like to start by announcing my commitment to things. This is probably why I will never do a "100 Days to Offload" blogging challenge. As Al Swearengen from Deadwood said, "Announcing your plans is a good way to hear god laugh." So over the month, I tried to watch a movie a day. A few times I felt like I was building a buffer just in case I couldn't get a film in on a day or two. You can see my entire log of 35 films I watched in January on Letterboxd.
When you watch that many films, you are bound to hit some stinkers, and yeah, I did. I also found some gems. I want to write about a few of them here. I don't write reviews on Letterboxd or do star ratings. I either enjoyed a film or I didn't. Trying to rationalize what I like down to a scale of five is too simplistic.
As you may know, I love Hatsune Miku. When rumors started circulating last month that she was finally coming to Fortnite, I took notice. I never got into Guitar Hero and the like when it was popular, but my wife and I did buy a cheap plastic guitar to play Clone Hero with a few months ago, and it works with Fortnite Festival, their Rock Band-like mode. I've also not played Fortnite outside of one or two brief moments. I had to do it. For her.
I purchased the big Miku bundle, but there was also a "battle pass" for more Miku as part of a "Music Pass." The concept of a battle pass was so good for Epic's revenue that they couldn't resist making more and more battle passes to pay for. The trick here is to buy a monthly $12 subscription to avoid paying $10+ per pass. But then you have to remember to cancel it when you're not playing, the predatory nature of all subscription fees. So, yeah, I also got the Fortnite Crew pass of passes.
Throughout my tech career, people I worked with would often ponder when the next bubble would burst. Well, it came and went and no one noticed, because it was a murder-suicide. In 2020 tech became obsessed with drama, and the companies screamed, "If everyone stays home all the time no one will use our products or see our ads!" It didn't make sense then, but this was the excuse they used to cut pay and lay people off. Then when they realized they were all online companies and that people would use the internet at home they cast their next spell: laying off employees for the fun of the sport. They claimed no one wanted to work, which should mean the layoffs take care of themselves, but no, they had to take the jobs by force. It sure sounds like nobody wanted to work if you had to kick 'em to the curb, right? And now we are in a hellscape where working conditions are so bad that employees are quitting in protest. The remaining employees get laid off. Oh, and no one is hiring.
Throughout this cycle, the 2020s are shaping up to be a lost decade for tech and for no other reason than the billionaires want it to be. We've seen the big ideas tech has been trying to push for the last five years, all fads that nobody wants and cost more than they could ever recover. So here we lay unemployed and without any kind of democracy in sight.
When Mastodon was experiencing a blip of popularity in 2018, I learned about this other thing early in development that looked too similar to Instagram. Since then, I've always wanted Pixelfed to succeed. I like the idea of a self-hosted Instagram minus the Instagram. I still do, but I'm not sure the idea at all is a good one. This isn't specific to Pixelfed, but when you federate your images freely, there's nothing to stop the parasitic "AI" companies from getting them delivered on a platter. So I don't know how I want to share my photos anymore.
In 2022 when Mastodon got its big push into being a thing, I spent a lot of time seeing if I could finally set up Pixelfed. In the four years since I last looked into it, Pixelfed still lacked proper documentation. I finally got something to work, but the S3 support was not working. Fine, no S3. Maybe it could be fixed soon?
I never did lose a battle But I'm feeling further from the end of war Deplored, ignored and rarely ever self assured Why does it seem like the ones who have everything have nothing inside?
I made two mistakes I found out after I published my 11ty blog rewrite—apologies to Robb and everyone's feed readers. The first one was forgetting to change my base URL in my 11ty metadata after moving the deployment to my main site. Hopefully, I deleted all my Echofeed spam I sent to social media before anyone noticed. The second was what 11ty refers to as a "common pitfall" which took me a while to wrap my head around.
I'm a huge proponent of standardizing dates as ISO 8601. Dates need not be complicated. While I'm not exactly sure why 11ty outputs different dates on my local machine than it does after being deployed from my Gitea server. I tried setting the timezone and everything, but that had no effect.
I have been a huge fan of Astro ever since it launched. I was an early adopter and that meant as Astro learned its footing I would constantly face breaking changes. That was fine, but after a few years, it became less understandable. So when Astro decided to end 2024 with version 5 they decided to introduce yet another new breaking change. The documentation explaining how to adapt was incomplete and not helpful. They had a way to preserve compatibility but I know what that means: delaying the inevitable. Besides, I had already gone through enough, it was time to leave.
I had heard of 11ty from a lot of people I respect and I didn't know anyone using Astro. Hell, one of my favorite mentor's photos is at the bottom of every 11ty documentation page. That is a pretty good endorsement. My wife's favorite animal, the possum, is 11ty's mascot. Another good sign. The way 11ty works is quite new to me, so it took a lot of endurance to get accustomed to it. At different parts of my journey, I would briefly consider a hosted blog solution, but lol, I had just gone through the shit with a particularly transphobic blog host last summer. Never again.
This year I've migrated to Linux for my primary computer-ing, but I've yet to find any apps I feel particularly strong about. Most things are web apps anyway, so it doesn't matter too much.
