Inane Remarks

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Basil

@basil@trivial.observer

Basil's Blog / Digital Garden.

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A victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.

Expect sarcasm, dogs, puns, sport, beer, cycling, tech, pubs. Sometimes several of these at once.

so it goes.

Northumbria

Fedizen since Jul, 2008

Here since May, 2023

Feb 29, 18:53

The TV shows I've found most re-watchable... Not always my favourites, they also need a re-watchable quality as well as being good. Wouldn't mind hearing what other people's go-to shows are for watching over and over.

https://trivial.observer/blog/2024/02/20240229/

Open thread
Jan 28, 09:12

Turns out the dog was reasonably well behaved on my pub crawl yesterday.
Fingers crossed that as she gets older she accepts her fate as a pub dog.

Resistance is futile.

Open thread
Aug 01, 2023

Thought I could use the open library covers API to retrieve book covers with an ISBN. Which, in theory, I can.

But the vast majority of what I've searched for so far have no cover, so it's kind of not worth it.

The data is editable, so I could contribute the covers myself... But the site gives zero guidance on what is acceptable.

Can I just download the cover from the authors website and upload it, because fair use... Or is that a no-no?

https://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/api/covers

Open thread
Jul 23, 2023

well... I think I've fixed it. I've no idea why it was broken and no clue why the CSS I've changed has fixed it. Moreover, it's not exactly the fix I was looking for but it'll do.

Open thread
Jul 22, 2023

Ah, hubris.
It would seem that the code blocks, on the list page, knacker the content widths at certain resolutions.

And after trying to figure it out for 90 minutes, I'm still completely bemused by it.

Open thread
Jul 08, 2023

Filled a small paddling pool to try and cool the dog down this morning. She quickly drank as much of the water as she could manage, spent the following hour puking most of it back up, and now has a near constant stream of piss coming out of her.

Open thread
Jul 07, 2023

Fediverse followers, note there will still be a fair bit of testing spam coming out of this account while I work out the kinks of my Gotosocial<==>Hugo nonsense.

Open thread
Jul 07, 2023

Girl, 8, dies in Land Rover crash
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/wimbledon-merton-police-car-camp-road-school-b1092601.html

This death, like the rest, is a baked-in consequence of our choices.

From road laws and enforcement, through infrastructure design, right down into the setup of our communities, and the function of modern living being designed around the necessity of flinging multi-tonne juggernauts around the place just to go about your day in any normal fashion.

And collectively, we've decided it's fine, for example, to have hundreds of Panzer tanks driving past schools every day.

Open thread
Jul 07, 2023

Managing Hugo content in a submodule
https://www.eliostruyf.com/managing-hugo-website-content-asset-submodule/

Suddenly I had this thought today when pondering using different writing tools. Looks like plenty of people do it so might give it a go. Keep the writing completely separate from the website. Decoupling all the things.

Open thread
Jul 07, 2023

Webfinger (and similar systems) can store meta data about an actor, but we seem to only use webfinger for endpoint / uri discovery.

My understanding is that we ask a social media server (e.g. a mastodon instance) for the ActivityPub outbox for "@user@server.com" and maybe some other info.

But I'm sure it can store anything we like, so why not social graph stuff? I'm mainly thinking about connections and interests.

E.g. mine would list all the ActivityPub accounts I follow and then a list of topics I'm interested in. Then everyone in that list who I follow would have a file that did the same.

Why then, can I not query these files for all ActivityPub accounts, up to 4 degrees of separation away, that are interested in Cycling or Football?

I feel like the fediverse in missing a trick. It's a halfway house between an algorithm on-boarding you and the cack-handed manual discovery that is being relied on currently.

But this is such an obvious thought, I must be missing something.

Open thread