I just realized that my source feed which usually auto-posts links to my blog posts stopped working a couple days ago. I don’t want to double-hit the timeline in case @help resolves it, but if you usually follow my stuff here and not RSS, you’ve got some goodies waiting for you at heydingus.net. 🙂
Made a bunch more little improvements around the site today. It’s fun gleaning more about CSS. But I need to stop tinkering with design and get more actual writing done!
If you’re following me on Mastodon and wondering how those link posts I did this morning (and have made for months) have hyperlinks and styling, they’re all done with this shortcut and Micro.blog. It plays nicely (if not perfectly) with Mastodon and all lives on my own website. (Try the permalinks!)
Alright, that’s pretty good. 😆
We also have a shirt inspired by @marcoarment’s recent nostalgic foray into Palm hardware and software. If you know, you know.
(Available in many colors, plus long-sleeve, sweatshirt, and tank top.)
Not perfect, but progress.
Great news coming from Germany: today, the Bundestag adopted the gender self-determination law, which will allow trans people to change their gender on their official papers with a simple declaration at the civil registry. Gone are the medical requirements. 🏳️⚧️
https://www.bundestag.de/dokumente/textarchiv/2024/kw15-de-geschlechtseintrag-997406
I’m thrilled to see the Duel of the Defaults continue to rage, stewarded by @robb@social.lol, over five months on. The teeny-weeny-web is so cool. 😎
I kind of lost my morning hanging around waiting for a call from pest control who said they would ring me up Friday morning. But, (more) credit due, the phone rang at 11:55 AM. 🤷♂️
🆕📝 Humane pinned their launch date, if not their pin
Forgive my pun, but I’m just oh-so-clever. 😜
🔗
We start out building valuable devices, move into services, capture users and step on developers.
We spin up streaming media, drop prices, increase availability, wait for collections to whither and then safely hollow out libraries, squeeze creators and raise prices.
Ooh, cutting to the quick. 😬
🔗
The rather depressing fact is, much of what I do online is because I like interacting with other people. As I wrote about a few days ago, I have zero friends and rely heavily on platforms to provide this for me. More than this, though, is my love of getting replies. In many ways, the reason I take pictures and write blog posts is for other people’s reactions, and not hearing them sucks.
I wouldn’t say not getting replies sucks, but it sure is a thrill when I do hear from readers.
Follow that siren’s call, Greg, back to Micro.blog. 😉
🔗
No other foldable has this form factor and I really like it. It is almost like it brings everything a lot closer to you and gives you just enough space to be comfortable. Sometimes using the iPhone Pro Max, I feel the phone isn’t the right device for this task and I wait till I get to my MacBook. These instances occur far less on the Pixel Fold.
This—forgive me—flexibility to cover a wider use-case area is why I’m eyeing the Pixel Fold with jealously. I think they nailed the form factor and now just need to refine the experience.
🔗
I don’t get a ton of [X] DMs, and I get fewer now than ever before, but Texts offers a better interface to them than [X] itself does. I also have my Instagram, WhatsApp, and Signal accounts connected to Texts. If I used any of those platforms heavily, I’d rely on their dedicated apps. But I don’t, so a universal messaging inbox is better. I’m more interested in having one central place to check than anything else for those platforms.
It’s why I signed up for Beeper too. I’d rather just one spot for my infrequent chats.
🔗
There are so many mind-blowing things about eclipses but the one I can’t stop thinking about is the nearly impossible coincidence that the sun and the moon are the same relative size in the sky. If the moon were a little bit smaller or farther away, we wouldn’t have total eclipses where you can look directly at the sun, see the corona, the sky goes dark, you see a sunset effect all around the horizon, etc. That is some spooky magical shit.
I love coincidences like this. On a grand enough scale, sometimes things just work out.
🔗
It’s not unreasonable to think that we could be on the verge of a breakthrough computing change that changes the world. Is the Vision Pro that product? I don’t know, and I haven’t exactly been shy about how the current version of the hardware and software hasn’t clicked for me like I’d hoped, but Apple has a pretty remarkable track record here and I’m taking a leap that maybe this will make more sense to me in the next year or two.
And @matt@isfeeling.social with a similar take.
🔗
This is what happens with early, evolving platforms in categories that basically didn’t exist before. We’re so used to Apple being a well-oiled machine that it’s hard to look at the Vision Pro and not judge it by all the same rules as the other products Apple produces.
But we can’t. The Vision Pro is about learning, trying things, figuring out new stuff, and hoping it’ll evolve into something new and different and relevant (and hopefully much more affordable!) in the future.
Jason with the long view of Vision Pro.
🔗 Eclipses Should Be Celebrations of Science, Not Pseudoscience // John Gruber // daringfireball.net
We were informed by astronomers, years in advance, exactly when and exactly where the eclipse would occur — down to the second, down to the meter — and everyone in the path of totality could literally see how exactly right those predictive calculations were. We should be celebrating and emphasizing this to laypeople, because these same scientists are the same people who’ve been telling us for decades that we’re destroying our climate with carbon emissions.
I just released my ‘🤣 Markdown Memes’ shortcut version 1.0:
This shortcut helps you to reuse memes saved as Markdown without having to re-upload the image to your Micro.blog account (or wherever you store your image files) or re-write the alt text over and over again. It presents a list of memes saved to a text file for you to choose from, or allows you to upload a new one and save it to that same text file.
Some niceties:
- Auto-setup to create and update the necessary text file
- Auto-sorting to put your most used memes at the top of the list
Get it from the HeyDingus Shortcuts Library.
📷 #mbApr Day 12
Would you believe this was taken inside at Caesar’s Palace? It’s like magic!
I just updated my ‘MB Photoblogger’ shortcut to version 1.2:
- Adjusted the composition of the final text to display better in Mastodon clients (image on the bottom, thanks @burk)
- Split up the RSS results to make it easier to determine the day’s prompt, and double-check that it’s for the correct day
- Simplified how to customize the title of each photoblog post, which is done upon first setup but can be changed at any point
Get it from the HeyDingus Shortcuts Library.
📷 #mbApr Day 11
My heart lives at the intersection of rock and sky.
🆕📝 Edelrid’s Design Team Is at the Top of Their Game
When you trust your life to your climbing gear, it's nice to know that someone's put a lot of thought into how it works.
I’ve been using Things for — goodness — 7 years now and every time I save a task with the share extension I think, “Surely @things@mastodon.online will add ‘When?’ menu so I can set a due date on this task soon.” And yet, here we are! Line me up for that football kick again, Lucy!
And one more change that I need some feedback on… I figured out how to do the gradient blockquote style I’ve been trying to implement. But I’m afraid it might be “too much”. What do y’all think?
Been playing with CSS today and tidying up some corners of the website.
Very thankful to @garritfra@fosstodon.org who posted about how to implement a DuckDuckGo search bar on your website. I’ve never been happy with Blot’s search tool and wanted to use DDG for a while, but never figured out how. This was drop-in perfect.