What’s your favorite gif app on macOS?

Am I wrong to assume that when Amazon has a package out for delivery that suddenly becomes “delayed in transit” and will come a few days later either:

1. The delivery person forgot to drop off that box and has no time to come back;
2. The delivery person stole the package; or
3. The delivery person damaged the package?

Anyway, Amazon delivered roughly half my Sonos order.

Mental health victory: over the last few years I’ve worked hard to reach this place and I think I’ve achieved it– for the first time in a decade, my hobbies are important and fulfilling again.

I can’t believe I haven’t updated this since March.

When I look back at that post though, I know at least partially why. I opened with, “Gracie is still with us.” April 30th was her last day with us. It’s still painful.

But there have been quite a few important updates since I last wrote.

Music

I am now playing in a band seriously for the first time basically since high school. I’m having a ton of fun writing music again, and I think we’re going to be ready to perform live soon. Once we have some more demos recorded, I might post some of the music. This has meant I’ve spent a lot more time thinking about guitar gear and music again and it’s bringing me a lot of joy.

Newish stuff I’m listening to

Health

After my weight crept up again, not nearly to its high, but enough, I started Wegovy. After years of concerns, I had my cholesterol close to under control. But this winter, even before I had started to gain back some weight, my cholesterol shot up way high. With my family history of severe heart disease, it was time to get on a statin. But my weight kept creeping up and we also have a history of weight-related diabetes. I was struggling, and I knew I didn’t want to get things out of control. After discussing it with my doctor in what was a quick and relatively easy conversation, he agreed that with my activity level and diet plus family history, it would be worth trying Wegovy as I could see some real benefits.

I haven’t lost monstrous amounts of weight– instead, I’ve lost weight just like I have in the past when I was the most successful counting calories. But the “no food noise” thing is real– I cannot believe how much less I think about food, how much faster I feel full, and how much easier it is to just eat less. While I was counting calories in the beginning, I am not at this time. I don’t really need to because my appetite doesn’t lead me to going over. I’m losing at a rate of about 1.5 lbs a week, depending on the week, and I’m now much closer to my “typical” healthy (but still quite over) weight, even though I’m not yet on a full dosage.

My most serious side effect seems to be increased heart rate– it makes it a little harder to do the most intense forms of exercise and it makes my sleep feel a bit less restful. It’s worth it for me.

Unfortunately, I’m not able to do my favorite exercise– volleyball– very much lately. Someone crashed into me while I was swinging for a hit back in May. At the time, it felt ok, but ever since I’ve had shoulder issues. It’s just on the very edge of my motion. I can do almost everything at the gym and never feel it in every day life. But if I try to play volleyball, I really feel it. And the other day I did a some pull-ups for the first time in a while and there it was. I probably should get some imaging, but I’ve been taking it easy and it has improved, just slowly. Welcome to being in your late 30s.

Travel

We went to Providence for our reunion, Nashville for a wedding, and Seattle just because and had a gra time late May through mid June. We also went to London this summer as our big trip for the year. It was my first time to the UK and we had a very good time. My review is short and simple: I’ve never been somewhere that reminded me of New York so much. I do love to travel, and it’s a bit tough on me that post PowerSchool acquisition I don’t get to travel much for work. Oh, and I just got back from visiting my sister and her husband in Pittsburgh over Labor Day weekend.

Miscellaneous

I started to go to a book club at my favorite local bookstore and I’ve had a really good time doing it. I missed the two summer ones (because I was in London for the first and in a rut with reading for the second), but September’s book is Slow Horses, which I expect will be an easy read given how much I love the AppleTV series so I’m excited to head back there.

I’ll try and do this once more before the end of the year.

Threads crossposting (still in beta) stopped working for my blog and I can say for sure that I miss it. Threads has succeeded a drawing in a lot of the people I know (in real life) where all other forms of post Twitter social media remains a space for the chronically online.

Hulu makes it so difficult to find the next episode of a show that I’m in the middle of watching. I’m not sure I could use the app anymore without the TV App.

Demon Slayer S1 E19 has an intense ending.

I cannot believe Alsobrooks might loose her race. Hogan was a horrible governor who somehow remained popular and will absolutely crush the national agenda in the US Senate — do you think we get Red Line support with the guy who killed it and harmed Baltimore for a generation?

Mike is being thoughtful about why people don’t use Linux, but I’ll just be glib about it. The hardware sucks and the application software sucks.

I’ve been trying really hard to consider whether or not something is worth saying at all before posting. This is not worth saying, but I can’t stop thinking it: the new version of Reeder could not be less “for me”. I don’t get it at all, so I’m going to stay being the old man yelling at cloud now.

Barry Sampson looks at website analytics and says:

I look at that list and while I think it might be interesting, for me it’s not actionable.

I disagree! I used to feel this way, but I recently changed my mind. In particular, I find it very valuable to know “Where those visitors appear to come from”– this is the most reliable way for me to know that someone who has a blog has linked to one of my posts. And so, without analytics, I’d never read some of the best responses to my writing, nor would I find bloggers who read me so that I can add their RSS feed and read them as well.

The best blogs to read are written by people who are interested enough in things that I write that they would bother writing a blog post in response. I’m curious if Barry will ever know this post exists– probably not! But with analytics, he would.

via Loren

The correct tax on unrealized gains is a strong estate tax.

I was excited about what I had heard about JPEGXL. But this sounds terrifying.

Apparently, sometimes it takes a bad dream to reveal fears I harbor. Or perhaps anger that’s still simmering.

This issue about Bridgy getting “success” messages from Mastodon instances when sending them ActivityPub posts but those posts never showing up sure looks like something some Micro.blog users see.

When I say that Mastodon is not ActivityPub (and AP has problems) this is what I mean.

Is The Acolyte the first time that canon Star Wars media was cancelled without a structured ending?

I caught the attention of Matthew, leading to an update to his mega post on the IndieWeb.

As ever, I’m always thrilled when someone responds to something I write on their blog. I am sure he is sick of writing about this, so I hope my small followup doesn’t lead him to feel the need to jump back in (unless he wants to!).

So, I wanted to answer his wondering:

Jason also has this to say, which I’d like to address.

There’s this beautiful world where Integration is Not Your Problem, but we don’t live in that world. Not only are RSS/Atom feeds not generally supported by other systems, there’s little to know reason to ever expect them to be. Even API entry points are largely dead and a struggle right now. But I don’t agree this makes it not my problem.

I’m curious as to what Jason means by ‘we’ here. He might not live in that world, but I certainly do.

So do I! Almost everything I read on the internet I read using Feedbin. If something doens’t have a feed, I try to make it one. RSS has essentially been what I consider “the internet” since Google Reader. When I say “we don’t live in that world” what I mean is that the people who want to read my blog, to a reasonably approximation, do not live in that world. Just like it’s terribly difficult to get people to switch messaging apps, I can’t convince people to browse the web the way I want them to.

I am not publishing copies of my content to various platforms because I think Matt is wrong:

You owe these platforms nothing. You are not obligated to integrate with them. You are not obligated to provide them with “content”. You are not obligated to acknowledge their very existence.

I don’t owe platforms anything. Whatever obligation I have follows from the later part of my post– namely I want to make it easy to read my blog for the people who want or may want to read it.

Matthew notes:

The following sentiment is one I find admirable, however.

I like to make it easy for people who opt in to read what I write. I think it is important, or at least valuable, to put in some work to make it so that people who read have to do less work. POSSE, and the tech that supports it, is what makes this possible.

This is why I provide feeds. This is why I try to improve my website’s typography and accessibility. That much I can do. But if making my writing more accessible to other people means manually posting links on commercial platforms, then be damned to them.

Here we’re in total agreement. But I’m pleased that my host, partially inspired by the IndieWeb, and certainly inspired by POSSE, makes it so that manually posting links on commercial platforms is not a thing I have to do at all. It also makes it so that I don’t have to do anything to read people’s replies to my posts from whatever platform they read them on when that’s supported! It’s great!

And I’m glad Robb made something like Echofeed so that this is possible without doing things yourself if you don’t host somewhere like Micro.blog.

I, of course, wish platforms cared about my stupid little blog being able to publish directly to them in a way that they don’t. But I care much more that if people who may want to read my blog use those services, they can still find their way here.

If I didn’t use Plausible analytics to occasionally troll the what domains are referring people to my blog, I’d have never known Matthew saw what I wrote. Maybe that’s ok, but I think it’s better that I can find the folks interacting with me, from wherever they choose to do so.

I don’t fully understand the bill proposed in Lousiana that would have forced App Stores to enact age restrictions. ¹ I’m not sure that age restrictions at the App Store-level on apps is the way to go. However, I do think that there should be a secure API for physical devices to report if users are over a certain age, and I think that should be available to web browsers.

I think we need to permit and preserve the right to access adult content while still permitting protecting children. Rather than pointless dropdowns asking for your birthdate (like many online alcohol ordering services have, for example), there should be an API request that activates a passkey-like biometric authentication that will report back TRUE or FALSE. We should let apps and websites ask a device, “Is the current user over a certain age?” Maybe limit that to a few ages (in the US, 13, 18, and 21 would cover nearly all age-related restrictions) or have some kind of rate limiting (once asking for an age verification, you cannot change the age you verified for 3 minutes or something).

This way, if there’s content that we want to only show to those above a certain age, you can do so with some confidence. Maybe this can only be done in states that adopt the ISO 18013-5 standard– if you want to get age checks from the platform, adopt and provide identification that can be loaded electronically onto our devices. I worry a little bit about this because the US has a terrible history of limiting access to state IDs for all kinds of marginalized groups. But I think there’s something to be done here by the platforms. This is a level of safety that I think we should hold the duopoly platforms take on, but once, in a uniform, standards-based way. Not state by state, or even to a degree, country by country.

Fox will never report on this. If they did, not a single member of the military nor their families would ever consider a vote for Trump.

Anyone who cares about foreign policy should be terrified of a Trump presidency.

I need to get back on my reading train — give me some good, fun, fast SFF <500 pages.

I am the only person I know that doesn’t find bidets special.

Our HRV lease is up in about 9 months. I think it’s time to go electric. We’d lease again, I think.

Seems to me like the cars to check out are the Ioniq 5, EX30, and XC40 for not-astronomical, smaller crossover, 225+ mile range. What am I missing? Are there 25 model changes I should be aware of?

I don’t know why we have slow, bad service on the light rail because of all these Baltimore County stops where we refuse to do transit oriented development. Ever backwards.

Just to briefly weigh in on my own experience with the SSO Tax as a provider and customer.

1. Any SSO that is not bog standard Microsoft or Google does come with meaningful costs that can get out of control.
2. SSO has never succeeding in reducing support for log in issues, and sometimes has increased it.
3. The SSO tax is more about a signal– SSO is required by large, sophisticated clients. But those customers and buyers almost always also require other things that are complex and expensive like negotiating contract terms versus standard terms of service, purchase order/invoice-based payment with net 30 or longer terms, etc. You’re not being upcharged for just SSO, it just so happens that requiring SSO is a pretty good sign you’re going to be a much more complex customer on the whole.

I quite often see the SSO tax only being applied to custom SAML BS, whereas a standard log in with Microsoft/Google/Github/OAuth provider-named-here is not an extra charge. I think that makes perfectly good sense.

And by the way, Microsoft Entra/ADFS/whatever they call it is an insanely jacked-up and dumb system– like all things Microsoft.

I’m still dealing with viral keratitis. Most of the pain is gone, but I can still use just one contact lens. I can see ok like this (I can legally drive because my “bad” eye is the one that is not infected so my vision is actually corrected just fine). But the difference in vision still leaves me with a low grade headache most of the day. And although my eye itself is no longer in a lot of pain, I am still having some soreness around my brow and below the eye (I’ve been calling this “orbital pain” but who knows if that’s accurate.

For this reason, and just the way my calendar worked out, this week was particularly grueling at work. It just felt like constant pressure and a fair bit of exhaustion.

Despite that, now that we’re nearing the end, there were some nice things that happened. Today I got some really positive feedback from one of our customers directly and I indirectly heard about some solid validation on what we’ve been cooking. I had a couple of one-on-ones where I got to quick agreement and an action plan that we feel good about. There were rough parts of the week too, where things are not going as planned or smoothly. But I’m glad that after a week that felt endless, what I remember at 9pm on a Thursday were a few bright spots.

Tomorrow I am headed back to the eye doctor. I am not confident I’ll get the ok to put back in my right lens, but I’m choosing to be hopeful. It’d be real nice to be able to see and get rid for this dang headache.