Most popular feeds on Bluesky
I find this list interesting. Bluesky just recently crossed 28M users, and yet on this list the most popular feed has been liked just 35k times. Custom feeds are one of the marquee features of the platform, and yet it's so minisculely utilized by users.
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TikTok's Wild Ride
The TikTok ride this past 24 hours (with it going offline and then this morning coming back online) seems entirely theatrical and setting Trump up to be seen as the savior. Blah blah blah.
I already want off the ride that the next four years is sure to be.
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My Browser "Startup" Folders
This blog post refers to Magic: The Gathering. As noted, it is also now my job. So while I deeply love the game, I always want to alert folks I also have a bias.
Last weekend, I talked about my Firefox plugins. This weekend, I want to share how I use the browser, and one of the big step forwards for me.
In the 1990s, when dial-up internet was still in its infancy, my family was connected and (like today) my favorite game ever, Magic: The Gathering, gave me a very good reason to be online. I had discovered IRC, Internet Relay Chat. And specifically, I had found #mtg on "Efnet." It was a chatroom that could have up to 100 people in it on busy days. It was the virtual hangout for us. And that hangout, made it so I came home from school, and I got on the family computer, and I hung out for hours each day.
Remember, this was the origins of the Internet. This was back when kids were sent out of the house by default. Though that era rapidly came to a close. And this was the era when Internet access was metered. So, when one month I took the family over our 100 hours of online time in a month, it was a big deal and one I got into a bit of trouble when the parents saw my online time in a quantifiable way.
I share this tidbit from my past to show that my Internet addiction started early. My grandmother smoked her first cigarette when she was like 7. I started being online when I was 14.
These days, I wouldn't be shocked to learn I had weeks where I spent 100 hours a WEEK online, between work and home. Basically in my life, I have always been online. And it's been because of what is now my employer: Magic: The Gathering.
This entire story is to highlight how serious I take being online. I live in the browser window. Firefox is my workshop.
I used to agonize over finding the most productive or efficient start page for my browser. During Yahoo's heyday, had a feature which let you setup a custom start page on their site. Embedding weather, news, bookmarks, etc. Start pages have gone out of vogue, but I still want to be efficient and online as quick as possible.
I have a handful of pinned tabs which I keep always open in the browser:
- Gmail
- Google Calendar
- This blog
- RSS Reader for news and articles
- Wallabag saved articles
- Bluesky & Mastodon both have ones
But those are all personal stuff for me and not for work. Unfortunately, Firefox doesn't let you customize start pages by the tab container (one of the extensions I talked about last week). My solution is instead to maintain "Startup" bookmark folders. One folder for personal, one for work. I bookmark the tabs I want into each folder.
For work, I won't tell you what tabs I use, but I have settled on 3 tabs which I keep in the Work startup folder.
So if I need to start my Work browser system, I open a new tab with the 'Work' container in the browser. So all of those tabs are using work related logins and cookies, etc. Then I can right click on the 'Startup' folder and open all of the bookmarks into their tabs, and boom - I'm off to the races.
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In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trials 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It's the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.
A quote from Captain Gilbert, the Army psychologist assigned to watching the defendants at the Nuremberg trials.
I was reminded of this quote from this Reddit comment.
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Today's coding output
Today was largely a lazy day except for some coding. Nothing was a major project, but I messed around with a few ideas and finally implemented a month calendar view for archives. Currently it's just in the sidebar of everyday to link the current month.
I also messed around with a few things:
RSS Headline Summarizer
A script which runs on my home machine where I can run a local copy of the Llama LLM, and I feed it the day's news headlines from my RSS reader, and it spits out a summary of the topics in the news. No real use, but was curious to mess around with the code for it.
Goliath
I worked on pulling all the links from my Bluesky and Mastodon feeds into its own RSS feed. This is a variation of something I had thought seriously a year or so ago which I called Behemoth. It would have been a combined reader for social feeds as well as RSS feeds, and other APIs I could fold into it.
Today was nowhere near that, and was just me poking around at the APIs for each platform, no full implementation.
Glowbug Calendars
As noted above, the calendar display for Glowbug. It's been on my to-do list for a while now and today was the majority of it. There's some more to do with reworking templating to allow the calendar to be set based on the page which is being generated.
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Overall, it wasn't anything too strenuous, but just fun explorations and distractions during the day.
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Automated Archives for January, 19th 2025
This post was automatically generated.
Articles To Read
The following are articles that I saved today. Substance and quality will vary drastically.
- AOC ’28 Starts Now - Truthdig
- No title found
- Timeline of Palisades and Eaton Fires: The First 24 Hours
Blog Posts On This Day
- January 19, 2024 (2 posts)
- January 19, 2023 (6 posts)
- January 19, 2022 (1 post)
- January 19, 2021 (13 posts)
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The lesson of J.R.R. Tolkien’s abandoned Lord of the Rings sequel
'The New Shadow,' which Tolkien left unfinished at his death, has a chilling warning about the dangers of historical amnesia and peacetime rot.
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