Feediverse
Mar 15, 2024
What if we had a great experience that ties together both short-form discussion and re-sharing and long-form reading, in a way that better showcases both kinds of content and realizes that the way we consume both is different? What if it had a beautiful, commercial-level design? And what if it remained tied to the open social web at its core, and pushed the capabilities of the protocols forward as it released new features and discovered new user needs?
Copy and paste from Obsidian with formatting
Oct 21, 2023
tl;dr: Copy as HTML plugin
Copy/pasting from Obsidian has some issues. The first problem I hit was that pasting into Slack was coming through as unformatted text - the raw Markdown. After a bit of fiddling, switching from Edit to Reading mode resolved this. Pasting from Reading mode properly formats the text.
Pasting into Google Docs created some more interesting problems though. While Reading mode carried the formatting through, it also brought elements of my Obsidian theme, like background colour which, naturally, wasn’t what I was looking for. Then I found the Copy as HTML plugin, which handles its own Markdown to HTML conversion and copies the output from that, avoiding bringing along any unintended elements from the editor. This leads to a nice workflow where you can draft and edit documents in Obsidian, keeping them close to other notes to allow for future remixing/cross-referencing etc, while making it easy to transfer it to Google docs to share or collaborate on.
Omnivore, the free, open source read later app
Oct 12, 2023
I’ve been using Wallabag as a self-hosted read later service for a while. Like a free, open source Pocket/Instapaper. It works well enough, but the general UX is a little rough around the edges and development doesn’t seem super speedy - the Android app hasn’t seen a release in a couple of years. I recently stumbled upon Omnivore and it’s already won me over.
The good
- The look and feel is generally very pleasing - it has a similar feel to Pocket
- You can use all the functionality on the hosted instance at omnivore.app for free
- You can customise your reading experience, from the font face right down to the margin size
- There’s a beta RSS reader. I already use FreshRSS so this isn’t super valuable to me personally - I’m happy to manually “promote” content from RSS to read later - but if you’re only working with a few feeds with high quality content, I can see this being handy
- Email inboxes. You can setup email addresses to register with newsletters and have them come straight through to Omnivore. You can also send PDFs and highlight/annotate as with articles
- Regular updates. The Android app was updated last week
- Offline reading in the apps
- Highlights export through well-maintained plugins (Obsidian & Logseq) straight into your notes. Wallabag highlights/annotations use XPath notation, which I’ve found difficult to write markdown export scripts maintaining full formatting from the original article
- It’s self-hostable…ish ⬇️
The less good
- I gave up on self-hosting
- Hosting under a domain name didn’t “just work” - even after setting all the URLs in the
docker-composefile, I was still directed to alocalhostURL - I did a find and replace to change all
localhostreferences to my instance’s URL but wasn’t able to add content - The team are actively working on making it “more self-hostable” so I’ll try again some time!
- Hosting under a domain name didn’t “just work” - even after setting all the URLs in the
I’m finding it very enjoyable to use and I think I’m a convert! As I’m not currently self-hosting there is every chance the hosted service may go away or my data get lost, but I’ll keep exporting my highlights and spin up my own instance once they’ve ironed some of the kinks out!
Arc Browser And Tim Berners-Lee's Dream of Intercreativity
Jul 29, 2023
As I was reading Tim Berners-Lee’s book on the origins of the web it became clear that TBL has, or had, a real passion for democratising the creation of the web and for people to be able to create content directly in the browser, even editing the content they’re viewing.
We ought to be able not only to find any kind of document on the Web, but also to create any kind of document, easily. We should be able not only to follow links, but to create them - between all sorts of media. We should be able not only to interact with other people, but to create with other people. If interactivity is not just sitting there passively in front of a display screen, then intercreativity is not just sitting there in front of something ‘interactive’.
Throughout the book TBL seems frustrated that his idea that a web browser should also be a web editor never took off:
Hostname Aliases on a LAN In Linux
Jul 27, 2023
I have a little computer running Linux in my home that I use a home server, running various services such as FreshRSS and linkding. I wanted to setup a bunch of memorable hostnames I could use to point to different services on that machine. This was my journey.
My primary OS is Windows. I’m used to using the machine name (hostname) of the computer to resolve to its local IP address by some sort of magic with no human intervention (apparently this is NetBIOS? I dunno, I’ve literally never had to think about it), but that wasn’t working for this Linux server PC. After trawling through a bunch of StackExchange posts suggesting the user edit their hosts file…on each and every device on their LAN, which is obviously the wrong way around, I found posts such as this helpfully indicating that the functionality is offered in zero-conf(iguration) services, such as mDNS and that installing Avahi on the Linux machine should broadcast the hostname as hostname.local and then be available by name rather than just IP. After a quick
sudo apt install avahi-daemon
this all worked pretty promptly!
Weaving The Web, by Tim Berners-Lee
Jul 13, 2023
Weaving The Web - The Past, Present and Future of the World Wide Web by its Inventor by Tim Berners-Lee, 1990
A couple of years ago I went on a quest to find the perfect note-taking software for me. I dabbled with Roam, but was looking for something less siloed. I tried TiddlyWiki, but found the tech stack quite clunky, as straight out the box it’s just an HTML file that has no way to write your changes anywhere. Eventually I stumbled on Obsidian, which was exactly what I needed: local notes, Wiki-style interconnected-ness with simple and (relatively) standardised Markdown for formatting. It got me thinking about the structure of the web and how fundamental links and connections should be. I was inspired to read Tim Berners-Lee’s book on the origins of the web. I took a bunch of notes, but these are the ones that resonated most strongly.
Gemini Why And How
Jan 21, 2022
I thought I’d start off by explaining why and how I setup a Gemini server.
Why
We were chatting at work about the issues with the modern web - speed, cruft and general usability. Someone dropped a link to the Gemini project page.
Debugging Unity Android Apps
Jul 23, 2018
This is pretty much a repost/summary of a StackOverflow post, as it took me a long while to find this information; hopefully Google will do its magic and surface this for future generations.
I had a need to debug a Unity game on an Android device. The build running on the device was a Development build with debugging enabled etc etc. For reasons I had neither time nor inclination to investigate, Visual Studio was not discovering the device and it was not showing in the Attach Unity Debugger list, despite the device being on the same Wifi network, and physically attached by USB cable. I knew the IP address of the device, but not the port the debugger process was listening on, which apparently changes with each launch.
To summarise the StackOverflow post, you want to get hold of the ADB logcat output for your game. I did (something like):
How and Why Is This Object Being Destroyed, Unity?!
Jul 17, 2017
I recently ran up against a problem in a Unity project I’m working on: a GameObject was being Destroyed, but I didn’t know why or from where. The codebase, naturally, has many calls to Destroy() and contains its own methods with that name, which made both Find References and text-based searches impractical. I just wanted a breakpoint in UnityEngine.Object.Destroy().
Round 1: OnDestroy()
Spoilers: you may well know this method is a dead-end.
Unity will automatically call OnDestroy() on all components on a destroyed GameObject. I thought this might allow me to set a breakpoint, but OnDestroy() is deferred to the end of the frame, so the callstack doesn’t go back to the original Destroy() call. Next!
Sanitarium HD Patcher On GitHub
Dec 9, 2015
Just a quick update: I’ve open sourced my Sanitarium HD Patcher. The code and latest release can now be found on GitHub! Enjoy!
Sanitarium HD Patcher
Feb 7, 2015
It is now available! Please find v0.1.0 here. This version will only work with executables with MD5 of 0A09F1956FCA274172B0BB90AA5F08A7. If people turn out to have other versions I’ll try to get hold of the exes and get them supported. Enjoy!
UPDATE: Permanent page at sanitariumhd.
New Year's Resolution Patch
Feb 1, 2015
I guess that title would have worked better a month ago.
Anyhow. I’ve always been fascinated by software reverse engineering and general binary hackery, but had never really thought of a project to try it out on. Then I remembered the Fallout High Resolution Patch and the Infinity Engine Widescreen Mod, which apply cracking/patching techniques to allow old games designed at 1990s resolutions to run at glorious 1080p. I decided to do something similar.
Targeting
I wanted a target for which no fan patch already existed. I was browsing GOG, and saw that the game Sanitarium had recently been added. I remembered that I already had a copy installed on my PC - perfect! Target acquired.