Some girl just walked by my house, talking loudly on the phone. I overheard her say, "You've seen me at gremlin, but I don't think you've seen me at hot gremlin before..."

@xian i think it was a severe caffeine deficiency

“Gaming handheld with glasses-free 3D with eye tracking” - you mean like the New Nintendo 3DS? Would be interested to see if this is any less migraine-inducing

https://www.techspot.com/news/105725-tencent-unveils-11-inch-handheld-gaming-device-glasses.html

Just heard a story on NPR where the TSA advises “spreadable” food items must be taken in checked luggage for air travel - e.g. gravy and cranberry sauce goes in the suitcase.

I’m just picturing a cavalcade of mason jars exploding like cannons or grenades in cargo

@williampietri exactly! 😅

@supersole it’ll kinda be a liquid once it’s all in mah belly though 😋

(hmm, that’s kinda gross now that i think about it)

Woke up with Nickelback stuck in my head. Hoped it would go away, but I might have to take a trip to Urgent Care 😫

Happy to have gotten a possibly too-clever thing working on Pebbling Club last night: A single-node web service, paired with an in-process background job queue, which scales to zero when not in use.

Deployed on fly.io, their web proxy auto-starts the service to respond to an incoming HTTP request. The service fires up and does the needful. It also runs through pending jobs in the queue - e.g. RSS feed polling, garbage collection, etc.

Then, if both the server and queue go idle for about 3 minutes, the service shuts down. When it's shut down, I'm not billed for CPU time.

Just to be sure the thing kicks over periodically even if I don't use it, I have an Uptime Kuma install that hits the home page every 30 minutes. That seems to be enough to ensure all the RSS feeds stay fresh.

https://github.com/lmorchard/pebbling-club/blob/main/server/bin/exit-on-idle-node.ts

This kind of scale-to-zero thing doesn't matter so much if/when the service starts getting steady traffic. But, if it's mainly used as a little personal service, that can save a ton on hosting costs since it's essentially only running when being used.

I'd like to make this thing dirt cheap for other folks to run, assuming I ever get to a point where it's good enough for that 😅

There's also a scheduled machines feature on fly.io where you can have them fire up a machine automatically, but it didn't seem to work as expected for me. Probably still need to play with that a bit more. Would be very cool if this thing could just be all self-contained on fly.io and not need an outside process to kick it

I had a bit of an enthusiasm-lull toward Pebbling Club this past month, but I think I might be picking it back up again?

The next big pieces I want to build are getting the thing connecting to Mastodon and Bluesky accounts to ingest links from friends - alongside RSS/Atom feeds - into a big personal inbox.

Also want the option to ingest links posted to my own accounts as bookmarks, so they just automatically end up in my collection.

And, of course, eventually I want this publishing feeds and posting to social networks as I save bookmarks. It'll be able to federate with other instances of itself using the same channels.

Big idea is I want to make this thing a clearing house of links, as a companion service to other social networks.

https://github.com/users/lmorchard/projects/5/views/2?sliceBy%5Bvalue%5D=v0.3+-+social+utility

Trying to be very realistic about my scattered ADHD enthusiasm for the thing, but hoping to maybe have it in decent enough shape for other folks to use in the new year 🤞

Shower thought: An idea I'd had for a random thing to hang on a wall is an old recycled laptop display which silently plays Star Trek: The Motion Picture in slow motion over the course of a day or so and loops.

For as self-indulgent & ponderous the movie was, it was chock full of beautiful frames of sci-fi. Especially for 1979.

Also occurs to me that it would be neat to have running on a smartwatch as wallpaper, if I ever wore one.

Like, just imagine glancing at it from one random moment to another and seeing something like this, entirely removed from context or plot

@bengerman What, you don't want to feast your eyes on this guy for like 45 minutes to 2 hours?

@rasterweb welcome to the games grid, program

I feel like the older I get, the more I resent manipulation of all kinds. Like, not that I'm more immune to it, just that it pisses me off more and more once I recognize it. Advertising, sales tactics, rhetorical techniques, dark patterns - all of it just feeling ever more cynical & obnoxious to me.

@JoshuaACNewman Hah, yeah, I forgot I follow that account too @2001