markjgsmith

Podcast player weirdness - I downloaded some podcasts earlier this morning. I was listening to one of them and mid episode it suddenly stops. I look at the player and no matter what I do, I can't get it to play, it's just stuck. I try listening to other podcasts and they are fine, but when I go back to the stuck one, it's still stuck midway through. Then I notice that the download button isn't greyed out. It should be because I already downloaded it.

It looks as if midway through somehow the episode got deleted. My device had the screen off with the cover closed at the time, in a stationary position, so it's unlikely to be a fat finger type flub.

I'm just documenting it in case it happens again. #

Cory Doctorow on interop (41:45): "At a certain point, when you have to use engineers to block interoperability instead of lawyers, then you just give up. Because lawyers solve the problem for ever, right. Lawyers teach every financier, every entrepreneur and every user ‘don’t trust interoperable solutions’. Engineers they have to fight and fight and fight and eventually they lose in these wars of attrition. And so once you take away the lawyers the company sue for peace." #

Social media impartiality I love the Verge and especially the Vergecast Podcast. They explore great topics and do fantastic reporting. They make great content. I like that they are really pushing for an evolution in decentralised social media. But I'm getting the sense that they are ActivityPub shills. Now when ActivityPub crops up I find myself questioning their motives. They borderline ridicule the user bases of competing protocols. Sure poking a bit of fun can be ok, but recently it feels very one sided. I don't like that feeling.

I don't mind them having their own opinions at all but given the influence they have I wish they were a bit more impartial. I know there's the old saying that 1 way to do things is better than many competing ways, but I'm ok with there being several social media protocols, in fact I think it might even be a wise way to proceed in this case.

I wish they would choose at least one other of the big contenders and really get behind it. Whether it's Bluesky's AT protocol or Nostr or even RSS or something else, they all have some great features. I think their coverage would be a lot better for it. Right now it's like they're all Windows fan boys. #

Make git fast again - Git is awesome software but it is quite slow when using it to manage many small files. For example I have 17000 markdown files in my website's data repo and the git client is unbelievably slow and often unresponsive. I wish ghis could be improved. That's a big issue if you want to manage a static site with git.

If you want to make many people's lives a lot better consider improving git to make it better at handling large quantities of small files. #

Extreme and weird bullying - I recently wrote about a bag I was gifted. It's a nice bag, but it has on three sides of the bag the word PINK in giant white letters. I actually think it looks quite cool, but bullies don't share my exquisit style and have been using it as an excuse to chastise me.

Yesterday someone tampered with my other bag, a backpack, when I wasn't looking. I don't know what they did exactly, but they had moved the position of the bag from horizontal to vertical. About 20 minutes later I moved the bag, and the strap that stretches across your chest, which is very stabilizing when the bag is heavy, was caught in the chair it was on and it became detached from the bag. Kind of a weird coincidence that that would happen right after the tampering insident.

Well today I've been inspecting the strap in a well lit room so I can see clearly the situation. The bag is all black with all black stitching. The strap that became detached was a sliding strap and it's not possible to re-attach it. I think it would require unstitching and restitching, and likely I'd end up with the bag in a worse state. Imagine my suprise to find not only that the stitching is freyed right at the top of the slider rail, it wasn't before, but even stranger was when I peel back the seem right next to the freyed bit, there are 4-5 stitches made using pink thread. The matching strap on the other side doesn't have these rogue pink stiches. No pink stiches anywhere else on the bag.

Both bags were gifts from totally different people in totally different places. One was from a male, the other from a female. The backpack, I actually picked it out in the shop. What are the chances? All day today both males and females have been randomly saying 'no' to me for no apparent reason. Sometimes the world just doesn't want you to exist, it doesn't matter what you do.

Also worth noting, since I mentioned the weirdness with milk gifts, and food drenched in red sauce, and red splodges a few weeks ago, food gifts have literally fallen off a cliff. They had been getting me by on tough days. Now I'm really struggling often. Most people it seems are only willing to help if I accept their belittleing, or totally outrageously insulting and totally wrong framing, and if I standup for myself they are the ones that 'no' me, with enormous righteousness. Tis a crazy crazy world. #