I am irrationally excited about my early birthday gift, Arcade Game Typography by Toshi Omagari. A fascinating and unique take on the history of gaming.
A sad day for Evernote users (I haven’t used it any time recently but I know a lot of folks that loved it).
But it’s another good cautionary tale about the dangers of cloud-hosted services. Every company seems invincible until it’s not.
Announcing jekyll-webmention.io 4.0.0
Sabbatical accomplishment! I finally cut version 4.0.0 of this gem for integrating Jekyll with the Webmention.io service, which enables webmentions for static sites.
Well, I must confess when I first agreed to take over maintenance of this plugin I wasn’t prepared for just how burned out I’d gotten at the time, so while I did manage to get 3.3.7 out the door, I have to admit progress was far slower than I would’ve liked.
But, version 4.0.0 is finally done, and I’ve managed to integrate a bunch of changes I had queued up while dealing with a bunch of open issues in the tracker.
Here’s hoping I didn’t break anything horribly (I dogfood the main branch on my own blog but I’m not going to claim that exercises every corner of the codebase, and I’ve not begun the monumental effort to close out issue #29, so automated tests are still very much absent).
With that said, version 4.0.0 of this plugin brings along a couple of major new features, along with some more minor enhancements. While the gem behaviour and associated configuration should be backward compatible with the 3.x series, the changes are significant enough that I felt it best to bump the major version of the plugin so folks are less likely to experience a surprise upgrade.
Continue reading...Ending and Beginning
It’s official, I’m no longer an INVIDI employee. Let the sabbatical begin!
This is a copy of the note I posted to LinkedIn announcing my resignation from INVIDI. Since I didn’t syndicate my last blog post there, you’ll forgive a bit of overlap in the subject matter, but I liked what I wrote and wanted to preserve it on my blog. You know, Own Your Data and all that.
Continue reading...An eagle-eyed friend spotted a new arrival in the yard: a newly emerged White Admiral butterfly!
I am a legit Star Trek nerd and this just makes my heart sing! The interactive navigation (which I think currently requires Chrome?) is something special.
Turning the page
After 21 years in my job at INVIDI I realized I needed a change, and in that moment of change, some space to reflect.
The beginning
Twenty-one years.
For many of the folks I know, twenty-one years is a long time in a career, let alone in a single company.
But the strange thing is that, while on the resume it looks like I’ve had just the one job, in reality I had the great fortune to have experienced a remarkably diverse series of roles, and it seemed like every time I started to get a little antsy, a little bored, in need of a change, INVIDI offered me another opportunity, another challenge, another path to walk.
And it has been quite the journey, though one that has come to its natural end.
Continue reading...That moment when you think “I know it’s a bad idea, but I kinda want another coffee”, only to realize you hadn’t finished your previous cup…
I’m honestly very excited about the possibility of a revival of blogging and so forth, but I’d love to see the word “content” thrown into the dustbin. I don’t create “content”. I write (occasionally). And my writing isn’t just the grist for some corporate mill; my blog isn’t just a source of inventory for some ad network to monetize.
I don’t know how I became a vaporwave fan, but the new Macroblank is pretty damn good…
That moment when you think “you know, I should put this little script I cobbled together up on github, someone might find this useful.” Then you do a little search and find 18 other similar tools in varying states of disrepair…
(in this case, a more customizable xdg-open replacement)
A Fictional Me By ChatGPT #3
Fake biography #3 about me, written by ChatGPT. Or: What is ‘real’? How do you define ‘real’?.
Yup, I’m still at it, post fake biographies about myself as written by ChatGPT.
Today’s biography is based on the following prompt:
Write an approximately 500 word biography for Brett Kosinski in the first person perspective that includes a brief work history as well as unusual or outlandish personal details. In case you are not aware, Brett Kosinski had a career as a Software Developer before transitioning to Product Management 10 years ago. He is based out of Edmonton Alberta, Canada. He is known as the person who reverse engineered the compression algorithm used to encode assets in Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and as a result, the scheme has been dubbed “Kosinski Compression”.
(By the way, that last part is also true, much to my chagrin).
Continue reading...