What I have done in the first week of 2023 (teaser: mastodon, omg.lol, playdate, ankermake)
I was motivated by muhh's blog entry to write down what was on my mind in the first week of January. I'm not sure yet if this will become something more regular, but I wanted to start putting something online more often anyway - more on that below.
I've had the last two weeks off. The weather was bad, I had a cold 🤧 and therefore a lot of cycling wasn't an option either (at least that's what I told myself). So, I used the time to hang out at the computer a little more than usally. There was a lot of exciting things to discover there. Somehow Elon started this with the downfall of twitter, which he initiated. I had only been there reading for years anyway, and then after the takeover I decided to download my data, delete the clients on my end devices and no longer use the account.
As an alternative, I was of course interested in Mastodon and clicked an account on the standard instance mastodon.social. Thanks to tools like movetodon and fedifinder my timeline has also filled up pretty quickly, and I actually "met" pretty quickly some real people with whom you could exchange ideas in a friendly manner. All in all a very positive experience.
One great thing about the fediverse is the extreme dynamics of the tools and clients that are currently being built around it. It feels like back in the early days of Twitter where, for example, a single programmer, Loren Brichter, with Tweetie could turn the whole twitter landscape upside down. (BTW he only has an inactive account on Mastodon 😢)
I tried countless clients over a few days. Among others (unsorted)
- Ice Cubes for Mastodon (beta) by @dimillian (@icecubesapp),
- Mammoth: for Mastodon (beta) by @JPEGuin@mastodon.social,
- Wolly for Mastodon (beta) by Matteo,
- Mastoot,
- Mastodon (official app),
- Toot! (on Mastodon),
- Komondor (beta) by @343max@chaos.social, and
- Ivory (beta; officially alpha ;-)
The official app is okay, but IMHO not great; toot! I liked the range of functions very much, but you also have to cope with the strange design somehow. Because I follow some accounts that post a lot, and since the timeline on Mastodon is not orchestrated by any algorithms, posts from other people are in danger of being lost. Thats why a good list function is very important to me personally. There, Mammoth also makes a very good impression, but in the end I was lucky and was able to test Ivory via Testflight. The app by Paul Haddad and Mark Jardine has an button design that is a bit too playful for my taste, but otherwise it is extremely stable and really great at everything it does. The recently added list features are awesome, as they allow certain accounts to be hidden from the home view. So, atm I stick to Ivory and am looking forward to even better builds.
Then, sometime last week, I came across a post from @otaviocc@social.lol on omg.lol. And then, coincidentally, I signed up for the service with thousands of other people (who must have read a post on Hacker News and not otaviocc's post 😎). On omg.lol you ultimately get a "funny" address on the web that contains a wide variety of small services. A single page website (to use as a business card), a statuslog, an omg.lol-email address (forwarder), different DNS services, pastebin, PURL service, a weblog (beta), etc. And while I was at it anyways, I also have my Mastodon account moved from mastodon.social to social.lol. Luckily that went really smoothly. It was a lot of fun getting involved, configuring everything and thinking about what it's even good for 🤦♂️.
In the meantime, I continued to work with the AnkerMake M5, which also arrived after a very long wait at the beginning of December. All in all I'm very happy with the 3D printer, but still don't really know what got into me back in early 2022 when I backed it on Kickstarter. But that is definitely going too far at this point and maybe I'll go into more detail elsewhere.
Well, micro.blog is kind of a universe in itself too. In addition to choosing a theme, there is of course the client question. I got some for iOS (the official app, Gluon for Micro.blog and MacOS (MarsEdit 5, which I use via Setapp) looked at various editors (iA Writer, Drafts and Runestone. In addition, there are useful tools as Mimi Uploader (iOS) to upload images and Epilogue for Micro.blog to track books, but I'm just starting out here, there are just too many apps and I have to see which ones "click" for me.
There are of course all sorts of little helpers for publishing interesting links and posts on Mastodon or blog entries. Among others Linky and Re: Toot by Simon B. Støvring (who, by the way, is also responsible for Runestone) I would like to mention at this point.
As if all that wasn't enough, at the beginning of last week, after a 1.5 year wait, I received my long-awaited playdate game console. (In the meantime I had actually already forgotten that I had even ordered it and I was all the happier that it suddenly arrived.) It's a lot of fun to deal with the little yellow box and I wanted to jot down some impressions I got. I rented a domain with Wordpress installed last year already and tried a few things with micro.blog but didn't really publish anything on either platform. This year I wanted to change that and thus started with a post about the playdate.
All in all, it was an exciting time in terms of IT. Now all of a sudden I somehow have three blogs and will soon have to concentrate on one of them and see when everyday work starts again tomorrow, whether I still have the time and, above all, the desire to continue writing down my thoughts, or these escapades were again one of my "manic" excursions into something new and I would lose interest again the day after tomorrow - which would be a pity.
So, maybe cu next week 🙋♂️
PS: initally, I wanted to talk a little bit about the music and podcasts I've listened to, too but this post is already way too long.
💤 good night
🐕 Another walk with the dog.
😍 Still messing around with all the small little details here on omg.lol.
🤔 Connecting my Statuslog with Day One via [IFTTT](https://ifttt.com).
🤔 Connecting my Statuslog with Day One via IFTTT.
😅 Configuring my new mastodon account on social.lol.
😰 Moving my mastodon.social account to social.lol - I hope this isn't too stupid an idea.
🐕 walking the dog
🤔 tinkering with the weblog stuff
Hello, World!
Hello, World!
Actually, I know I'll never find enough time to blog anything regularly. Nor will anyone but me read it, let alone be interested in it. But today I had a day "off" and now I have three blogs:
I should only keep one of them. Which one? No idea! 🤔🤦♂️
Hello, World!
Hello, World!
Actually, I know I'll never find enough time to blog anything regularly. Nor will anyone but me read it, let alone be interested in it. But today I had a day "off" and now I have three blogs:
I should only keep one of them. Which one? No idea! 🤔🤦♂️
😍 Konfiguriere seit Stunden vergnüglich [omg.lol](https://home.omg.lol/).
😍 Konfiguriere seit Stunden vergnüglich omg.lol.
playdate
I’ve been a happy owner of a playdate game console for a week now. I ordered it in July 2021 and finally received it a mere 1.5 years later. Since then I’ve really enjoyed the console. Every animation, every sound somehow expresses the joy and dedication that Cable Sasser and his team at Panic evidently put into the development of this – while rather expensive piece of hardware.
I really like the first two games of Series 1 so far and they couldn’t be more different. Whitewater Wipeout is quite a challenging game of skill in the spirit of California Games, which I played with friends for hours on the C64 and immediately brought back fond memories. The game makes very good use of the crank. At first I was happy about 200 points, meanwhile it’s a few thousand and my sons, who grew up with graphically bombastic touchscreen games on iPad and Co. or complex titles on the PS4, also liked it straight away and now fill the high score. However, how you can achieve several million points in this game will probably always remain a mystery to me.
Casual Birder is „a snap-‚em-all adventure set in beautiful seaside Bird Town“ and also entertaining. However, I haven’t really progressed very far here.
I’m definitely looking forward to the next 20 games that are included in the purchase price, which also puts it into perspective, and I’m excited for the upcoming store (aka catalog).
Meanwhile, you can load your own games and applications onto the device via USB or a website (called sideload). A probably almost complete overview of all projects can be found on the playdate community wiki. The games are often offered on itch.io and usually cost somewhere between $1 and $10.
So far I’ve been into Bloom, „a real-time narrative-driven social sim about starting up a flower shop“ and Rocket Bytes, „a 1-bit precision rocket flying reverse platformer“. The former is just plain nice, the latter hard as hell. Other games I would like to check out are EYELAND, Daily Driver (Tech Demo) and A Balanced Brew. And if you have a dollar left over, you can also buy A Joke Thats Worth $0.99 for a smile.
As if that weren’t enough, Panic has an app called Mirror that allows games to be streamed and recorded directly to a monitor. Accessibility has also been considered. And then of course there’s the development environment, once in professional and as if that wasn’t enough, also a comprehensive web editor, with which you can develop really professional games in the browser.
It was also a good thing that I have been the happy owner of an AnkerMake M5 since December 2022, so I was able to get a suitable Magnetic Cover, because unfortunately I didn’t have the official ordered and now the shipping would be more expensive than the case itself ;-(
I’m excited to see how the little yellow part will continue, I’m looking forward to regular game updates for the next eleven weeks and at the same time I’ll be listening to the official podcast. Long story short: for me personally a really compelling overall package.
Shelly Plug S - Custom firmware integrates adapter plug into Apple HomeKit
I have been using Shelly Plug S plug adapters for some time now and am very happy with them. They are inexpensive, run reliably and can be controlled easily within your own network via REST API. The only thing they are not compatible with is HomeKit. Thanks to appgefahren.de I just stumbled across a custom firmware published on github, which can be installed via a single URL call. Then you can hang via QR code the plug super easy in HomeKit. However, with HomeKit integration, you give up the ability to use the Shelly Cloud and therefore its native app. Of course, this should be weighed up carefully beforehand. However, the way back to the original firmware should be just as easy.
Chef der Bundesnetzagentur unterstützt Schuko-Stecker
„Alle weiteren Hemmnisse und Hürden beim Ausbau der Solarenergie müssen abgebaut werden. Die Teilnahme an der Energiewende sollte gerade für die privaten Haushalte mehr Freude bereiten!“
Das ist eine sehr schöne Passage im Antwortschreiben des Chefs der Bundesnetzagentur. Es macht mir Hoffnung, vielleicht doch noch meine Balkonkraftanlage betreiben zu dürfen, bevor mein Netzbetreiber sich nach Monaten des Schweigens vielleicht irgendwann doch mal durchringt auf meine Anfrage zu antworten. Grade bringt es zumindest wenig Spaß, Teil der Energiewende sein zu wollen - im Gegenteil.
Anybox - Manage bookmarks like a pro (iOS / macOS)
One app that I’ve been using a lot for a while now is Anybox. Both the Mac app and the iOS app are very functional and the developer is friendly. It has completely replaced pinboard.in as my bookmark manager, although there is also a very nice iOS / macOS third party companion app called Pins, which is currently no longer being developed as rapidly as it was in the beginning, but is still great.
Hello, world!