Notes

joshua stein via @jcs@jcs.org - Feb 06 2024 10:23:10

How many of you are also on BlueSky?

Mastodon still has the discoverability problem where I can't see random posts I might like because I'm on my own server and can only find new people to follow when someone I already follow forwards something I find interesting enough to investigate (which then leads to the other problem where I can't see a random person's old posts in my client without having to view their profile on their own server).

I don't really want to run my own server and keep it up to date, but I can't join someone else's server with my own identity (I tried living on SDF's servers and they kept forgetting to renew their TLS cert). I wrote my own ActivityPub server but it was too hard keeping up with the private "Mastodon API" that every mobile app uses, so I gave up and switched to the official Mastodon server software which is huge and constantly changing (and breaking).

I hate that Twitter died and fragmented everything.

joshua stein via @jcs@jcs.org - Feb 03 2024 12:41:11

If you've ever gotten this annoying error when trying to restart or shut down System 6 because StuffIt Expander 4.0.1/4.0.2 was running in the background, you can fix it by opening StuffIt in ResEdit and changing the existing 'mstr' resource 100 to have an id of 103.

'mstr' resources tell MultiFinder which menu items to generate fake clicks for in order to quit or open another file from Finder when the application is already open in the background. StuffIt needs one because its File->Open menu item is named File->Expand... but Aladdin goofed and numbered it 100, which is supposed to be the name of the 'File' menu if it's not named 'File'. By changing it to 103, it lets MultiFinder know how to remotely open a file and also unbreaks its ability to select File->Quit at shutdown time.

joshua stein via @jcs@jcs.org - Dec 18 2023 10:47:54

Why is it that Apple can set up an API and leave it running for a decade but Google has to change their way of doing the same thing every 2 years and every consumer of it suddenly has to migrate to the Next Thing?

I've had to migrate Pushover to a different Google thing (push notifications, billing library, etc.) half a dozen times now and it always goes like this:

1. Receive e-mail that I have to migrate to some new version of a thing
2. Ignore it
3. Login to one of Google's dozen dashboards for something unrelated and see warnings that I have to migrate by such-and-such date
4. Read the documentation and see it's now much harder to do the same thing I was doing before with no benefit to me or my users
5. Nope out of it
6. Receive more dire e-mails from Google as the migration date gets closer
7. Read on Stack Overflow how to do it in a succinct way that condenses Google's awful documentation into a few steps, pointing out all the gotchas
8. Finally do the migration and hate Google just a little bit more