Software

It's now been roughly 6 months I've switched from DuckDuckGo to Kagi. I started paying right away after roughly the one month trial.

I had not been very happy with DDG; mostly the results were very low quality (having to switch back to Google one too many times; results often lagged behind by months of publishing), many search bugs, and there's been that thing with Bing advertising, and generally not seeing many improvements over the ~2 years I tried to use it full-time.

This is a very short post because to be honest, I didn't figure much out myself.

My uploads/static files are now saved in R2 under its own URL (part of my enterprise zone) so that my normal caching rules and other settings are applied.

Add these to your application.env file:

3_ENABLED = "true"
S3_BUCKET = "<bucket name>"
S3_ENDPOINT = "https://<some-id>.r2.cloudflarestorage.com"
S3_ALIAS_HOST = "<connected domain>" 
S3_PERMISSION = "private"
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID = "<access_key>"
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY = "<secret_access_key>"

The token/API key is a bit hard to find, but it's on the top right.

I specifically disagree with his stance on free speech, because I think that it depends on your interpretation of what free speech means. If you allow the most intolerant voices to be as loud as they want to, you’re going to shut down voices of different opinions as well. So allowing free speech by just allowing all speech is not actually leading to free speech, it just leads to a cesspit of hate.

Regardless of what happens to Twitter, Elon Musk is without a doubt the most interesting man in the world right now. He's positioned himself at the intersection of so many trends and topics that it's hard to keep count, and through it all, he's tweeting memes. It's the greatest show on earth, no work of fiction could ever hope to compete.

It's also incredibly divisive. Not since Trump has a single character managed to invoke such extreme levels of love and hate on the world stage for weeks at the time. Nor has anyone been able to play the media like a fiddle with such virtuosity.

If you're using Mastodon with Cloudflare CDN/protection and minify turned on, you'll notice the site may look broken (after a few visits, when hitting Cloudflare cache).

And you'll notice errors in the webdev tools similar to Failed to find a valid digest in the 'integrity' attribute, with computed SHA-256 integrity:

Failed to find a valid digest in the 'integrity' attribute for resource 'https://mastodon.yeri.be/packs/js/common-997d98113e1e433a9a9f.js' with computed SHA-256 integrity 'YgEhHmwjKL88zKfUOMt/qRulYurIuHzhn4SZC9QQ5Mg='. The resource has been blocked.
@yeri:1 Failed to find a valid digest in the 'integrity' attribute for resource 'https://mastodon.yeri.be/packs/js/locale_en-f70344940a5a8f625e92.chunk.js' with computed SHA-256 integrity '1VgpQjY/9w/fgRLw1QH2pfzqr36p3hINvg9ahpBiI2U='. The resource has been blocked.
@yeri:1 Failed to find a valid digest in the 'integrity' attribute for resource 'https://mastodon.yeri.be/packs/js/public-a52a3460655116c9cf18.chunk.js' with computed SHA-256 integrity 'onh6vHxzykkVgJkiww+OCPk0tKC48KMUD9GVJ8/LKJQ='. The resource has been blocked.

Basically, the sha256 hash doesn't match the js or css static files.

Always a hassle to get mail delivery to work.

Had a similar problem with a VoIP (Nexmo SMS/call forwarding) tool that just refused to work using local mail servers without a valid cert. Gave up and started using Mailgun. 

Long story short: use something like Mailgun or another provider.

Using localhost SMTP server support seems to be limited if you don't have working certs. The documentation is also lacking as to what does what. Didn't figure out how to have it ignore SSL.

Started looking into a service to auto-post from this blog onto my Mastodon feed. Feed2Toot fit the bill perfectly.

I wanted to run the whole thing from a Docker container, though, so I'll quickly write a how-to.

This whole thing runs from a Raspberry Pi, as root. No k8s or k3s for me. The path I use is /root/git/feed2toot/, so be sure to modify that to whatever you're using.

Recently visited Ikea and had to get a Christmas star-light like I used to have during my childhood.

Most of my (non-track) light at home is smart using either a TP-Link Kasa smartplug or Philips Hue (and I want to avoid adding more brands, more apps, and more shit). However, Philips Hue is quite $$$ and not always all that easy to get in Singapore (shady retailers, limited stock, not many options).

The QR-code menu—which you access by scanning a black-and-white square with your smartphone—has taken off ever since. It may dominate going forward. But I hope not, because I detest those digital menus. Never mind dying peacefully in my sleep; I want to go out while sitting in a restaurant on my 100th birthday, an aperitif in my left hand and a paper menu in my right. And as eager as I’ll be for heaven if I’m lucky enough to stand on its threshold, I want one last downward glance at a paramedic prying the menu from my fist. In that better future, where old-school menus endure, I’ll go to my urn happy that coming generations will still begin meals meeting one another’s eyes across a table instead of staring at a screen.