Dinner for Anchovy. Been quite a day with contractors in and out of the shed for hours and temperatures down to mid 30s (cold for PDX). Her carrier is open now so she can stretch her legs. Still have a small space heater keeping the carrier toasty though

So, after years & years, I decided to try subscribing to NewsBlur and try it as an RSS reader. Lots of ancient old garbage feeds in there from my backcatalogue of OPML imports. So I deleted nearly everything.

Then, this nice feature showed up in my email inbox. That's... genuinely thoughtful

@brainwane Oh, thanks for the reminder, I've been trying to do better with the alt text as a habit!

@Macross Oh, I've still got a half-dozen ones I've written kicking around here somewhere. Newsblur is pretty good though, could also self-host it, but kind of want to see if the sharing features on it work decently

@Macross Oh and it's got an iOS app that seems not awful, which I'm not going to bother writing 😅

Almost poured cat food into the coffee grinder. I think I need to go to bed

I get these earplugs regularly for sleep and such, but I never thought of them as the perfect gift. Someone who updated the Amazon product image seems to think so

Anchovy has been restless and wandering a bit but then settled down to contemplate lunch.

Food delivery happened just after this first picture but I was too slow to catch her perking up and sprinting out of the carrier

@golikehellmachine@mastodon.social They are pretty decent earplugs, really

LRT: for basically the history of the iPhone, I avoided buying one because (among other things) it was stuck using WebKit browsers. I worked at Mozilla and I wanted to use Firefox. I'm a weirdo, I know.

Still, even if Apple eases up on that requirement soon, it'll probably be years before a non-WebKit Firefox is excellent on an iPhone - if only because it's been years not spent optimizing. And probably years ahead of Apple dragging heels over technicalities not approving this or that aspect of a non-WebKit browser engine, while presenting the appearance of being willing to approve something.

Yeah, I'm probably going back to Android after I've gotten a few years out of this iPhone 13.

I might even jot down a blog post of all the things I dislike about my iPhone. It's picky nerd shit, but a lot of it boils down to not feeling like I really own this particular expensive pocket computer that never strays beyond arm's reach.

Got a laundry list of things I used to do with Android phones to which Apple just says "no". And ideally that should be in exchange for convenience & reliability & it-just-works, but the balance just hasn't added up favorably for me.

Like, it's not even on like the basis of some Manifesto of Open Source Principles or whatever. I'm not consistent enough in following that crap.

This iPhone just doesn't let me do things I want to do, some of which are admittedly tinkery and not common use cases. But still, that's a lot of money to spend on a bag of personal papercuts and withheld permissions always in my pocket.

@mdhughes Yeah, I'm guessing if I poked at it some more and bothered opening Xcode again, I could find some cracks in the garden walls. Adjust some of my hacks to accommodate it, etc.

Some things seem to need more hacking than I want to bother with though. Like, sideloading via dev tools looks like a thing that works but has limits and needs periodic re-permissioning.

Under Android, I had my last Samsung phone running game emulators. Used Syncthing for sharing files between personal machines that aren't all Macs. Had a full linux desktop with VSCode if I plugged it into a monitor & keyboard. Could run shell scripts and run servers. Didn't even have to root it. Got a bit of work done that way, though it was a bit of a novelty.

@suetanvil Yeah, I guess maybe it's that I'm not quite Done With Phones yet? Because I was kind of expecting this iPhone to be a phone that Just Works and I don't have to futz with it. But I keep bashing into the sides of the playpen, so 🤷‍♂️

Really what I probably want is to stop futzing with my iPhone and build, like, a wearable bandolier of microcontrollers that do stupid shit

@banjofox2 @thegibson Yeah, just a bigass chewbacca bandolier of blinkenlights nonsense mixed with occasionally useful widgets

@retronianne I've got a sadly neglected MiSTer that I've been too busy to play with lately and an old VGA CRT begging to be hooked up to it 😪

Anchovy contemplates dinner (we really gotta fatten her up)

All that contemplation was a bit tiring. (also I'm running a bunch of installation and unit test crap so I'm distracting myself looking at the cameras)

@ajroach42 it's Ogg all the way down for this mysterious figure