Congrats! My native youtube RSS feeds are mostly 404 or access forbidden, depending on the day, as are many others’.

Ok. This makes it trivial to do so since youtube RSS feeds are eithet nonexistent or unreliable.

Used to use FreshRSS. Switched to miniflux and I’m much happier now. It’s very, very simple, very clean, and does exactly what it says on the tin. You may, however, want the less opinionated experience of FreshRSS. You can always try both. (PS. I don’t typically use miniflux as my actual reader – I use reader software for that most of the time, with all my devices pulling from the same miniflux-based RSS source.)

Ok, let’s say you selfhost RSS Bridge at myselfhost.net:1234. Let’s say you want to follow a youtube channel, @fancyyoutuber, via RSS. Plug the channel into rss-bridge, and it outputs an RSS feed at myselfhost.net:1234/feed/youtube/fancyyoutuber/atom.xml (I totally made that link up). You plug that into your RSS reader of choice as the feed source, and, boom, the youtube channel is in your reader.

So, when we drive up to Georgia or South Carolina from Florida, there’s a point on I-75 where the Jesus billboards come out. Many of them are the usual “Babies have heartbeats” variety, but there’s also the following:

• “Have you decided yet … Jesus” which we always render in an exasperated voice, aka “OMG have you decided yet? Jesus!”
• “Go ahead, let go. I’ll catch you - Jesus” which we always respond to with “WTF Jesus just reach down and grab me, you’re RIGHT THERE!”
• “Jesus is in control” with mysterious Russian tanks and American soldiers.
• Zombies and Jesus for … reasons.

It’s a fair warning, but on my M2 MBA the only things that don’t work are the microphone and some elements of graphics acceleration. I keep macos on a tiny partition for firmware updates and, I guess, to recover in the event of a catastrophic failure, but … it’s been rock solid. Most of the software I use has compatible builds, which might be the most surprising part.

Obsidian, logseq, and others work natively with markdown files that are almost cross-compatible and can be edited and used in any text editor. Things like back linking may not be present in that case (of using a plain text editor) but it doesn’t disappear from the file.

Roam uses a proprietary format but exports to markdown.

Birds. Servers are big, strong, imposing birds. Mobile devices are small and flitting birds. Things in between are birds in between. I’ve put some thematic value on some of the bird names (a showy bird for media, etc.).

Oh, no, it’s exactly that. “If you let one Nazi into the bar, congrats you have a Nazi bar.”

I don’t know the story about a table. Which is surprising, because I grew up in a bright red community where delivering pithy metaphors about the futility of breaking bread with the opposition was sport. (For the record, I wouldn’t break bread with Nazis.)

Let me give an example: I have a friend on Bluesky. He’s as middle of the road as it’s possible to be (and I say that in an entirely neutral way; it makes him neither better nor worse than anyone). He’s nice, and a good person. But he’s aggressive, disruptive, a fight-picker, and a single-issue conversationalist on social media. Bluesky seems to have a disproportionate number of people who are very nice, well-meaning, but aggressive and disruptive. I left Bluesky to exit an echo chamber for something more serene. I think that’s one thing the loud folk don’t quite get, regardless of their ideology: not all of us are here to yell and throw things all the time.

There’s a joke (or possibly simple wisdom) about a bar that’s worth discussing here.

Thanks to COVID and work from home and smartphones and Teams/Zoom, I’ve gone from an hour commute each way to a constant stream of meetings, texts, emails, IMs, etc. that must be addressed immediately, from 8am to 6pm. I don’t think the “back in my day” folks fully understand how much more people are asked to do now. I once obliterated an older colleague when he complained that youngs these days don’t put in half the hours he used to. I was like “Um, you used to go to the print office and wait four hours for prints to come out, take them back to the office, proof them, then take the documents to the courthouse and file them in person. In the same time, I’m responding to 100 emails, reviewing 20 documents ON MY PHONE, conducting 3 conference calls, listening to 2 coworkers’ breakdowns, and drafting, reviewing, printing, proofing, and submitting the documents you used to sit and wait for.” To his credit, he said I was right and I never had a problem with him again.

All of which is a long way of saying that, sometimes, more often than I would like, I can’t just “go to the restaurant” because of time or because I’m no longer commuting. For all their problems, the apps mean that I’m eating fewer frozen pizzas and more poke bowls and salads.