Sometimes it’s fun to see what I can do in one evening with my exclusively self-taught skills in Motion.
If only actually making the videos the graphics are for wasn’t so much work.
Anyway, have a Smolblog bumper.
Heard that there are plans in place to take care of SVB’s customers. As someone employed by one of those customers… thanks.
There need to be consequences for those responsible for this, not for those affected.
This FreeCell app gives 10 points for moving cards to the foundation but deducts 5 for every other move. But your score can’t go below zero. So every move with 0 points is free.
So if you turn off auto-solve and manage to sort everything…
Heads up if you had an active Tweetbot or Twitterific subscription, the developers are beginning refunds. For Tweetbot, you can transfer to Ivory or opt-out entirely.
I’ll encourage anyone that can to opt-out of a refund in support of these small businesses.
Okay, since LocalWP still doesn’t have PHP 8.0 (much less 8.2!), what’re people using these days for WordPress development?
How are people getting their taxes done these days? Just found out my usual accountant isn’t available this year.
And Miller/Coors/Blue Moon gets the first genuine LOL of the night.
So on Twitter I got a lot of news by osmosis. Anyone have any Micro.blog or fediverse accounts they recommend on that front? Or should I just start curating my Apple News again?
I don’t want to be as angry as Twitter could make me, but I do want to keep an eye on things.
Does anyone know if the free Twitter API tier is one user per application? Or is it 1.5k tweets per user?
More Twitter changes! Except these might mean this blog might stop cross-posting. So you can also follow me at
🖖 DFTBA 🖖
What Discord do I join to discuss extensions to Markdown? 😉
No but seriously, what do y’all think of using @ //url/to/embed as a block-level element to denote embedding remote content (like a YouTube vid or Tumblr post)?
Just paid for my first text ad on a website. 😬
The last straw, I guess...
I’m not leaving Twitter, but I’ll be using it a lot less like I used to.
I wish I could leave outright, but I’ve got too many social connections on there that I don’t have elsewhere. People I’ve met in different places that haven’t moved to other places. (Or they have, and I just missed it—which is likely.)
But after a few days of having to use the official app… it feels like Facebook. Or Instagram. A whole lot of stuff that I don’t care about, even when it purports to only show me what I care about (the “Following” timeline). And I don’t just mean advertisements, I mean:
- Tweets from people followed by people I follow
- Tweets liked by people I follow
- Links to accounts that might be interesting to me for some reason
- Out-of-order replies or truncated threads
Throw in some obnoxious UI elements like a new tweet button and a banner proclaiming that there are tweets that I have not seen while I am indeed scrolling up to read said tweets, and I feel like I’m squinting to see through a haze of noise to see the one thing I came to see: tweets from people I follow.
People with more experience in the world of Twitter apps (like Manton and Craig and John) have already said their things, but I’ve got two more data points to add.
First, I recognize that this is a pretty pathetic straw to be the one to make me “leave” Twitter. Others have been dealing with rising bigotry, hate, and a general increase in… uncivil behavior on the platform. This has always been there, and it’s been there since well before Twitter was taken private. Since then, though, the platform leadership has made it clear that this will continue in the name of “free speech,” welcoming back some of the most prominent accounts that encouraged said vitrol.
I want to note that this was something I knew was happening but rarely saw. I used Tweetbot instead of the official Twitter app, and it only showed my timeline in order along with any mentions or direct messages. Since someone of my race, religion, gender, and sexual orientation is not typically the target of hate and harassment campaigns, it was something I didn’t experience. But I followed enough accounts and heard enough stories to know that it was happening somewhere; I just didn’t see it.
The problem is the more the Twitter app shows me what’s happening “on the platform” and less of who I’ve chosen—for the sake of my mental health—to listen to, the more I’ll see. I don’t even want to see trending topics much less whatever tweets people are angry about. Tweetbot allowed me to control what I saw on Twitter; the official Twitter app doesn’t. That is why these third-party clients were so important to me.
Second, this has confirmed that Twitter’s new ad-hoc approach to policy also extends to the API. The theme repeated by app developers has been “respect,” or rather the lack thereof: the banning of 3rd-party apps was made with no notice beforehand and no acknowledgement after. It’s also inconsistent: several smaller apps, including the Mac desktop version of Twitteriffic, have yet to be banned. No respect, no communication, no consistency. If nothing else, this shows Twitter is not a stable platform for building on.
Which brings me to Smolblog. I’ve been working on it off-and-on for years now, and one of the key features has always been a Twitter integration that will import posts from and send posts to Twitter. As part of the big refactor, I was rewriting this module to use the new version of Twitter’s API. It wasn’t until I was most of the way in that I learned that there are still key features—like posting images to Twitter—that are simply not available through version 2 of Twitter’s API.
With the growing instability in the API, I simply cannot waste any more time building a feature on an API that is incomplete and could change at a moment’s notice. The change could be in a data structure, or it could be a policy change that would ban Smolblog. With me already feeling “behind schedule” (an attitude to examine later), I need to get core functionality out, and that means putting any Twitter work on the back burner.
So there it is. Twitter stays on my phone, but it gets shoved into the back page with Instagram and Facebook: apps I only touch when I need to. And I’ll likely need to; there are people, things that I can still only get to through Twitter, and asking people to give up their hard-won audience is no easy ask. But this makes the mission of Mastodon, Micro.blog, and every other independent cross-compatible service that much more important. And I hope one day that Smolblog is in that list.
Jack Dorsey was right about one thing for sure, though: Twitter should have been a protocol, not a company.
Shoutout to App Store review for the < 24h turnaround!
Also PillTimer 3.1 is now live! I did a D&D reference in the update notes, but now I’m regretting not doing a retro Windows reference.
Maybe when Microsoft makes the new AI-powered Clippy, it’ll be able to do this? (via Bernice King on Twitter)
If this neutering of Tweetbot is intentional and not a mistake, I will be using Twitter much less.
Regardless of intentionality, I’m halting the Twitter side of Smolblog for now. I don’t have time to waste on an API this unstable (whether by error or fiat).
Looks like it’s still a great day to not be able to use Tweetbot?
Microsoft doesn’t own the ending to Minecraft. It is now CC0-licensed and in the public domain.
Getting some serious Elasticsearch vibes from WotC’s proposed changes to DnD’s open-source-like license, except instead of medium co against ginormous co, it’s ginormous co vs. I guess everyone from individuals to CritRole??
I had to squeegee the inside of my windshield this morning.
Bookmarking this write up on the Channels app solely because I have wanted an app that will make a pretend cable channel out of my Plex library, and I thought I’d have to build it myself.
Under what conditions could the NFL, in good conscience, restart the game? (I know, I know, what conscience?) 🏈
Who is asking for the game to restart? It makes a huge difference for me whether it’s the players or the league.