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| | | | | | | | | | | |_) | | (_) | (_| | more stuff that I don't
|_| |_| |_|_|_| |_|_|_.__/|_|\___/ \__, | want to put excessive effort into
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I decided to have a miniblog where I throw some words onto the page. Contrast my main blog, which I use for big feature entires that I want to highlight. Entries there might not be much longer than here, but they have more of a place of prominence and are immediately placed into the feed, unlike here.
Miniblog entries can be promoted to feature blog entries if I think I have a lot more to say; in that case, I will add a link to the main blog page from the miniblog entry.
Miniblog entries aren't immediately placed into the feed; they get put in a digest feed entry whenever enough pile up. There is a colored horizontal line indicating which entires are above where the feed has been updated.
I gave up on Liferea as an RSS reader. There were a few minor issues that consistently annoyed me (in particular, it wouldn't try to open articles in the built-in browser with reader view enabled, it would give up and render the whole page as normal), but I had a big issue I found I could reliably trigger by just viewing an article.
It could just be a combination of the old package in the Raspberry Pi OS repo and the tiny amount of RAM on the Raspberry Pi I was using (2GB Pi 4), but I had to hard unplug that Pi after it locked up and I saw all of the RAM and swap max out and all 4 CPU cores peg at 100% in the little desktop tray applet I had before everything stopped responding and I couldn't SSH in (it was still on the network as far as I could tell, it was just too hard stuck to do anything). I was connecting over RDP, since it's very convenient to just pick up from where I was on whatever actual computer I'm sitting at.
Over in my homelab blog article, I mentioned that I set the 2GB Pi 4 as an always-on machine (which I would totally have as something other than a Pi, but the current state of the computer hardware market has killed all ambitions of that for now). I'm a bit surprised the OOM killer didn't step in and just start slashing, although maybe I didn't wait long enough (alternatively, it sits at nearly 100% memory utilization and slowly keeps trying to do whatever it was doing).
I could reliably trigger it by viewing a specific article, and if I didn't take too long, I could kill the offending process that was spawned (some webkit process that Liferea uses to render pages) that was prepared to eat all of my RAM before things locked up. Sometimes, I could in fact view the article that caused problems, but viewing another one after it would then cause the aforementioned memory and CPU usage spike.
I am now using newsboat. I don't like newsboat much. It isn't the worst thing, it is just weirdly unfriendly, probably in some misguided effort to get the user to read the man page, but the manpage is way too long and I just want to look at my feeds. I also had to manually do touch ~/.newsboat/urls before I could import the .opml file with all my feeds. Why?
My ~/.newsboat/config looks like this:
browser falkon auto-reload yes bind-key LEFT quit unbind-key LEFT feedlist bind-key RIGHT open bind-key TAB open prepopulate-query-feeds yes
which makes life quite a bit easier when it comes to navigation. As a regular user of the Links browser, I absolutely love having left be back and right be open. The unbind-key entry there keeps you from closing newsboat on accident. Binding tab means I can browse with the mouse (it doesn't have mouse support, but I can give it scrollwheel inputs) and have open and quit available on my other hand.
I really do miss having the list view folders in Liferea, although it's the only feed reader I currently use that had it. I also wish newsboat had mouse support. It doesn't matter much on my laptop since the trackpad is right there next to the keybaord, but it is annoying on my desktop.
You can add this however to ~/.newsboat/urls:
"query:Unread Articles:unread = \"yes\""
which will add a query feed that pulls a list of every unread article into one view.
I also have the following query feed in my urls file:
"query:All Articles:unread = \"yes\" or unread=\"no\""
which just shows every article in one big pile. Just what I want.
This is the not-exactly-regular reminder to use RSS/Atom feeds when you find them.
I started using Liferea for following my feeds on a Pi 4 since it's not as heavy as using Thunderbird or something on the machine. It's in the default repo, so you can just sudo apt install liferea You probably want to change the view mode to Normal View instead of Automatic in the settings, since it doesn't switch between the two modes at reasonable window sizes (it switches to the wide view way too early).
If you haven't subscribed to my feeds, here are the URLs you want to put into your feed reader:
Keeping up with both is the best way to keep track of what I'm doing. The Neocities auto-feed is very lacking but up-to-date, while the manual feed lets you actually see the post contents (very useful if you're somewhere without internet and you just had your feed reader download everything beforehand) but is only updated when I feel like it since it is mostly manually edited via a template I made.
If you have no idea what to do with these, install Liferea (Linux) [edit] see the entry above or Thunderbird (most platforms) on your computer (instead of adding a mail account, you'll add a "feed account", which is totally local and just puts all your feeds under one heading like if it was a mail account), Feedbro as a browser extension on Firefox and Chrome, and Feeder (F-Droid link) if you're on Android (Google Play link here. If you have an iPhone, I've heard good things about feeeed but can't actually recommend it from experience.
This is basically an update to an older blog entry dealing with this that might still be useful, although the advice in this post is more up-to-date. Have fun!
First entry of the new page, so here we go!
I pre-ordered the 30 Minute Preference Madoka model kit, along with a few other items. I will probably have to wait for a while, since even though the Madoka kit is supposed to come out this month, it could be any time whatsoever this month. Worse yet, since I didn't feel like double-paying for shipping, I will have to wait for it to come out before I get my other items. I really can't waint, but I have to wait. I totally overpaid, but all of the character kits are way more expensive than they should be in the US, like 60% more expensive. I also bought the GQuuuuuuX itself, even if the ending of that show is stupid. I held off on buying any gunpla kits from it until I had finished.
The new Pop'n Music has hit the USA, but I have no idea when it will come to Florida. As far as I can tell, there are no Pop'n Music High Cheers cabinets east of Chicago yet. I need a nearby Pop'n cab so badly, it's so much fun. IIDX, maimai, and Pop'n will absolutely end up being the games I play the most when I go to the arcade.
FukuokaBBS has returned from the grave! I am glad there is a second English-speaking Strange World instance once more. I really do like the format of Strange World a lot. It also still features a 2ch style lounge board for organized, threaded discussion.
Lastly, I've been playing the NES release of Dragon Warrior (you know, Dragon Quest). It's honestly worth playing. Definitely obnoxiously grindy at times (the grind needed to face the Green Dragon is stupid), but a lot of the specific limitations it has end up coming together into a fairly cohesive whole for what is a very early console RPG. The simplicity of it helps a lot too; just about everything in DQ1 can be pieced together without a guide fairly easily (with like two exceptions), although I will not blame anyone for looking up a guide. I also won't blame anyone for playing an updated release, like the Super Famicom or Game Boy Color releases, and I might end up doing the GBC release to play DQ2 when I get to that. Might. Dying isn't much of a punishment in DQ, which is nice. You lose half your gold, so one thing you end up doing is spending a lot so you don't lose so much when you venture off into the unknown (or if you are really lazy/pressed for time and don't have the wings or the spell that sends you home, you'll deliberately die to go back to the castle so you can save).
It's interesting to find out that Dragon Warrior features a lot of visual enhancements over DQ1 on Famicom (most notably, character sprites now face all 4 directions, which is something I had never considered to be something that would need to be enhanced), along with having a save battery (DQ1 on FC had passwords, and they're long).
I had a few more things I wanted to post, but I forgot what they were. Oh well, they'll come to me if they're important. Also, I'm still thinking about just how hyper-rushed GQuuuuuuX's pacing was combined with the extreme dependence on having watched 0079. I enjoyed watching the show while I was watching it, but it's such a mess the longer I think about it.
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You might also want to check out my proper blog, which features somewhat longer (if still not long) articles.