I’ve seen a fair amount of chatter recently regarding accessibility of terminal apps, and it has me thinking. There’s been a recent growth of both full TUI toolkits and of lighter cli polish and shine modules, lots of tools to make the terminal more accessible and generally more comfortable for the average user, but it can come at a cost – these kits can make the cli less accessible to some sets of users, especially people with low vision, using screen readers or other assistive technology.
Continue reading “First Thoughts: Term-accessibility”CheerLights: Let’s Glow Together
Not long ago, I read about a cute IoT project, CheerLights. It’s a network of RGB lights that all change colour together, coordinated by a Twitter bot. The idea is that we all rig up RGB lights of some description, then when someone pings the Twitter bot they all change in sync; just a nice little community togetherness thing. It’s adorable and I love it.
Continue reading “CheerLights: Let’s Glow Together”Full 1.0.0 release: Fedi-follow Widget
My Fedi-Follow widget is ready for a full 1.0.0 release!
The widget provides an interface for Fediverse users to easily follow or share a url from their home instance. It’s the first stage in my plan to make it easier to integrate Fediverse sharing and following into other platforms, like WordPress or other site engines.
Continue reading “Full 1.0.0 release: Fedi-follow Widget”Initial release: “Follow on Mastodon” widget
I’ve made a widget to make it easier for visitors to follow federated blogs and such on Mastodon. It presents a dialog to ask for their instance URL and confirm the account they are invited to follow, then sends them to a page on their instance to make it happen.
It’s available for anyone to use; just link your visitor to https://eroosenmaallen.gitlab.io/fedi-follow/?follow=https://roosenmaallen.com/author/admin.
Continue reading “Initial release: “Follow on Mastodon” widget”Bits of Galaxy
So, I’ve been toying with the idea of putting together an online space game. Inspiration comes from things like TradeWars 2002, Escape Velocity: Nova and FTL, with multiplayer in the theme of a MUD. Real-time, but a bit chill, maybe as much a shared experience as a ”game”. In particular, I’m aiming for the server API to be conducive to AI/ML agents running around exploring.
Continue reading “Bits of Galaxy”No more Google ads
Got rid of Google Ads from the site; they were causing a huge slowdown and nobody ever clicked on them. So, the site should perform better. If I find a decent, free, and fast analytics service then I’ll toss Google Analytics as well.
So, if you want to support me, or just say thanks, or just like sending money to folks, I do have a Ko-Fi.
Dear Liberal government, your housing plan is bad
A perverse incentive is an inventive that has an unintended and undesirable result that is contrary to the intentions of its designers. The cobra effect is the most direct kind of perverse incentive, typically because the incentive unintentionally rewards people for making the issue worse.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
The problem being addressed is a lack of access to housing for Canadian families. Recently, the average asking price for a house in Canada broke $800,000, with around 25 bidders for each house. Of those bidders, about 18 are families looking for a home, and the other 7 are investors looking for an asset that will generate revenue while appreciating indefinitely.
Continue reading “Dear Liberal government, your housing plan is bad”Open-Source: Covidbot-Ontario
I built a #MastoBot to post local #Covid19 numbers. In the process, I found Ontario Public Health’s data feeds and ended up building something much more generic and reusable than I initially intended. Aside from the very local hospitalization and ICU numbers from KHSC, the Ontario feeds can be filtered to be useful anywhere in the province.
Continue reading “Open-Source: Covidbot-Ontario”