Excursions

I have been working with David Merfield on a little side project. The idea started simple - what if there was a simple posting interface for Blot? In extension, something that one can use to write and publish a post to Dropbox. Blot is simple as-is for writing and posting (it’s all files). But there are times when I do want to quickly post from my web browser. And for such times, I still need a simple writing interface.

That thought was enough to interest both me and David. We got to work. The project got neglected in between. And then was picked up again. And I think, it is in a state now where it can really be useful to a few. I can attest to that because I, myself, have been using it for few days now.

Here’s Wall — a “web-accessible text-editor over Dropbox, works nicely with Blot”.

I believe this would be useful for many. It is clean. It is light, pure-client side application. It supports local drafts. It can export markdown. It can publish to Blot. Perfect for all those text posts.

I have my own fork of the project where I want to use the editor and support publishing to multiple places. To start with, I have extended it to post it anywhere in Dropbox.

I have hosted it here as Scribe. I plan to extend it next to be used as a micropub client. Still in works, though.

Of course, this is not perfect yet. For one, it does not work well on smaller screens. But it is a good enough. Do give it try.

I don’t think it must be surprising to anyone — the use of that dumb, forgotten app on your smartphone is on the rise again. The phone. People are calling others more. They are talking to them longer. If you can’t meet others physically, your mind reaches out for other ways.

I watched Parasite today — I didn’t like it. I believe if a movie with the same premise and same treatment was made in US, it would have no chance at Oscars. This did win because it was foreign. Very similar to Slumdog Millionaire.

I’ve been working with IndieWeb for quite some time now and I still get confused with implementing a simple IndieLogin workflow before a micropub request. There’s just too much back and forth between multiple endpoints. Time to put the head down and get this working!

I am still not sure about dates of the posts! Ignore this pls.

I’m getting tired of the Coronavirus coverage around. I don’t want to watch it, read it. Anyway there’s hardly any news that’s not regular anymore. Of course, avoiding it means avoiding Television and internet altogether. My Kindle’s been the only savior. Dependable as always.

Apparently, the lockdown and stay at home orders have caused the podcast downloads to decline. I guess it’s mainly due to the lack of any form of commutes. Has been, for sure, the case with me. Contrarily, I believe the podcasts episodes being released must be on the rise.

It has been a wonderfully productive day today. There’s a dev project that had been stagnant for long. Almost forgotten. All that was needed was some focused, distraction-free time. I managed to find that today.

And that leaves me absolutely delighted!

Dear people, we are divided by Nation. Region. Race. Religion. Launguage. Culture. Economies. And many more things. But I believe it is time now to be united by one resolve - stay the fuck at home. Don’t listen to your deranged peers. Your idiotic leaders. Even your families.

Coronavirus looks pretty much the same, no strains more deadlier that others - and that is a good news. What that means is it has not been mutating at a rapid pace. In more technical terms, the virus has a “proofreading machinery, however, and that reduces the ‘error rate’ and the pace of mutation”. Here’s Benjamin Neuman of Texas A&M University contrasting the coronavirus with influenza, “which is notoriously slippery”.

Flu does have one trick up its sleeve that coronaviruses do not have — the flu virus genome is broken up into several segments, each of which codes for a gene. When two flu viruses are in the same cell, they can swap some segments, potentially creating a new combination instantly — this is how the H1N1 ‘swine’ flu originated.