Commafeed 🔗
I have been giving Commafeed a try as my self-hosted RSS service. It’s got a very simple presentation, decent keyboard shortcuts, presents the Fever API to RSS clients like Reeder, and has filtering capabilities (though I am having some challenges understanding their ins and outs).
The main issue I have with it is its somewhat limited set of sharing options, but that actually helped me decide to decommission Wallabag (which is not one of them). I’ve found that pretty slow and not as easy to deal with as Pocket across platforms. I wanted to like it, but it’s hard to justify for a kind of tool I’m glad to have but don’t feel a deep attachment to. So I’m switching back to Pocket, and Commafeed works just fine with that.
Stories for Tiddlywiki 🔗
The Stories plugin for Tiddlywiki lets you create a second column and divert tiddlers to it so you can have things side-by-side. I don’t use it much for my personal wiki, but for my work wiki it’s a great way to have my interstitial journal sitting open and ready in one column, and my active tiddler open in another.
This appears to be the closest to a link I can find.
Fujifilm X100VI 🔗
I am not made of stone. I preordered one. I took my X100V to San Francisco a few months ago for a work trip and renewed my affection for the series. As with Portland, I much prefer the X100s to a larger ILC for street carry. I did keep thinking, as we walked around Chinatown at night, “man, I wish this thing had IBIS.” I still liked the shots I got, but you’re managing harder tradeoffs. With any luck I didn’t preorder too late to get one before next September, but we’ll see.
I’ve long held that the X100 series could stop iterating once it had weather resistance (solved with the V) and IBIS (solved now with the VI). I suspect a faster lens would make the bulk unacceptable, so I will not hold my breath on that one. I’d like the series to match up batteries with the X-T series, too, but that might be another bulk issue, and I have accrued a collection of the WP-126S batteries between the X100F and X100V, so I’m set. I have a very thin Wasabi charger that’s great for travel. During my SF trip I had all-day walking around juice on the battery in the body and a pair of spares at the bottom of my sling.
I wonder if the X-Pro series ended with the X-Pro3. I liked mine a lot but also felt like the “anti-chimping” display was a little gimmicky, and it didn’t have IBIS. Returning to a normal rear panel of some kind and IBIS would be great, but I’m good with the X-T5 and not so hung up on the rangefinder-esque design that I’d run out and buy an X-Pro4. And if I did, I’d slap my nice 23mm on it and have … an X100 but a little bigger and more conspicuous and a few stops faster. Nope. I think the X100VI has the makings of a desert island camera.
Work 🔗
Today was IT steering committee day. I was asked if I thought my crew does more or less than traditional IT. Interesting question. My current place sells SaaS, my last place had a lot of on-prem estate (and a hyper-overbuilt network given the size and nature of the business).
At my last place I presided over the last of a desultory teasing apart of corporate IT and something we called “SRE” for a period before settling on “developer services.” For reasons I will avoid enumerating, we had some struggles with that teasing apart that persisted over four years – I left engineering, did IT, went back to engineering, then went back to IT one more time. Each time I’d chip at the problem from my new perch. It all came down to loosening some death grips in IT, reassuring corporate security that the engineers wouldn’t wrap the car around a tree, and eventually just being a little bit of a prick with the one remaining IT person who felt it right and proper to require security engineering to petition for log dumps so they could audit their own services.
“If you make him give them self-serve access to Splunk, he’ll quit,” warned the manager I had over that team.
“Well, good. He needs to be this tall to ride. If he can’t handle letting people see logs for their own services, this is probably for the best.”
I wrote a memo (the only “Mike uses his directorial ex-cathedra voice” memo I’ve ever written) explaining that everyone needed to be this tall to ride. He couldn’t handle it and quit. Wasn’t tall enough to ride.
Anyhow, I have a lot less complexity to deal with at the current place. There are still some weird “why does this route through IT” issues that pop up, but they’re pretty easily resolved by visiting my security colleagues and asking “did we do this for a reason” (seldom) and then asking engineering “would you like to remove me as an external dependency?” (usually, but sometimes I wonder if they think I’m trying to trick them).
What it amounts to is an interesting inversion of value. When I presented today about the year’s big initiatives it was mostly about portfolio governance, access management, and providing administrative uplift to the vendor management process. We still have to deal with traditional IT admin stuff, but it’s pretty contained. Not nearly as sprawling and perilous as it was at the last place.
Anyhow, “traditional for where” is the real answer. I’m glad to be doing my job in a context and era where the parts that are simple and the parts that are complex have sort of shifted around.