Bryan Fink

Just finished my first ever playthrough of Super Metroid. Finished in 11:16 with 71% of items found. More importantly, had a good fun time doing it. Enough that I'd consider playing more … but probably in search of the missing 29% instead of reducing time.

It's snowing leaves and hailing acorns in the north country.

Quick shoutout to Inkscape as the best open source developer experience I've had in a while. Instructions for getting set up actually worked. Finding a bug to start with was easy. Response to my merge request was quick and friendly.
I've lost the post that linked me to their work toward a version 1.5, but thanks to y'all for boosting it!

Someone is scraping my fedi instance. I'm taking it offline for a bit.

Hard not to see it as An Omen that Gitlab went 503 at the exact moment I was ready to submit my first patch to a project hosted there in years. 😬

It never ceases to amaze me how the e-bike community will rehash every discussion the motorcycle community has had for decades. Helmets and helmet laws, speed limits, licensing, sharing space with cars, risk perception, exceptionally risky riders giving the whole community a bad look, the general population only seeing a leisure device where everyday utility exists, price, theft deterrence, luggage options, weather concerns …

I just moved a site that I have never publicly linked to, from Github Pages to my own personal server. That means I can now view the access logs. No sooner had DNS propagated the update, I got LetsEncrypt certs set up, and nginx restarted, than two IP addresses managed by McGill College (158.69.*) scraped the entire site.
I more curious about what I'll see now than ever. The internet is a weird place.

SiriusXM spam in the mail for the first time in years today. I was shaking my head at the coincidence of having *just* fixed our XM-capable car radio last weekend.
Nope, not a coincidence at all.
The Toyota dealer told Sirius that my car had been in for service a couple weeks earlier. The letter says so explicitly.
Lol that what the Toyota dealer told me at that visit was that my radio was incapable of receiving XM (or any other signal).

@MakerTube@mastodon.social Looks like I currently have 3.4GB on MakerTube, and I've been a Patreon supporter at 5USD/mo, so that end of the scale looks reasonable to me.

@gnomon Ah, I see elsewhere in this thread that the bag has a waterproof liner. I carried a Timbuk2 messenger for a number of years. It also had a cordura outer with PVC liner. I never treated the cordura, and also never had water issues. Trust the abrasion resistance of the cordura to prevent damage to the liner, and it's probably fine.

@gnomon I've used Nikwax wash-in waterproofing (TechWash & TX-Direct) on my cordura riding gear. I felt like it improved water shedding, so that sitting water didn't just weep through. It was less effective at something more structural like a leaky/worn seam, iirc.

I am technically not the first owner, but I’ve put all but the first few hundred of its 68,643 miles on its clock (the actual first owner kept it only a very short time). Read long-term reviews, and you’ll find that’s nothing for this model. Additionally, I have always parked it in a garage, and I have kept up on the maintenance schedule. It starts every time, without complaint. It doesn’t leak any oil or coolant. It maintains engine temperature right in the middle of the gauge. All lights, gauges, and switches work perfectly. The toolkit is complete. The owner’s manual is included. Even the tires (Metzler Tourance NEXT) are in good shape, with several thousand miles of wear left. It’s not cosmetically perfect - it saw a parking lot drop here and there over the years. But it has little to no rust, partly owing to spending half of its life in idyllic California climates. Other than those parking lot drops, it has never “been down.”

After a couple years away, I fell back into the bad habit of scrolling Reddit recently. It's still trash, and a scroll through it does not improve my mood in any way. But there's always *new* trash, so like a raccoon I dive back into the dumpster, hopeful for a tasty morsel.
But when I loaded Reddit this morning, instead of showing me the day's horrors, it dropped a "Prove you're human" overlay on me. I hope that's a permanent fixture. I closed the tab. Prove I'm human in order to access the humanity-grinding tool? No thanks.

Brand new woodworking video, up on PeerTube first!
I shot this footage almost a year ago, and then stalled on editing it when other projects came up. People being excited to see my older woodworking videos come to PeerTube, has given me the energy to pick this up again. Look forward to two more videos in this series soon!
#woodworking #video #PeerTube #MakerTube

RE: https://makertube.net/w/6TiiH4n8sN9Tn5nWp4QYch

@a Well, you should clearly start by buying a domain to host it. 😆

Remember when I asked for USB-C hub & cable maker recommendations? It turns out I had more to learn about what I needed than just who makes good equipment.
https://blog.beerriot.com/2026/04/17/usb-c/

Now back online. According to awstats reporting on my server logs, the scraper was Facebook. Probably ought to add a rule for that bot somewhere…

I've been idly researching alternative smartphones. It's a complete waste of time, for a number of reasons, but I'm curious, so it happens.
A common design I'm seeing is a fingerprint reader built into the side of the phone, usually as part of the wake button. Every reviewer loves it, "Look how my thumb just naturally rests on the reader when I pick it up!"
Their *right* thumb. I rarely pick up my phone with my right hand. My phone lives in my left front pocket, so I pick it up with my left hand.
Anyone know how well these setups work left-handed? How naturally does a left index or middle finger reach these readers? How well do the readers register them?

@bonzoesc@m.bonzoesc.net 🤯 well TIL. thanks!

@BartS@wehavecookies.social Thanks, but I really was looking for experience with side readers, and not alternatives to side readers.