(async () => { const colors = ['fb6b1d','e83b3b','831c5d','c32454','f04f78','f68181','fca790','e3c896','ab947a','966c6c','625565','3e3546','0b5e65','0b8a8f','1ebc73','91db69','fbff86','fbb954','cd683d','9e4539','7a3045','6b3e75','905ea9','a884f3','eaaded', '8fd3ff', '4d9be6', '4d65b4', '484a77', '30e1b9', '8ff8e2'].map(c => `#${c}`); const mask = document.querySelector('#mask'); const replacement = await fetch('/images/2025-04-12-tidbyt-second-life-tidbyt-mask.svg').then(r => r.text()); mask.style = ''; mask.innerHTML = replacement; let i = 0; let delay = 10; const svg = mask.querySelector('svg'); svg.removeAttribute('width'); svg.removeAttribute('height'); svg.setAttribute('style', 'width:auto;height:auto;position:absolute;top:0;right:0;bottom:0;left:0;opacity:0.4;'); for (const path of svg.querySelectorAll('path')) { delay += 20; delay *= 1.02; setTimeout(() => { path.setAttribute('fill', colors[i++ % colors.length]); }, delay) path.addEventListener('mouseover', () => { path.setAttribute('fill', colors[i++ % colors.length]); }); } })() Remember the Tidbyt? It’s a super low-resolution, internet-connected, wood-paneled display that I wrote a review of it back in 2022. It’s been on my shelf for years now, showing the time, weather, warning me when the UV is going to be high. In 2023 I used it as an excuse to learn some Rust, to render custom graphics. It’s a toy, a distraction, a worry stone for me to work on when I need something open-ended and low-stakes. Anyway, the company that made the Tidbyt is no more. They got acquihired by Modal, a company that makes serverless AI compute hosting. So, they aren’t making devices right now, and the blog post promises that their cloud services will keep working. I don’t hold anything against the Tidbyt team: in fact, our Val Town office was coincidentally right next to theirs in a WeWork, and we met in real life! They’re very nice folks, and were doing so much with a small team. Lots of respect to them. Modal made a smart choice acquiring Tidbyt. But realistically, it’s time to make sure my device doesn’t become e-waste. The Tidbyt is ready for this One of the biggest critiques of the Tidbyt was that it was just an LED matrix and an ESP chip. You could buy an LED matrix on Sparkfun, the ESP, a power supply, some wood for the enclosure, and you’d have your own DIY Tidbyt. Maybe you could do it for half the price! But that’s also a strength. The Tidbyt is not some custom SoC with an exotic custom software stack and boutique hardware. It is what it looks like: a neat combination of commonplace parts. That makes it kind of future-proof and flexible. The first step is to replace the firmware. Tidbyt’s stock firmware routes all of its requests through the Tidbyt company’s servers. I want to eliminate that hop. Replacing the firmware Thankfully, Tidbyt published their ‘HDK’, which is an open source version of their stock firmware. It’s remarkably simple: It connects to Wifi It downloads a WebP image from a URL It displays that WebP image The HDK contains the code to do this stuff. There’s very little code required, but it does drag in a WebP decoder, Wifi library, and a library for running the LED matrix. But, setting up the HDK I ran into issues both small and large: it had issues with HTTPS URLs and Wifi passwords that contain spaces. Plus nobody has been added as a contributor to the HDK repository, so Pull Requests aren’t being accepted and it hasn’t had a change in 7 months. But the community came to the rescue with tronbyt’s firmware-http, a fork of the HDK that fixes every issue I experienced. Open source works! So back in 2022 I included this chart of the Tidbyt network: With an updated HDK, this workflow is a lot simpler. Instead of sending images to the Tidbyt servers and those Tidbyt servers delivering them to my device, the device makes requests directly of the server that generates the images. Replacing pixlet The Tidbyt team wrote pixlet, a little framework for generating pixel graphics that the Tidbyt displays. It lets you define a React-like tree of components - some text in a stack, a rectangle, images, and so on - and does all of the layout and rendering. The tronbyt community also forked pixlet and are actively developing it, which is fantastic. But this part of the stack I really never liked. That’s why I spent so much time reimplementing it in Rust and JavaScript. Partly it’s the language - pixlet apps are written in starlark, which is kind of an outgrowth of the Bazel build system from Google. Starlark is sort of like Python, but isn’t actually compatible with anything in the Python ecosystem. It’s very niche, limited, and overall just weird. I think I understand why Tidbyt would choose Starlark - it’s fast and has hermetic execution - making it safe to run untrusted Starlark programs because they can’t access the filesystem, network, or even the system clock without being given explicit controlled APIs to do those things. If you’re building a cloud service that runs a lot of untrusted user code, dictating that code is all Starlark is a really good cheat code - I know firsthand how hard it is to run untrusted JavaScript. But I’m not building a cloud service full of untrusted code. People who are self-hosting their Tidbyt devices (dozens of us!) don’t benefit from the tradeoffs of the Starlark language. They’d be better off with something normal. I rewrote pixlet again It’s called indiepixel and it’s a Python reimplementation of pixlet. It supports almost the entire pixlet API, and comes with the added benefit of being Python. You can use Python modules! You can read from the filesystem, parse CSVs, do all of your usual Python stuff. You can embed it in a Python application to render some graphics. What does indiepixel do currently? Renders text in the glorious retro BDF pixel font format. Renders pixelated pie charts, rectangles, and boxes. Supports animation for its WebP outputs. Provides a nice UI for browsing your selection of screens. It’ll probably never be finished, but it works well enough to power my Tidbyt. I’m running indiepixel on a free Render server instance, but it should run pretty much the same on any Python-compatible hosting: the only tricky dependency is Pillow, which it uses for image parsing and rendering. My free time for computer-oriented side projects has been limited, due to other commitments and an intention to get offline on the weekends. I’ve been sewing, biking, and running more. So I really want a side project I can enjoy, and indiepixel has fit the bill. It’s really satisfying to implement a new widget and see it rendered in blocky 64x32 pixels. The Pillow image rendering library for Python is mostly wonderful and very powerful. Why Python? Why is indiepixel written in Python? Well - I learned from tidbyt-rs that Rust would be an awkward fit as a scripting language for rendering graphics. The well-known Rust complexities around memory management made simple things difficult for me, which would make them totally unacceptable for others. Besides the attraction of being able to compile a small binary that might be able to run on the Tidbyt itself, Rust didn’t have many other advantages. The Pillow module really is such an advantage for Python. JavaScript doesn’t have a real alternative: there’s sharp, a great module for image conversion, but nothing that has such a great canvas interface. node-canvas is fine, but it doesn’t support WebP or animation, which are critical features for this project. I also wanted a test out the amazing new Python tooling that Astral is cooking up, like uv. I now have a better grasp of the Python ecosystem than I did a few months ago, and it’s optimistic but mixed. uv is amazing, but Python has a lot of legacy cruft around packaging. People are critical of NPM, but I think it did benefit from being established after PyPI and learning from its lessons. Thank you Steven Loria for a PR that fixed everything and made it all work and saved me months of tweaking settings. The graphic I watercolored that Tidbyt a while while ago and have been seriously dragging my feet on finishing this blog post. Sometimes the watercolor-illustration wags the technical-blog-post dog’s tail? Anyway, it’s a callback to that little world, with some small tweaks: this time I thought it’d be nice to have it be both watercolored and interactive. That ‘cybernetic’ feel. The secret recipe: a nice palette from lospec, creating a black & white mask of areas in Affinity Photo and vectorizing it with potrace, and then just some JavaScript that recolors based on hover handling. If you’re using the Tidbyt or some similar pixel-displaying device, try out indiepixel! It’s niche and has required a silly amount of effort to generate a glorified weather clock in my apartment, but it was a fun time chasing another interest.

Reading Whether it’s cryptocurrency scammers mining with FOSS compute resources or Google engineers too lazy to design their software properly or Silicon Valley ripping off all the data they can get their hands on at everyone else’s expense… I am sick and tired of having all of these costs externalized directly into my fucking face. Drew DeVault on the annoyance and cost of AI scrapers. I share some of that pain: Val Town is routinely hammered by some AI company’s poorly-coded scraping bot. I think it’s like this for everyone, and it’s hard to tell if AI companies even care that everyone hates them. And perhaps most recently, when a person who publishes their work under a free license discovers that work has been used by tech mega-giants to train extractive, exploitative large language models? Wait, no, not like that. Molly White wrote a more positive article about the LLM scraping problem, but I have my doubts about its positivity. For example, she suggests that Wikimedia’s approach with “Wikimedia Enterprise” gives LLM companies a way to scrape the site without creating too much cost. But that doesn’t seem like it’s working. The problem is that these companies really truly do not care. Harberger taxes represent an elegant theoretical solution that fails in practice for immobile property. Just as mobile home residents face exploitation through sudden ground rent increases, property owners under a Harberger system would face similar hold-up problems. This creates an impossible dilemma: pay increasingly burdensome taxes or surrender investments at below-market values. Progress and Poverty, a blog about Georgism, has this post about Herberger taxes, which are a super neat idea. The gist is that you would be in charge of saying how much your house is worth, but the added wrinkle is that by saying a price you are bound to be open to selling your house at that price. So if you go too low, someone will buy it, or too high, and you’re paying too much in taxes. It’s clever but doesn’t work, and the analysis points to the vital difference between housing and other goods: that buying, selling, and moving between houses is anything but simple. I’ve always been a little skeptical of the line that the AI crowd feels contempt for artists, or that such a sense is particularly widespread—because certainly they all do not!—but it’s hard to take away any other impression from a trend so widely cheered in its halls as AI Ghiblification. Brian Merchant on the OpenAI Studio Ghibli ‘trend’ is a good read. I can’t stop thinking that AI is in danger of being right-wing coded, the examples of this, like the horrifying White House tweet mentioned in that article, are multiplying. I feel bad when I recoil to innocent usage of the tool by good people who just want something cute. It is kind of fine, on the micro level. But with context, it’s so bad in so many ways. Already the joy and attachment I’ve felt to the graphic style is fading as more shitty Studio Ghibli knockoffs have been created in the last month than in all of the studio’s work. Two days later, at a state dinner in the White House, Mark gets another chance to speak with Xi. In Mandarin, he asks Xi if he’ll do him the honor of naming his unborn child. Xi refuses. Careless People was a good read. It’s devastating for Zuckerberg, Joel Kaplan, and Sheryl Sandberg, as well as a bunch of global leaders who are eager to provide tax loopholes for Facebook. Perhaps the only person who ends the book as a hero is President Obama, who sees through it all. In a March 26 Slack message, Lavingia also suggested that the agency should do away with paper forms entirely, aiming for “full digitization.” “There are over 400 vet-facing forms that the VA supports, and only about 10 percent of those are digitized,” says a VA worker, noting that digitizing forms “can take years because of the sensitivity of the data” they contain. Additionally, many veterans are elderly and prefer using paper forms because they lack the technical skills to navigate digital platforms. “Many vets don’t have computers or can’t see at all,” they say. “My skin is crawling thinking about the nonchalantness of this guy.” Perhaps because of proximity, the story that Sahil Lavingia has been working for DOGE seems important. It was a relief when a few other people noticed it and started retelling the story to the tech sphere, like Dan Brown’s “Gumroad is not open source” and Ernie Smith’s “Gunkroad”, but I have to nitpick on the structure here: using a non-compliant open source license is not the headline, collaborating with fascists and carelessly endangering disabled veterans is. Listening Septet by John Carroll Kirby I saw John Carroll Kirby play at Public Records and have been listening to them constantly ever since. The music is such a paradox: the components sound like elevator music or incredibly cheesy jazz if you listen to a few seconds, but if you keep listening it’s a unique, deep sound. Sierra Tracks by Vega Trails More new jazz! Mammoth Hands and Portico Quartet overlap with Vega Trails, which is a beautiful minimalist band. Watching This short video with John Wilson was great. He says a bit about having a real physical video camera, not just a phone, which reminded me of an old post of mine, Carrying a Camera.

I used to make little applications just for myself. Sixteen years ago (oof) I wrote a habit tracking application, and a keylogger that let me keep track of when I was using a computer, and generate some pretty charts. I’ve taken a long break from those kinds of things. I love my hobbies, but they’ve drifted toward the non-technical, and the idea of keeping a server online for a fun project is unappealing (which is something that I hope Val Town, where I work, fixes). Some folks maintain whole ‘homelab’ setups and run Kubernetes in their basement. Not me, at least for now. But I have been tiptoeing back into some little custom tools that only I use, with a focus on just my own computing experience. Here’s a quick tour. Hammerspoon Hammerspoon is an extremely powerful scripting tool for macOS that lets you write custom keyboard shortcuts, UIs, and more with the very friendly little language Lua. Right now my Hammerspoon configuration is very simple, but I think I’ll use it for a lot more as time progresses. Here it is: hs.hotkey.bind({"cmd", "shift"}, "return", function() local frontmost = hs.application.frontmostApplication() if frontmost:name() == "Ghostty" then frontmost:hide() else hs.application.launchOrFocus("Ghostty") end end) Not much! But I recently switched to Ghostty as my terminal, and I heavily relied on iTerm2’s global show/hide shortcut. Ghostty doesn’t have an equivalent, and Mikael Henriksson suggested a script like this in GitHub discussions, so I ran with it. Hammerspoon can do practically anything, so it’ll probably be useful for other stuff too. SwiftBar I review a lot of PRs these days. I wanted an easy way to see how many were in my review queue and go to them quickly. So, this script runs with SwiftBar, which is a flexible way to put any script’s output into your menu bar. It uses the GitHub CLI to list the issues, and jq to massage that output into a friendly list of issues, which I can click on to go directly to the issue on GitHub. #!/bin/bash # <xbar.title>GitHub PR Reviews</xbar.title> # <xbar.version>v0.0</xbar.version> # <xbar.author>Tom MacWright</xbar.author> # <xbar.author.github>tmcw</xbar.author.github> # <xbar.desc>Displays PRs that you need to review</xbar.desc> # <xbar.image></xbar.image> # <xbar.dependencies>Bash GNU AWK</xbar.dependencies> # <xbar.abouturl></xbar.abouturl> DATA=$(gh search prs --state=open -R val-town/val.town --review-requested=@me --json url,title,number,author) echo "$(echo "$DATA" | jq 'length') PR" echo '---' echo "$DATA" | jq -c '.[]' | while IFS= read -r pr; do TITLE=$(echo "$pr" | jq -r '.title') AUTHOR=$(echo "$pr" | jq -r '.author.login') URL=$(echo "$pr" | jq -r '.url') echo "$TITLE ($AUTHOR) | href=$URL" done Tampermonkey Tampermonkey is essentially a twist on Greasemonkey: both let you run your own JavaScript on anybody’s webpage. Sidenote: Greasemonkey was created by Aaron Boodman, who went on to write Replicache, which I used in Placemark, and is now working on Zero, the successor to Replicache. Anyway, I have a few fancy credit cards which have ‘offers’ which only work if you ‘activate’ them. This is an annoying dark pattern! And there’s a solution to it - CardPointers - but I neither spend enough nor care enough about points hacking to justify the cost. Plus, I’d like to know what code is running on my bank website. So, Tampermonkey to the rescue! I wrote userscripts for Chase, American Express, and Citi. You can check them out on this Gist but I strongly recommend to read through all the code because of the afore-mentioned risks around running untrusted code on your bank account’s website! Obsidian Freeform This is a plugin for Obsidian, the notetaking tool that I use every day. Freeform is pretty cool, if I can say so myself (I wrote it), but could be much better. The development experience is lackluster because you can’t preview output at the same time as writing code: you have to toggle between the two states. I’ll fix that eventually, or perhaps Obsidian will add new API that makes it all work. I use Freeform for a lot of private health & financial data, almost always with an Observable Plot visualization as an eventual output. For example, when I was switching banks and one of the considerations was mortgage discounts in case I ever buy a house (ha 😢), it was fun to chart out the % discounts versus the required AUM. It’s been really nice to have this kind of visualization as ‘just another document’ in my notetaking app. Doesn’t need another server, and Obsidian is pretty secure and private.

This website has a new section: blogroll.opml! A blogroll is a list of blogs - a lightweight way of people recommending other people’s writing on the indieweb. What it includes The blogs that I included are just sampled from my many RSS subscriptions that I keep in my Feedbin reader. I’m subscribed to about 200 RSS feeds, the majority of which are dead or only publish once a year. I like that about blogs, that there’s no expectation of getting a post out every single day, like there is in more algorithmically-driven media. If someone who I interacted with on the internet years ago decides to restart their writing, that’s great! There’s no reason to prune all the quiet feeds. The picks are oriented toward what I’m into: niches, blogs that have a loose topic but don’t try to be general-interest, people with distinctive writing. If you import all of the feeds into your RSS reader, you’ll probably end up unsubscribing from some of them because some of the experimental electric guitar design or bonsai news is not what you’re into. Seems fine, or you’ll discover a new interest! How it works Ruben Schade figured out a brilliant way to show blogrolls and I copied him. Check out his post on styling OPML and RSS with XSLT to XHTML for how it works. My only additions to that scheme were making the blogroll page blend into the rest of the website by using an include tag with Jekyll to add the basic site skeleton, and adding a link with the download attribute to provide a simple way to download the OPML file. Oddly, if you try to save the OPML page using Save as… in Firefox, Firefox will save the transformed output via the XSLT, rather than the raw source code. XSLT is such an odd and rare part of the web ecosystem, I had to use it.