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Plex has this Relay feature that basically pipes your traffic through their servers if direct access isn't possible for whatever reason, bypassing NAT and presumably cutting down on their support tickets. For free users the relay is capped at a measly 1 Mbps and the [ever-growing expense that is the Plex Pass subscription service only bumps this up to a whopping 2 Mbps. I can imagine this being useful for a selection of people. But as this feature is turned on by default, it's very easy for any issues with your server's network configuration to go unnoticed. It turns out my port-forwarding rule for Plex hadn't been working for several months (thanks Ubiquiti) and I never noticed because the relay feature was masking the problem. So... you're telling me Plex isn't meant to be almost unusably slow this whole time...? It doesn't help that the remote-access configuration UI has been very buggy for 6+ years, making it impossible to tell if the issue is with your server or the broken interface. So please don't make the same mistakes as me. Make sure your Plex client is actually connecting to your server directly, and use a Port Forward Checker.
Credits / Attribution Some of the art used around this blog are by other people. Here is a list of them: Smug Videah by Kelevtov Rantsona Sidebar Videah by ScruffKerfluff Callout Pixel Art Videah by lockedsdcard Videah Mutant Standard Emoji by Caius Nocturne
I bought an e-reader recently, specifically the Kobo Libra 2. I felt like I wasn't reading books/manga as much as I wanted and I think the convenience of being able to carry my entire library around with me will help with that. I own an iPad Pro but I wanted a device I didn't need to think about charging that often and wouldn't give me eye strain. This post is a bundle of notes about my current reading setup. I had owned a Kindle Paperwhite before but it was so locked down that I couldn't find any joy out of using it since I was forced to use it how Amazon product managers wanted me to. The Libra 2 I spent several hours doing research and I think the Libra 2 is the best device on the market at the moment, at least for my needs. I picked it up in white to try and make an important psychological distiction. I wanted it to differ from every other electronic rectangle I own and treat it more like a nice book rather than a computer that will inevitably make me angry. Which all things considered is quite funny with all the computer nonsense I ended up doing to it. It's got a 7-inch screen which is a little shy of the perfect Tankōbon volume size, but close enough that manga is comfortable to read. I remember reading somewhere that the screen has one of the best contrast ratios in an e-reader and it is indeed very good. Navigation buttons are a dying breed in the e-reader space but I really can't live without them. Using a touchscreen to navigate is hateful and is really fake skeumorphism. You can pretend all you want but it does not feel like you are flipping a page! Thankfully the Libra 2 has two buttons on the side where you hold it so you can go back and forth with just one hand. I got the very overpriced official SleepCover case in orange. Matches my iPad case. Stops the plastic from making flexing sounds. It can let your e-reader stand upright for some reason. Book Management The only real book management software in town for e-readers is Calibre but it's stuck in the late 2000's UNIX school of UI design and I reaaally don't want to deal with that kind of thing anymore. I want organising my books to feel comfy. I also don't want it to depend on having my laptop with me, constantly wiring it to my e-reader to sync new books. It's not perfect but Calibre-Web works better for me. Despite the confusing name it's a completely distinct project that just happens to be compatible with Calibre's database format. I have it hosted on my personal VPS so I can access it anywhere and can give friends access if I need to. It's not quite Plex for books but it is close. The bootstrap UI is a little dated but it works for what I need. I'm keeping my eye on a relatively new project called Librum that's in its infancy. If it matures it promises some nice features like syncing reading positions and its own dedicated client. Reader Software The default reader software the Libra 2 comes with is called Nickel and it's fine. It looks and runs ok enough and the built in Kobo Sync functionality can be tweaked to work with my Calibre-Web instance by replacing the endpoint in a config file, which I have to give Rakuten props for letting you do. But sideloaded files can be very broken. I was half way through a book before I realised Nickel was just throwing all of my notes and highlights into the void whenever I closed it, which was very rude. This is apparently a common problem that's been around for a while and it seems Rakuten have no plan to fix it anytime soon. I went looking around for some open source alternatives. Most people reach for KOReader. It runs on pretty much everything and is packed with an ungodly amount of features and has a steady community built around it. But if I'm being honest I just can't find any enjoyment using it. The user interface just isn't up to snuff. It feels impossible to navigate and there is no real library view, only a file manager. When I'm holding my e-reader I don't want to be reminded that it is a computer all the time. It's meant to be a book! I came across Plato which is made exclusively for Kobo devices and worked on by the guy responsible for bspwm. It's really fast and responsive, more so than Nickel even. The UI is pretty much exactly what I'm looking for. It's not nearly as feature complete as KOReader but it's written in Rust which is a language I feel confident enough in to tweak and implement things to my hearts desire. I've already made a small change that got merged upstream too! Syncing Originally I was using Kobo Sync with the endpoint changed to point to my Calibre-Web instance to sync my books wirelessly. But it was buggy and slow and could only pull in KEPUB files. Plato has a built in hook system that lets you run arbitrary binaries when a directory is opened. Using this I wrote a small CLI tool that just pulls every book that hasn't been downloaded yet from my Calibre-Web instance using the OPDS protocol. I've stuck the code for this tool up on my Github if anyone else is interested in using it! In the future I would like to take advantage of this hook system to also sync reading positions and other metadata Plato stores. Tailscale VPN I love plugging as many of my devices into my Tailscale network as I can and I thought it'd be a fun little project to try and get it running on the Libra 2. Someone had already done most of the work by getting it to run on the Kobo Sage. It turns out it's a little harder for the Libra, I had to spend a ridiculous amount of time compiling some missing kernel modules in a horrendously slow emulated x86 emulator just to get this thing running. The joys of owning an ARM laptop. I think being able to type ping kobo and have it Just Work makes all the hours spent worthwhile though ☺️ I packaged all the work I done up nicely in an install script so it should be dead easy to get this working on your Libra 2 as well. Tailscale has a built in AirDrop-esque file transfer feature that I find really useful for quickly sending PDFs to my e-reader that I don't necessarily want to be a permanent part of my library. Unfortunately I couldn't get Tailscale SSH working which was one of the main reasons I attempted this in the first place 😢 I'm not sure why but my first guess would be that I need iptable packet filtering but that would require swapping out the whole kernel which I don't feel comfortable doing at the moment. Maybe some day though. SSH The Libra 2 only has telnet support out of the box behind a developer cheat code (typing devmodeon into the search bar) which is fine because I'd be using it over a Tailscale wireguard connection anyway. My threat model doesn't exactly involve people bruteforcing telnet over public WiFi just to steal my furry books. But for completions sake I stuck the Dropbear SSH server on mine and then disabled telnet. Storage The Libra 2 has 32gb of internal storage which is pretty huge for books considering how small EPUBs usually are. But I like reading manga which can be pretty hefty. An average volume is 200mb, with stuff like Uzumaki coming in at 800mb. What if I need to store every uncompressed volume of One Piece for offline reading in the event of the apocalypse? Most e-readers treat manga as secondary to books and rarely offer higher storage options or mini-SD card slots anymore. Thankfully the Libra 2 has a mini-SD slot... it's just an internal one not meant to be user accessable 🫠 Image taken by MobileRead user 'supermighty' This is better than not being able to upgrade the storage at all though and was actually one of the main things that pushed me in the Libra 2's direction when doing research. Someone on the MobileRead forums replaced the SD card and posted instructions on how to do so. I haven't done this for mine yet but I plan on giving it a shot and sticking something utterly ridiculous like 512gb or 1tb in there. It seems like a pretty risky/messy mod to do though, the slot and card are caked in waterproofing glue that you'll need to reapply afterwards if you're like me and enjoy reading in the bath. Even if this seems excessive it does let me sleep easier at night knowing I can replace the internal storage in the event it somehow fries itself. Dictionary This is a feature I didn't know I wanted till I used it. It's a pretty big leg-up over reading physical books when I can easily hold down on a word I'm not sure about. I'm using the ebook-reader-dict project which is based on Wiktionary since that's the one Plato recommends and is designed to work with. Unfortunately it's a bit hit or miss. I'm not too happy about the quality of the definitions sometimes, I'll probably look at alternatives at some point. Plato renders the definitions without any padding which looks a bit weird. I can probably fix this easily in the code later though. Feels good using open source software sometimes. Font For reading, I use the font Atkinson Hyperlegible which you might know from Cohost, but it's also used by the very blog you're looking at now! I've fallen in love with it as it's really easy to read even when the text is very small. Very pretty and accessible.
Since things are uh... collapsing? I thought it'd be a good idea to finally get my blog up and running. Come in, get comfy and take a look around! Cozy right? Getting Started (Again) Ok admittedly, this is my 4th attempt at making a blog. This time I'm using Zola which is like Hugo or Jekyll but more Rust-y and less JavaScript-y. I can't make any comparisons beyond that because I haven't used either, but my initial impressions of Zola are good! The theme you're looking at I made from scratch using Tailwind which is the only way I can do frontend web stuff now. I wanted to move away from what I had been using in the past (Ghost) and have my blog sit in a git repo in plain text instead. How I currently have things set up means when I push any changes to the blog's GitHub repo an action runner will automatically build my site (in about 17ms!), compile Caddy, embed the site into the binary using caddy-embed (in... a lot more than 17ms!), then finally push it as an image to DockerHub. My server will then see this new image, hot-swap it, and start serving my blog straight from memory! Little Gremlin I hope you like my little rantsona in the sidebar! He took the longest to get working out of everything if you can believe it. I can disable him on a per-article basis, you don't have to worry about him 🤔-ing the more serious posts. You can't see him unfortunately (try looking at this page on a larger screen) but I hope you like my little rantsona in the sidebar! He took the longest to get working out of everything if you can believe it. I can disable him on a per-article basis, you don't have to worry about him 🤔-ing the more serious posts.
More in technology
Here are the Vim forks I know about: Neovim: “a Vim-based text editor engineered for extensibility and usability, to encourage new applications and contributions.” Vim Classic: “a stable, long-term support fork of the ubiquitous text editor, maintained without the assistance of generative AI tools.” EVi: “a hard-fork of Vim v9.1.0 (Jan 2024) before AI was used in the project.” MacVim: “a macOS version of the Vim text editor, providing a graphical user interface for Vim, while tightly integrating with macOS and providing features specific to the platform.” This list doesn’t include Vim-inspired editors like Kakoune, Vim-style plugins for other editors like IdeaVim, or Vim “distributions” like LazyVim. Contact me if you know of other forks!
Thought I’d make a quick blog post about some weird behavior I’m seeing on iOS 27 and Dynamic Island live activities, that I initially thought was restricted to the Duo, but turns out affects everything. Yay. Maybe this post can save some others some time, and hopefully Apple can fix it. Long story short, ever since iOS 16.1 introduced “Live Activities”, where we can display handy little widgets in the Dynamic Island, there’s been a bunch of different configurations for showing things up there: something on the left, the right, when expanded, when two apps are showing things and yours gets a bit smaller, and on the lock screen. One interesting one is if you only need to show a small indicator in the Dynamic Island (screen recording indicator, electric vehicle charging status, etc.) you can do so, which just shows on the left on older iPhones, and on the Duo a single one below the camera cutout. Apple describes how to do this in their developer documentation (emphasis added): If you can’t find a solution to display views for leading and trailing compact presentations with limited width, provide a compact leading presentation that best represents your Live Activity, such as the view you use for the minimal presentation, and an empty view for the trailing compact presentation. The system hides the empty trailing view automatically. Unfortunately, in iOS 27 (and 27.1, and 27.2), this only half works, due to a new addition in iOS 27: isDynamicIslandLimitedInWidth. It’s a variable that basically tells you if the Dynamic Island is even narrower than normal, presumably because they knew the Duo was coming with its vertical Dynamic Island, but also because as of iOS 27, Live Activities now show in the Dynamic Island when the device is in landscape too. So it’s handy to know if you have a bit less space than usual. In this new narrow view however, it seems like they didn’t test all the configurations thoroughly, as if you provide EmptyView for that trailing compact presentation, it’s not empty at all, and in fact enforces a quite large minimum size so the Dynamic Island looks hilariously tall. In other words: The system hides the empty trailing view automatically Left: what it should look like. Right: reality You can imagine this is especially rough on the Duo, where navigation buttons, toolbar buttons, tab bar buttons, etc. are all competing for precious space on the right. But that’s only half true. It displays perfectly fine (hiding it) when isDynamicIslandLimitedInWidth is false (AKA how it always used to be), but in the new cases where it can be true, like the Duo and iPhones in landscape, that’s when it breaks. So tl;dr: In iOS 27, Dynamic Island Live Activities are improperly sized if you use the listed EmptyView configuration and isDynamicIslandLimitedInWidth is true. This makes it especially bad on the Duo, womp womp. Complications Now, you might be saying “That’s weird, I haven’t seen that behavior! This is nothing but hogwash!”. But it is not hogwash, just a little complicated. There’s basically three categories of apps. Apple apps Maps, for instance, displays this single, small Dynamic Island live activity perfectly well and sized, and has been beautifully compiled with the iOS 27.2 SDK. By all accounts it should show this bug, too! Apple apps don’t have to use the same APIs as us normies, so funnily enough through really cool tools like REA we can disassemble the iOS Simulator and see that it’s in fact true, the Apple Maps live activity just completely bypasses WidgetKit and instead just renders plain UIKit through MapsBannerViewController which shows the cute little cyan widget through a ManeuverAccessoryView and then for the hidden trailing view simply returns a DistanceAccessoryView with CGSizeZero, which iOS actually respects, unlike our paltry SwiftUI EmptyView. Third-party apps NOT updated to iOS 27 If your app hasn’t been compiled with any of the iOS 27 SDKs, it only knows about iOS 26, and thus doesn’t know about (or have to worry about) the new, troublesome isDynamicIslandLimitedInWidth property, so it just… displays perfectly well. Here’s the Rivian app, which hasn’t been updated for iOS 27 yet, which shows the Live Activity displaying perfectly sized on the Duo (indicating vehicle charging): (Technical disassembly detail for the nerds: iOS shows the app’s minimal config, a smaller config normally used when multiple apps are in the Dynamic Island together, rather than the normal compact config, so it bypasses this issue entirely.) Developers who updated their apps for iOS 27 Surprise! That picture from before? On the left is just me compiling with the old 26 SDK that works! Unfortunately if you are a good developer who updated their app for iOS 27 and all the new features, you kind of get punished through this bug, because your live activity displays the improperly sized way described above, and you can’t just use raw UIKit like Apple. So you’re kinda stuck where I am: do I ship a weirdly sized Dynamic Island experience for everyone? Do I shove something extraneous in the compactTrailing spot just so it doesn’t look as empty? Do I not update the app at all until Apple fixes this bug? Widgets are techincally a separate extension from your main app, so you could compile them with a different SDK (26) than your main app (27) which fixes this bug, but I’m not sure Apple approves of that. Apple On the bright side hopefully it’s an easy enough fix, treating EmptyView like you used to on iOS 26 and per the documentation (the part that is weirdly right beside the mention of the new API that introduces this craziness in the first place). Radar/feedback assistant ID: FB25301955 Easy reproduction code if you’re curious: import ActivityKit import SwiftUI import WidgetKit struct CircleAttributes: ActivityAttributes { struct ContentState: Codable, Hashable {} } struct BlueCircle: View { var body: some View { Circle() .fill(.blue) .frame(width: 20, height: 20) } } @main struct CircleLiveActivity: Widget { var body: some WidgetConfiguration { ActivityConfiguration(for: CircleAttributes.self) { _ in BlueCircle() } dynamicIsland: { _ in DynamicIsland { DynamicIslandExpandedRegion(.center) { BlueCircle() } } compactLeading: { BlueCircle() } compactTrailing: { EmptyView() // pls respect me } minimal: { BlueCircle() } } } }
Vicky, driving me home from O'Hare, got sixteen dollars for the best conversation I had in months. The last line is hers.
I’ve had “AI usage statements” in the back of my mind ever since I read Ethan Marcott’s blog post sharing a round-up of his favorite ones. I didn’t consider writing one for this site, since it had the smell of status-signaling. Like a quasi-political declaration of allegiance to some sort of in-group (be it pro-AI, anti-AI, etc). I couldn’t be less interested in that.1 But then something happened that caught me completely off-guard. I was reading a post on my friend’s personal blog. This was a guy that I knew personally and looked up to. I’ve been reading everything he had been writing for years. About two-thirds of the way through a long (and fairly insightful) blog post, I had a sudden realization that the post had been written by AI. I’m not the best at detecting this kind of thing, but once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. It was unmistakable. And the thing is, I didn’t feel indifferent or even disappointed, as I might have predicted. I felt betrayed. For somebody who considers themselves open-minded—even optimistic—towards the development of AI, I didn’t know where this feeling was coming from. I have theories… maybe it has something to do with the social contract between the writer and the reader. Whatever it is, I didn’t want anyone who was reading my blog (hi mom 👋) to feel the same thing. So for the sake of transparency, here is my AI usage statement: The content of this website is written by me. I do not use AI to generate the text you are reading because writing from scratch helps me process my thoughts (which is one of the main reasons I blog in the first place). I don’t currently use AI-powered writing tools (grammar-check, spell-check, dictation tools, etc), but I may experiment with them as long as they don’t undermine the thinking process. The code for this website was originally hand-written, but I have since used AI to make several useful updates. I expect to continue using AI to write code for this website and other personal coding projects. When I create a public project exclusively with AI, I mention that fact in the project README.2 I am experimenting and my AI usage may change. When it does, I’ll update the policy here on my /about page, which is where it will live long-term. To explain why, see Paul Graham's Keep your Identity Small. ↩ For an example, see s-tier ↩ Thanks for reading this post via RSS! Let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment on the original post or sending me an email.
