tinker.ph

Remember WhatPulse?

I grew up in the nerdy corners of IRC and I remember WhatPulse was a huge thing back then. It’s essentially a keylogger, except instead of being used for malicious purposes, it just displayed a leaderboard of the top typers and mouse clickers. Being on the leaderboard somehow gave you street cred on the servers and channels that you joined, because it indicated you were one of the active users. Now, it’s branded as Productivity analytics for [...]. The site and apps are filled with all these charts and heatmaps of your keyboard, mouse, and application usage.

I’ve been wanting buy a new keyboard, and haven’t decided on a layout yet. I recently installed WhatPulse again just to track my keypresses. I have this irrational fear of losing my F keys, and I really just wanted to validate whether I use them enough to justify the F-row or not. I’ll be using it for the next ~30 days and hopefully it can give me enough insight.

Adding X.com link support isn't as trivial as I thought

Embedding X.com links is something I want to start adding support for. Typing it on Obsidian is easy since it automatically converts to embed. WordPress’ Gutenberg editor also has an easy embed function.

I realize coding it isn’t as straightforward after looking at the X/Publish tool. It seems to spit out <blockquote> tags with the content pre-filled. I will need to issue network calls first to retrieve this info.

Let’s see where the rabbit hole takes me.

けっきょく・きた・よ。

Roughly translates to: at long last, I’ve finally arrived., which is kind of a poetic way of saying hello world, I guess?

I’ve been thinking about writing again. The main reason I think I couldn’t keep up in the past is that the amount of thinking it requires to actually write something good is sometimes too much for me. I just end up not writing anything for weeks, and then months, until my domain expires or my next thought doesn’t sit well with my previous content anymore. I suppose this time around, I’ll just treat it as my markdown notepad.

I’ve been using Obsidian for a little bit, and coupled with Astro, I can now have a markdown editor with a simple static site that I can host for free on CloudFlare Pages. Since the blog content resides just within my shared Obsidian-Astro workspace, it’s be a breeze to update. Plus, it will always be open on my desktop.

Same place where I dump my notes is the same place I make blog posts. Will this actually stick?