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CrossPooter - Poot your toots around the web
CrossPooter logo, showing a smiling cartoon face among arrows branching away CrossPooter is a simple script for personal use, that reads the RSS feed of this website and posts the latest article to GoToSocial and Bluesky. It was inspired by EchoFeed, but I wanted to try my hand at making something similar myself.
You can see the source code here.
Features
CrossPooter reads the RSS feed of this website and checks if the latest article has been posted yet. If not, it will grab the article’s OpenGraph tags to construct a post.
The post will include a link to the article, the article’s title, and the article’s description. It will also attach an image if one is available.
The script is inteded to be run via cron every hour or so. I’m assuming that I won’t be posting new articles faster than that, so the script only checks the latest article.
Things I learned building this
Bluesky was very straightforward since I just used the official python sdk. GoToSocial probably would have worked with the Maston library, but the API was simple enough that I wanted to try just sending HTTP requests.
I’m still very inexperienced when it comes to creating complex HTTP requests, so I stumbled a lot with setting the correct headers and formatting the data in the correct way. But it was a good exercise in reading source code and documentation, and now I have a stronger handle on how to do it.
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Good grief, I thought this was The Onion.
Google removes pledge to not use AI for weapons from website
https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/04/google-removes-pledge-to-not-use-ai-for-weapons-from-website/ -
The geometric nests of the white-spotted pufferfish
The white-spotted pufferfish, or Amami hoshizora fugu, is a species of pufferfish newly discovered in 2014 near Japan’s Amami-Oshima Island. The males spend roughly a week constructing an elaborate circular nest about 2 meters in diameter to attract females.
Divers had known about these structures that appear in early summer every year, but apparently it took a while to catch the fish in action.
The circular nest of the white-spotted pufferfish -
So the latest Stormlight Archive book is apparently the last of its arc, so I guess I will read it after all.
And I don’t remember what’s been happening at all, so I guess I will go read all five of them now… -
Hobbies that I am no good at
A distinguished actor appeared on TV and talked about their love for juggling. They had taken lessons at various times and always sets aside time to practice because they enjoy it so much. They then recounted how they recently met their juggling teacher of ~10 years past, displayed their current juggling skills, and was met with astonishment at how they had not improved one bit in all that time!
It was a funny story, but what struck me was just how nice it was that juggling was a constant source of enjoyment for this person despite apparently being no good at it. That’s a hard thing to do.
I think that the internet is partly to blame, since the entire world’s top talent is now at our fingertips. It is too easy to see the best of the best, compare ourselves to them, and end up thinking, “Well what is the point of me doing this at all, then?”
But we must allow ourselves to enjoy things, even in the face of our clear mediocrity. Is there anything I enjoy doing – and let myself enjoy – that I am not good at? Am I denying myself of any hobbies just because of a lack of skill? Let’s dig in.
Hobby: Web development
This one is tricky, because I used to be decent at it but am now well behind the curve. I can slap together some HTML + CSS + JavaScript and make an OK web page. I was adept at Ruby on Rails 10 years ago and can still fuddle through making a web app.
But I touched python for the first time last year. I used Docker for basically the first time last year. I have no idea how to fix a Linux server when things don’t go exactly according to Getting Started guides. I have never touched a JavaScript framework. I have a small comfort-zone and am totally lost outside of it.
These things don’t bother me though, because I enjoy the time I spend tinkering. Occasionally I decide I want to try something new, and I stumble and fumble my through it and maybe learn a little along the way. This is possibly the only creative activity that I can enjoy in a pure, for the love of the craft kind of way. I like that.
Not-yet-a-Hobby: Drawing
Sometimes I get a hankering to draw a picture, and I always enjoy the time I spend doing it. But I am not a good artist. I’m especially terrible at drawing faces. Awful.
I can’t call it a hobby, since I rarely make time to draw. I have a suspicion that I would enjoy it if I let myself, and that the main thing holding me back is that I think I’m no good at it.
Hobby: Haiku
A few years ago I developed an interest in Haiku. The hyper-minimal structure makes it so that changing just one preposition, or modifying the word order a little, can have a huge impact on the poem’s overall meaning and impact. I think that’s fascinating.
I was lucky to find a group of people that meet regularly for Haiku. We decide on a few prompts, spend a month writing 3 Haiku each, and come together to comment on each other’s pieces and have our teacher critique us.
I think that I’m not bad at Haiku, but to be honest, I thought that I would’ve gotten a little better at it by now. This isn’t discouraging though, as I find myself not really caring how skillful I am. The exercise of distilling a scene to its barest core and painting its picture with my words is fun. I feel like there are some low-hanging fruits for improvement if I put more effort into study, but I’m pretty happy just puttering along at my own pace.
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What to call these short-form social media postings?
They aren’t “tweets” anymore, “post” can’t distinguish from long-form content, and “toot” is just silly.
The Japanese term for them means “murmur”, which is fantastic. -
The solution I've landed on:
1. Post to fediverse from nice mobile clients.
2. Blog pulls latest posts when building, and includes them in the generated site.
The order is backwards from a POSSE standpoint, but it's easy and it works. -
Maybe: use an iOS shortcut to
1. Type some text
2. Add yaml front matter to my text
3. Save the file into the git repo, which exists on my iCloud drive
4. Use Working Copy to commit & push
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Is there a best way to update a static blog from my phone?
Opening the blog repo in a text editor and pushing to git will definitely be too much friction for me to do regularly.
I want to just be able to just write text, save/send it somewhere, and have my home PC (I guess?) process it for me. -
Dragonsweeper - A lovely minesweeper game
This is a really excellent take on minesweeper. Spaces can contain monsters of various strength, and you need to spend HP to defeat them. By collecting EXP and hearts to level up and heal yourself, the goal is to become strong enough to slay the dragon.
It took me a few tries to get a handle on the strategy, but this is super fun!