clarity flowers @clarity@xoxo.zone

I wrote a ~1000 line tool that lets me add pages to my website as vaguely markdown-ish files that are then turned into html and gemini pages. Which means I'm now on gemini! gemini://clarity.flowers/

I was genuinely surprised at how little time it took me to build this. Feels really refreshing to start and finish a project in the same week for once.

Been working on my budget software again recently. After such a long break I'm finding that I'm feeling refreshed and much more creative and am seeing the code more clearly.

One thing I've been struggling with is how ncurses swallows all your stderr output. It really messes up my printf debugging. So, I modified my logger to log to a file which is then printed when you exit ncurses mode. Then I made a shortcut that lets you step out of ncurses mode temporarily like Vim.

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One of my 2021 projects is to start writing down my thoughts instead of just telling my girlfriends about them

I wrote about using browsers without tabs, and the relationship between convenience, scale, and alienation: https://clarity.flowers/blog/convenience.html

I've felt immensely powerful ever since it actually sank in that you can just write your own simple bash scripts and put them in your bin. Here's a script that uses imagemagick to dither an image and then opens it in macos preview https://gist.github.com/clarityflowers/47003dc2817072fa1778776b62d291e8

getting really into intentionally over-dithered images these days. might end up making my own dithering algorithm bc I'm not satisfied with what I get out of imagemagick

Updated my website (https://clarity.flowers) to include links to my reading list and the most recent thing I've made. Also made the html more accessible and gave it a lower-key look.

Incredible that I can find so much joy in writing a whole feature's worth of code, realizing that I don't actually need that feature, and then deleting all of my work. The responsibility of maintenance holds so much weight in my mind.

My budgeting software seems to get slower and slower every month, so, I'm writing my own to replace it. Working with ncurses has been a little bit frustrating, but ultimately less frustrating than any other UI tool I've ever used.

reading RFCs is a delight

I turned off animated reactions and gifs in slack and my life is so much more peaceful now. why do allistic people use those godawful parot reactions all the time

Here is what the data format looks like (this is what I directly edit)

this is done! there's a lot I could add to the toolchain to make it nicer, and there's many more books I could add too, but I'm calling it done now because I want to build a habit of actually finishing things

https://clarity.flowers/books/

Apparently per the spec, in the majority of cases it's not necessary to supply closing tags! And you also don't need to explicitly provide html, head, or body tags. In their examples, the syntax ends up looking only a few steps away from markdown.

Learning some absolutely wild facts about html https://html.spec.whatwg.org/dev/syntax.html#syntax-tag-omission

and hell, when I feel like those updates aren't too personal, I could also copy them to a public blog if I wanted to keep existing in the public sphere (online is bad often but I do like meeting new people).