Mandaris

Just wanted to make a little something.

Music by LofCosmos from Pixabay

Feel free to contact me with any feedback!… Well, almost any feedback.

Transcript

There is a _lot_ of content out there. Some of it's news, some of it is propaganda. I hope that this helps you get to whatever you want to read faster.

Text-only websites are quite useful, especially today, because web pages are increasingly filled with ads, videos, and bandwidth-heavy content.

Found via Neblib

If you have seen the trailer, then you have seen the movie.

It was late at night, we wanted to watch something lite. Seeing Nicolas Cage and his stunt double mow through unremarkable opponents was just the thing we needed.

Description from The Movie Database

When Ashley and her young daughter Sarah get caught up in a criminal enterprise that puts their lives at risk, she turns to the only person who can help: her estranged father Matt, currently living the life of a retired beach bum in the Cayman Islands. Their reunion is fleeting as they are soon tracked down on the island by crime boss Donnie and his lieutenant Bobo.

Here is a link to The Retirement Plan trailer.

Template uses lantern by Robb Knight

If you are not familiar with Dungeons & Dragons, there are two general flavors for how to play:

1. Using miniatures and a map, or
2. Theater of the mind.

This reminded me of all the times that I would play with my daughter when she was little.

Two weeks ago, my wife told me that we should start looking for new phones for our daughters because they have been having performance problems for the last couple of months. They are both using a 6th generation iPhone and seeing limits with battery life and a couple inconvenient os incompatibilities. My wife said that we should buy a new phone for ourselves and hand down our iPhone SEs to them.

So I was really excited about what this Apple event was going to bring.

And I am excited about the upcoming camera control button and I’m excited about just moving up from what I previously had. I understand that just because it’s a new phone and it’s a year over a year change it’s not always going to be exciting.

But, this release feels kind of weird it feels almost as if there wasn’t a lot there.

I think the problem is that with the upcoming release. There’s a lot of things that are being promised by Apple Intelligence. Which is something that I don’t really want.

I feel that ultimately we are moving towards a product that I am no longer the target audience for. And there’s nothing wrong with that; not every product is going to be made for me.

The uneasiness that I feel is that I no longer know what that product is going to be.

Am I being materialistic in hopes that some magical tool will made? Or, am I sad that they don’t make them like that anymore?

I didn't know that I was going to enjoy this as much as I did.

This show harkens back to the old school gods. The fickle ones that would smite you down because of a petty slight or demand that you kill your children because the will it so.

A long way from Disney’s Hercules. There is murder (patricide, infanticide, and everything in between), sex (quite a bit), and just a whole lot of creepiness.

Honestly, I didn’t think that I would like it but I found myself caught up in the execution of the story.

I think this is definitely a show for anyone who is a fan of Jeff Goldblum. I haven’t seen all of his movies, but he certainly knows how to show someone slowly crumbling under paranoid. It’s how I imagine minions working under some comic book villain; it’s not a matter of if but when he’s going to kill you.

And that’s part of it all.

Zeus comes from a horrible upbringing, and in a lot of ways, it’s stuck with him and as the King of the Gods no-one has been able to tell him no. Not a recipe for good mental health.

The other actors round out the cast pretty well but there are quite a few times where it felt that things happened because the plot dictates it.

I don’t think we’re going to see another season of this, but I’m so happy that we got this one.

Overview

As discord reigns on Mount Olympus and almighty Zeus spirals into paranoia, three mortals are destined to reshape the future of humankind.

I don't do a lot of hobbies like I used to.

21. What kind of adventures have you had pursuing your hobbies?

I think the closest thing I have in terms of adventures related to hobbies is trying to find hotels or things along the way when we are going on vacation.

You don’t really know what you are going to get as far as quality along the way and driving in America has become more and more… um… aggressive as people speed by in order to get there just 2 minutes faster so that they can wait at the next light or traffic congestion.

This movie allowed me to laugh with my friends.

I think that’s my favorite part of this movie. Just being able to sit back and have fun with it. I’ve never really considered Deadpool a serious character and honestly didn’t have a lot of expectations going into this.

If you’re familiar with Marvel movies and crude humor, than this is the movie for you.

It’s certainly the movie for me and wouldn’t mind watching it again with my friends.

Overview

A listless Wade Wilson toils away in civilian life with his days as the morally flexible mercenary, Deadpool, behind him. But when his homeworld faces an existential threat, Wade must reluctantly suit-up again with an even more reluctant Wolverine.

At one point, I thought it would be cool to work at a movie rental store.

20. How do you like to watch movies? Are you a theater goer, a streamer, or do you like physical media?

I used to love going to the movies. It was a wonderful time to sit back and enjoy watching something. I still like it occasionally because of the assigned seating removes hassle of trying to get there early to get good seats. Unfortunately, the movies haven’t been a fun recently because I’m usually sent to get food in the middle of the good parts.

I feel that I was an early adopter of streaming and remember the days when Netflix would send you a disk so that you could install the client onto your PlayStation. It felt that having access to everything was inevitable and I could give up looking for things that had fallen off the back of a truck. The last couple of years have proven that online libraries are uncertain to be there and having multiple subscriptions is untenable.

Physical media was the only consistent. I say was because we’re on our fourth dvd player and they are becoming more and more scarce. I’ve been looking into how rip these for the future.

But, back to the question.

I would say I like to watch movies uninterrupted.

I’m on mastodon too much a lot a fair amount of time and come across items that I want to share with others on my blog. stoot is a Hugo shortcode that allows you to have a static version of a mastodon post on your site. This can match your template or be restyled as you choose.

Why?

As of this writing, I don’t use anything specifically to store links. I attempted to save things to Apple Notes and Drafts and this gives me the URL.

The example that I’ll be using for this post will be to https://social.lol/​@mandaris/112944060166510117.

This works for storing the information for general notes and references, but still leaves the sharing of the content unfinished. In a lot of my previous posts, I would just have a link to a post. This is acceptable, but I’d like to make it convenient for my readers (a.k.a me) to get all the content in one place instead of going back and forth.

I remembered that Hugo offers shortcodes that allow you to embed a tweet, youtube video, etc. into a post and did a search for that. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find one for mastodon. When looking at the one for twitter, I see that it is essentially adding the code that is provided when you embed the iframe¹ that twitter supplies. I suspect that it’s because mastodon also has an iframe that it’s not necessary.

The embed pretty small easy to read compared to the code that is loaded for a twitter embed.

Using the URL above, we can see what is created by mastodon. I added spacing for legibility.

<iframe
  src="https://social.lol/@mandaris/112944060166510117/embed"
  class="mastodon-embed"
  style="max-width: 100%; border: 0" width="400"
  allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen">
</iframe>

<script 
  src="https://social.lol/embed.js"
  async="async">
</script>

This produces the following output.

It look alright, but I found that it would cut off the bottom of longer posts and the scroll bars wouldn’t consistently show up. It looks like the embed.js is adding overflow: hidden to the styling during rendering and it can effect embeds with text. I’ve included a picture below in case this is fixed by browsers or changes in the code in the future

I could add the following css to force the embed to expand as needed, but that’s one of those solutions that you find out after working on something else.

.mastodon-embed {
  overflow-y: auto !important;
}

Full stop, this is where I should have stopped but I’ve already invested the time to make this shortcode.

How?

This is a Hugo shortcode that will allow you to embed a mastodon post into your blog. It places the post or toot in the document as a <blockquote> and is still pretty legible my RSS reader. It’s 100% based off of this post by Bryce Wray. I think that you can find updates from the original author by looking at the git repository for his site.

I’m not a Go expert like Leon, who could give you a wonderful breakdown of the code. :) Suffice to say, if you’ve got a background in code you can figure it out.

My goal is to pull the specific code out so that I can use it on Micro.blog as a plugin for myself and others. So, I pulled out the shortcode and an associated css file and placed it in a different repository.

stoot plugin on GitHub

Again, I didn’t change any of the code found in the css file and you may look at it and wonder where --text-base and --social-sans-serif are defined. Those are in Bryce’s hugo-site repository under assets/css/partial/__050-global.css. I thought about just adding them to this repository, but I wanted to get some feedback from users and I saw that it seems to work without it.

I tested the plugin with a couple other Micro.blog themes such as Sumo, tiny, cards, and Tufte and it seemed to work well. Although, Tufte did have the images show up larger than I would have liked. You can use custom css to make changes as desired.

Usage and comparison examples

The shortcode format looks like the following.

{{< stoot instance="$InstanceTLD" id="$Id" >}}

PLEASE NOTE: I had to remove the brace on either side because of it wasn’t attempting to process the shortcode in the code block above. I tried using %lbrace; but it doesn’t replace it properly. FIXED: Changed the block to be markdown and putting a comments /* */ around the contents worked.

Below, you’ll find the mastodon embeds and then stoot renderings. As of this moment, stoot does not do anything with the text of posts that are marked as sensitive. I’ve removed the call the the javascript after every embed to reduce repeated calls².

Regular ole toot

Mandaris @mandaris@social.lol

Working on another technical project. It’s looking like it’s going to get more complicated than I expected. Part of me is excited and part of me dreads having to hunt down unexpected issues.

3:19 PM • August 11, 2024 (UTC)

This is a toot with an image

Mandaris @mandaris@social.lol

I think I might give this a try.

12:30 AM • July 31, 2024 (UTC)

This is a toot with multiple images

Mandaris @mandaris@social.lol

Another post with multiple images.

8:39 PM • August 14, 2024 (UTC)

This is something with a content warning.

Notice the difference in what is displayed by both.

Mandaris @mandaris@social.lol

I'm trying something with a content warning.

6:21 AM • August 11, 2024 (UTC)

This is a toot with content warning on the images.

Mandaris @mandaris@social.lol

Multiple images with sensitive content

Sensitive content
(flagged at origin)

Sensitive content
(flagged at origin)

Sensitive content
(flagged at origin)

Sensitive content
(flagged at origin)

8:51 PM • August 14, 2024 (UTC)

This is a poll

Mandaris @mandaris@social.lol

Test poll. Toppings on pizza.

85.7%

Yes

14.3%

No

14 people

3:16 PM • August 13, 2024 (UTC)

Considerations for the future

After working on this, there are somethings I’d like to think about in the future.

1. What changes would I like to implement?

This plugin uses different style choices. It fits perfectly into Bryce’s site because it was made by and for him. I’m essentially taking what he’s done and shoved it into my page.

This is on me to change using the custom css option offered by Micro.blog.

2. Another shortcode?

During testing, I realized that I’ve added a fair amount of shortcodes in my writing. Hugo doesn’t handle this well and makes transitioning between different themes troublesome.

I’m playing with the idea of creating a Micro.blog plugin that contains all the shortcodes that I’ve seen. I’ve thought about this everytime that I look at the Tufte theme, but I’d have to see how much bandwidth I have in September

Feedback

As always, I love getting feedback on any of this.