Recent Posts
Fast Image View in Newsboat
As reported earlier, I’m not alone in giving up the Twitter ghost. My good friend Ryan has also given up his presence there and returned back to maintaining his blog, The Signal Watch, with renewed fervor.
I couldn’t be happier.
But I don’t want to miss a single post. So I’m using Newsboat to keep track of his site. One aspect of his site is that he frequently posts great images. So how can I make it easy to view the images without having to use Newsboat as a launcher for my browser? What if there were a way to view images in the Unix shell. Does this sound impossible? Too good to be true? I’m glad to say that the terminal program I use, iTerm, has added just such magic!
Here I am cat-ing an image from the terminal!
With the existence of this utility, all I needed to do is wire it into being an image handling program in Newsboat, and I’ll have a fast way to view images from my text-based news reader.
Read on to find out how to complete the integration.
How I Mastodon
After Twitter went private, I found that management did a number of things to the corporate culture and to the content of the site such that I no longer wanted to use it. Previously, I had stopped having a persistent store of Tweets there, and I started deleting tweets after 30 days. That helped reduce my ties to the site, but around December 1, I quit Twitter and did the big delete. Good riddance.
Since then, though, I have had the great pleasure to discover Mastodon!
My home feed for Mastodon
And while it’s different than Twitter, I’m finding the quality of discourse and the community there to be really special. It’s less commercial and more intellectual. It reminds me of early-90s USENET before the eternal September: an open, engaging, friendly group of communities full of amateurs and professionals sharing insights about things they love, from the X-Files to 15thth century lullabies. I’ve joined Latin translators, fans of old Anglo Saxon languages (Middle-Dutch, Middle-English, Frankish), programmers, instructors, SF tech scene folks, and the creator of one of the Greatest Video Games of All Time.
To be clear, it’s not Twitter, but it has been positioned as an alternative to Twitter. In this, I think a certain disservice is done to Mastodon. I’d like to cover how I recommend one think about Mastodon; provide some tooling to make your use more fun, efficient, and less Twitter-like; and provide some resources for those making the leap.
Farewell, Angelo Badalamenti
Pictured: Badalamenti (left) and director David Lynch (right)
On the 11th, I saw that Angelo Badalamenti had died. As a fan of moodiness and reverb, it was sad to see an artist adjacent to the Doo-Wop of the Damned echo on to that great, permanent stillness.
Badalamenti knew how to provide sounds that let the expansive, strange, and wonderful dreams of David Lynch breathe onscreen. While I first conceptualized his music as being part of the Pacific Northwest (Twin Peaks), the first Lynch movie that ever caught me was the quintessentially Angeleno Lost Highway. While Badalamenti might have been more-frequently associated with moody, foggy, reverb-laden soundscapes, his compositions for the Trent Reznor-produced Lost Highway showed his flexibility in that he could do lounge or more straight-ahead, less-atmospheric movie scoring:
For me, my favorite Badalamenti composition was his transfixing and transporting soundtrack to Mulholland Drive: