mahna mahna .net

tl;dr Want your Mastodon home feed in your RSS reader? I've cooked up just the thing.

I am enjoying Mastodon, the federated Twitter alternative, quite a bit. So far, my experience with it has been extremely pleasant, and reminiscent of the internet of the early 2000s, which was far more decentralized, and far more neighborly.

However! Speaking of the internet of the 2000s, I am one of those people who still misses Google Reader, and still uses an RSS reader. There are 154 feeds in my reader currently, including one for my Twitter home feed (provided by a third party), another for Facebook (ditto), and another for Instagram (ditto). Because this is the twenty first century, dammit, and I should not have to go gallivanting all around the goddam web to find out what's going on! This is why RSS readers got invented, and why they still rock. Anyone who tells you RSS is dead simply stopped using it (or never did).

I have been a political junkie for as long as I can remember. My father was a professor of political science, so in my 1980s childhood home, the single television screen was tuned to at least 90 minutes of news each night, plus what few political programs there were in the era before multiple cable news outlets. I remember PBS's Washington Week in Review being a favorite on Friday nights -- along with the MTV Friday Night Video Fights and Night Flight. (Any Night Flight fans out there? Sometimes I think I am the only person who remembers it.)

I am deeply moved by today's news that Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh ("Thay") has passed out of this life at the age of 95.

If you know don't know who he is, the obituary in the New York Times, though short, is the best one I've read so far, and the only one that gives you a sense of the kind of wisdom he preached.

Last year, my colleague Mohammed Shamma tweeted about a project I'd completed using Django, Wagtail, and HTMX. One thing led to another, and now there's an episode of the Django Chat podcast out there in the world that features Mohammed and me as guests. We talk briefly about how we came to be web developers before moving on to how and why our team embraced this excellent trio of technologies, and how we use them to get our jobs done at UC Berkeley.

Today I'm officially introducing a bit of software I crafted earlier this year. Seevooplay is a web app for online invitations and RSVPs, geared toward self-hosters. Throwing a party? Don't give all your friends' email addresses to Evite. Don't expect your friends to be on Facebook. Embrace the indieweb, kick the corporate middleman to the curb, and let your copy of Seevooplay (running on your own website) send email invitations and collect responses for you! That's the pitch, anyway.

Seevooplay is written in Python on the Django framework. It can be easily integrated into any existing Django site or project, but can also run as a standalone app.

Problem: You want to log in to a Gnome desktop on a remote Ubuntu 20.04 host.

Complication: You can only reach the host via SSH.

Further complication: A bug in Gnome currently makes it impossible to enable Gnome's built-in screen sharing if you connect via SSH. ☹

Solution: Use TigerVNC and an SSH tunnel, and log into that desktop! Here's how, minus the 2+ hours of head-scratching and swearing that accompanied my long trip down this short path today.