melanie kat blog

For this roundup of links I've got bad social media websites, big tech's big failures, and a fun music video.

So you want to read a dying media publication.

I moved to San Francisco only months after graduating from a small university in a small town in a small state.

Vercel and Netlify offer amazing free hosting but what happens when you use more than they like?

Every time Alfred has a new update, I think about writing workflows for it again, and every time I get caught up in what is the easiest way to write code for it, just in case I want to share it.

If I were to force a theme out of this collection of links it would be: It's transphobic to ask me to come back to the office.

When the iPhone was released in 2007, it came without the ability to print.

There was a time when I listened to a wide variety of podcasts.

The world of newsletters has both exploded and imploded in the last few years.

I recently mentioned that I like how modern read-later apps have natural-sounding text-to-speech capabilities.

Everything wants to be a subscription service.

When I write these year-end reviews, I go back and try to figure out where my time went and then figure out if I should admit to playing so much Picross.

Here's the true game of the year.

I used Letterboxd when it first came out but I deleted my account in 2019 to protest the site's decision to protect nazis, for which they later apologized.

Put a pride flag frame on an image for your profile pictures This is the web version of an Apple Shortcut I made in 2018, which pushed the limits of what you can do with the platform and dynamic image generation using the built-in toolset.

A while back I had a VPN app that would look out for unknown Wi-Fi networks and automatically connect to the closest VPN server to your location.

Sindre Sorhus launched yet another excellent free app for your iPhone and iPad: Any Text.

Buckle up, there's a lot of links this time.

Here's what I've enjoyed over the last few weeks.

At this point I’m just coming up with reasons to play with the Mastodon API.

I often recommend a lot of apps for different platforms to people, so I decided to catalogue them recently.

Anyone can be anyone when it comes to commits.

I'm trying to get better at bookmarking and categorizing things so I can find them later.

Update: I've turned off this website for now.

Over the past few months, I decided to familiarize myself with how the Mastodon APIs work across all servers, so I put together this site for simply viewing and sharing links to Mastodon posts.

In San Francisco, when we get summoned for jury duty, we are lucky enough to have a website to check that tells us it will be updated at 4:30 pm on weekdays.

I've just started playing around with omg.lol, and I'm enjoying my time playing around with all they have to offer.

I feel like this cute little fellow got left off of so many best of 2022 lists because it came out so late in the year, but gosh it is great.

What even is time anymore?

I don't think I ever introduced my software company, Girlfriend Technology, on this blog.

It is wild that this piece is 12 years old and constantly gets more relevant with age.

Previously I have posted about danah boyd's research on how hormones impact how your brain processes depth, but here is another study about how interpupillary distance, IPD, settings on VR headsets make it hard for people other than, for example, cisgender

A love letter to a public transit system I haven't used in years.

DankPods put together a great guide to headphones.

Welcome to the blog that was known as melkat.link.

Ever think it would be funny to replace a word with another?

Tired of seeing "Safari cannot open the page because the address is invalid." alerts when you try to open a magnet link?

The amount of talk about the environmentally harmful and the further harming of people who struggle financially is mind blowing but Doc put it in words the crypto-bros will understand.

I never thought a game about spiders would happily capture me in it's web, but here we are.

danah boyd's piece from 2014 has always been facinating to me, but relating it to my own experiences around transitioning and the ways that I have percevied depth just feels like a lot of gender validation for me :)

We all know SMS two factor auth is very dangerous due to it’s insecure nature, but we don’t often here companies actually doing anything about it.

This has long been true, but for some reason it still needs to be said: two-factor authentication over text message makes you less secure than not having it.

With the recent sexual assault allegations of former people’s champ GrandPooBear, I’ve been thinking a lot about his sudden heel turn, and I think this article hits him on the nose with a newspaper.

Congratulations to the people at Medium!

Virtual avatars for streaming and videos have become popular over the last few years.

I don’t know Polish but this is pretty fascinating about how the language handles pronouns.

I don’t know what’s more wild: a React hook that makes your custom UI elements accessible or that this came from Adobe.

This article is a beautiful takedown of the fake feminism people sell.

Watching Maddy find themself has been a joy, and reading about how Celeste developed with them is great.

Cassidy had an excellent talk today about building an adventure game with NextJS, which is definitely in my interests because I’ve been building my own visual novel in NextJS over the last few months.