iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

feature request for @stream.place I hit friction every time I'm trying to see if a particular streamer is on. it's hard for me to scan past the title. what do you thinking about flipping the title and the streamer in the UI to make it easier to track the person first?

two samples of a stream preview from stream.place. the first one has the title of the stream above the streamer. the second one flips them

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accidentally hit the hotkey to quit firefox and got this: dear reader, I did not close the tabs.

A dialog box that says "Close 267 tabs?". Below that text is a checkbox labeled "Ask before closing multiple tabs". There are two buttons "Cancel" and "Close tabs"

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it's the time on sprockets when we dance

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I just cut this gif which feels like an appropriate response posture

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alan @al9000.com · 06/09/2026

I feel like you're more animated than that

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*waves hi in elephant

a high contrast photo of a little elephant figurine that's shot from the side with the elephant facing the right side of the frame. it's a color photo, but almost black and white from the contrast. the elephant is on a table with a little texture that is almost white from a reflection of a light behind it. The body of the elephant appears black since it's entirely backlit. A little light crosses the front of the face lending a bit of tan color to the area around the eye.

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things I never want to do: be in charge of this many status bars

The Cloudflare status page with 123 status bars that are mostly green on them.

dope. quick bug report. when I click Open Library from the extension if freaks out.

an error page trying to open library from the extension

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I'm getting a 500 on the image. cloudflare thinks I'm a bot?

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alan @al9000.com · 26/08/2026

negative, ghost rider. and I'm getting NaN for the timestamp. (same behavior on firefox, chrome, and safari on mac. I don't think I've got any bullshit running that would cause the issue)

a view of the audio player displaying NaN for the time of the audio

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fuck it, we ball. (cc: @kirancodes.me who got me thinking about emacs again. sure, it's not vanilla. that's only a matter of time, though)

The start up page for Doom Emacs. The word DOOM is spelled out in ASCII art letters above the word "EMACS" in regular size type. Below it options for opening files, projects, and the like.

alan @al9000.com · 24/08/2026

sure enough. you've probably already got screenshots, but just in case.

a screenshot of the Colibri Social Flock interface in a browser. there are three columns: a list of channels, the main chat area, and a list of members (which turns out to be covering the button I need)

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alan @al9000.com · 24/08/2026

ah, the "Also find alan..." didn't register as links. looked right at it, but since the rest of the sections were like "involvement", "languages", it didn't read as a section to me. it felt like social links. not my website (which is kinda silly and sample size of one, but that's where my head went)

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look. i'm not saying writing rust code with python is the best way to do things. I'm just saying it works.

A view of computer programming code. It's in the Neovim editor with a dark blue background. The code is mostly a deep gold with some white, blue, purple, and red scattered around. The code itself is from the Python programming language, but it assembles a collection of code for the Rust programming language.

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it's been a minute

A closeup of a command line terminal for a machine named "dojo" in the "workshop" directory. The command run is "ruby --version". The output is "ruby 3.3.3 (2024-06-12 revision)"

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was checking out the history of blacksky post and hit this image back from when I was @alanwsmith.com. I remember how fun it was to fuck around with feeds. the atmosphere feels like that right now. like we've got this chance to shape things before inertia sets in. blackskyweb.xyz/blacksky-par...

A post from @rudyfraser.com talking about the launch of the original blacksky feed and getting it started. There's a screenshot with a list of feeds on it. Several of them of them are from me: Space Stuff, Happiness, Spotify Songs and a few more. The date on the image in the lower left corner is Aug. 15, 2023 and 10:52PM

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awesome stuff (lowkey heads up that the video at the bottom of the history part 1 post seems busted. I'm getting a message saying the account was terminated blackskyweb.xyz/blacksky-par... )

screenshot of the bottom of the page with a "video unavailable" thumbnail that has a message about the video's account being terminated.

alan @al9000.com · 01/08/2026

ah, yes. testing parsers as mind-scrambling method.

a few lines of code showing test cases for a text parser where there's a lot of quotes and backslashes in front of the letter n and some x characters floating around

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alan @al9000.com · 30/07/2026

film you’ve watched more than six times with a gif. hard mode: no star trek, star wars, lotr, marvel, disney or ghibli.

alan @al9000.com · 04/07/2026

that photo should be black and white

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alan @al9000.com · 07/05/2026

my god. they finally did it. they ported doom to a book

A photo looking down at a half dozen books on the shelf of a black book cart. The middle book is titled "DOOM".

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alan @al9000.com · 10/01/2026

making this my wall paper

A photo of a smooth, dark rock that's about the side of a grapefruit with googly eyes on it. It's resting in sandy dirt overlooking a canyon in the background. There's text above the rock that says 'There are no rules!'

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alan @al9000.com · 30/12/2025

there's an analogy here. or a metaphor. or something.

A black and white photo of a tree in a cemetery. The tree is in the foreground. It's bare of leaves. The ground slopes down gently behind it to the left with visible tombstones. The truck of the tree grew in such a way that a tombstone is slightly embedded it it.

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alan @al9000.com · 23/12/2025

i have made my first meme

The Geordi La Forge meme where he's holding his hand up in a 'hold on there a minute' gesture with the words 'seize the means of production' beside him. In the lower half, he's pointing in a now you've got it gesture at the words 'seize the means of distribution'

alan @al9000.com · 13/12/2025

just set up a new site on netlify. guess who's added ai into their mix...

the Netlify new site page interface with a "Build with an AI agent" box in the middle

alan @al9000.com · 26/11/2025

you know what's not great for streaming? 1.6Mbps

A report from fast.com showing a download speed of 900Mbps and an upload speed of 1.6Mbps

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alan @al9000.com · 24/10/2025

ah yes, there you are, SVG viewBox. I was wondering where my ol' archnemesis has been

A web page title SVG Scrubber. There's some text explaining it's a tool I use to prep SVG images for use on my site. The main part of the page has a hand draw box around the words "For Example, This One!" There's a blue box behind it that only covers about two thirds of the hand draw box (which is where the problem is)

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alan @al9000.com · 23/10/2025

(testing using SVGs as image uploads)

hand written text that says: Yeah. I really want a tap interface for strudle so I can tool around with it on the iPad at the beach.

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alan @al9000.com · 12/10/2025

I've been browsing The Met's open access collection of free art work. Picked "Illustrated Legends of the Kitano Tenjin Shrine" for my new terminal background. More details on the image here: www.metmuseum.org/art/collecti...

A computer terminal with a dim, black and white version of Illustrated Legends of the Kitano Tenjin Shrine in the background.

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alan @al9000.com · 18/09/2025

one of these days, my keyboard layout is gonna be perfect

A image with the headline "Mac Layout 3.0.152". The text under it says "Moonlander - You created this layout 5 years ago". Beside that is a big orange number that says "274 revisions"

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alan @al9000.com · 27/06/2025

Movie you’ve watched more than six times with a gif. “Hard mode” no Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, or Marvel.

alan @al9000.com · 05/06/2025

been working on error messages for bitty (my reactive web component). Making them the best they can be is an explicit part of the project. Here's the current iteration Adding the messages more than doubled the number of lines of code (from about ~130 to ~410). I'm more than happy to make that trade

A view of an error message from a browser developer console. The text is below (fair warning that it's long). The text itself is followed by two messages showing the related elements.

Here's the text (lines of hashtags have been removed to save space):

A BITTY ERROR OCCURRED

FINDING THE ERROR

(message clipped to save alt text space)

ELEMENT OUTPUTS

Dumps of the <bitty-js></bitty-js> element and the element passed to the error function are in follow up console messages below.

ERROR ID: 2

A <bitty-js></bitty-js> element is missing its 'data-bridge' attribute

COMPONENT UUID

The 'data-uuid' attribute of the <bitty-js></bitty-js> element associated with this error is:

c0a3b9c2

NOTE: 'data-uuid' attributes are added dynamically. They should be visible in the 'Elements' view in your browser's developer console.

ERROR ELEMENT DETAILS

The element with the error is a BITTY-JS tag with a 'data-uuid' attribute of:

c0a3b9c2

DESCRIPTION

Every <bitty-js></bitty-js> element requires a 'data-bridge' attribute that connects it to a '.js' file that powers its functionality.

The 'data-bridge' attribute is missing from the <bitty-js></bitty-js> element with the 'data-uuid' attribute:

c0a3b9c2

RECOMMENDATION

Add a 'data-bridge' attribute to the <bitty-js></bitty-js> tag with the path to its supporting '.js' module file. For example:

<bitty-js data-bridge="./path/to/module.js"></bitty-js>

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alan @al9000.com · 04/06/2025

Still working on a tagline. This ain't a bad start

Light blue text on a light red (but not yet pink) background. Large text at the top says "bitty.js". Smaller text below it is split into three lines that say: small component, big reactivity, and vanilla js

alan @al9000.com · 24/05/2025

Further refinement to the color picker I cut out the high-contrast modes. I'll have them as a customization, but browsers only have light/dark preferences right now. So, I'm going with that by default.

A web page titled "Alan's Color Picker" in orange text on a dark blue background. There's a TD;DR section below it in light blue text explaining the steps to use the picker. The right side has three boxes: Mode, Background, and Colors. The Mode box has to options: Light and Dark. The Background has three sliders labeled l, c, and h. Below them is a checkbox labeled Isolate. The Colors back has four color tabs labeled c, l, h, and a. Below the tabs is a six by eight grid of the word set in different colors. The get light as the go from left to right and the color hue shift going down each row. Below the grid is a single slider labeled c. An Isolate checkbox is below it.

alan @al9000.com · 23/05/2025

a linter, but every time you open a file the whitespace is increased by one

A screenshot of some JavaScript source code. There are line numbers on the left and then somewhere around ten spaces before the first line of text. The second line has the same number added again. The pattern continues back and forth as the lines of code progress. Some of the lines are almost half way across the screen.

alan @al9000.com · 20/05/2025

color picker is almost done. just gotta filter the output and add a copy button. (probably some spell checking too)

A screenshot of my color picker. It has content on the left and a set of colorful controls on the right to adjust the way the content look.

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alan @al9000.com · 17/05/2025

I _think_ I've finalized the design for my color picker. Working today on outputting the CSS to copy/paste into a site. That'll wrap up the first version.

A page titled "Alan's (prototype) Color Picker". It's has a middle blue background with a light goldish title an light blue text. The main content is the left two thirds of the page. Subheadings are a little more towards purple with pinkish underlines. The text includes a note saying I need to write more about it, some basic instructions, and a section called Random Filler Content which contains just that.

The right third of the page has controls for picking colors. It starts with four buttons at the top for Light, High-Contrast Light, Dark, and High-Contrast Dark modes.

Below that is a box labeled "Background" that has three sliders labeled "l", "c", and "h" in it (which stand for lightness, chroma, and hue) as well as an checkbox labeled "isolate".

Below that is a box labeled "Colors", It's the main picker where you can select from a top set of tabs labeled "t", "l", "h", "s", and "a". The "t" is selected and shows the word "text" under it highlighted in the same light blue that makes up the text of the page.

Underneath the "text" label is a six wide by eight tall grid with each cell consisting of the word "set". Each "set" has it's own color. From the top down, they hues shift across the color circle. From left to right, the colors start darker and get lighter.

Below the set grid is a "c" slider (again for chroma), and an "isolate" checkbox.

alan @al9000.com · 16/05/2025

Dear New Programmers, I've been slinging code for 30 years. I still do stuff like this ~~~~~~ Spoiler: This is JavaScript where three equal signs compares things. A single equal sign, attempts to assign one thing to the other. When you're trying to compare things, this is not helpful

A snippet of code showing a JavaScript 'if' statement with two checks in it. The first uses three equal signs. The second uses only one

alan @al9000.com · 16/05/2025

making progress my color picker design goal is to remove as much as possible for the initial experience next step is to collapse the individual pickers under tabs (without that you end up having to scroll up and down too much which can make it hard to see the what you're changing)

A screenshot of my color picker. It's title Alan's (prototype) Color Picker. The background is light blue, the headline is middle brown. Secondary headlines are pickish. The main body text is a dark blue.
The sidebar on the right has buttons for switching between "Light", "High-Contrast Light", "Dark", and "High-Contrast Dark" modes. There
are three sliders labeled "l", "c", and "h" below them (which stands for lightness, chroma, and hue).

Below that is a "Colors" section the consists of 6 by 8 groups of the word "set" in various colors. The first group has the word "text" over it. The second says "headline".

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alan @al9000.com · 16/05/2025

I saw the note from @pjpscriv.com about this being part of an overall test for comments. Based on the -75 vote count, it seems I'm not the only one who dislikes it source: meta.stackoverflow.com/q/433817/102...

A screenshot of a Stack Overflow Meta page talking about the experiment. It's title Update May 15th, 2025 and shows a negative 75 vote count. The full page is here if you'd like to read it: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/433817/102401