iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Waldo Jaquith @waldoj.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/10/2026

I’m pretty sure my GitHub commit graph is actually a graph of when the weather has been bad (hot, cold, snowy, rainy) and/or days have been short.

A GitHub commit graph, showing Git commits over the past year. The bulk of the commits came in December–February, almost none from mid-March through mid-June, and then a more modest number of commits from June through October.

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Waldo Jaquith @waldoj.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/09/2026

One of these is the logo for X/Twitter. One is the logo for X11. Huh.

A black “X,” with one stroke solid, the other broader, filled in white.

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Waldo Jaquith @waldoj.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/08/2026

After many years of using !! to re-run the last command (especially sudo !!), I finally looked into the syntax I was parroting. These look very useful! I'm confident I can remember !500 or whatever, but I'd really like to be able to remember !ping or […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

!500 — Run command number 500
!! — Run the last command
!-3 — Run the command 3 before the current one
ping - Run the last command that started with "ping"
!?example .com — Run the last command containing "example.com" anywhere

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Waldo Jaquith @waldoj.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/08/2026

My BirdNET-Go says there's a 100% chance that this spectrograph contains owl calls. ...No.

An extremely boring spectrograph, basically just a series of horizontal lines, showing no repeated calls of anything at all.

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Waldo Jaquith @waldoj.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/07/2026

@mathowie I’ve got a little drying-yard setup where I age pressure-treated lumber in anticipation of using it (so I can avoid shrinkage and paint it immediately). I sure wish I could buy it dry.

A pair of neat stacks of dimensional lumber, price tags still affixed to the ends, on a flat, weedy gravel patch.

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Waldo Jaquith @waldoj.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/07/2026

Continuing the home-page-ification of my personal website, I've added a sidebar with HTML-3-table-style bevels and a very 90s #c0c0c0 background. Fighting my normal urge to get everything right before publishing, I've pushed it out with lots of embarrassing […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

A two-column homepage, with the right 75% being blog entries, and the right 25% is a sidebar. The sidebar lists “Recent Posts,” “Noisiest Birds Today,” and a song being listened to now. The design is black text on a white background, and the sidebar is gray.

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Waldo Jaquith @waldoj.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/07/2026

I'm adding more features to my retro-designed blog. Today's addition: the song I'm currently listening to. If you miss the web of the '00s, just go ahead and create it.

Now playing: Dirty Ought Trill by Tyler Childers

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Waldo Jaquith @waldoj.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/06/2026

I sed this license plate would be awkward.

A Subaru with the Colorado license plate “GREP.”

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Waldo Jaquith @waldoj.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/04/2026

I welcome you to share my shock at a $16 bag of M&Ms at the grocery store.

A grocery store display of really big bags of M&Ms for $16.79 each.

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Waldo Jaquith @waldoj.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/03/2026

Huh, I'd never seen this before. This was for a c7i.2xlarge, which I appreciate isn’t as ubiquitous as a t3.micro or something, but I'm still surprised.

Failed to start the instance due to insufficient capacity.

Amazon EC2 doesn't have capacity at this time to launch your
instances. While we continuously manage and add capacity,
availability of your preferred instance type in your preferred
Availability Zone is not guaranteed.

Troubleshooting tips

Diagnose with Amazon Q

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Waldo Jaquith @waldoj.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/03/2026

RE: mastodon.social/@kottke/11621259819… We've taken our kids to one of these near us a couple of times now, and they love it. My wife and I like it a lot too. They don't absolutely nail it (for example, there's no salad bar), but the cups are […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Interior of a Pizza Hut, with red checkered tablecloths, booths, and stained-glass chandeliers over the tables.

Exterior of a Pizza Hut, showing the signature red roof.

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Waldo Jaquith @waldoj.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/02/2026

I got a sweet deal on a 32-address subnet.

A storefront window that says “IP Collection Store.” Below can be seen a bunch of stuffed animal toys.

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Waldo Jaquith @waldoj.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/02/2026

Apple shouldn’t put hinge screws in so tightly that a reasonable person can’t remove them.

An open MacBook, showing exposed circuit board and screws.

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Waldo Jaquith @waldoj.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/01/2026

Please enjoy Virginia Delegate Wendell Walker’s absolutely unhinged list of “everyday life” expenses that Virginians are liable to rack up in a normal January, which he shared on X-Twitter. He’s a man of the people, you see.

This is a big and complicated table of expenses that cannot cleanly be transcribed here. But it’s described as a list of detailed expenses that a normal person might incur in a month, but the dollar values are all from the 1990s. This person requires a large number of home repairs, spends hundreds of dollars on pets monthly, plays six (six!) sports, and seems to live a life of luxury as their home collapses around them.

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Waldo Jaquith @waldoj.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/12/2025

Apple Maps' search functionality, on both macOS and iOS, now has the hint text of "Apple Maps.” This is weird. Apple Mail, Notes, and Photos, for example, have the hint text of "Search.”

A screenshot of the sidebar of Apple Maps, showing that the search field has the text “Apple Maps” in it.

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Waldo Jaquith @waldoj.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/12/2025

Gandi disabled my U2F keys without warning. This sort of incompetence is why I moved all my domains away from them earlier this year (to Namecheap; Porkbun was runner-up).

Gandi is evolving, and so is its security!

Security keys now use a new protocol. Keys registered before September 10, 2019, are no longer compatible and have been deactivated.

Therefore, we have removed your security keys: Yubikey, Yubikey 5 NFC from your account.

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Waldo Jaquith @waldoj.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/12/2025

It's this guy right here, in a suit, en francais, talking about how to keep huge government software projects from failing catastrophically. This interview was conducted in October, when I was in Montreal, testifying before a hearing about their DMV's big […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Middle-aged white man, arms crossed, wearing a blue suit and a blue tie. He’s standing in front of a back curtain, and is looking directly into the camera.

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Waldo Jaquith @waldoj.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/11/2025

I never did manage to log into this Google account today. Every CAPTCHA was just as indecipherable.

A CAPTCHA, which I inherently cannot represent as ALT text, but it says something like “mandrines” or possibly “marchines” or maybe “mandnines”?

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Waldo Jaquith @waldoj.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/11/2025

@simon I'm surprised that it doesn't natively label speakers, instead of "speaker 1," "speaker 2," etc. That's always a chore with diarization, but frequently (as in this case) the transcripts contain the information necessary to identify speakers.

{
"text" : "Can we please have a roll call?",
"timestamp" : "01:29-01:32",
"speaker" : "Speaker 1"
},
{
"speaker" : "Speaker 3",
"text" : "Councilmember Johnson?",
"timestamp" : "01:32-01:34"
},
{
"text" : "Councilmember Nagengast?",
"speaker" : "Speaker 3",
"timestamp" : "01:35-01:36"
},
{
"text" : "Here.",
"speaker" : "Speaker 1",
"timestamp" : "01:37-01:37"
},
{
"speaker" : "Speaker 3",
"text" : "Councilmember Penrose?",
"timestamp" : "01:37-01:38"
},
{
"speaker" : "Speaker 3",
"timestamp" : "01:39-01:39",
"text" : "Here."
},

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Waldo Jaquith @waldoj.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/11/2025

One of the great things about Amazon, once they started selling music, was their huge collection of 30-second clips from each song. It is frustrating that, at some point, they removed that functionality—for years, they've simply shown a table of track […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

A track listing from an album, which shows just the track numbers and titles. There’s no functionality to hear a bit of a song, no information about how long the track is.

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Waldo Jaquith @waldoj.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/11/2025

I very much doubt that user research demonstrated to Microsoft that what people really want, as the very first thing on GitHub's home page, is a chat-based LLM interface. In fact, I'll bet that less than 1% of page loads results in somebody actually using […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Screenshot of the top of GitHub’s logged-in homepage. It says “good afternoon, waldoj!” and then has a text input box, with the hint text “ask anything.” A pull-down selector shows that it’s running GPT-4.1.

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Waldo Jaquith @waldoj.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/11/2025

My fellow security aficionados may share my fascination with this CVS POS system updater I spotted in the wild yesterday. The typos do not inspire confidence. It appeared to be stuck at this 99% point, also a bad sign.

storeOS
Please wait while we prepare everything for you. This may take a little time

Data Sync
99 % complete - 0 minutes remaining

Services

storeOS
These are components that need to load before launching
Secuirty Agent
Service
Web Application

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Waldo Jaquith @waldoj.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/11/2025

Safari on macOS has so little chrome at this point that it's hard to find a place to grab a window to move it. Fitt's law is clear about why this is a problem, and, time was, Apple’s long-suffering Human Interface Guidelines wouldn't have allowed this.

A wide, squat screenshot of the top bar of a Safari window, the part of a window where it can be clicked on to move it. Almost the entire thing is interface elements (window resizing, toggling the sidebar, the URL bar, etc.,) providing preciously little space to click on the bar itself.

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Waldo Jaquith @waldoj.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/10/2025

Here are some of the photos. I especially enjoy seeing everything *other* than the subject—the background stuff that seemed mundane then, but has been made fascinating by the passage of time.

A small, closed-up newsstand, labeled “DOWNTOWN NEWSSTAND.”

A white teenaged male, hair bleached blonde, sits outside in the winter. His face is in his hands, his eyes partially closed.

A man plays drums and another man plays guitar on a sidewalk. A small boy appears to be dancing.

A large crowd in a grassy amphitheater, in front of a stage. A modest cityscape is in the background.

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Waldo Jaquith @waldoj.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/10/2025

Many months of seeing @rejectedplates leaves me confused by plates like this. The DMV’s rules are baffling.

A Virginia license plate, in a tightly cropped photo of a Jeep, reading “URABUT.”

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Waldo Jaquith @waldoj.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/09/2025

So here's a weird thing that challenges my understanding of how iOS and macOS work. I gave $5 to Virginia Public Media (VPM). My credit card recorded it as “VPM.” iOS reported it as "Vpm.” But iPhone Mirroring rendered the iOS notification on my MacBook as […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Website screenshot, reading: “Sep 12, VPM, Pending.”

iOS notification: “American Express, Vpm, $5.00.”

macOS notification: “American Express, Vape Parts Mart, $5.00.”

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Waldo Jaquith @waldoj.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/09/2025

Why the heck does Apache keep hitting the ceiling for the number of workers, so it stops accepting new requests? The traffic isn't high enough to justify this! ... Ah. Well. Yes.