Lord Matt (old geek)

The round-robin has returned to my blog once more. I am still looking for bloggers who would like to take part in hosting this weekly event. Hosting means you get to list 10-ish things that you liked that were recently posted. Ideally including the best of other active hosts. Round Robin will come out a little less frequently until I find some more bloggers who want to take part. 🔙 Last week’s…

In my last post, I talked about how WordPress, IndieWeb, ActivityPub, and the friends plugin came together to allow blogging over the Mastodon network. In this post, I am going to look at some fine-tuning that I have applied. Our two main case studies are Matt’s Social Node and I Am The DJ. Each of them has had a few teething troubles. Brid.gy: A helpful third-party website One IndieWeb…

Over the last few months, I have been running a pair of blogs that connect directly to Mastodon and the whole federated ActivityPub network. Some of you may have heard of Mastodon. It is a social network not entirely dissimilar to Twitter back when it was good. The big difference is that Mastodon runs on lots of servers owned by all sorts of people. Mastodon uses something called ActivityPub to…

Back in the day, bloggers would often get together and make lists of cool things or stuff they really liked that others (usually in the in-group) were doing. The hosting of said list would move from blog to blog. Each week’s edition would link to the previous week’s and (later) to the next week’s. In the spirit of getting back to what blogging is good for, I’m going to start a round-robin. I…

I have been working on a slightly silly RPG game. A game where the players build the map as they play and everything is based on the cards the players hold. The game is, from inception, a bit silly. Players have no character sheet and just have a bunch of cards. They start with 5 HP (health/hit points) cards for HP which are drawn at random. They look like this: The first thing you will notice…

This week, because my life is not hard enough, I sat down to write a game in the programming language Python. A language I’ve not used before. Well, I say “not used” I have written a microPython script for a Pi Nano but I’m not counting that. The game – Get To The End – is an idea I have had for a while. This week was just when I started to work on it. I shall be posting updates on Mastodon…

I asked ChatGPT to write a blog post about the future of artificial intelligence in the world of blogging. This is what ChatGPT says about the involvement of AI and blogging. Artificial intelligence (AI) has been making waves across industries, and the world of blogging is no exception. With AI becoming more sophisticated and capable, it’s important to consider how it might impact the future of…

Something I find myself doing often is sorting some array. Usually, this is to put the array in some order that makes sense later. For example, alphabetically, ordered by score, or by newest first. I use a lot of sorting for my directory. Arrays are one of the most commonly used data structures in PHP if you don’t count strings and integers. Sorting them is dead useful for lots of reasons. In…

Here is some news for the three or four people aware of my directory project. For those reading this that have not heard yet – I have been working on a directory of the very best bits of the Internet. As sections mature (and I figure out what I am doing), I will create GitHub repositories where anyone can contribute entries. Each entry is an XML file carrying all the data needed to display it…

In this post, I will introduce you to some of the secrets about how anti-vaxxers work, the money behind it, and what you might be able to do about anti-vaxxer aggression. I am going to give you tips on countering misinformation that the anti-vaxxers are going to hate me for sharing. My hope is that this post will be the third and last entry in a trilogy of posts about anti-vaxxers. However, I…

No one expects to get grapes from thistles. We don’t seek apples from a sycamore tree. And no one expects figs from stinging nettles. This should be obvious. Yet an anti-vaxxer I spoke with recently insisted that they – a random person with no science background – should be trusted on medical issues because it is the message that matters. No, it doesn’t. If the message about putting rockets…

This is the story of how an anti-vaxxer caused a lot of good. Before we get into this story, I want to make it clear that I am not going to report on what the anti-vaxxer and I said to each other. I refuse to platform nonsense and I did not have anything much of interest to say. However, what came out of it, is worth talking about. Our story starts one day recently with me browsing Mastodon. I…

John J. Schaub is a guy who started out as a data analyst but he is also a fellow geek. He started a side business mostly to help him sell off duplicates in his gaming collection. Things did not stop there and soon John had a growing business selling beautiful dice sets. (We gaming nerds love our dice). John tells his story in a readable and easy-to-follow way. He talks us through the ups,…

Can the OGL 1.0a be revoked?

Before we begin, some standard disclaimers. This is not legal advice. I am not a lawyer (IAMNAL) not a solicitor nor qualified to offer legal advice. I am a giant nerd who occasionally reads dry law books for fun. That said, YMMV (your mileage may vary) and all standard, implied, or assumed disclaimers apply. Dungeons and Dragons nerds like me might be aware that Wizards of The Coast (WOTC)…