Category: Uncategorized

Good things for the week of March 16th.

Posted on by Hope

OK I’ll try not to do that again. I looked at my last post date, and it was a month ago, holy crap! I basically skipped the month that Richins, the case I’m following, is in trial, but that’s not really a reason, because I usually post on Sundays, so I have no idea why I did it lol!

  1. my Boundaries class at church! A lot of fun, but also very deep. Thankfully, this one is in the sanctuary, and it’s only six weeks long! No more seminary for me!!!!!!!!!!
  2. The case of Utah Verses Kouri Richins. It’s a very interesting case. I think it’s because Utah is a very interesting state. They tend to let defense attorneys get away with twisting around all over the place with their questions, asking compound ones that are really really long, mischaracterizing everything, and just being rather ridiculous. There were really long arguments that were all for nothing, because the defense never put on a case! That is, until the Judge really doesn’t like the mischaracterizing, etc, then he’ll say something, but otherwise nah. The state couldn’t jump up and object every second either, otherwise the jury would get mad. We did have a whole bunch of objections!! Since the defense didn’t put on a case, Closings will be tomorrow.
  3. Although I had to pay for it, having my computer recovered at Staples. It’s so much easier now that I can task switch back and forth!!!
  4. Completely getting rid of threading in thunderbird. I didn’t have to ditch Thunderbird, if I got rid of that ridiculous thing!!!
  5. Streamers who cover cases, and read filings. .My biggest tip is to find the ones that cover trials and hearings, and read filings. This way, you’ll have the cleanest record of a case. If you just find someone reading from a script about a case to you, you’ll need to go do further research. You can also use a clean feed. I’ll very often use clean feeds! If it’s a filing, there’s no such thing as a clean feed of a filing that I can actually use. A clean feed is a feed without running commentary. Here’s my one big tip and condition for that. If you constantly talk over the testimony without pausing. It’s a no!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The reason is, it distracts me, and I can’t concentrate on the testimony, I start to concentrate on what the streamer is saying. If you can hold your thoughts in until you manage to pause the court feed, or until theirs a break, then great, we’re good! So,when I’m in a trial, I do prefer something for reading purposes. If you have the style where you put something on the screen, and don’t ask the witness to read it, Thanks but never thanks to the prosecutor in Richins!!! I would like the commentator to read it for me. However, I don’t need and/or want constant chattyness.

Good things for the week of February 1st.

Posted on by Hope

OK OK so last week’s post failed spectacularly, just like my phone is right now! I tried to put a link in that for some reason, it didn’t like. I still like that service, I’ll put the link in as an URL, or try to this time! I’m now testing two clients, so I intend to link to those as well!

  1. Church worship night! Unfortunately I won’t be able to go this time, hopefully they’ll do it somewhat often. By that i mean, once every few months or so.
  2. https://scour.ing This is a really cool service that filters your RSS feeds for you, surfaces the interests you add, and gives you a feed of the feeds you’ve added. It will also recommend feeds for you. CP went weird on this link, so you might need to copy and paste it.
  3. BlindRSS!!! I’ve been looking for an RSS reader for a decade and a half at this point. I’m not sure if I’ve ever prayed about it, but it would be an answer to prayer!!! Mostly because when Google Reader shut down, it left me without an alternative, I was able to replace it temporarily, but the replacements really don’t work that well for me. In comes a vibe coded app 13 years later, by a random blind dude using AI!!!
    Also, it’s effectively feeds list by default, none of this timeline crap! Your feeds don’t look like new Reddit, or X!! Most people say the feeds list format looks like an email, but I say it looks like a list of feeds. There’s no email involved, or inbox. I can’t stand the river, and I think it’s invention was unnecessary! I’m also linking to a blog post by someone else in the community, who describes what the program actually is, and a bit about how to use it. < Here’s the post.
  4. FastSM. This is a client for Mastodon that’s been recently developed. A better client for Mastodon was in fact a necessary thing because although we do have Tweesecake and TWBlue, they’re the leftovers from the Twitter era, when it was actually still Twitter. They’ve both been redesigned to support Mastodon, which was very difficult for the developers, I’m sure.

My very strange day!

Posted on by Hope

I attempted to put the day one app on my phone to see if I could journal with it. I have a goal to journal this year, and I really want to get into the journaling habit! I really do enjoy the act of writing literally everything down! I just had a friend ask, “so, are you going to stop blogging,” No, i never intend to stop doing that!!!! This is all private stuff.
The app looks really cool! It does have an email feature, so I thought I wouldn’t have to stop using my current service, I could write my entries via email, and put them up there, until I get used to using the app. For some reason, I really like web interfaces! When it gave me the email address, of course there’s no way for me to get that to my computer! I tried emailing it to myself, I never got the emails! I tried enabling icloud sync, which I do not like, and this is where the problem happened!! In order for me to access the note i took with the email in it on the web, my phone needs a passcode, I always think those are very tricky, and never usable for me! Of course, I said sure, just for this time, and needless to say, like my phone always does it never lets me log in!!!!! Now, I have a passcode, and literally can’t use my phone, because every time I even type it in, even though it’s the easiest thing in the book, it says I failed.

Reddit is stupid!

Posted on by Hope

Reddit broke the subscriber thingy on old reddit, and everywhere else. In other words, we can’t see how many people are following the sub anymore! They did this recently, like probably just like sometime last month, and apparently they’re doing this as a thing, just like when they killed private messages earlier this year! Well, Reddit users not seeing subscriber counts.Not seeing your own follower numbers is fine, but we can all see who subscribes to a channel on Youtube, or at least a fairly honest number of subscribers as it is right at the moment. I say “fairly honest,” because we all know what Youtube does with subscriber numbers when a creator is about to reach a milestone etc! Apparently i haven’t been going to Reddit enough to realize that it was actually missing, and not me just doing something stupid. This means probably not a whole lot lately!
Today I actually noticed that it was missing, and then I went hey, someone has to have developed a userscript for that already! guess what? it was created last week!
It’s right here!

Quick takes post for Saturday.

Posted on by Hope

Yeah these are usually posted on Friday, but I didn’t get myself over here to do it! Needless to say, you get Seven quick takes on Saturday, and yeah I should’ve done this sooner!

  1. The defense started yesterday in the Read case! They called an expert in vehicle event data.
  2. My rent is going up by quite a bit as of tomorrow.
  3. As a result, I’m taking a break from church. I’m not able to find transportation, and I can’t afford to keep going via Uber.
  4. After Read is over, I need to get back to the Simpson archivals! I really should’ve gotten back to them after the end of my class!!
  5. I’m testing a couple different RSS reader services as of late, as I always am. Feedify,
    and Feedgrab
  6. I want to be on Facebook, but don’t really want to have my family find me on there. I would rather them not track down everything I’m posting, and yell at me about it. I want to make a fake account. I’ve tried this a couple times, but it has failed so far. Facebook thinks I’m impersonating someone when I try to use a different name, that isn’t my own. I’m not impersonating someone, I’m trying to keep the profile private.
  7. I downloaded the book, The Artist’s Way, from Audible. We’ll see where it goes. It’s something I’ve always wanted to read, and/or try.

Full sermon text.

Posted on by Hope

32 years ago this summer at vacation Bible school, I gave my life to Jesus. I was just shy of 10 years old, and didn’t know what to expect. I grew up in a non-Christian home.
We went to church for around six months when I was little, and my Grandpa, and friends provided influence that my parents didn’t. As a result Jesus was brought up at Easter and Christmas, but not much else. I did have friends at school, who were believing at the time, thankfully! The question I most remember asking my formerly Catholic grandfather was, Grandpa, “what is Easter actually about?” It was then, when I was around 7 or 8, that he told me the story of God and Jesus.
I grew up with a mom who really didn’t know what to do with me, which is honestly not her fault, because youu don’t get a parenting manual when kids our born, you just have to rely on your own ingenuity and innovation. Oh, and a vision teacher who constantly decided to reprimand me, because that was just her way of doing things! She even interrupted other teachers to do so.
To her credit, she thought I could do more than my parents ever did. Not so much more, though. She did have me enrolled in ballet class, when I heard my dad say to me at the very beginning of my first year, “you can’t take ballet lessons.” However, my parents and her both thought I would never graduate high school, and they nearly made sure I didn’t, even though I was on full track to graduate, I was thrown into the remand and sentence system.
In other words, I was given a modified diploma, forced to take an incomplete in one of my classes, and sent to an institution for three years. Fortunately, the place no longer exists today!
During this time, I prayed daily, and relied on my faith. Even though I did not have biblical knowledge, I relied on what my school friends, and my Grandpa told me. That The Lord died for me, and that he rose again on Easter Sunday, and also, that he would be my savior for the rest of my life!
Romans 5:8 says, But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. John 3:16-17 state:
16 For God so loved the world that He gave His only begottenSon, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.
17 For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.
Now is the time for me to ask you, if you would like to know Jesus like I do, if you want him to come into your heart, and be your Lord and savior?
This is only the first step. The next step is to be baptized with the holy spirit, and receive the gifts that he wants to give us! Without the gifts, we make ineffective witnesses! In other words, we wouldn’t be able to “go and make disciples of all nations,” as Matthew 28:19 says.
The baptism of the holy spirit is extensively discussed in scripture, something I don’t have time to get to today, however I will get to these two things. acts 1:5says for John truly baptized with water,but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.”
Acts 1:8 says But you shall receive powerwhen the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea andSamaria, and to the end of the earth.”
Now, would all of you like to be baptized with the holy spirit, and have all of the gifts?
The last and final step, is to ask anyone if they need healing. In addition to being our Lord and savior, and sending the holy spirit to guide us, Jesus is also our healer. What do I mean by this? he will heal anyone with any kind of issue physical, or emotional.
Isaia 53:5 states:
But he was pierced for our transgressions,
    he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
    and by his wounds we are healed.
James 5:14-15 ssay:
14 Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. 15 And the prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven.
So, is anyone here sick, or injured? I would like to pray for healing for you!

Expect no service to save you!

Posted on by Hope

OK warning, this blog post got rather ranty, and goes toward my reasoning of exactly why I would kind of like the internet of around 17 years ago back. I was thinking 2008, but Twitter was starting to become mainstream then, so nope!
an article in the NYT says “no service will save us, and we shouldn’t expect one to.” Well yeah, no kidding! If you expect an internet service and/or platform to save you, you have major problems too big to name!
It is a lesson in decentralization and federation. We should not expect a service to “save” us, in fact, we should look to open standards and protocols that were built at the beginning of the internet. Sometimes not the beginning, ActivityPub is a fairly recent protocol, as of the last eight years or so. However, a decent amount of probably US leftists and liberals who are flocking to BlueSky right now are the exact people who are saying something like, Mastodon is too confusing for me!, and I can’t use it.
They’re also saying they don’t want to have anything to do with X, and that’s fine. I have my own reasons for not wanting to use that service often. Mostly because when Musk layed off the accessibility team, which is when he showed he really didn’t care about anyone with a disability whatsoever! He also failed to allow any sort of third-party client catering to disabled users free access to the API.
The thing is, the entire Fediverse, things like Mastodon, and Pleroma, were built by mostly people on the left. . that may seem offensive to some, or that I’m generalizing, I did say “mostly,” I do not follow daily development extraordinarily closely. Although we actually have proof of this, because when Gab came to Mastodon, a whole lot of people, including developers and instance maintainers wanted Gab blocked. Accept me, and a few people who support free speech. I don’t support or use Gab now, especially after their accessibility took a dump, but I did in 2016-2018.
It’s also a lesson on service decay, no I refuse to use the newspeak term that Doctoro made up late last year because I’m not a fan of cussing online, and like most newspeak terms, it is in fact thought-ending. You could say the entire world is going to crap, not just the internet, and yet someone conveniently made up a 1984-style term to explain what’s happening to the internet, so now we’re all just expected to use it. We used to say, “something is dead,” or “something jumped the shark,” now we must use the term that Doctoro made up. It’s also called platform decay, so from now on I’ll use that term. However standards don’t really “decay,” as it were. There can be a deprecation of standards, but if you deprecate RSS, for instance, you deprecate podcasting. You would also deprecate part of the ActivityPub protocol, I believe. Now you might be thinking, well… people don’t podcast much these days, and do most of their stuff on Youtube ETC. However, if someone has a podcast, what they’re most likely doing is syndicating to Youtube. They’re probably also live streaming on top of that, so it depends on which feed gets it first, but it doesn’t really matter, because Youtube also supports RSS. Although you may have to watch most things after the fact.

FedEx is weird.

Posted on by Hope

I just had to report a Fedex driver for walking off and laughing at me. Wouldn’t even say anything to me, but when I told him this isn’t funny, he laughed, and said, “why?” He was bringing a pretty big package, and I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to get it in, thankfully I was able to! If he would’ve brought it inside the door, I would’ve been able to get it the rest of the way into my storage. It’s one of those really long, really awkward packages, it’s almost as tall as me.