Honk Cyan Cellophane v1.5.0

It's that time of year again when I smash the button and the honk comes out. 1.5.0 has a bunch of exciting changes.

We've got new images coming. AVIF and HEIC are now supported, for all you freedom and iphone lovers. Converting jpeg to avif really does make a pretty big difference when browsing the timeline over a more modest link. But there's no new build dependencies for things who prefer to keep things just as they are. libavif and libheif are only loaded if present and requested.

I spend some time uselessly optimizing memory usage and some other performance tuning, to make things not really all that much faster. But it felt good.

You've got high uptime standards. You expect six nines. Nice. But honk's millisecond restart times were threatening all of that. Well now you can do hot restarts with SIGHUP. Very nice.

Every honk can now trigger a web. Let your honks flow freely into other systems where people do not expect them.

And despite all that, the release packaging is 40% smaller? How? The R&D team has been hard at work on a new quantum compression technique. Is the big dependency included? Is a smaller dependency with the same features included? By creating a quantum superposition, we achieve observable functionality without excess entropy. Magic!

That's all. See you soon, when 1.5.1 comes out.

I've verified that gleam is modern software.

vivo:~/work/gleam-1.11.0> make
grep: repetition-operator operand invalid

After five long years, the local Starbucks has finally returned the sugar caddy to a customer accessible spot on the counter. Nature is healing.

LinkGaslighting? - For several months now I’ve continued my project where every day I go back through my archives and clean up broken links in old posts. If something is broken and I can find it in the Wayback Machine (https://web.archive.org/), I replace the link. Lately I’m noticing something new and insidious. Of course there’s a lot of linkrot, where stuff is just gone. (In my archives, Yahoo News and Make’s Craftzine are the two biggest offenders.) Then there’s stuff that’s gone, but the domain has been repurposed by someone else. Sometimes it’s obvious (porn and gambling ahoy!) and other times they create a plausible looking site filled with SEO glurge. And then there’s this third dark pattern I don’t even have a name for yet, where the same entity is still in control of the domain and the link goes to a plausible looking URL, but it’s NOT the page I linked to originally.

Here’s an example. In 2001 I wrote a post (https://www.web-goddess.org/archive/554) about Jenna Bush, saying I sympathised with her and that she was just acting like a college student. In it, I linked to a Salon.com article (http://www.salon.com/mwt/wire/2001/05/30/jenna_bush/index.html) about her. If you follow that link now, you are silently redirected to an article about her beliefs about safe sex (https://www.salon.com/2007/09/25/jenna_bush/). If you don’t look closely, you might miss the fact that the safe sex article is from 2007. If you go to the Wayback Machine, you’ll see that the actual article I linked to was about her buying booze (https://web.archive.org/web/20010605091134/http://www.salon.com/mwt/wire/2001/05/30/jenna_bush/index.html). I’ve now found several other Salon.com links to that redirect to posts about the same general topic of the post, but aren’t the actual one I linked to.

Another example. In 2013 I linked to (https://www.web-goddess.org/archive/11354) a Serious Eats recipe for “tobacco cookies” (http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2013/05/tobacco-cookies-recipe.html). If you click that link now, you’re redirected to a recipe for Chocolate Dipped Tuile “Cigarettes” (https://www.seriouseats.com/chocolate-dipped-tuile-cigarettes-cookies-recipe). That one gave me pause. Is that what I originally linked to? If that’s what the recipe is called, why did I call it something else? Here’s the Wayback Machine to the rescue again, confirming that there really used to be a recipe for tobacco cookies (http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2013/05/tobacco-cookies-recipe.html). WTF.

I’m not clear on why or how this is happening. Maybe some sort of custom 404 logic that picks out a keyword and sends you to a likely recent link? It’s infuriating though that they don’t give you any warning that it might not be the page you’re looking for. It makes finding broken links that much harder, because they’re actively trying to gaslight me. Links are a contract and a promise. Silently redirecting https://www.web-goddess.org/archive/77747

H5N1 attack on Castle!

It's unfortunate that video game bloat pushes VRAM requirements into LLM territory.

I spun the torment nexus wheel and landed on "pckbc hacker".

"Dune Books in Order: How to Read All 26 Novels"

Don't.

Only in Pennsylvania do we get "guy who owned Taylor swift's wyomissing house" news.

https://www.inquirer.com/crime/carter-reese-counterfeit-art-dealer-taylor-swift-20250530.html

Maybe we don't need to copy every feature from C.

DZ: triple threat

Weather service hat trick.

Clarion county, Second Amendment Sanctuary County, is now on trump's shitlist. Go woke, go broke.

https://www.inquirer.com/news/pennsylvania/homeland-security-sanctuary-list-montour-clarion-counties-20250530.html

Got a bad honk in the feed tube and it obliterated safari scroll performance. Jank city. Officially declaring it not my bug, though. For a while (or still?) comment threads on lobsters were unscrollable in safari.

The moon landing was faked!

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/good_1960s_nasa_footage_202505221535.mp4?_=14

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/05/ai-video-just-took-a-startling-leap-in-realism-are-we-doomed/

Know your hail sizes.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2025/05/30/hail-texas-thunderstorms-lubbock/

Tariffs are back on for now as appeals court grants a pause.

So they paused the pause? Or unpaused the paused pause? If they triple click do we start over from the beginning?

New PA TV show. Motorheads on Amazon. It's Friday Night Lights, but also the Fast and the Furious. Fast cars and troubled teens and unhappy families, what more could you want? I think it's set in western PA, like somewhere between Pitt and Erie, so probably no Amish like in Banshee.

ACPI quirks aren't real. They can't hurt you.

Countdown to honk 1.5. I think maybe next week? It's going to be a good one. Almost as good as 1.5.1 will be.

The NNTP protocol has a mandatory SLAVE command, but it's acceptable to reply "202 emancipated".

Pronouncing the x in xlock like xylophone.