Notices by Velocipede Rider (ruari@velocipederider.com)

Ok can I get a quick #WristCheck from everyone? I'm curious about the range of timepieces here.

Take a picture of your watch right now and say what it is. I'll start, Armitron Griffy.

Boosts appreciated.

@matt No it was not always bad. I have some old phones as well. Things were better.

The reissued Nokia 3310 was pretty OK IMHO (the UI was not as good as the old ones but passable and typing was fine)

The "Nokia 225 4G" has noticably worse UI than the 3310 reissue but is 4G. Typing is much the same.

@matt All KaiOS phones make me want to kill myself after a while.

So it really does not matter than they have WhatsApp and can upload GPS to Strava because everything else makes me want to tear my hair out.

@matt If you found the MP01 buggy… you will be dissapointed in the MP02. The predictive text is a fucking nightmare. I logged a bunch of bugs to them but I don not think they go me at all. It would be unusuable for Signal/Pigeon I reckon because of how hard it was to type.

Also the sound quality on my unit was attrocious (maybe I just have a hardware fault 🤷)

But at that point I was left thinking… why?

@matt I mean the phone is supposed to be about call and messaging and it was terrible at both.

@matt Ok I have two Punkt MP01s

I was also given by them as an early external tester/enthusiast and MP02 before it went live by the founder Petter Neby. I once met up with him in Oslo for a chat (he is Norwegian but no longer lives here).

I hate to say it but that phone was so fucking buggy I could not deal with it. It killed my interest in Punkt. I should probably start it up again and try updating it, maybe they fixed things but it was such a let down at the time.

@feditips I can tweak this old script that I used to use on my watch account that posted hourly updates of the time in binary as Christmas trees (lit and unlit).

Make it into something more useful and embed it in a blog post

https://gist.github.com/ruario/dcbb5a42df8590cb9bf61e846bba393e

@feditips I guess I could write a short blog post about it with maybe an example script.

@feditips My "bots" (actually just automated posting) are tiny shell scripts run as cron jobs. At set intervals they use cURL to fetch information from the web, extract key values with tools like sed and grep and then post with Toot (if those values have changed since last time).

I know it is not for everyone but the barrier for entry is fairly low if someone is at all command line savvy.

@feditips Well it just makes the posting part really simple as you can just pipe text into it from the command line. Here is a small excerpt from the shell script that posts the @vivaldiversiontracker information.

@ihabunek

@feditips I now eagerly await a future post on best tips when alt texting from you. 😆

@eys

@feditips I also sometimes use @ihabunek's wonderful Toot TUI masto client from the terminal and appreciate the alt text greatly myself.

Here is my older post as an example

https://github.com/ihabunek/toot

@eys

@feditips FWIW I do think a lot of sighted users do use the alt text as well. Images are sometimes deleted from caches on instances. In addition there are extentions and tools built into browsers (including Vivaldi) to prevent loading of images for various reasons. Here is my earlier post, which interestingly shows the entire alt text even though the toltip did not.

@eys

A side note @feditips since you write masto tips. Toot is really nice for automating posting from scripts. My @browserversiontracker and @vivaldiversiontracker are basically just short shell scripts powered by cURL to fetch information and Toot to post it.

With tools like these doing the heavy lifting simple info posting masto bots are pretty straightforward if you have basic command line skils.

You have probably written about these things before but I mention it nonetheless. 🤷🏼

@ihabunek

@feditips Yeah I need to think about this going forward. I often have long alt text and not just because I include a full copy of written words from a screenshot. Now I am thinking about how I should order things, so that the most relevant part is near the front, so when it is too long, they'll at least get something.

@eys

Ever had a dream about a wonderful bike only to lose it?

This site has you covered… you are welcome.

#DreamBikeRegister #DrømmenesSykkelregister

https://www.dreambikeregister.com

One of my reports. No doubt @unimyra will understand the importance of this.

I should probably note that this site is associated with @erlendloe and his new book. I suspect the book with only be in Norwegian but much like Flexie-Belle's register, his Dream Bike Register is useable by all. 🎉

https://cappelendamm.no/_drommenes-sykkelregister-erlend-loe-9788202802042

EDIT: Ok I see my my alt text English translation is clipped (at least on hover for the Mastodon web interface). If you cannot speak Norwegian and want to read that entire summary (which you do!) use your translation service of choice on the link.

Ok, yes the full alt text is present apparently. I see it when I inspect the page with dev tools but does not display in its entirety for the tooltip.