Notices by Casey Peel (gairdeachas@mastodon.social)

This weekend in Seattle is the Emerald City Hoedown - a gay country & western dance event that brings people in from all over the country.

If you want to scoot-a-boot, come out and dance one evening at their social dances. I'll spin you around the dance floor (or you can spin me, I'm vers like that).

There are beginner classes for two-step, waltz, shadow, and line dances all weekend long, so check out their schedule.

Hope to see you there!

https://raincountrydance.org/hoedown/schedule

#seattle #dance #queer

Well, it's not the Christmas we expected, or deserve, honestly.

Daniel is sick with COVID and has been isolating in the second bedroom the past two days. So far I've avoided catching it and am able to take care of him.

This is oddly reminiscent of the lead-up to Christmas 2023 when I tested positive for COVID and isolated in the basement the *20 days* leading up to Christmas day (fuck you paxlovid, never again) and he took care of me.

But we're together and the sun came out and I'll take it.

Masto is, hands down, the best social media platform I've ever been on at any stage of its lifespan.

You want nerdy kind humans? We got those -- hell, furries built the place.

How about smart kind humans? Scientists, academics, researchers in spades.

Thirst-inducing kind humans? Oh sweet baby jeebus you have no idea. 🥵

Thoughtful, caring humans? All over the place.

And the Venn diagram of these has so much overlap it's delightful.

And lack of discoverability is both a downside of the Fedi but also oddly one of its biggest strengths. Because finding friends of your friends is the best way to grow a community of people with shared values and interests vs having some interactive-based algorithm throw strangers' posts into your timeline.

Unfortunately getting bootstrapped into a community is hard and onboarding new people to the Fedi *into a community* is hard.

Oh hey, I'm almost 47 and been out for 25 years and I still tear up when a straight ally randomly posts queer-affirming statements.

That's the subtoot. ❤️

Happy legal wedding anniversary to my wonderful husband @datasaurus!

6 years ago we were legally married by WA State Supreme Court Justice Mary Yu -- one of our queer supreme court justices -- in the Temple of Justice.

It was a small, special service with two of our best friends as witness, including @jonobie. Such a perfect day 🥰

Love you Dr. Husband! 😘

#queerLove

Beautiful #sunset out on Alki in West #Seattle tonight.

I just saw a graybeard touting the benefits of self-hosting personal internet services. And I agree centralization has caused numerous problems, but as someone who admins a public-facing web and email server for DProofreaders: fuck that shit.

Scrapers make hosting web content a constant exercise in frustration and mitigation. There's more spam than real email these days and going through hoops to have GMail and Yahoo accept mail from your domain is non-trivial.

There is no easy solution.

Ah yes, random.choices(), please tell me all about your cum_weights and seed.

Zohran Mamdani's win for the Democratic candidate for NY mayor is giving me hope this morning. ❤️

After buying some 3Reality plugs and a temperature sensor he now has it wired up to #HomeAssistant. The temperature sensor is outside above the fan. We have another one inside the living room. When the temperature inside is above a set temp, and the temp outside is below it, the fan turns on. When the temp inside is cool enough or outside warms up, it turns off.

2/x

I want to brag at how brilliant and crafty my husband @datasaurus is.

We live in the PNW which in the summer has warm days but cool nights. Indeed many places do not have AC. But I have terrible allergies so just opening up the windows at night to cool the house off makes me miserable.

So last year he created this filtered air box as part of a kit and rigged it into the living room window so we can bring filtered air in when it's cooler outside.

But this year he got cleverer.

1/x

And this is all working brilliantly. The house has big West facing windows, but the porch is on the East. It's 5p here and the air on the porch is cooler than the house so the fan turned on.

The fan will help cool the house off at night without letting it get too cold. All without turning on the AC or pulling warm air or wildfire smoke inside.

This is the kind of home automation that feels like you're living in the future, honestly.

4/4

But the past few years we have to worry about wildfire smoke here in the PNW. So in addition to the temp, he's incorporated the air quality index from the PurpleAir sensor in the neighborhood.

If the air quality is poor the fan won't come on. If the fan is on and air quality gets too bad, the fan turns off.

3/x

Another slew of AI crawlers hitting DProofreaders this weekend, this time our #MediaWiki instance. Thanks to our prior work -- and the MW file cache -- the server is still up and serving traffic but the average CPU load increased by 6x and the server is running very hot.

Shout-out to the MW community who put together https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Handling_web_crawlers -- the Lockdown extension is now installed and doing a stellar job of restricting expensive pages to authenticated users.

I need a do-over today.

My phone will literally not charge anymore so I had to emergency-buy a new one from the local Target. I need to bus to the store later to pick it up.

I locked my coat, wallet, and sunglasses -- with the keys to the lock -- in my locker at the gym this morning so I had to walk home in 30 degree weather in a tank top and shorts. It was f'n cold.

Lets hope the phone, currently at 3% and plugged in, stays powered up enough for me to transfer stuff off of it.

UGH

I'm opting for explicit consent and DMing people to ask first before adding their blogs to the Kagi small web index.

I'd rather err on the side of explicit consent, particularly in light of some of the excellent thoughts from @nanianmichaels in https://tech.lgbt/@nanianmichaels/113831200564784201

Remember kids, consent is sexy!

I just looked at several dozen profiles of masto followers and those I follow (queers, techies, artists, and combinations thereof) and found those with blogs (with feeds) or homepages.

Now the quandary if it is ethical to submit these public URLs myself without explicit consent of the blog/website owner. The goal is to make these more discoverable via Kagi, and Kagi does respect robots.txt, but I also believe in explicit consent. 🤔

Guess I could individually DM the dozen of you...

One of the things that I love about the #Kagi search engine is that it surfaces relevant "small web" sites, like personal blogs. This is great because there's a lot of useful info in those!

They're now curating a small web set for artists (illustrators, comics, etc) and I want to help ensure that #queer artists are being represented. Point me to queer artist websites and I'll help get them added!

Ditto blogs of queers too!

https://mastodon.social/@kagihq/113828104059791579

It was easy to get personal blogs added to the Kagi small web!

I'm happy to help add others' blogs -- especially queers, women, POC, and non-techies -- just comment on this post or send me a DM.

Kagi's current blog requirements are at https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb but in short:
* Personal blog with RSS feed
* No ads, spam, LLM content, etc
* A post within the last year
* English-only (but I'm keeping a list of those in other langs for when they accept them)

Boosts welcome.

#blog #smallWeb #kagi