blog.lmorchard.com

Fediverse Oracles, Feedspools, and street plums (Catching up: August 7 – August 28)

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 19:00:00 GMT

TL;DR: Catching up on a sprawling few weeks of infrastructure rebuilding—from porting C64 BASIC maze generators for the blog to rewriting my RSS feed reader in pure-Go SQLite—along with building a Fediverse ActivityPub bot in a day, resuming my Persona 5 Royal save on a jailbroken Switch via Moonlight, making street plum shrub, and receiving surprise mail from the Church of Scientology.

10 PRINT Backgrounds and Infrastructure

I tinkered a bit on the blog. I Persona 5 Inception

One night's nerdy-ass activity involved taking advantage of the Steam sale to buy Persona 5 Royale for PC—I've bought this game like three times now. Since I already had over 40 hours into it on my Switch, I was inspired by . So naturally, I started Building a Fediverse Oracle

I also fell down a massive rabbit hole this week, getting back on my Fediverse bullshit. I started reviving my ancient where folks submitted questions to the "oracle" and secretly answered other folks questions in the background anonymously.

It's still a mess, but I started a new Feedspool Burn-down

On the topic of infrastructure, after finally solving the mystery of my vanishing RSS feeds (TL;DR: a tag query bug was slowly unsubscribing me from everything over the course of a year), bringing 400 feeds rushing back kicked off a massive development burn-down on feedspool-go.

I merged a dozen PRs this week to get the reader into fighting shape. The biggest architectural shift was ripping out the old in-memory filtering and migrating to a pure-Go SQLite setup, which let me implement robust full-text search using SQLite's FTS5 (complete with BM25 relevance sorting).

I also finalized an HTTP API for JSON read/write access, added multi-arch Docker support, and shipped a ton of quality-of-life features: atomic HTML rendering, per-feed User-Agent overrides, item annotations, and an HTML scraper feed type so I can finally follow sites that refuse to provide proper RSS feeds.

On a broader level, a lot of this recent feedspool-go API work is me quietly laying the groundwork to make the reader much more accessible to AI agents. The end goal is to have an AI agent plug directly into the JSON feed API to produce daily personal newsletters that curate the firehose.

Bring Your Own Music (BYOM) Updates

Between the fediverse and feedspool work, I also managed to cut some new releases for my Of Cats

Minnaloushe (the Hunk) and Cosmo are getting along thankfully well, with only a few sprints through the house chasing each other. I Of Cars

I also . I don't have the disposable income for it, but I've been wishing for a Slate truck that I could cover in stickers like a laptop to take on 5-mile grocery runs.

What I really want, though, is if I had infinite money, I'd pay someone to find me another pristine 1983 AMC Eagle Station Wagon (my first car, which had fake wood paneling and which I drove until a wheel literally fell off) and convert it to electric.

Of Plums

We have fruit trees lining the street around our house. Usually, we just let the late-summer fruit fall onto the sidewalk as a cleanup chore, or give a thumbs-up to furtive folks who come by with ladders to pick them. But this weekend, I Of Scientology

In weirder news, the Church of Scientology Miscellanea

This mad lad live-coded a machine language SID music player in C64 BASIC DATA statements with a grid-based tracker reading from screen character RAM for live editing and persistence as REM statements in the same BASIC program. Oh and he wrote the machine language in straight decimal numeric opcodes, no assembler.

In college, I read Julian Jaynes's

Finished reading both of Children of Strife goes like this:

Man... his Children of Time series, in between all the cosmic strangeness and body horror and high concept sci-fi, somehow ends up being as optimistic and sensawunda-ful as the best of Star Trek.

I finally set up a minimal Finger daemon using my own little Python script. You can now finger me@lmorchard.com and get an ASCII cow saying "Just setting up my finger!" (This was part of the whole push to move off S3 and onto a cloud VM).

- Rands reflecting on what it means when almost every writing tool starts invisibly injecting text watermarks into your prose.

- "Vibecoding is like being an executive of a large company that is barely under your control. You never feel like you really know what’s going on..." I feel this in my bones.

- Michael Harley noticing that the parts of his archives that survived 14 years were the parts he owned and kept simple.

- A wonderful bit of digital archaeology getting the old UNIX talk command working over modern networks.

And for a quick hit of nostalgia, I bookmarked

Remember Me: The Case of the Vanishing Feeds

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 19:00:00 GMT

TL;DR: My self-hosted feed reading stack quietly shrank from hundreds of feeds down to 33 over the course of a year, and I didn't notice until my reading list got eerily quiet. The culprit: an unpaginated API call that turned "the 1000 most recent bookmarks" into a silent ceiling on my subscription list. I had been unsubscribing myself, one bookmark at a time.

Star Trek: The Next Generation,

Rube Goldberg feed reader

So, I have what I think is a fun little self-hosted Rube Goldberg stack powering my feed reading these days. (And you know I love Rube Goldberg machines.)

First, I use Next, I use a little Go CLI tool I built. It iterates through the tagged Linkding bookmarks, fetches the links, and figures out whether those links are themselves feeds or whether it needs to autodetect feeds from HTML pages. Then it builds an OPML file as a subscription list. I run this on a crontab schedule every half hour, so my subscription list stays current with my bookmarks.

Then, I use another Go CLI tool that I built - to fetch feeds from that OPML subscription list and build a static website as my personal RSS newspaper. I run this on the same half-hour schedule - every 30 minutes, a fresh build.

The stack, and the loop that turned out to matter

This stack has served me pretty well for the past year or so, with just occasional bug fixes and tweaks along the way. For the most part, the cronjobs percolated away on one of my basement homelab machines and I never bothered to peek at the logs or otherwise check up on them.

The quiet

But lately I'd noticed that my reading list seemed to be getting quieter and quieter.

It was gradual enough that it took me until just last night to realize I was missing quite a few feeds from the regular rotation. It was kind of like that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation - - where Dr. Crusher steadily loses people off the Enterprise but takes a while to work out that the problem is with her universe rather than her memory. 😅

The bug

After a few hours of frustrated code-staring, I found it. Here's what FetchBookmarks looked like in linkding-to-opml:

// Use linkding client to fetch bookmarks
// For now, we'll get all bookmarks and filter client-side
// The go-linkding library may support server-side filtering in the future
bookmarkList, err := c.client.ListBookmarks(linkding.ListBookmarksParams{
    Limit:  1000, // Get lots of bookmarks (adjust as needed)
    Offset: 0,
})

Past me left a comment describing the bug and then shipped it anyway. 🤦‍♂️

Unsubscribing one bookmark at a time

Here's the part I find genuinely funny: that 1000-bookmark window is sorted newest-first, so it slides. When I first set this stack up, all my feed subscriptions happened to fall inside the window and everything worked great. But every new bookmark I saved pushed the oldest one out the back.

So for the past year, every time I bookmarked an article, I had a chance of silently unsubscribing myself from a feed. I wasn't losing feeds because sites died. I was losing them because I kept adding new stuff.

The fix is boring: page until the collection is exhausted, advance the offset by the number of records actually received rather than the number requested (so a server that caps limit still pages correctly), and stop on an empty page as well as on reaching the reported count, so a wrong count can't spin the loop forever.

I also pushed the tag filter into the API query while I was in there. It turns out, despite my earlier comment, the golang library supported that just fine. 🤷‍♂️ Linkding treats a #tag token as an exact match, ANDs multiple tokens together, and ignores case - the same contract my client-side matchesTags was implementing. So the filter can run server-side and transfer 792 records instead of 34,568. I kept matchesTags running over every result anyway, so if Linkding's query semantics ever drift from my assumptions, the failure mode is slow instead of wrong.

The bug behind the bug

Then, with pagination fixed, a second bug immediately surfaced.

GenerateOPML emitted one outline per successful feed discovery. But multiple bookmarks on the same site normally resolve to that site's single feed - three articles I saved from one blog are three bookmarks pointing at one feed.xml. So the OPML had duplicates, and any reader importing it would see the same feed listed several times.

This had been latent the whole time. With 33 results, a collision was unlikely enough that I never saw it. Across 792 bookmarks, 159 feed URLs repeat, which produced 628 outlines for 464 distinct feeds. Fixing the first bug is what made the second one big enough to trip over.

That one's fixed too now - keep the first result for each feed URL, so the htmlUrl a reader displays stays stable between runs.

Anyway

Nice to solve a mystery, even if it's one I set for myself months ago. 464 feeds, and my reading list is nice and noisy again.

The thing I keep turning over is how comfortable the failure was. A crashed cronjob would have gotten my attention in a day. A cronjob that succeeds, exits zero, logs a cheerful total_fetched, and produces a slightly smaller OPML file every week is invisible for a year. The stack never stopped working. It just kept working a little bit less, and I adjusted my expectations to match right along with it.

Which is, come to think of it, exactly Dr. Crusher's problem.

Living in a Smoker

Summer in the Pacific Northwest is back in its "is that smoke or a barbecue?" phase. Waking up to golden-brown skies brings back all the 2020 wildfire PTSD. I spend my mornings refreshing the PurpleAir map to find out if the air outside tastes like a campfire today. Fuzzyspoon and I tried to workshop lyrics to — about the only productive thing you can do when the AQI looks like this.

We're managing with the air purifiers cranking, but honestly I keep thinking of that scene from Spaceballs :

Smart-App Enshittification

My home smart appliances decided to become an ad network. My dishwasher . As jer Raccoon Pool Parties

Out back, our water feature hosted another raccoon-pool-party.mp4

The midnight raccoon pool party.

Cat Quests and Quirks

Inside, Cosmo stares at me with bright yellow eyes like about Minnaloushe: he absolutely loves a breeze. Give that cat a fan or a cranking air conditioner (a necessity with the smoke) and he will just sit there staring straight into it, letting the wind ripple his fur.

On Model Welfare

I read Steve Yegge's essay on

Personally, I don't believe LLMs are sentient. I do think they're like ultimate mechanized improv partners, so their output will ", but I'm not nearly that intimate with my agents. I do try to keep things calm, kind, and blameless though.

Miscellanea

Someone actually emailed me out of the blue asking to buy decafbad.com, which I've held for over 25 years. My counter-offer was simple: I haven't heard back yet, but a man can dream.

Ham Vocke's piece on , arguing that human domain knowledge remains the ultimate bottleneck because pulling the right solution out of the model requires knowing what you actually want.\

I stumbled across a Polygon article on Metroid that was decafclaw and other side projects, and fell down a rabbit hole of game streaming and retro classics.

The Great Cat Parole Experiment

When we last spoke, Minnaloushe was in "cat jail" in my office. Well, the big guy has been on a real journey. After a scuffle that put him back in solitary, he's slowly been earning his freedom. There have been many cycles of , and we're now at a stage of without any bloodshed. It's a relief, honestly.

Of course, a free-roaming Minnaloushe means a new level of chaos. He's a menace who , and generally causes adorable trouble. But he's also a big, goofy bear of a cat and I'm glad to have him out and about now.

A Tattoo for Puck

In the midst of all the cat drama, I got my second tattoo, a memorial for my old friend Puck, who we lost back in 2015. It was done by Shipping, Shipping, Shipping
At some point, I should probably write more about workaday projects. I'm pretty quiet about those. But, it's been a productive few weeks on side projects: I've been banging away on
For decafclaw, there's been a ton of work on improving the scheduling system, fixing bugs in the vault and skill loaders, and generally trying to make the whole system more robust. I even started to tackle the project skill's tendency to hallucinate tools.

For byom-sync, I've been focused on improving purchase link resolution, adding support for RSS feeds, and starting to spec out a "shopping list" feature. It's been a lot, but it's satisfying to see these projects moving forward.

Adventures in Game Streaming

I finally caved and tried out GeForce NOW, and I have to say, it's pretty impressive. It's led me to rethink my whole living room gaming setup, a project that's been evolving for nearly a decade. The idea of a powerful PC tucked away in the basement, streaming games to any screen in the house via

For those not familiar, Sunshine is a self-hosted, open-source replacement for NVIDIA's now-defunct GameStream, and Moonlight is the open-source client that lets you stream from it. The combination promises a high-performance, low-latency experience. Might just be the end of an era for my dedicated living room gaming PC.

Miscellanea
- I watched a raccoon have a full-on pool party in our backyard pond, and I'm not even mad.
  
  raccoon-pond-bandit.mp4
  The pond bandit returns.
- I also bookmarked Tiago Forte's guide on .
- A few more interesting reads from the past few weeks: , a call to action from Jeffrey Zeldman on the importance of owning your own content.
- I also bookmarked which has some great tips on speeding up CI, and a post about and byom/mixtapes rabbit hole kept swallowing me whole (cover art, mosaic hero images, virtualizing an 8000-track playlist, npm releases, Navidrome and Plex playback), starnet sprouted a Quality-Based Narrative epic, and I fell down a gacha-game reorientation hole and an Oxford-comma nerdsnipe hole in the same week.
  
  The tiger is out
  
  When I left off last week, Minnaloushe — a.k.a. "the Hunk," so named because : jump on top of my office door, then from there jump through the gap above the five-foot pet gate in the doorway. He did it twice, and then I caught him doing the jump math and butt wiggles for a third go. Certainly not a dumb critter.
  
  By the weekend I had to concede the point entirely, with apologies to Nael, grade 1, whose I have never been able to get out of my head:
  
  The tiger He destroyed his cage Yes YES The tiger is out
  
  Between jailbreaks, he kept himself busy being a menace to my desk specifically. I turned around one afternoon to find him (twice), buried his head in a foam pumpkin to stretched across the keyboards and monitors like he pays rent here.
  
  The freedom tour did not last. There was Is this a music blog now?
  The mixtapes project I started last week refused to let go. What began as "somewhere to stash my playlists off Spotify" has, over the course of the week, . to the availability prescan so it isn't frantically checking 8000 tracks you'll never scroll to.
- Cover art and mosaic heroes. byom-sync now out of the album art it does have. The index and playlist pages look a lot less like a spreadsheet now.
- It plays my own music. Even though it defaults to pulling audio from YouTube, I got it
The rest of the week was the unglamorous tail of shipping something: I Back on my gamedev bullshit, quality edition
starnet, the long-simmering cyberpunk netrunning RPG, got some attention too. Last week's exploit-barrage mini-game landed a follow-up ( — StoryNexus-style storylets, driven by facts accumulated over a run. If you've ever played Fallen London and wondered how the story keeps reshuffling itself around what you've done, that's the machinery I'm trying to build a version of. It's the connective tissue that could turn a pile of mini-games into an actual game. We'll see.

The live-service reorientation problem

I spent a chunk of the week trying to climb back into a couple of gacha games and bouncing right back off. I fired up Zenless Zone Zero again after loving it last summer and thought: when what I actually needed was a "here's WTF you were doing last time" reorientation.

That's the recurring trap with these free-to-play things: they're — and which had a genuinely wild rather than upgrade a six-year-old GPU — I know cloud gaming is "how they get ya," but my internet is good and I'd rather make a few extra mortgage payments. Less happily, the Xbox controller I use has become Miscellanea
Wrapping up

Not a bad week: a cat who has evidently decided that walls are a suggestion, a side project that keeps threatening to become a real thing, and enough good reading to keep my "gardener, not tenant" convictions well-watered. On the quieter side, my therapist byom-sync and byom-player). Plus more starnet gamedev (an exploit-barrage mini-game with a Butterchurn "brain damage" overlay), I finally ditched Disqus for remark42 after almost 20 years, and Minnaloushe is inching toward parole from cat jail.

Minnaloushe makes parole soon?

Minnaloushe has been in cat jail for about a month now, behind a tall gate in my office while we reboot the introduction process. He's still got a couple weeks left, though and said "that's incredibly sweet of you to say and I'm glad to be here with you." So, you know, maybe Skynet will go easy on me.

Somewhere to stash my mixtapes

So, I made a thing this week: , a little thing that watches what's playing at bigsonicheaven.com and appends new songs to a Spotify playlist.

Along the way I .

All of this jibes with what a bookmark I saved this week names outright: Back on my gamedev bullshit

starnet, my long-simmering cyberpunk netrunning RPG, got some more attention too. This week I was exploit-barrage.mp4

The exploit barrage in motion: belts of exploits orbiting a target node while its shields wear down.

There's a target node in the center, surrounded by defensive shields. Orbiting the target are a couple of concentric belts of exploits you've queued up. When the barrage starts, the shields wear down, your exploits occasionally get burned or disclosed or used up, and a detection-risk "noise" level climbs.

I'm who's been pushing their luck. There's a whole trove of

Disqus, gone after 20 years

This felt overdue: after almost 20 years, I

The final straw was they turned on

Complete garbage. I mean, sure, I was freeloading comments off Disqus most of this time. But inserting ads for vitamin supplements and crypto scams and boner pills on my blog is unacceptable. That convinced me to get over the hump of figuring out self-hosting, rather than pony up for a paid plan.

The part I'm quietly pleased about is that I got the Remark42 comments to did a lot of the heavy lifting there. Still on my wishlist: figuring out whether there's Miscellanea

I printed has space in the base for metal weights so it doesn't topple over. #gamedad
The raccoon is back. raccoon-return.mp4
The pond bandit, returned from a month's absence and back on the electrical cords.

A cluster of "the AI bill is coming due" reading this week: after AI failed the quality checks ("Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence... that would produce a high-quality product"), and after assuming they could replace workers for free, which, hah.

Two on the state of gaming as a business: , which is a genuinely sad read about hemorrhaging not just people but the trust and momentum that make good teams.

, which lets an agent see how your code actually renders in the browser.

The EFF wrote a nice reminder that

A small, sharp piece of advice: : "The surest way to ruin an engineering team is to believe it will survive whatever you do to it."

Conan O'Brien

Podcast-wise it was a good week for retro and sci-fi: the Retro Hour on the , Aftermath Hours on the slow death of as a new kind of grief.

Songs that were stuck in my head, for the record: Parralox's , Battery's cover of Depeche Mode's "Shame" (), and, unfortunately right before bed, the hyperactive

None of this was especially planned. A dead Spotify playlist cap turned into two new repos, a game about breaking into computers grew a way to render brain damage, and my blog quietly shed a service it had carried since roughly the Bush administration. That's about the right ratio of accident to intent for a good week around here.

Minnaloushe in cat jail (2026 Week 27)

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 19:00:00 GMT

TL;DR: This week saw Minnaloushe's 'cat jail' reintroduction process, deep dives into live-coding music with strudel.cc (including a cover!), and a major overhaul of the starnet project's audio engine and core mechanics. Plus, reflections on the web's evolution, LLMs, and other miscellanea.

Minnaloushe in cat jail

Minnaloushe has been in so far, with Cosmo still showing a desire to be friends. We're hoping the gate is tall enough to prevent any escapes, even from a Live-Coding Music with Strudel.cc

I've been really digging into of the intro to "Stripdown" by Agent Side Grinder, which has been stuck in my head for weeks. You can check out my

blog.lmorchard.com

Fediverse Oracles, Feedspools, and street plums (Catching up: August 7 – August 28)

10 PRINT Backgrounds and Infrastructure

Bring Your Own Music (BYOM) Updates

Of Plums

Remember Me: The Case of the Vanishing Feeds

Rube Goldberg feed reader

The quiet

The bug behind the bug

Anyway

Living in a Smoker

Smart-App Enshittification

Cat Quests and Quirks

On Model Welfare

Miscellanea

The Great Cat Parole Experiment

A Tattoo for Puck

Adventures in Game Streaming

Miscellanea

The tiger is out

The live-service reorientation problem

Wrapping up

Minnaloushe makes parole soon?

Somewhere to stash my mixtapes

Disqus, gone after 20 years

Minnaloushe in cat jail (2026 Week 27)

Minnaloushe in cat jail