Minor Feedbin RSS Bug?

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I think I just uncovered a minor bug in Feedbin‘s RSS parsing.

I used some inline CSS to flip an emoji upside-down in a recent blog post, but it’s displaying right side up in Feedbin (and therefore in NetNewsWire, so at first I thought it was a bug there, but if I let NNW read the RSS directly instead of pulling from Feedbin, it displays the inverted emoji properly).)

Screenshot showing the inverted emoji on my website on the left and right side up in Feedbin on the right.

I’ve confirmed that the inline CSS is present in the raw RSS feed (which makes sense, since it displays properly when loaded directly in NNW).

Screenshot of the proper HTML/CSS in the RSS feed as seen in BBEdit.

But when I use Safari’s inspector to peek at the HTML that Feedbin is rendering, though the span tag is there, the style argument with the inline CSS has been stripped out.

Screenshot of the HTML as served by Feedbin showing a span tag with no arguments.

Is this a bug? Or is Feedbin intentionally stripping inline CSS style declarations out for some reason?

Simple Sabotage Field Manual by the United States Office of Strategic Services

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Book 11 of 2025: Simple Sabotage Field Manual by the United States Office of Strategic Services: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

A fascinating little World War II artifact that in some ways can still be quite relevant. Sure, much of this is very much of its time, and many of the more specific suggestions are technologically obsolete now. But the broad strokes, and especially the oft-screenshotted section advising office workers on ways to slow down beaurocratic functions, are as useful today as ever. If, of course, you ever happen to find yourself in a situation where an autocratic fascist regime is in power and you have reason and opportunity to do what you can to gum up the works. (Ahem.)

Me holding the Simple Sabotage Field Manual on my iPad

Indiginerds edited by Alina Pete

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Book 10 of 2025: Indiginerds edited by Alina Pete: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

A short but very solid anthology of comics dealing with the intersection of modern indigenous life and nerd interests. Several good stories in here; my personal favorite is Alina Pete’s “Dorvan V”, addressing Star Trek TNG’s colonialist underpinnings and how one fan’s relationship with it changes over their life.

Me holding Indiginerds

Weekly Notes: Feb 10-16, 2025

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  • 🤬 Facebook is in one of its occasional moods where it decides that as a 51 year old white male, I should be served ads for guns, holsters, body armor, ultra-right-wing religious clothing, and erectile dysfunction pills. I hide ’em all, and they’ll cycle out eventually (at least, they always have in the past), but it’s always annoying when this happens. (No unsolicited advice about how to “fix” this, please. I’ve heard it all.)

  • 🥶 So tired of the cold and snow. I do have to say, what I originally thought was just a silly joke a few weeks ago got us thinking, and y’know…hot water bottles come in really handy in weather like this! Thankfully, it looks like we’ll be warming up enough to get rain for the next week. I’ll take it!

  • 🇺🇸 I’m not going to get too much into it, but I continue to be amazed at how quickly and thoroughly our government is being dismantled. As I grumbled elsewhere, if I’m going to be forced to live in a world with a megalomaniacal tech billionaire doing everything he can to tear down the world’s superpowers for his own benefit, can I at least get James Bond to swoop in and save the day, please?

📸 Photos

Framed by silhouetted tres, the full moon sets in a sky shading from light blue to pink over the pink-tinted snowcapped Olympic mountains across the water of the Puget sound.

The moon setting over the Olympic mountains one morning before work.

A wooden bench in front of some winter vegetation. Graffiti sprayed on the backrest of the bench says 'me' on the left side and 'you' on the right side.

Amusing (Valentine’s Day inspired, perhaps?) graffiti seen this morning on a bench along the Soos Creek trail.

📚 Reading

Finished the last of this year’s Philip K. Dick Award nominated works, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Alien Clay.

📺 Watching

Wrapped up season 16 of Drag Race (my favorite didn’t win, but I’m fine with the winner), and decided to take a slight break from Evil to get caught up with Law & Order and Law & Order: SVU. While season five of Scrubs still lands pretty solidly mostly in the “pleasantly distracting amusement” category, their homage to The Wizard of Oz is still a standout episode.

🎧 Listening

  • A few weeks ago I picked up the Resurgence compilation from Spleen+, and it’s really strong. I’m a big fan of compilations, but they’re often very hit-and-miss; while that’s certainly true for this one as well, the ratio of hit to miss is really good here.

    Embark on a sonic journey with “Resurgence”, the latest conceptual release from Brussels-based Spleen+ (a division of Alfa Matrix). This deluxe collector’s edition brings together 133 active bands from across the globe, spanning the diverse sub-genres born from post-punk’s iconic roots. Spread over an impressive 7-CD collection, this box set captures the essence of a movement that has influenced generations of music, art, and culture.

  • Soft Cell will be touring through Seattle in May (along with Simple Minds and Modern English), and while that’s a really good and very tempting lineup, I decided to go to Underworld (also in May) instead. However, that did lead me to digging through Soft Cell’s website, where I found that they’d recently released a very nice six-disc box set reissue of Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret that I picked up. It arrived this week, and so for the past few days, that’s about all I’ve been listening to.

🔗 Linking

  1. Marcin Wichary: The hardest working font in Manhattan

    A lot of typography has roots in calligraphy – someone holding a brush in their hand and making natural but delicate movements that result in nuanced curves filled with thoughtful interchanges between thin and thick. Most of the fonts you ever saw follow those rules; even the most “mechanical” fonts have surprising humanistic touches if you inspect them close enough.

    But not Gorton. Every stroke of Gorton is exactly the same thickness (typographers would call such fonts “monoline”). Every one of its endings is exactly the same rounded point. The italic is merely an oblique, slanted without any extra consideration, and while the condensed version has some changes compared to the regular width, those changes feel almost perfunctory.

    Monoline fonts are not respected highly, because every type designer will tell you: This is not how you design a font.

  2. Ex Urbe: History’s Largest & Most Famous Disability Access Ramp

    Time for the largest, most famous disability access ramp in the world, paired with a twist about how our feelings about a piece of history can reverse completely based, not just on the historian’s point of view, but what questions we start with.

  3. The Braille Institute has updated their excellent Atkinson Hyperlegible font to add two more versions.

  4. Washington state Republicans have introduced a bill to get rid of voting by mail (bill info, current bill text (PDF)). This would have no substantive effect on safety or security, but would disenfranchise many voters and would make voting much more difficult for many more. Please voice your opposition to this bill and help protect voting by mail.

  5. Seventeen states (and no surprises as to which: Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia) are suing to get rid of Section 504, which would remove all protections for disabled people. The link has more information on the case and pointers for how people in those states can contact their state Attorneys General to urge them to drop out of the case.

  6. A few software things that I’d like to see if I can find time to play with at some point:

    1. FreshRSS is a self-hosted RSS aggregator that can serve as a backend to NetNewsWire.

    2. linkding is a self-hosted bookmark service like the old del.icio.us.

    3. Both are supported by PikaPods, which looks to be a reasonably priced way to bridge the gap between where I am (I understand what the above software packages do and would like to use them) and what’s necessary to use them (self-hosting has moved on from LAMP setups and now tends to require Docker setups, which I vaguely understand but don’t know how to use and which aren’t supported by my Dreamhost account anyway).

    4. And if I could get linkding up and running, I’d love to figure out how to hack into the old Postalicious WordPress plugin so that I could get it working with modern WordPress and linkding and finally satisfy my long-dormant urge to get my old linkblog posts up and running again. Realistically, I probably don’t have the PHP/programming knowledge/time to manage it, but a guy can dream, right?

Weekly Notes: Getting Started

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So I noticed Cygnoir do one of these, and I really liked the template, and thought (as she did) that it might be a good way to help me reboot my blogging habits. So here we are! My thanks to Cygnoir (and to Jedda for inspiring her) for the template and inspiration!

  • 🌨️ This week’s weather meant that we ended up with one full snow day and two late-start half days…with an end result of the week just being weird and not feeling as productive as usual.
  • ♿️ I’ve gotten started on my Section 508 Trusted Tester certification training. In theory, you have 180 days to finish this program; I’m approaching it as “180 days or until the current administration gets around to pulling the plug” and doing my best to get through as quickly as possible. Hopefully because this program is hosted under Homeland Security it won’t be in the crosshairs as soon as others, but we’ll see….
  • 🚀 Norwescon and Seattle Worldcon 2025 planning continue to move right along.
    • We’re just about two months out from Norwescon, so this is when website updates start to ramp up, I start spending more time making sure my laptop music library is ready to go, and I make sure everything is set for the Philip K. Dick Award ceremony. There’s always something to do.
    • Worldcon is still about six months out, and I have less to do there, but there’s still a pretty reasonable constant stream of stuff, with website updates and queuing up posts for the con’s blog once they’re edited and signed off on.

📸 Photos

Not much of a week for photos. But since this is my first time doing one of these weekly notes, here’s a simple one from last week, showing my current set of laptop stickers.

The top of lid of a MacBook Pro with six stickers: A rainbow A11Y, the United Federation of Planets seal, Norwescon, a classic ranbow Apple logo, Seattle Worldcon 2025, and Gothic Pride Seattle.

That’s an A11Y (accessibility) sticker I got at this year’s Accessing Higher Ground conference, the seal of the United Federation of Planets, Norwescon, a classic rainbow Apple logo that I’d had stashed away for probably close to two decades (maybe more, I don’t know when they stopped producing these), Seattle Worldcon 2025, and Gothic Pride Seattle.

📝 Writing

📚 Reading

📺 Watching

  • Evil: We’re just starting season three, and continue to really enjoy this show. Smart, creepy, funny.
  • RuPaul’s Drag Race: About midway through last season, and so far Dawn’s my favorite, though I don’t know if they’ll win. Q’s costuming skills are impressive, and Plain Jane is a strong all-arounder (but I can’t stand her attitude).
  • Scrubs: We’re early in season five in our rewatch. When we started the rewatch we were pleasantly surprised at the solidity of the first few seasons; by this point, the show’s pretty much settled into its groove and is generally pleasantly amusing, but not as strong as when it started.
  • NOVA: “Dino Birds”: Neat look at recent science exploring the evolution of birds, their ties to dinosaurs (they are dinosaurs), when flight entered the picture, and so on.

🎧 Listening

  • I now have tickets to see Underworld in May and Nine Inch Nails in August (the night before Worldcon starts). Really looking forward to both, and kind of wishing I could time travel and tell my nin-obsessed 20-something self that it would take 30 years, but I’d finally get to see them live.

  • For Reasons™, I’ve recently added the Chipmunks’ The A Files album to my collection, where they cover a bunch of vaguely SF-themed songs.

    They do a cover of “The Purple People Eater” that I swear sounds like it could have been produced by the same team behind The Rednex’s “Cotton Eye Joe”, and they’d probably mix together disturbingly well.

    “Cotton Eye Joe” is always something of a guilty pleasure (except that I’m not fond of the “guilty pleasure” thing, and prefer to just enjoy things I enjoy without guilt, however cheezy they are), and now I’m sitting here being amused at how catchy The Chipmunks’ “Purple People Eater” is. If you’re into goofy ’90s technopop, it’s better than it has any right to be.

Linking

  1. WSDOT: Brick-by-brick: The quest to get a custom Lego model on a ferry

    Local artist Wayne Hussey is a lifelong Lego lover and architect. One of his creations now lives aboard our ferry Issaquah. Getting it aboard was also quite a puzzle.

  2. Blogroll.club: A categorized list of blogs, in something of a throwback to the “old school” days of blogging. I like that there’s a single RSS feed that aggregates posts from all the blogs in the lineup, and have subscribed to that for a daily selection of posts from random (to me) people. I’ve also submitted Eclecticism to be included whenever they get around to it.
  3. Culture, Digested: Neil Gaiman is an Industry Problem

    Even taking into consideration their years of exploitation and abuse, Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer remain models of artistic success in the 21st century. Gaiman created an extremely sellable brand — affable, “oh goodness,” harmless Britishness wrapped up in a “I have read a lot of books” kind of storytelling — and the publishing industry used that not only to sell a lot of his books but that of his friends as well. Amanda Palmer has crowdsourced her way into a perfect little Patreon pyramid scheme, where all money flows to her and she gives back vibes and requests for domestic labor. This is the ideal artistic arrangement these days, where stars receive 95% of Patreon/Substack/other crowdsourced forms of income and everyone else competes for scraps. Both are reliant on a dedicated, servile audience, willing to turn over their time and bodies and cash to get a piece of that bohemian existence that only millionaires can manage these days. It’s the bohemianism not of Weimar, which Palmer constantly references, but the bohemianism of contemporary Burning Man, full of tech billionaires wearing the worst outfits you’ve ever seen in your life.

Norwescon Thursday Dance Sneak Peek

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Video still showing Star Trek's Enterprise behind graphics of audio being played.

My Thursday night dance at Norwescon is going to have a “Star Trek vs. Star Wars” theme, so I put together a video to play behind me of starship shots from the movies. I alternated clips between franchises, and most of them have been in the 10-20 second range; a few as short as 4, a few as long as 40.

In my alternating, when I made it up to the refit Enterprise reveal in The Motion Picture, you may be surprised to read that I restrained myself, and did not just drop the full eight-minute sequence in there.

Cutting out Kirk and Scotty’s reactions and some shots that are mostly spacedock scaffolding got it down to two minutes, fifty-one seconds.
I’m biased, and I’m not even sorry about it. 😆

Here’s a two-minute sneak peek (originally posted to Facebook, and so is silent so as not to run afoul of their automated audio copyright bots; feel free to listen to whatever audio you wish as you watch) of my background graphic setup for the Norwescon Thursday night dance. This will be playing on the big projection screen/video wall on the stage behind me.

The background video is 2 hours and 12 minutes of mixed Star Wars and Star Trek spaceship and battle shots (space and space ships only, no on-the-ground battles, so no Hoth or Endor). Two hours of that goes back and forth between Trek and Wars, but the last ten minutes is all Trek, because I was only pulling from the theatrical films, and there are two more Trek films than there are Wars films.

The “vinyl” platters at the top left and right automatically update with the cover art for whatever track is being played, and rotate as if they were actual turntables.

The waveform display at the top is live waveforms of the audio being played; the top waveform is the left turntable, the bottom is the right.

The title and artist of the currently playing track at the bottom automatically update.

The graphics on the t-shirt that the mini-cartoon-me is wearing randomly change every few seconds, with a selection of mostly (but not entirely) Trek or Wars themed images.

Some slightly more technical details for those who may be interested:

All the elements are assembled in OBS, and when I’m DJing, I’ll be pushing that video stream out to the the on-stage screen behind me.

The turntables and audio waveforms are pulled from djay Pro using OBS’s window capture feature, cropping down to the elements I need, playing with the color levels, and adding an alpha channel to turn dark/black pixels transparent. Cover art with dark/black pixels that become transparent is accounted for by placing the turntable graphics over PNGs of black circles to act as “platters” and black out the background video.

The “now playing” text also comes from djay Pro; in this case, djay Pro automatically creates a “now playing” text file, and I tell OBS to read and display that text file.

The Norwescon and DJ Wüdi logos are simple static PNG files.

The cartoon me is a static PNG file with a plain black shirt. I point OBS to a directory with small square white-on-black images that it randomly picks from on a five second rotation to create the “print” on the t-shirt.