Some small OnePo improvements and fixes:

• Making links to other pages the traditional way, via the "link" icon and the dialog box, works again on the iPhone.
• You can also make links by just pasting a link to any page straight into your post, without clicking the link button. When you do that, a nice automatic preview and link appears. We've had this for ages, but there was a dumb bug that broke it for most cases, except YouTube. All fixed. Here's a nice example (and a cool game):

You'll note I didn't have to create any content for that, I just pasted the address of the page straight into this post. This is based on the "open graph" tags that websites already provide for the benefit of Facebook sharing.

• Speaking of the automatic link feature: pasting a URL like that in the middle of your text once again splits the text into two sections, with the link preview in the middle.

As I mentioned, you can still make links the old-fashioned way too.

(At this point I don't care that I'll never be able to buy the domain onepo dot com. I'm still going to call it that, because how can you not?)

Boo: I have paxlovid rebound. I am “screamingly positive” for COVID, much like in this article. It happens.

Yay: the rebound symptoms are mild, as promised. Think “severe allergies.” No one has yet reported serious symptoms during the rebound, and more importantly paxlovid reduces hospitalizations by 90% during the initial course of COVID.

I have to stay isolated for another five days and retest. I’ll live! (Literally)

If you don’t have any risk factors they say you probably don’t need it. I took it because of my asthma and history of difficult flu. That may well have been a super-great decision. I don’t have a control Tom. 🤪

🌠 for anyone who finds themselves facing the “paxlovid or not?” question.

My favorite bit about this story is that the light from this star began its journey 13 billion years ago, but the star is now 28 billion miles away, because the universe kept expanding and we kept on moving apart from one another during those 13 billion years.

Only that's not right, because the star died aeons ago. Stars like our sun live 10 billion years; huge stars like this one are too fast to live, too young to die; they wink out in 10 million years.

So it's more accurate to say the former location of the star is now 28 billion light years away. And no longer part of the "observable universe," because light from where that star is today will never reach us. 28 billion light years = 8584 megaparsecs (yes, I asked google). A galaxy 4,300 megaparsecs away from us is receding from us at the speed of light. Our relative velocity is therefore close to twice the speed of light, which is possible because it's not the velocity of either object relative to a point that isn't moving. And that means light from there will never reach us again.

[Waves goodbye, realizes it's a bit late for that]

Hey gang, sat down to write a post today and pictures were busted; sorry about that. Post tomorrow, got us a fix for uploading pictures today. Enjoy.

Work is currently underway on support for adding alternative text to any image, whether in a post or in a comment. For comments this involves a bit of a design overhaul, so it may be a Minute.

Hi gang,

I saw a couple of friends coping in a DIY way with a possible bug today (tough to say at this point), and it prompted some thoughts about how little attention I've given the platform in a long time. My last push to the server was... cough... two and a half years ago.

In a way this is not such a bad thing. Hey, it works!

But there's a lot that could be improved, and long-running bugs that haven't received attention (notifications for your own replies, anyone?), and believe it or not I'm still interested in the question of whether I did everything I could to make it easy for folks to onboard and, yes, grow the site.

But of course there's very little time.

Meanwhile... recently in another context I was facing pleas to do more in a space that's outside of my more essential responsibilities from day to day. I am very well supported at work. But as in any workplace there are gotta-haves, wanna-haves and really-oughta-haves and it can be tough to juggle them.

So I struggled to organize this really-ought-have stuff as a Project. But a Project implies a Budget and Time and there is no budget or pre-scheduled time for that particular thing right now (darn those pesky gotta-haves). That meant everything I was writing felt like a recipe for stress.

I felt stuck, and anxious.

Then I noticed a kanban board feature in our internal wiki and deliberately created an itty-bitty kanban board to track progress in that particular arena.

When I was asked if I wanted to turn it into a Project instead... I said "nope!" Because the medium is the message. Project = Milestones. Schedule. Release Dates. Time Pressure. All of which are appropriate when resources are available, and needlessly stressful when they are not.

But a kanban board says "hey... this is the art of the possible! Nibble at it. Bash at it. Occasionally really go at it. You'll get there."

My kanban board at work turned out very well and I'm still using it to nibble away at the oughta-have thing I can only work on occasionally.

So in the same spirit, I plan to set up a kanban board for One Post Wonder.

And today, in that kanban spirit, I did three itty bitty things to move the ball forward:

1. The "submit a bug" button just sends me a damn email. It used to post an issue to my github project, which was too clever by half. I didn't get any notifications, I didn't pay attention and you probably felt neglected. I'm sorry about that. This should be better.

2. I fixed an issue that caused gmail to reject some emails from One Post Wonder. There are services you can pay to deliver your emails reliably. Cost aside, I feel it's important that we try to maintain independence in this area. Even though it's a pain in the ass and an ever-moving target.

3. I changed the welcome message you see when you sign up from "each day, post a carefully curated sonnet concerning the state of world affairs or you will be punished with lasers" (*) to this:

"It doesn't matter if it's a cat picture, a duck joke or a column worthy of Alexandra Petri."

I think this is way more welcoming, and I hope it will encourage people to feel like it's OK to just chill here. Lord knows I do. Shitpost away, everyone. You just can't do it more than once a day.

(*) It didn't really say that. It was far more well-intentioned but still kinda intimidating.

Ingredients

In the pan

2 14 oz bricks extra firm tofu, chopped into 1/2" cubes or so

8 white button mushrooms, quartered

1 medium tomato, cut in eighths

Dressing

2 carrots, peeled and chopped in chunks

1 stalk celery, chopped in chunks

1/4 cup almonds

2 tsp balsamic vinegar

1/4 cup chopped cilantro and basil

1 cup water, or so

1 tablespoon curry powder or paprika

Place the tofu, mushrooms and tomato in a broiling pan. Don't use pyrex. It'll go BOOM. Maybe not the first time, but eventually. Ask me how I know.

Start preheating the oven to 425 degrees fahrenheit.

Puree the dressing in a food processor or vitamix blender. I use the smoothie setting on the vitamix.

Pour the dressing evenly over the contents of the pan, taking care not to spill over the edges. You might wind up setting some dressing aside for salad purposes.

Shake a little more curry powder or paprika on top.

Bake for 30 minutes at 425 degrees, then broil on high for 20 minutes, or until the tops of the tofu have a bit of yummy black char. Be prepared to placate your smoke detector.

I know, I know. Banh mi literally means "bread" in Vietnamese. But we mostly steer clear of bread as a staple food, and we love banh mi. So I came up with this.

I've read that in Vietnam banh mi sandwiches are stuffed with all kinds of things. Even ice cream. Whereas I'm sure the usual filling, served as a salad, has a name of its own. But I don't know it, so.

Whatever, this is delicious.

Ingredients

• 2 heads lettuce, chopped
• 3-4 stalks of green onion, chopped
• A chopped garlic scape (green stalk) or two, if you have 'em
• 1 sliced carrot
• 1 14 oz box firm tofu, cubed
• Sliced mushrooms
• Fistful of arugula
• 1/2 cup chopped cilantro
• Fresh basil, if you've got it
• 1 red bell pepper
• 6 tablespoons rice vinegar (it matters)
• 2 tablespoons Bragg's liquid aminos (or a smaller amount of soy sauce)
• 1 date, chopped (to balance the acid; or use hoisin sauce and ditch the Bragg's)
• A generous shake of paprika
• Black pepper to taste
• Toss in some sesame seeds

Combine and serve.

Rice vinegar seems to be the real "I am eating Vietnamese food" taste signal here, along with the cilantro.

Feel free to sub in actual onions, actual garlic, jalapenos, etc. according to your digestive capabilities.

The above would also be bangin' on actual baguette I'm sure, particularly with a little mayo. Also I haven't tried cucumber yet, which is definitely canonical.

The Kilobyte's Gambit is a lovely mashup of a chess engine in 1K of JavaScript, plus awesome CGA retro pixel art. I love it.

Kicked my ass immediately, I’m not good at chess. A friend of mine in college used to say, regarding vegetarianism, that he wouldn’t eat anything that could beat him at chess. I found this worrisome.

It also reminds me of this:

Atari 2600 Video Chess! This was chess in 4K of 6502 assembly language, on a machine with only 128 bytes of RAM that was only really capable of displaying three, maybe six objects per line on the screen, and that only with tricky programming. If you look closely, you’ll see that the chess pieces are drawn on alternating lines to get around this limitation. Apparently it played decent chess.

Before we hand the OG Atari developers the tiny-chess-program crown, though, the author of the 1K JavaScript chess engine has also written a 326-byte chess game for DOS, as well as... a 1K chess cartridge for the Atari 2600. Yes, it flickers a lot, but hey.

So many props given. Two summers ago I wrote an AI checkers game of my own, using the minimax algorithm. It wasn't terribly good at checkers and it sure wasn't 1K of JavaScript. To be fair, it was also readable code.

I just renewed onepostwonder.com for three more years. 🎂

Every few years I reach out to the guy who owns onepo.com. He always says no. I have made some credible offers. That's cool, the man likes his domain.

I should really take "beta" off the site, huh.