I maintain two emails over at The New Leaf Journal. My site administrator email is info [at] newleafjournal. It largely exists to receive spam emails. A certain gentleman purportedly from Qatar Energy sent me the following email:

Dearest  info,

I am [REDACTED], Manager of Finance and Accounts, at Qatar Energy. I have 
$100m for Investment.

Contact me if you are interested, I have all it will take to move the fund to 
you as a contract fund to avoid every query.

I will give you more details upon receipt of your response.

Regards,
[REDACTED].
Finance and Account,
Qatar Energy.

This email bothers me. Why did he not capitalize “Info”?  If my name is Info now, he ought to capitalize it. The spammer also spammed my naferrell at newleafjournal email. That one led with Dearest naferrell.  I respect creative spam. This is just trash.

If you have a WordPress site, you can subscribe to yourself on Minds and Minds will recognize your WordPress account as a follower. In order to this, you need the ActivityPub and Friends plugins, both available in the regular WordPress plugin repos

After both are configured, go into your Friends admin menu and add a new friend. Add your Minds account in the following format:

@[username]@minds.com

From the WordPress side, you can “subscribe” to your Minds account. I checked from the Minds side and it recognized my WordPress site as a new subscriber/follower.

Caveat: There is a quirk with multi-user WordPress sites. I set my default user on my site to my administrator account (not hidden in this case so not a big deal) and subscribed with my user account. From the Minds side, it recognizes admin account as subscriber even though from the WordPress side I subscribed as user.

RSS? (Evan Sheehan)
RSS can even become a burden. A feed reader is another inbox, and like all inboxes you have very little control over how much stuff gets put in there. The more feeds to which you subscribe, or the more prolific some of the authors are, the more of a commitment opening your feed reader becomes.

I came across an interesting blog post by Evan Sheeran noting that it is easy for to become overwhelmed by new feed articles using an RSS/ATOM Feed Reader. He stated that “[t]he more feeds to which you subscribe, or the more prolific some of the authors are, the more of a commitment opening your feed reader becomes.” I recommend reading his original post where he considers what an alternative may look like. For anyone facing similar issues, I also recommend my own recent article on organizing feeds. I separate feeds by update frequency, with the three main grounds being Daily, Weekly, and Sporadic. Separating feeds with less frequent updates makes it easier to stay abreast of their new posts. I also linked to other systems for organizing feeds since my method works for my feed collection, but may not make sense for every feed collection. In using a feed reader or RSS/ATOM feeds generally, I encourage people to ask themselves why they are doing so. I use a feed reader and read-it-later tools so I can collect articles and media from websites and bloggers I want to follow without needing to go to each site individually or outsource my reading to an algorithm. To the extent I organize my feed reading so I never end up with 2,000 unread articles, it is so that I can keep tabs on good internet writing. As I noted in my feed organizing survey, not everyone has the exact same goal or style that I do. Understanding your purpose in organizing feeds goes a long way toward keeping your feed reader from being overrun (for lack of a better term).

Tree Style Tab Issue by Nicholas A. FerrellNicholas A. Ferrell
I had been using Tree Style Tab for side-tabs on Firefox along with a userChrome.css file to remove the top bar. I was surprised to find when I opened Firefox this morning that Tree Style Tabs was not working. Instead of checking its GitHub repository, where I would have found the issue, I tried to ...

I use side tabs with my Firefox set up. I briefly switched from Tree Style Tab to Sidebery when Tree Style Tab had an update issue. I was impressed with Sidebery and it comes with more power features than Tree Style Tab out of the box (It also does a better job of clearly showing nested links). However, I opted to switch back to TST when the developer expeditiously fixed the issue with a new update. Why? Firstly, while I was impressed with Sidebery, it does not do anything beyond TST that I need. Secondly, TST can take on my theme for its coloring and I like my theme.

Minds to Mastodon by Nicholas A. FerrellNicholas A. Ferrell
I have a social media account on Minds. Minds added ActivityPub support not too long ago. I had been able to follow my Minds account from Mastodon and follow my Mastodon account from Minds. However, posts were not showing up in either case. Today, I was surprised to discover my most recent Minds pos...

I wrote a post a few days ago about how my Minds posts are now visible from my Mastodon instance. I noted one issue, however. Minds has a praiseworthy set up where users can add hashtags separate from the post. I noted that I liked the set up last year on The New Leaf Journal, and Minds subsequently improved it by making the hashtags visible while still separating from the post. However, Minds has always allowed people to put the hashtags in the body of the post similarly to other social media platforms and software. When using Minds’ method for separating hashtags from the post body, the hashtags are invisible on Mastodon (I have not tested on any other ActivityPub-based clients). I tried writing my hashtags into the body of a Minds post and they carried over to Mastodon as expected. Consider this something to keep in mind if you use Minds and have followers on Mastodon or similar Fediverse networks.

Linking by Jeremy Keith (adactio.com)
A collection of hyperlinks to collections of hyperlinks.

I came across a good post with links to bloggers who share links on Jeremy Keith’s website, adactio.com. I added the adactio links feed along with a few of the link feeds noted in the post to the Links category of my personal feed collection. I may start sharing a few links each day here at The Emu Café Social, but note that I share 21 external links from around the web (with commentary) in each edition of my Saturday New Leaf Journal newsletter, The Newsletter Leaf Journal (note you can subscribe to the newsletter via RSS). In fact, I should organize the hundreds of links I share from my newsletter into a public Git repository before I start any new projects…

I use Xfce as the desktop environment on my workstation. I have read some complaints that Xfce is dated compared to GNOME, KDE Plasma, and other newer and shinier desktop environments, but I disagree. Xfce looks slick with a good theme (the Linux distribution I use, EndeavourOS, comes with a nice Xfce spin out of the box). But even if you think Xfce old and best used with an AmigaOS or Windows 95 theme, there is something to be said for heritage. I learned recently that Xfce traces its origins to the Roman Empire from a report in Atlas Obscura titled For Sale: A Mouse-Infested Roman Helmet That’s Stumping Historians. The subject of the report is a decorative Roman helmet that has two mice on the back. Historians are stumped, but I immediately recognized that the mice look very much like the Xfce logo. Switch to Xfce and use the desktop environment endorsed by Emperor Antoninus Pius. While the helmet sold for $1.2 million, Xfce is 100% free as in free coffee and open source.

I have a social media account on Minds. Minds added ActivityPub support not too long ago. I had been able to follow my Minds account from Mastodon and follow my Mastodon account from Minds. However, posts were not showing up in either case. Today, I was surprised to discover my most recent Minds post in my Mastodon timeline, which I promptly boosted.

Nicholas A. Ferrell's boosted post from minds.com in his Mastodon timeline on linuxrocks.online.
See it on Minds: https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/1599828018962894868

I have two outstanding issues. Firstly, my Mastodon posts are still not being picked on Minds. Secondly, Minds hashtags are not being picked up by Mastodon. However, I am using Minds’ nice method for adding hashtags instead of writing them directly into the post. I will write some hashtags into the post body to see if those carry over to Mastodon. While I would like to see Minds add support for RSS/ATOM feeds, its ActivityPub and separate NOSTR implementations show a good commitment to federation.

Writing Prompt: What anime did you start the new year with? by Yomu (Umai Yomu Anime Blog)
Or if you haven’t watched any yet in 2024, I guess what anime will you start with? Surely anyone reading this has watched something though, right?

Yomu at the Umai Yomu Anime Blog asked readers to answer the following question:  What anime did you start the new year with? The first anime I watched in 2024 was actually a 2023 series: BanG Dream! It’s MyGo!!!!! Two factors came together to make that 2023 musical melodrama my first anime of the new year.

First, I had started working on my long 2023 anime year-in-review article for The New Leaf Journal in late December. My year-in-review features a list of my top-six series of the previous year. I had considered publishing it in late December, but I had multiple projects in the works so I delayed it until the first week of January. I then became sick in late December and my ill health trickled into the first few days of 2024. Being sick and not having work assignments, I had little to do. I had read some positive reviews of BanG Dream! It’s MyGo!!!!! and, after confirming that familiarity with the BanG Dream! franchise was not a prerequisite to entry (I had no prior familiarity), I decided to spend some of my sick hours watching the series to see what the fuss was about and make sure that I covered all the bases I wanted to cover for my 2023 anime review article. While it is far from perfect, it impressed me enough  to earn the fourth spot on my final anime of the year ranking, which made me delete a section that I had written for (former) sixth place The Angel Next Door Spoils Me Rotten (that one still has its full-length review, however).

tab bar not finishing loading with latest .21 update · Issue #3440 · piroor/treestyletab by piroor (GitHub)
tab bar not finishing loading with latest 3.9.21 update solution: reinstalling 3.9.20 everything is fine again Details many open tabs 500+ (but was never before a problem) latest firefox beta 123.04

I had been using Tree Style Tab for side-tabs on Firefox along with a userChrome.css file to remove the top bar. I was surprised to find when I opened Firefox this morning that Tree Style Tabs was not working. Instead of checking its GitHub repository, where I would have found the issue, I tried to fix it myself and in the process, inadvertently reset my Firefox display settings (separate from my user.js). I decided to switch to Sidebery while the issue with TST is being resolved. While I found TST to be a bit prettier, I like some features that Sidebery comes with such as multi-level nesting. I may stick with it for a bit and see how it goes.

Google vs HN at the NLJ (1) by Nicholas A. FerrellNicholas A. Ferrell (The Emu Café Social)
As of the evening of January 18, 2024, we are on pace to have more Google referrals this month (according to Koko Analytics, which I also use here) than Hacker News referrals.

I have been busy with New Leaf Journal and law work as of late, but I return to The Emu Café Social with a fun New Leaf Journal update. As of the afternoon of January 29, 2023, we have more Google referrals at The New Leaf Journal than Hacker News referrals despite our fairly high Hacker News page 1 appearance earlier in the month. It took a record Google month to do it, but is another sign things are looking up in terms of New Leaf Journal notoriety after struggling for much of 2023 with our arbitrary Bing ban.

Over at The New Leaf Journal, my January 5, 2024 article, which was about drug-enhanced professional cycling results, became the sixth New Leaf Journal article (going back to February 2021) to appear on Hacker News page 1 (only after a stop in The Browser newsletter). It reached as high as 11th on HN and was our fourth-strongest Hacker News article of the six that made page one. The page 1 run dissipated, but it left behind one encouraging point about NLJ’s notoriety. As of the evening of January 18, 2024, we are on pace to have more Google referrals this month (according to Koko Analytics, which I also use here) than Hacker News referrals. It will take a record Google month for us to do it, but we should make it by the 29th or 30th. While I am not a Google fan and only use Google Search via Startpage, I am a proponent on making it possible for people to find writing of interest with whatever search engine or front-end they prefer.