Jeremy Keith writes of issues with Safari, video and service workers, and in doing so helped to solve a perplexing mystery for me: a while ago I noticed that videos I posted here, like, say, the one in this post, would no longer play in Safari. Firefox, Chrome, Brave, and everything else I tried, played the video. But not Safari.

It turns out that a combination–fortuitously the same combination Jeremy encountered–of videos hosted on Amazon S3, service workers, and Safari causes an issue with the video playback. Jeremy pointed to this post from Phil Nash that got to the bottom of the issue:

Some time passes and you deploy a video to your site. Everything is still working well in Chrome, in Firefox, in Edge. You check Safari. The video is broken. You don’t know what’s gone wrong.

…

I first thought it could have something to do with the CDN I’m using. There were some false positives regarding streaming video through a CDN that resulted in some extra research that was ultimately fruitless. Once I’d exhausted that line of inquiry I went back to the failing request.

Observing the request in Safari’s inspector lead to further trawling the internet and eventually things started to add up. Safari was sending an initial request to fetch the video with a Range header set to bytes=0-1. You see, Safari requires HTTP servers that are serving video and audio to support Range requests like this.

The solution Jeremy suggested–instructing the service worker to ignore MP4 files–was one easily implemented here in Drupal, where I’m using the Progressive Web App module: on the service worker settings page (/admin/config/system/pwa/serviceworker), add this pattern to the “Exclude URL patterns” field:

\.(mp4)$

Bump up the “Cache version” field at the bottom of the settings by one, flush the Drupal cache for good measure and, ta-da, videos now play in Safari.

From David Noel’s Friday’s Five newsletter, a photo of a Vitra “manifesto” about workplaces. My favourite is “nowhere.”

(If you are ever in metropolitan Basel, a visit to Vitra is a must).

Ton asks “What do you use for bookmarking? How do you use bookmarks?”

I have three systems I’ve settled into.

Email myself a link

When I’m reading an article on my mobile that I want to return to in the very near future to read more completely, I email the URL to myself using the built-in Android share-by-email feature. This isn’t elegant, but it puts the URL in my email inbox, where there’s no question that I’ll see it.

FreshRSS Favourites

When I’m scanning my RSS feeds, on either desktop or mobile, using FreshRSS, and I come across something I want to make a point of returning to, but not necessarily immediately, I use the built-in FreshRSS favourites system (tap the star in the header of any item). I make a point of reviewing this section every couple of days. This is the system closest to using Instapaper or Pocket, both of which I’ve tried in the past; the advantage it has for me over those approaches is that because it’s integrated into my feedreader, I don’t have another place to go looking for these items.

Nextcloud Bookmarks

On the desktop, when I encounter something that I want to be able to reference in the medium-to-long term future, rather than read in the near future, I use the Nextcloud Bookmarks app, running on my self-hosted Nextcloud instance, via a bookmarklet in my browser toolbar. This app has been updated recently to include a more visual interface; this is certainly more pleasing to look at, but is overkill for my use (and it’s also rendered the tag editor a little buggy). This is the system closest to what I used to use Pinboard and Delicious for; they were both useful and full-featured, but they weren’t owned-and-operated, which is why I migrated. I only rarely miss the social features of those systems.

To be honest, bookmarking things in this way is most useful in the mechanism it provides for assuaging “I should really bookmark this” feeling, in the moment, rather than for any practical utility it affords in the actual medium-to-long term future. I have found it a useful way to collect links to hotels, restaurants and other places I want to visit (I’ve got a very rich “Berlin” tag in this regards).

My bookmarking hygiene is nowhere near as rich as Ton’s; it seems that it’s “saving a list of things to see in Berlin” is the area of greatest overlap.

A couple of months ago at Pen Night we received a tutorial on converting fountain pens to become “eyedropper pens,” where the entire barrel of the pen is used to hold the ink, rather than a cartridge or converter. The benefit of this conversion is a pen that can hold much more ink; good for Antarctic expedition journalling, etc.

This conversion obviously requires the barrel to be watertight, and, to this end, I acquired an O-ring from the Bookmark ($1 plus tax; an excellent value).

What I neglected to note, however, is that the J. Herbin pen I selected to convert has a tiny hole in the bottom of the barrel. And so, when I syringed in the Sunshine Yellow ink, it immediately drained out (fortunately I was able to slurp most of it back up).

I got in touch with PenChalet, where I’d purchased the pen, and they confirmed it’s not a defect.

So now I’ll have to figure out a way to seal it up.

Stay tuned.

One of the fringe benefits of relocating my office to the basement of St. Paul’s Anglican Church Parish Hall is that I have a front row seat to the workings of the church; it’s not quite a back-stage pass, but it’s a deeper look behind the curtain than living across the street for 18 years provided.

This week’s big event is a meeting of the Anglican Church of Canada’s House of Bishops, a gathering that brings the bishops of the 30 Canadian dioceses of the church to Charlottetown. The most obvious manifestation of this gathering, from where I sit typing, is the smell of supper cooking in the kitchen upstairs, supper that will be served to the bishops at tonight’s “House of Bishops Dinner.”

Prince Edward Island, in case you were wondering, falls in the Diocese of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, led by Rt. Rev’d Ron Cutler from Halifax. Within the diocese, the Anglican Church in Prince Edward Island is supported administratively by Regional Dean The Rev’d Father David Garrett, from St. Peter’s Cathedral in Charlottetown, and spiritually by Archdeacon John W.G. Clarke, who is also rector here at St. Paul’s.

When brother Johnny left for the west he left his vacuum cleaner with us. After a few years of solid service, it’s stopped sucking in things to the extent that it’s no longer helpful to our family (that it also weights a ton also doesn’t help in this regard). But it may still be useful to someone else, especially someone else who’s handy. So after the rain stopped this afternoon I put it out on the front sidewalk with hopes that it will find a new home.

Also: it is autumn.

My friend Sandy started working with Lady Baker’s Tea this autumn and we had a chance to chat about her new job last night.

Apparently the staff start each workday with a decision about what type of tea to brew for the morning.

I’m jealous: as I sit alone in my church basement office, thirstily typing away, my fellow-church-basement-dwelling mates across town are starting the day in a considerably more civilized, warming and social fashion.

Perhaps I should make a field trip to join them some morning; we are, after all, both active members of the Underground Business Society.

Friend of the blog Ray asked me to increase the intensity of the links in the daily email digest (sign up here).

And so I did.

And I took the opportunity to swap out the photo that appears in the head. And to make a few other tweaks to improve things for Ray’s aging eyes (because my eyes are aging too!).

Thanks to Ray for the prompt.

During our visit to Malmö in August I received the generous gift of some fountain pen ink sample bottles from my friend Nene. To that point, I must admit, my knowledge of fountain pen inks was limited to a general notion that there was blue ink and there was black ink, with the occasional red ink thrown in for effect. The notion that there was Morning Star ink–one of Nene’s gifts–and innumerable other inks covering the entire spectrum, was an unexpected delight to discover.

And so I dove in, following the URL on Nene’s sample bottle to PenChalet.com and acquiring four samples–Supernova, Adzukiiro, Kitano Ijinkan Red, Yellow Sunset, all pictured below (the similarity of fountain pen ink names to cannabis variety names is duly noted).

I’m so looking forward to trying all of these out.

I hosted the monthly Pen Night, for fountain pen aficionados, here at the Reinventorium tonight, and provided members with a cook’s tour of my letterpress shop. This was followed by a wide-ranging general discussion of everything from how to clean fountain pens to the ins and outs of vintage mechanical pencils. We meet again on November 25th at The Bookmark at 7:00 p.m.; if you are fountain pen crazed or simply fountain pen curious, you are welcome to join us.

This was my first go at hosting an event here in the shop, and it worked well: it helps to be housed in the Parish Hall where there are folding tables and chairs handy-by.