I’m posting this here as a service to the stymied. My 1Password, both on mobile and desktop, was complaining about being “offline,” despite my not actually being offline.

The error message on the desktop, accompanied by a red cloud icon in the app’s toolbar with a slash through it, looked like this:

I was confounded.

I uninstalled and reinstalled, checked my network connection, restarted my computer: nothing helped.

With the aid of 1Password support, to which I sent a diagnostics log, I learned that the error was a result of a 1Password Business account to which I no longer had access still being “signed in”:

Thanks for sending that diagnostics report through to me from 1Password on your Mac and apologies for the confusion as to why 1Password is reporting itself as offline here. After taking a look at the report, it looks like you have a suspended 1Password Business account signed in to the app on your Mac which is why 1Password is reporting itself as offline.

Sure enought that was it: I signed out of the offending account, and suddently I was “back online.”

Polly Coles writes, in The Politics of Washing, her memoir of living a year in Venice with her husband and four children, about a vaporetto that carries only residents, not tourists:

But it is not only colour and numbers that distinguish the passengers on the Three; it is a subtle but unmistakable difference of purpose that infuses every pore of the people who use it. Tourists are visibly mystified when the marinaio does not even stop to look at individual passes, and yet suddenly, unaccountably, prevents certain people from getting on to the vaporetto. But to those of us who are hurrying to school, or university, or the market, or work, it is perfectly clear that the man on the right is a tourist, while the man on the left is going to fetch his son from nursery. The marinaio does not need to see their tickets to know that. Why? Because human beings on holiday are radically different from human beings who are negotiating their way through the myriad small hurdles of daily life. It is as if the billions of atoms of which we are made become somehow more compacted when there is a job to be done, so that we exude purpose like a powerful scent — even, somehow, look different.

Holidaymakers inhabit a different skin; they are, above all else, in no hurry. The long day ahead contains no appointments, commitments, decisions or duties; all they have to do is eat and sleep and enjoy themselves as much as they possibly can. In this happy state of no-responsibility the body, so often tensed for action, relaxes. Their aura is unmistakably looser, their pace slower: they amble, pause to admire, hesitate about which direction to take, turn back to pass comment to a companion. They are, in a way, infantilized because they have been relieved of all the pressure to keep up to speed, on track or any of the other heartracing metaphors favoured by Western culture in the world of work.

This is a sentiment that perhaps only people who live in the neighbourhood cum stage set that is a tourist city: who among us has not been stymied on a trip to the post office by a gaggle of visitors, walking four abreast, in this “happy state of no-responsibility.” 

Coles’ book is an interesting read, both a tale of a family odyssey and an extended rumination on Venice and the tensions—tensions that exist on an exponentially greater level than here in sedate Charlottetown—between people who live there and people who visit.

This is a very niche post, which I write simply to help others who fall in the niche with me; the rest of you can move right along.

As I’ve mentioned before in passing, my RSS reader of choice these days is Reader, from the team that brought us Readwise (itself an estimable “highlight and catalog what you read” app in its own right).

Reader reads RSS feeds, but it’s also good, in an Instapaper-like way, of parsing HTML: you can use its browser extension to save an article you’re reading, for example, and it will show up in your Reader queue, in a nice distraction-and-advertising-free readable format.

There’s one aspect of Reader that’s mildly annoying: if an RSS feed is reported by another user as having a parsing issue, it can get marked on a system-wide level as “don’t use the RSS feed, but instead try scraping the HTML from the website.” In theory that’s a great and helpful fallback move, but, in practice, in can result a perplexingly presented feed.

Kottke.org is a feed of particular annoyance: if the site’s RSS feed is fed to Reader, then posts appear like this:

The body of the post is missing, and all that’s displayed is verbiage from the post footer about commenting.

I went back and forth with the (excellent) Reader user support desk a few times and that’s how I learned about the “helpful fallback move” that was causing it. Alas, as, again, this flag is set on a system level, it’s outside my control.

I found a fix, though: it seems like Reader tracks this flag using an exact URL match for the feed, so if I attach a random parameter to the RSS feed address, like this:

http://www.kottke.org/index.xml?feed

then this appears to Reader as a different RSS feed, and the workaround isn’t kicked in, so posts appear as you want them to:

I imagine that this kind of thing will be sorted by Reader at some point; in the meantime, this hack is useful.

I am a paying customer of Kagi, decamping from a lifetime of Google as my default search engine. The search results are almost always better than Google’s, especially for the non-commercial web.

Like every other toaster on the planet, Kagi is using AI to deliver what they call ”quick answers” (you can see them by clicking the “quick answer” link in search results, or simply by adding a question mark to the end of your search terms).

The current “quick answer” returned for a search for “Peter Rukavina” shows the downside of the current state of the art in munging together disparate web results and trying to sew a complete story: Kagi gets some of the details right (I am a writer, printer, and developer in Canada, and my blog is indeed here at ruk.ca), but it also reports that I died in 2012 after a setback in hospital (not true). There’s about half of the result that’s “true” (if I’m there Peter Rukavina in questions) and half that’s not.

I’m posting this here, in part, as a place marker to return to as technology advances and this sort of issues gets solved.

Through his weekly People and Blogs newsletter, Manuel Moreale is emerging as a sort of “Aslan of the small web.”

With Phil Gyford, whose ooh.directory is an old-style-Yahoo! directory of “blogs about every topic,” Kagi’s Small Web search, and Marginalia’s search, the personal, non-commercial, passionate part of the web—what you might call “the old web,” or “the web before capitalism blotted out the sun”—is re-emerging from under the bushel basket that Google’s search algorithm has imposed on it in recent years.

(Here’s a fun way to spend an afternoon: enter a word, any old word, into a Kagi search, and flip the “Small Web” toggle. I guarantee you will find interesting things: here’s a recipe for Brussels Sprout Fried Rice and here’s a post about walking through Bulgaria, for example.)

Which is all a circuitous way of announcing that I’m proud to be included in People and Blogs myself this week. I enjoyed the process of answering Manuel’s questions about my blog and my blogging, and the chance to remind myself why and how much I have loved—do love—this space.

I’ve been working out, twice a week, one-on-one, with Coach Cayla, for the last 22 weeks. That’s almost 50 workouts; a lot of Bulgarian Box Jump Reverse Crunches.

As Lisa will attest, in the early days I used to drag myself home from the gym, exhausted. 

I just wanted to lie down.

This caused a frisson of tension in our relationship.

I’m happy to report that, on leaving today’s workout, I feel energized, spent-but-not-exhausted, and eager to return on Tuesday.

Starting on March 7, 2024, I’m switching from private training to semi-private, as Cayla is launching a semi-private class on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 9:00 a.m.

Maybe you’d like to join, to help make up a group of six?

Cayla assures me that the class can accommodate anyone, from seasoned veteran to I’ve-never-been-in-a-gym. I am proud to vouch for her: she is patient, an excellent explainer, and she knows her stuff.

Lisa and I have worked out together half a dozen times in the last few months, and I can attest that, as much as I benefited from the one-on-one work with Cayla to get me over the hump of schlumpitude, working out with other people brings a whole new element, a hearty mix of competition and solidarity. I’m looking forward to it.

If you’re interested, or want more details, you can contact Cayla through her website. 

It will be fun!

In letterpress, lockup is the process of assembling  a jigsaw puzzle of rectangles around the type to lock it all in place, with the ultimate goals of (a) having it not fall out while on the press and (b) having all the type level, so that it gets inked evenly and prints uniformly. 

The pieces of this jigsaw puzzle, beyond the type, are a mixture of wooden and metal furniture, mixed with properly-sized-to-the-type metal spaces of varying widths. 

In a not-completely-outfitted shop like mine, lockup  can be particularly challenging, due lack of diversity and quantity of furniture, but lockup is always challenging anyway. 

Here’s a photo of my lockup for one side of the February This Box is for Good box. This was, indeed, challenging, as space was at a premium, yet the specific distance between LOVE and FOOD needed to be exact, and BE THE needed to be centred under FOOD. I’m proud that I managed to pull it off, even if it is a little Frankensteinian.