Scatter Splatter - Blog

Thinking About Running A Personal Mastodon Instance

2026-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

I have the itch to try something new. I have been looking at Mastodon and things like that a bit recently, and it certainly intrigues me. There is enough of a learning curve to get on there. It is not overrun (yet) with spam and AI-generated garbage.

There are several options of software already in the FreeBSD ports, and one that intrigues me is not in the ports, but they actually offer instructions for FreeBSD. I think it would be neat to learn to set one of those up and rewarding too. If I hosted a personal instance, it would be mine, and I would control what, if anything, is blocked.

Also, if I set up a personal instance, I would be safe from censorship. I do not believe in censorship in any way on the web unless it is something blatantly illegal. Personally, I don’t think I would ever have to be concerned about being censored because I know there are consequences to being a dick. A long time ago I was a troll and a damn good troll, but not anymore.

My thinking is that if I do set it up myself, I would set it up on a separate VPS. I would find something cheap and go from there. I know Mastodon requires Ruby on Rails and all that junk. Another option is written in Go, so that should be much lighter and faster. The ones not in the port system are written in other languages, which I could easily install.

I could do that on this saved VPS, but I don’t think it is something I want to do when it is new to me. I trust everything that is on this machine within reason. New stuff to me would take time for me to trust.

Another option is to maybe go with something that is just for me but managed to start with. That can be found fairly cheap. That could give me time to see if I use it and like it and not have to be overly concerned with the security and all of that sort of stuff for now.

I plan on thinking about this and whether I really want to go through with it or not. I hope that I can avoid what I do so often and jump directly into things. We shall see how that goes because I always say I will do that and then randomly just do it without giving it much thought.

Something I learned the hard way is that I want to keep this website sort of separated from my other stuff. I can link back and forth, but I want them to use separate domain names and be different entities. It would just make things simpler if I wanted to change domains for one or the other or just let one go altogether.

Used The 40s For Strict Presses In A WOD

2026-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

Today I wanted a quicker and simpler WOD to do. I had been sitting weird on the couch, and my leg felt inflamed between the bones. The problems with being in your 50s, right?

I wanted to avoid a WOD with a lot of leg stuff like squatting weight and certainly didn’t want to be jumping or stepping up in case my leg would give out on me. It felt like it wanted to do that.

I settled on an old workout that was air squats, strict presses, and rowing. The sets of air squats were small, so I figured it would be perfect along with the rowing to get my legs moving without overdoing it. By halfway through the workout, my leg had loosened up, which I knew would happen.

The sets of strict presses were small too. Only 8 at a time, so it was perfect to go out of my normal just be comfortable with it approach to the weight. I have fallen into the trap of going with lighter weight far too often lately. Part of that was my wrist cyst, which seems to be gone now. In the past it would go away and then come back within a week or two. This time it’s been gone for several months. Laziness was also a factor, too.

For a while I went with the 40-pounders almost every time. Today I went with those weights again. All except for that last set of 8 were unbroken. My girlfriend saw the last set and said they looked good and easy. That set felt good enough and was the only set in which I broke up the reps. I can’t say that they felt good, though.

I would not say that they felt easy, but the lifts certainly felt doable. It did not feel as heavy as I thought it would either. The nice part was towards the end of the WOD when my shoulders felt all blown up. It has been a while!

Music for the WOD was Trepalium

Comcast Back To Being Shit Again

2026-03-03T08:00:00+00:00

Well, Comcast is back to being complete shit again. For several months it was perfect with zero drops after the prolonged downtime back in December. Starting last week, the signal went back to being garbage with frequent modem restarts.

This has given us the push to finally think about getting fiber internet from Brightspeed. It couldn’t be much worse, right? If it is worse, we can always switch back to Comcast.

Maybe, eventually, we will have Glofiber as an ISP option too. I thought it was supposed to be done by now, but who knows? The borough screwed around far too long to approve them coming into the area. It’s good that they made sure it was legal and all, but they didn’t have to take so long to do so. They sure don’t want to waste any time having the police do the ice crap.

Options for internet service are good, though. We have been stuck in a natural monopoly for so long that I thought it would never happen. DSL was available, but everything I had read said it was unreliable.

We originally tried to sign up for Brightspeed’s fiber offering when it first became available, but the database they use for addresses is incorrect. Ours is not listed. I talked to a person and told them I could literally touch the neighbor’s house from ours, and she insisted that it may be some technical reason. I told her that there was an error in the database they use. We run into that a lot with all the websites that have dropdowns to select the address.

This stuff is only going to get worse with artificial intelligence taking over for a lot of the support stuff.

The amount of downtime we have been having is unacceptable. What’s even more unacceptable is the lack of communication. Only once did the ISP’s outage map say there was a problem.

Scroll Transitions Are Dumb

2026-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

I just came across a website with it, but it does seem to have fallen out of favor a bit. You know those annoying pages where they hijack scrolling to make text fade in and out when it’s on the screen or near the edge. It makes things so strange to follow.

The worst offenders have a bunch of different transitions depending on where you are on the page. There was a marketing page the old owner of our gym used. That was nothing but flashy buzzwords. He could have saved himself money by actually showing up instead of having emergencies regularly after nearly doubling the price of our lifetime unlimited membership while giving less.

Mobile apps are a mess with this sort of behavior too. I am sure that I have made it abundantly clear that I think most apps are awful steaming piles of 💩.

The thing is browsers have had a built-in way to scroll. It has been efficient for years. When marketers take the keys completely, it is nothing but fluff. In some ways it reminds me of the old days when you would often have to sit through a Flash intro to view a company’s website, then the site was often in Flash. Remember the ridiculous animations and sound effects?

This stuff is fine on a personal page or maybe a creative one. I’d even give them a pass on a product announcement page, but the general information or help pages are tedious and annoying. It’s a surefire way to get me to just leave altogether. I do have to admit I do not seem to be seeing it as often as I was a couple of years ago.

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should!

Nice To Get Some February Sunshine After Two WODS

2026-02-28T00:00:00+00:00

Today turned out to be a very nice February day. It is still winter, so of course the morning started out fairly cold, but the stronger sun did its thing, heating the air up along with the southerly breeze.
I got two WODs in this morning. First, I did the stupid vault workout, which was an overthought, overcomplicated one again. Later I did one with hang snatches and rowing.
For that second workout I held back a little since I haven’t been using the bar all that much, but my goal was to use the bar for the snatches. I went with a light 65 pounds, and it worked out great for me. I flew through the snatches! Since I was using the 10-pound plates, I had to break out one of my Christmas gift plates. I chose the pink donut plates to make the day more fun.
The snatches felt great. I expected them to feel a bit rusty, but I didn’t notice that at all. I flew through them. It felt like I was hitting the right positions and was very fast with them. Granted, they were hang power snatches, but I thought I would have to take some time to feel the right positions when I was first sitting them up. I didn’t record any of the sets, so I do not know for sure. It felt like the locket was fast and solid, and so was the turnover.
After I recovered a bit, I thought I should take advantage of the beautiful weather this morning. After all, it would be neglectful to not go get a little sunshine and maybe make some vitamin D. God knows my body doesn’t make enough of that. The sun and fresh air do me so much good and have been so needed after this past month or so has been so stressful.
The warmth of the sunshine on my face calmed my mind a bit. It helped make me feel content with the world, at least for a bit, after spending so much time being pissed at it over the recent days. The temperature was in the middle 50s, which felt amazing. There was just a slight breeze, but not too bad. It was nice to chill and listen to the birds and the airplanes in the sky from the small airport not too far away. I wonder if they were skydiving.
In a little while I will go relax a bit and watch the Phillies spring training game. We are planning on going, but we chose the wrong days. Having to try to plan things when you don’t even know the date fucking sucks. We took a guess and guessed wrong. In hindsight I was glad we made that trip when we did. We would have probably had to cancel it if it was when we originally planned due to unforeseen crap. Spring training was something to do, but the people I wanted to see were the reason for the trip.

Phillies Game Made Me Remember My Thyroid Surgery

2026-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

I was relaxing and vegging out a bit this afternoon and watching the Phillies spring training game. Not many of them are on TV, so I watch them when I can. I miss John Kruk. Ruben rambles too much.
Basically all my life I have watched games on TV when I could or listened to them on the radio. I would listen to a game many a summer afternoon or when I was at the mountains in the evenings.
When I moved here, I wasn’t able to watch a lot of the games. We didn’t get the channel they were on. I couldn’t really find them on the radio either.
Back in 2012, when I was waiting for my thyroid operation, I would watch a spring training game or two to settle my mind. The thought that I had medullary thyroid cancer because of a genetic flaw got in my head a bit. Waiting for the pheo tests and that stuff was very stressful. The fact that I knew no one local had any experience with that particular surgery was pretty scary to me.
I remember watching a game in the hospital when I stayed overnight. I did not sleep that night at all. It seems I can. I also watched a hockey game. Maybe it was a Craptiols game?
When I came home, I watched quite a few Phillies games on TV. Out of boredom, I managed to turn on the TV at the right time, and while channel surfing, I found a game. During that recovery phase that spring, I watched a lot of the games.
Watching those games brought my mind some peace. It gave me something to do rather than let the negative thoughts be too intrusive and overrun my thoughts. I didn’t know yet what the long-term consequences of my cancer were going to be.
It was a shame the Phils were not good back then, but it was something I enjoyed watching. I should be used to them not being good after all. They were bad for a lot of my childhood. I will always have 1993, though!
For a good while after that time, I had zero ways to be able to watch the games. We dropped back to the very basic cable, and the games were not on those channels. Shortly after that, we dropped all cable TV. A few years back I picked up YouTube TV to watch sports.
It’s funny how little things remind you of certain periods or completely unrelated things.
Thanks to the Phillies for keeping my mind occupied when it needed to be. That helped keep the depression and other mind clutter that is just not healthy.

It Has Been Awhile, Glad to WOD with the 40s Again

2026-02-24T00:00:00+00:00

It has been quite a while since I have done heavier WODs other than a few with the heavy kettlebell. I have been wanting to get back to it, but this past month or so has been far too chaotic to focus on intensity. I have been doing a lot of just-do-something workouts. That is just fine, especially in cases like this. I won’t go into details about that here, but at least I was able to hit a workout hard today.
Many of the WODs that have been programmed have been rubbish. Weird stuff, weird scores, and overly complicated. That doesn’t help me get back on board, but they do have older workouts available to log and, more importantly, find. I don’t care so much about logging them, but doing them is what I am here for.
I settled for an on-ramp one. Go figure! The movements were simple with not too bad of a rep scheme. Sure, I despise the hop-overs that they oh so love, but they make ok filler for when I want to be heavier than I have been.
I knew from the start I wanted to use the 40-pound dumbbell for snatches today. I have not so much as touched them in months. It has been on my mind that I have been wanting to break them out, but the dry air had my hands angry, plus I had tweaked my shoulder slightly a few weeks back clearing ice.
It felt great to be using that dumbbell for the hang snatches. Even being six on a side at times, they felt pretty easy throughout the WOD. The dumb hopping over the sandbag was a bit of a recovery, but it worked for this workout so I could push it with the snatches. I thought they would feel more challenging, but it felt great.
We don’t have much going on for the foreseeable future, so I would like to try to push the intensity of WODs during this downtime. It will be good for me to help burn off steam too!
Music for the WOD was Gorod.

Big Weather Hype Bust!

2026-02-23T00:00:00+00:00

This past storm that is currently off the coast was hyped like crazy here in Lancaster County. The local news station was all about the IMPACT! They seem to find something to hype about every day. It gets the old people all worked up so they keep watching. In their defense, they did finally back down a bit with the snowfall total hype last evening.
When their older meteorologist retired, their weather went the way of pure hype over everything. That television station really should take some responsibility for the problems they cause, but you know that will never happen. It’s all about maximizing the profit. His retirement was a loss to the local area when it comes to weather forecasting. He probably forgot more about the local nuances of the weather than most people know. That comes with many years of experience.
The Facebook and social media meteorologists were certainly a shitshow and fun to watch. They take the most absurdly extreme model output they can find and share it. They act all worried and may throw in. Track may change. yet they continue to share the most extreme model solution. or something like that. The sheeple eat that up. When they bust the sheeple, defend them to no end. I find it interesting how many people will thank them and defend them even though they are consistently dead wrong. They flat out lie about warnings. I remember one of them had listed that he got his meteorology degree from a school that doesn’t have a program.
The sheep will praise them about how they are so much more accurate than sources with actual experience and accountability. They will defend them and say how we should be thanking them for their time. All that fun stuff.
East of here got hammered, but even that, I think, was less than the forecast. The storm sure looks awesome on that satellite imagery. It has been fun to watch it come together from the enthusiast standpoint.

Checking Out Other Radar Apps

2026-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

I have been checking out other radar apps for Android over the past few days. For years I have used RadarScope. For the most part, that program has been great. It is fast, and there have been only one or two occasions that I can think of that it hasn’t just worked.
The one problem that I have had with it, though, is the warnings text. It used the typical microscopic Android text that cannot be zoomed in, so it makes things challenging to read. I have lived with that for years.
Years ago I had also downloaded RadarOmega. That app is a bit slower to load, but when I checked it out last week, that had been greatly improved. The text in the warnings and stuff is a little bigger, so I am able to read it with a magnifier without straining as much.
The interface doesn’t seem quite as intuitive to me, but I have to keep in mind that I have been using RadarScope for years and have gotten used to it. I felt the same way when I switched from Pykl3.
There would never be a perfect app for me unless I wrote it myself, so I have to weigh the pros and cons since I do not feel like writing one.
This is why it is great to have multiple options. It’s even better when the choices are not exact clones of each other with the only difference between them being an icon or two and using different trackers.
Neither of these apps is pretty, and that’s a good thing. The go-after functionality over following the latest crappy UI trends.

Gotta Get Back To My Lifting

2026-02-19T00:00:00+00:00

Life has been busy with a lot going on, so I have been neglecting my lifting. First I had the visit in December, then the holidays. Early January brought the post holiday funk.
After that we had the snow and ice, and I did make my shoulder a bit angry clearing that. Life turned to chaos around that time, and we had our trip. Now we are home from that.
I have been thinking, Man, I need to get back to my lifting. I love lifting. It brings me a deep level of inner peace and joy. Not only that, but it is just fun to move weight.
Last night I got a phone call from an old friend, and he asked if I was still lifting. I said no, but I plan on getting back into it soon. I feel like my mind is settled enough now to focus on it and not really risk injuring myself.
Now, because I haven’t been doing my normal lifting does not mean I have not been doing anything. I have been doing WODs and heavier weights in some of them. Today I did one with the empty barbell for snatches, but that was only because I haven’t done them in a while at all, so I wanted to get a feel for them. The last thing I need is for a new bad habit to set in. I have struggled enough with that in the past.
I don’t think we have anything planned, so I think I may try to get started on my lifting routine again this weekend. I also want to bump the intensity of my WODs and maybe start doubling up again.