The Darling Square library is hosting a special event in April and May: Crafting wellness: exploring gut health through knitting. Huh. I’ve seen a lot of random fibre projects in my time – coral reefs, breast prostheses, neurons, bunting with knitted leaves on it – but never a knitted gut biome!
Author: Kris
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Run Cliff, run! 🏃♂️
Today I learned about Cliff Young, a 61-year-old teetotaler potato farmer from rural Victoria, who won the 1983 Sydney to Melbourne ultramarathon. He may have even inspired Forrest Gump. How have I never heard of this guy? He’s amazing! I love his shuffle. The article there teases that he may have cheated, but really it’s just that he accidentally got up a couple hours early on the second day, breaking a gentleman’s agreement to sleep until dawn. That gave him a 30km lead, but given that he actually finished 50km ahead of second place, it seems obvious he would have won regardless. I wish I’d known about him before I ran my marathon; I would’ve added him to my little notecard of inspiration that I carried with me.
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Links that interested me today
- ‘Writing a Freer World’: An Appreciation of Tove Jansson at 92NY – My sister sent me that, surprised to learn that Tove Jansson was a woman! Yes, indeed. Relatedly, my friend Sohan is in Helsinki and texted me yesterday from the Jansson exhibition at the Helsinki Art Museum. It’s nice when your friends and family know your hobbies well enough to share things with you. 🩷
- The Greatest Two-Hit Wonders – I disagree with a lot of these on the basis that they are “album bands” rather than singles bands. I mean, the Cure? Crowded House? Jimmy Buffett? No way. (Blues Traveler = 100% though.)
- My Dinners With Harold: How a shy Ph.D. in English literature revolutionized the science of cooking and became revered in the most famous kitchens in the world – Lovely little profile. I really should get Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking for the Snook sometime.
- Hot ball in aloe gel – I laughed so hard at that Mastodon post that I cried. Juvenile, I know, but so funny. 😭
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Scrobbling and it feels so good
I was cleaning up old blog posts today when I saw a mention of the widget I used to have (decades ago) that showed what I was listening to. “That would be fun to recreate,” I thought. How hard could it be?
Folks, I could find no way to easily embed my last played Apple Music song. The desktop app allows you to get iframe embed code for playlists, but there’s no playlist for your Recently Played. You can create a Smart Playlist of songs you’ve recently played, but this will only include songs in your library and not songs you’ve streamed. Also, you can’t embed a Smart Playlist anyway. There are no WordPress plugins that do this, and no third party apps that I could find. There is a Developer API for Apple Music, but to register as a developer you have to pay $99 a year. Yeah, no.
For a second I thought about switching back to Spotify. Double-plus no.
Then I remembered… scrobbling. That was a thing, right? Turns out it’s still a thing. But how to scrobble Apple Music? I mostly listen on my iPhone, and the consensus seems to be that Marvis Pro is the way to go. This app is basically a wrapper for Apple Music, but it has a massively customisable UI (the Redditors love it), it scrobbles to last.fm out of the box, and it’s only $15 AUD. I figured it was worth a shot. Installed the app, signed up for last.fm, and verified that scrobbling was happening. Now to hook it up to WordPress…
This post from RxBrad has a handy Javascript snippet that can be used in a WordPress Custom HTML widget. Too easy! I signed up for an API key and set up the script… but it wouldn’t work. In the Block Editor preview it would show the album, but when I published the widget, it would just show a broken image on the site. I noticed in the console that there were some errors about the ampersands, and I could see that WordPress was actually converting them to HTML entities. I banged my head on a wall for 10 minutes until the Snook woke up from his nap and I patiently explained the problem. Less than 2 minutes later he had solved it. Oh right! We used to always put HTML comment tags around our Javascript, back in the day. (Insert “Do not cite the Deep Magic to me, Witch” meme.) Once I added those, everything just worked!
So yeah, there it is over in the sidebar on the homepage.
Limitations:
- Marvis Pro only scrobbles while the app is open. So if my iPhone screen goes to sleep, it won’t sync again until I wake it up. It does sync the whole history then, but it does mean the sidebar isn’t really necessarily “live.” Do I care? Not at this point. If I do, I can apparently pay $10 to unlock background scrobbling via last.fm Pro.
- Marvis Pro doesn’t have a desktop app. If I want to scrobble from my Mac Mini, I’ll need to setup the last.fm desktop app. Can’t be arsed right now, but it’s an option.
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5.6.7.8’s at the Crowbar
Was there any person in Sydney last night as cool as Chellio Panther Omo, the beret-wearing, middle-aged Japanese woman bass player of the 5.6.7.8’s? No. No, there was not.
Show was fantastic, of course. They played for a full hour, and they played several songs that I recognised like “I Walk Like Jayne Mansfield,” “Barracuda,” and of course “Woo Hoo” (from Kill Bill: Vol 1). The Crowbar was heaving and lots of folks were dancing, and I was very grateful for the breeze from the electric fans above and around us. I was also grateful I remembered my Loop earplugs, and the Snook got to try out his new pair for the first time. It’s nice to leave a show without your ears ringing for the next 24 hrs!
We also got to catch up with several friends beforehand, like Bex and Jakk and Megan and Hank (who took the photo above). 🩷
And of course, you can’t go to the Crowbar without having barbecue…
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Future Tech Collective
Great job to Georgina and Ruth for putting together such a fun meetup tonight! Ben Moir from AWS and Fiona Chan from Lookahead talked about some of the ways AI is impacting how we create products and experiences, as well the types of jobs that will be available in the future. Even as a noted AI skeptic, I really liked Fiona’s analogy likening prompt engineering skills to the way we all had to learn to use search engines. Really good panel discussion afterwards too! Thanks to Bilue for hosting.
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Random links I have enjoyed lately
- The Secret History of the Manicule, the Little Hand that’s Everywhere – 👈 Fun!
- Why do plastic containers always come out wet from the dishwasher? Science has the answer – Is this actually surprising news to anyone?
- How to make the Smitten Kitchen Purple Plum Torte in March, 2025 – More than just a recipe. Nice writing; subscribing to this blog.
- Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face – “Block AI scrapers” has been on my Blog To Do list for some time, but I know it’s a fruitless, Sisyphean task. I imagine once I know the scope of how badly they’re hitting me, I’ll be as angry as Drew here.
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Tech Lead Journal
If you haven’t heard enough of me talking about financial independence yet, I was recently on an episode of the Tech Lead Journal podcast. Check it out! 🔥
