[Blogging Intensifies]

Saturday 2025-03-29 – Link List

Ramen Junkie March 29, 2025 1 Comment

Blogging Intensifies Link List for Saturday 2025-03-29

26-Jan-2025 – MAGA Christianity is Anti-Jesus. Just ask Jesus.

Brief Summary: “Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde’s compassionate sermon at the National Prayer Service in DC perfectly expos”

Personal Notes and Commentary: “Yeah, even as someone who is no particularly religeous, I can tell you that whatever the hell these MAGA “Christians” think they are doing, it’s definitely not something that would be cool with Jesus.”

29-Mar-2025 – Why the new Trump leak is so much worse than what Clinton did

Brief Summary: “Even in a political environment marked by daily scandal and outrage, the revelation of a reckless an”

Personal Notes and Commentary: “Let’s see, destroying records because Signal does that, an unauthorized outside comms channel, a consumer tier app, and, oh right, actually leaking data.”

29-Mar-2025 – Disney faces US investigation over DEI practices

Brief Summary: “The probe is part of a wider crackdown on diversity and inclusion practices by the Trump administrat”

Personal Notes and Commentary: “The anti-Diversity folks are REALLY REALLY mad that Snow White isn’t pure white porceline, I guess.”

29-Mar-2025 – How Far-Right Manfluencers Are Grooming Lost Boys

Brief Summary: “Photo by Rebecca Lai, Modern-Day Debate, Anything Goes With James English. Design by Sam Donndelinge”

Personal Notes and Commentary: “Yeah, this is a huge problem and has been for a while. I’m not sure how to solve it other than, maybe these kids ju controls over what is being put out there? Or instead, our “leaders” can negotiate freedom for these fuckheads.”

29-Mar-2025 – Why Trump wants to ban barcodes on ballots — and why it’s an urgent threat

Brief Summary: “President Donald Trump’s new executive order on regulating elections is striking for the way it asse”

Personal Notes and Commentary: “As they said, “You will never have to have aother election again.””

29-Mar-2025 – Lock. Him. Up. Here’s what the Espionage Act has to say about disappearing information

Brief Summary: “In the past month, Trump has threatened to imprison peaceful protest organizers, falsely declared a “

Personal Notes and Commentary: “”

28-Mar-2025 – Walmart fires 6’4″ cisgender woman threatened by man who thought she was trans

Brief Summary: “A cisgender woman Walmart employee who says she was verbally assaulted in the female restroom by a m”

Personal Notes and Commentary: “While the hate pushed against Trans is a problem, this sort of collateral damage, is also a huge problem with all this anti-trans push.”

28-Mar-2025 – Pluralistic: Big Tech and “captive audience venues” (28 Mar 2025)

Brief Summary: ”

Today’s links

Big Tech and “captive audience venues”: The digital equivalent of baseball stadiums”

Personal Notes and Commentary: “”

28-Mar-2025 – Fighting a Global Problem Through a Local Lens

Brief Summary: “When I think of the gravest dangers facing our nation, disinformation is high on my list—second only”

Personal Notes and Commentary: “I voted in my local elections recently, have you?”

27-Mar-2025 – Trump Official Dragged After Suggesting ‘Atlantic’ Editor ‘Hacked’ Into Signal Group Chat

Brief Summary: ”
Speaking to Fox News personality Laura Ingraham, national security adviser Michael Waltz suggested”

Personal Notes and Commentary: “Anything but to accept personal responsibility fo fucking up. ANYTHING.”

27-Mar-2025 – Florida Wants Your Teen To Work Weekday Night Shifts, Because ‘Parental Rights’

Brief Summary: “Good news, Florida parents! Republicans in your state Legislature are here to fight for your rights!”

Personal Notes and Commentary: “”

27-Mar-2025 – Pikachu Spotted Fleeing Police Crackdowns During Turkey Protests

Brief Summary: ”

In a video that fills me with wonder at being alive in 2025, someone in an inflatable Pikachu cost”

Personal Notes and Commentary: “Truely the best Dystopian world we live in. First Luigi, now Pikachu, Nintendo apparetnly knows how to churn out revolutionry icons.”

26-Mar-2025 – “Can You Sing It A bit More Like This…?”

Brief Summary: ”

Time for the next episode in our thrilling story! So far it’s been all
set-up and no action. W”

Personal Notes and Commentary: “An interesting article about using Suno to make music.”

25-Mar-2025 – Bernie Sanders Has Been Warning About Oligarchy for Years. People Are Finally Listening.

Brief Summary: ”

As he waited in the shadow of a parking garage in Tempe, Arizona, to hear Sen. Bernie Sanders an”

Personal Notes and Commentary: “Yep.”

25-Mar-2025 – What the Fuck Are We Doing Here, America?

Brief Summary: “We’ve reached a point where a senior national security official can accidentally include a journalis”

Personal Notes and Commentary: “”

24-Mar-2025 – DNA testing firm 23andMe files for bankruptcy as CEO steps down

Brief Summary: “Co-founder Anne Wojcicki to pursue independent bid as California attorney general tells users to del”

Personal Notes and Commentary: “Oh boy, data privacy lost through bankruptcy for people using these services.”

23-Mar-2025 – How to delete for 23andMe data & Test Sample

Brief Summary: “23andMe is imploding, and you should do whatever you can to protect your genetic data. At the very l”

Personal Notes and Commentary: “”

05-Mar-2025 – Lauren Mayberry’s solo tour makes it to Texas at Scoot Inn

Brief Summary: “Written and Photos by Bang Ho

Feb. 26th, 2025Austin, Texas – Scoot Inn

When a consummate artis”

Personal Notes and Commentary: “”

21-Feb-2025 – Lauren Mayberry – Live @ The Masquerade

Brief Summary: “The stage was set at Hell @ The Masquerade in Atlanta, a venue pulsating with anticipation, as the c”

Personal Notes and Commentary: “”

Organizing

There and Back Again, A Joplin Tale

Ramen Junkie March 26, 2025 2 Comments

So, I’m using Joplin for my notes. Again. Still? Maybe a week ago, I saw an article about using Obsidian to post directly to WordPress. Which seemed like a neat thing, since I already just, write everything directly in Joplin. I also kind of looked around into Obsidian’s more robust plug in ecosystem. I had tried Obsidian briefly when switching off of One Note and to my more Markdown centric workflow. For whatever reason, I went with Jplin then.

So I decided, Ok, Obsidian seems to be a popular gold standard, it has better plug ins, I’m going all in. Migrating from Joplin was pretty easy, Joplin has an export that just dumps everything into a basic directory structure of Markdown files. Obsidian lets you drag and drop files in. Everything was working great. I also pulled in a bunch of my other saved news articles from my Github repository of saved news articles. Let’s get it all! I found an importer plug in and started importing my leftovers from One Note, one notebook at a time, sorting them down. Everything was going great.

Asie from, I find the Obsidian Tree, that mixes folders and files, to be absolutely cluttered and hideous. I found a plug in to fix this, but the plug in, somehow makes everything separate, but MORE ugly. I decided I would “get used to it” and “Use search more”.

There was also the matter of syncing between my two PCs and my phone. Obsidian has a paid tier, which does syncing, but I want the syncing to go through something I have more control over. Specifically, Encrypted then through OneDrive, like I use for Joplin. I want something I can download and backup locally as needed separate from the application. There is, thankfully, a popular plug in called Remotely Save, that lets you do just this, for free.

Hooo boy what a mess that was.

I am not really blaming Obsidian, or even Remotely Save, but I just, could NOT get this to work. At all. It would work just fine on the first upload, I could see all the encrypted data in my OneDrive, but pulling it down would create errors, all the time, all sorts of errors. I never did quite figure out why, it could be a combination.

I think I may have been occasionally hitting an API limit on OneDrive, because I was pulling down so much.
The plug in absolutely does not seem to know how to resume if it gets hung up, it just, fails forever more.
I found at one point that it was creating file names with forbidden characters, like “?”, I stripped those out of the files/headlines.
The plug in doesn’t seem to know how to handle if you move where the remote notebook is. I was saving “My Notebooks” to a folder in the cloud called “Obsidian.” Except this isn’t the default name, it names it after the notebook name. Sometimes I would forget to change this, then have to change it.
It also gets weird if you use the wrong Encryption Key. I would often enter the key, then forget to go through the confirm change dialogues, see also why I kept fucking up the remote location folder name.
Screwing up the encryption Key would mean it downloads a bunch of jibberish notes, which would then become part of the main notebook once a proper sync was done.
I tried recreating fresh notebooks to clear errors and I would randomly get old versions, despite everything pointing to the proper place
At leat once, It reverted back to the old remote folder name default.
It started randomly deleting notes, which really had me panicking, but I managed to dig everything out of the trash and restore it.

I tried several other sync plug ins, including some Git based ones, but they didn”t seem to work. Syncing across the cloud is extremely important to this while operation. In the end, I decided to just, go back to Joplin. I may still use Obsidian to middleman and finish my OneNote importing, but otherwise, my experience was terrible, and non-functional for my needs.

Link List

Sunday 2025-03-23 – Link List

Ramen Junkie March 23, 2025 1 Comment

Blogging Intensifies Link List for Sunday 2025-03-23

23-Mar-2025 – Trump’s Stupid, Bumbling, Utterly Lawless Attempt at the Destruction of Our Government Is Losing in Court

Brief Summary: ”

Republishe”

Personal Notes and Commentary: “As it should. Maybe the rails of the Judicial branch can do something since the Legislative side clearly is not.”

23-Mar-2025 – There Is No Need to Agree to Disagree With Trump Supporters

Brief Summary: ”

Republishe”

Personal Notes and Commentary: “Facts don’t care about your feelings bro.”

23-Mar-2025 – What’s a galaxy? All you need to know

Brief Summary: ”
What is a galaxy?
A galaxy is a vast island of gas, dust and stars in an ocean of space. Typically,”

Personal Notes and Commentary: “An interesting and somewhat lengthy article about galaxies.”

22-Mar-2025 – A Cute Handheld Gaming Device That You Can Build In An Altoids Tin

Brief Summary: “The MintyPi was a popular project that put a Raspberry Pi inside an Altoids tin to make a pocketable”

Personal Notes and Commentary: “Another TODO on a pile of TODOs. I dont even need it, I have plenty of portable gaming things.”

20-Mar-2025 – What DOGE is Getting Wrong About Privatizing USPS

Brief Summary: ”

On Thursday, United States Postal Service workers, retirees, and supporters gathered in dozens o”

Personal Notes and Commentary: “Privatize all the things for profits is kind fo always a bad idea.”

20-Mar-2025 – Björk’s Cornucopia concert film is getting a global theatrical release

Brief Summary: “Björk has announced a limited theatrical release of her concert film ‘Cornucopia’, set to arrive in “

Personal Notes and Commentary: “”

18-Mar-2025 – Radiohead’s management seemingly confirms the band will play shows later this year… via an auction listing?

Brief Summary: “Radiohead are set to return to live performance, with their management confirming upcoming tour date”

Personal Notes and Commentary: “”

18-Mar-2025 – Watch Billie Eilish perform an acoustic version of ‘Wildflower’ at the iHeartRadio Music Awards

Brief Summary: “Billie Eilish has performed a stripped-down rendition of ‘Wildflower’ at the 2025 iHeartRadio Music “

Personal Notes and Commentary: “”

17-Mar-2025 – Chappell Roan says her second album is still “far away”

Brief Summary: “Chappell Roan has addressed questions about her second album during a recent TikTok Live session.

“

Personal Notes and Commentary: “I guess it’s not quite Hot To Go yet.”

17-Mar-2025 – Radiohead have shared a playlist of ‘The Bends’ B-sides to mark the album’s 30th anniversary

Brief Summary: “Radiohead have shared a playlist featuring B-sides and remixes from ‘The Bends’ to mark the album’s “

Personal Notes and Commentary: “Just some bloke playing music.”

16-Mar-2025 – Democrats Are Furious With Chuck Schumer

Brief Summary: ”

In the wake of votes by a handful of key Democrats, led by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer,”

Personal Notes and Commentary: “I mean, they probably should be.”

15-Mar-2025 – Donald Trump Just Signed an Order Gutting Seven More Federal Agencies

Brief Summary: ”

In an executive order signed late Friday, Donald Trump effectively dismantled seven more federal”

Personal Notes and Commentary: “”

16-Mar-2025 – America is becoming a nation of homebodies

Brief Summary: “In his February 2025 cover story for The Atlantic, journalist Derek Thompson dubbed our current era “

Personal Notes and Commentary: “I mean, have you ever met… people???”

Link List

Saturday 2025-03-15 – Link List

Ramen Junkie March 15, 2025 1 Comment

Blogging Intensifies Link List for Saturday 2025-03-15

12-Mar-2025 – LGBTQ+ youth feel safer online than in-person — and it’s not close

Brief Summary: “LGBTQ+ young people feel significantly safer expressing their identities online, and most of them ar”

Personal Notes and Commentary: “I mean, have you see the world today, who knows what kind of crazy might suddenly lash out for whatever crazy reason they can.”

11-Mar-2025 – Chappell Roan continues to tease her new single ‘The Giver’

Brief Summary: “Chappell Roan has revealed snippets of her new country-influenced single ‘The Giver’, set to arrive “

Personal Notes and Commentary: “”

10-Mar-2025 – Photographers Are on a Mission to Fix Wikipedia’s Famously Bad Celebrity Portraits

Brief Summary: “Wikipedia is one of the most valuable repositories of information ever created by humanity. Having y”

Personal Notes and Commentary: “Yeah, some of the default photos seem really weird, but I kind of get it considering you are supposed to have permission to use a photo on Wikipedia. You would need an intersection of a person who edits Wikipedia and a person who can take photos well.”

Programming Projects

Python – Simple URL Extractor

Ramen Junkie March 10, 2025 2 Comments

This one is pretty basic tier, but more useful than most. I had a website full of links to pages of video files. I wanted a list that I could stick into yt-dlp. I could do a bunch of copy and pasting, or I could use Python to scrape and take all the links.

It takes a URL as a CLI Argument, specifically like:

> main.py https://website.com

It skims the page with Beautiful Soup and spits out a text file with the date-time-url.txt format. Useful if a site changes over time.

The site I was scraping was using some relative links, so it checks for “http” in the URLs and if its present, just dumps the URL, otherwise, it prepends “REPLACEME” in front of the link, so it’s easy to do a Find/Replace operation and add whatever the full URL is.

For example, if the URL is “/video/12345.php”, which takes you to “website.com/video/12345.php”, it outputs “REPLACEME /video/12345.php” on each line. It’s easy to then replace the “REPLACEME” with the URL on 1-1000+ URLs. I didn’t just add the URL because, at least for my use case, the links added a bit more than just the base URL, and I wanted it to function more universally.

Anyway, here is the script. I don’t think it uses any non-standard library that would need a pip install or anything but if it does, it’ll complain and tell you what to do.

## Simple URL Extractor
## ToUse, at CLI $> python3 main.py [Replace With URL No Braces]
## Will output a list of all href links on a page to a file witht he date time and URL.
## Useful for pushing to a bulk downloader program, though it does not processing so URLs may need to be edited
## If there is not full URL, it pre prends an easily find/replaceable slug

import httplib2
import sys
from datetime import datetime
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup, SoupStrainer

current_datetime = datetime.now().strftime("%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S")

try:
    url = sys.argv[1]
except IndexError:
    print("Error: No URL Defined! Please use main.py [URL]")
    sys.exit(1)

http = httplib2.Http()
status, response = http.request(url)
filename = f"{current_datetime}-{url.split('//')[1].replace('/','_')}.txt"

with open(filename, "x") as f:
    for link in BeautifulSoup(response, 'html.parser', parse_only=SoupStrainer('a')):
        if link.has_attr('href'):
            #print(link['href'])
            write_link = link['href']
            if "http://" not in write_link:
                write_link = f"REPLACEME_{write_link}"
            f.write(f"{write_link}\n")


## Reference
## https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1080411/retrieve-links-from-web-page-using-python-and-beautifulsoup
## https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4033723/how-do-i-access-command-line-arguments
## https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14016742/detect-and-print-if-no-command-line-argument-is-provided