Toby's Log - Toby Mackenzie's Site

Breakover JS for ``, etc


Fri, 18 Sep 2026 16:52:07 -0400

My blog has a lot of code blocks, as programming for web development and shell scripting is a frequent topic.  Some of the code blocks can get long and require scrolling.  To improve their readability, I decided I wanted to do something like a breakout, where the element can go wider than its container, but only when the user wants it.  I settled on doing a popover type dialog box when a button is clicked.  Since this was sort of a combination of a breakout and popover for user purposes, I dubbed it a breakover.  I built a simple JS solution for my site with a bit of CSS to improve the appearance.



New Phone: Pixel 9 Pro
Wed, 16 Sep 2026 14:02:02 -0400

A couple weeks ago, I bought a new phone, a Pixel 9 Pro.  That is my 3rd phone in the last three years, about as many as I had bought in the previous 15.  But the last two just weren't meeting my desires.  The Samsung S24 didn't support multiple profiles or the AVF terminal, and the separate Samsung account, required for some features, was off-putting.  The Minimal MP01 was missing reasonably frequent security updates, had a poor camera, had some buggyness and definitely had no video out or AVF terminal, among other things.  The Pixel can support all that I want and can run the security / privacy focused Android fork, Graphene OS, as well as other common Android forks.  This is my first try with Graphene or any self-installed alternative.  I set it up and then moved my SIM card over a little over a week ago.



tmux
Tue, 15 Sep 2026 16:31:16 -0400

I have started to experiment with using tmux recently.  It is a terminal multiplexer, sort of like a tiling window manager / tab bar that runs purely in the terminal.  It has decent mouse support, so it is not that different than using a GUI terminal with tabs, plus panes.  And it works and gives me roughly the same config and interface across platforms and terminal apps, including pure terminals like kmscon and potentially on remote servers.  I have been moving toward a lighter weight, simpler, more terminal heavy, dotfiles friendly setup, and this fits into that.  I spent entirely too much time getting my tmux configuration to my liking.



2020 Macbook Air, the (secure, up-to-date) end is nigh
Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:40:36 -0400

Wednesday, the same day that Apple announced some new products, updates, and what-not, I noticed a message from Homebrew that my 2020 Macbook Air (Intel) is no longer officially supported by the project.  I've still been able to update things, just needing to build more from source, but it will become fully unsupported in Fall 2027.  Apple will still provide MacOS 15 Sequoia with security updates to that same approximate date.  So that provides a likely end to when my Macbook can be considered up-to-date and secure.



MP01: First use
Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:20:03 -0400

I finally used my Minimal Phone (MP01) as an actual phone for about a week.  Previously, I had been using it as basically a small e-reader, waiting on the perpetually pending OS update.  But I decided I had waited long enough and went ahead and put my SIM in it.  Since I had already set up the OS and Google account, it just worked.  I really liked the hardware (e-paper and physical keyboard), but I gave up on it mainly because I don't think the OS update situation will satisfy my security needs.



#4885
Thu, 27 Aug 2026 15:49:33 -0400
This past weekend, I went to Blossom to see the Cleveland Orchestra, for the first and likely last time this season.  The headline piece was a Ravel piano concerto.


Site ideas section
Thu, 06 Aug 2026 16:35:20 -0400

I have decided to create an ideas page and section with a sub-page per idea to hold all my ideas instead of doing them as posts on my blog.  This is largely because I view blog posts as temporal things that are only really modified for fixes after initial publishing, whereas regular pages are evergreen, modified as much as desired to achieve their purpose.  I want to be able to update my ideas if I come up with more details, find a better way to explain them, or even want to take them in a different direction.  I have many idea posts that have sat unpublished, languishing waiting for a more thorough handling.  As pages, I will be able to put up the skeleton of an idea and flesh it out later.



#4883
Tue, 21 Jul 2026 18:34:38 -0400
My Uncle Tom's estate is having a second auction.  Smaller than the last one, wi…


#4882
Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:26:33 -0400
It was quite smoky today.  Lots of smoke wafted down from Canadian wildfires to Akron, Ohio and beyond.


#4881
Wed, 01 Jul 2026 12:57:40 -0400
Despite being a PHP developer and Firefox user for a couple decades, I hadn't added a search of php.net to my Firefox search engine list until some months back.  Now I can type @php and then enter a search to quickly look up PHP functions, classes, etc.


Blog comments / mentions display back
Wed, 01 Jul 2026 11:58:00 -0400

I have brought back the display of existing comments on this blog.  When I switched away from WordPress to my own blog solution, I didn't build any display of comments on posts since I haven't had comments enabled in years and wanted to make the switch quickly.  I also wasn't sure how I wanted to handle storing them, since my site data repo is public and will likely have an open license at some point.  Storing quotes by others under my own license is probably fine, but I decided to mostly do summaries unless the exact quote seemed important.  I did mostly do full quotes of my responses, since that's definitely my data.  So I put their comments and my responses all in a single markdown file per post, in more of a prose format than normal comments are shown.



Goodbye, Rackspace
Wed, 17 Jun 2026 15:14:17 -0400

We at Cogneato have finally shut down our servers and most other services with Rackspace.  It is definitely a relief to be done with that.  It was a six year operation, but a sudden large increase in costs pushed us to get it finished.