Eliot Hertenstein

Is there any atproto API that returns the bare value of a record rather than the value syntax? I remember a while ago trying to find one and ended up just wrapping it with an XRPC endpoint.

When We Get Komooted Following the sale of Komoot to private equity, Josh Meissner explores the broken relationship between corporate capital and our communities...

This is why we need Bluesky for Biking!

bikepacking.com/plog/when-we...

Precompiled React Native for iOS: Faster builds are coming in 0.81 React Native 0.81 introduces precompiled iOS builds, cutting compile times by up to 10x in projects where React Native is the primary dependency.

⚡ We teamed up with Meta to deliver precompiled iOS builds in 0.81/SDK 54. You get:

◆ Faster builds: Compile RN once per release
◆ Smoother integrations: Easier to add RN into brownfield apps
◆ Future-proof: Prepares RN for migration from CocoaPods to Swift Package Manager

expo.dev/blog/precomp...

In the US, the gold standard is probably Amtraker, or asm.transitdocs.com. But Amtrak's terrible (undocumented) API means often a bad experience is passed on to the user. While Carto doesn't actually have location information on the trains, it manages to deliver a fantastic experience.

OpenRailwayMap OpenRailwayMap - An OpenStreetMap-based project for creating a map of the world's railway infrastructure.

I think the hardest part about rail maps is bridging the gap between usability and information density – i.e. you want to be able to show a ton of information to advanced users while still making the site intuitive and easy to use. For example openrailwaymap.org vs. @piero.bsky.social's amtraker.com

Carto Tchoo by @nicolaswurtz.bsky.social is one of the coolest sites I've ever seen. Doing a rail tracking website well is really hard, and from what I can tell, he nailed every aspect of the experience.

carto.tchoo.net/map

There are so many reasons to love the Paris metro, but one of them is how quick stops are. The doors are open for less than 10 seconds at some stations.

This is what platform doors and high frequency enables! If trains are arriving every 4 minutes, missing a train isn’t a big deal.

👀

Update: it's just okay. Not worth it for $90 IMO and the battery life isn't great. It's also much larger than I expected. But, I'm going to keep giving it a go and see what the one-week update is!

how do you manage to only post bangers

A seat back on a flight, showing a tv (displaying a frame from the show clueless with three high school students) and a credit card reader

Currently transported back to the 90s on my United flight — there’s a credit card reader built into the seat back and they’re showing the trailer for “Clueless (1995)” which is wonderfully dated.

Oh that makes sense! I hope the busses were electric, underground diesel BRT sounds like a bit of a nightmare.

A view of the Seattle Metro “Symphony” station.

Anyone know why the Seattle Metro has such wide corridors in their stations? Possibly to accommodate a future express track or something?

Project Vend: Can Claude run a small shop? (And why does that matter?) We let Claude run a small shop in the Anthropic office. Here's what happened.

Claude running a vending machine proceeds to sell several tungsten cubes at a loss and then have an existential crisis.

www.anthropic.com/research/pro...

STINSON BEACH: At 9:58 p.m. a woman said she was in hiding after learning "spiritually, through her tum tum," that a man was stalking and trying to kill her.

Running into the same issue on the official bsky.app PDS, though. Same w/ 'encoding: text/plain' :(

See gist.github.com/eiiot/e5ca09...

𝘁𝗶𝗻𝘆Pod Your phone away from phone.

Ordered a tinypod (thetinypod.com) and will report back how it feels. I'm excited – I have basically stopped wearing my apple watch thanks to my Oura ring, but wish I could stop carrying my phone around. It *should* be able to do everything I want (Music, iMessage, etc.) but no YouTube or Twitter.

Nope :( I’m sure there’s some way to get the matter files onto a kobo but the problem is the remote syncing. I probably would’ve had to upload them to calibre web which is just a mess.

If you have any other ideas I’d be happy to help!

Isn't BskyAgent just an extension of AtpAgent?

Yeah was running into that earlier as well. There are a bunch of issues with the blob uploading – if I try to upload `application/javascript` it triggers the image parsing library Sharp which promptly throws an error 🙃

It throws an internal server error (even with my bsky.social pds)

Also cc @bnewbold.net

It seems to happen even with a 1mb-long string as well. Anything below 1mb gives a different error ("InternalServerError")

upload.ts GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

Can someone from the bsky team (maybe @jaz.bsky.social?) explain why uploading a string (5mb) as a blob just doesn't work on a PDS?

I have PDS_BLOB_UPLOAD_LIMIT=104857600 in my pds.env.

Recreation:
gist.github.com/eiiot/fce125...

Congrats!

Having a day

The News and Me

I wrote about the news (and me).

eliothertenstein.com/notes/news

FOREST KNOLLS: At 10:12 a.m. someone peeking through blinds saw a man with clothes strewn on the ground running around and yelling at passersby near the coffee shop.

A Chicago Pope implies the existence of an MLA Pope and APA Pope

Web payment pages are here on iOS—enable external checkout in your Expo app today Build Stripe-powered checkout flows that run on iOS, Android, and web. All from one codebase with Expo and EAS.

The court ruling in Epic v. Apple now allows iOS apps to include in-app links to external payment pages—with just your payment processor’s fee and no modal—if your app is distributed in the U.S.

This blog post is about what this means for Expo developers: expo.dev/blog/mobile-...