Stefan Hayden

Liveblog - a new mastodon client to quickly post durring live events

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 06:14:28 -0700

The Problem

I have had the the same problem since the dawn of micro blogging. If I am watching a live event like an awards show, I often want to have a series of posts all properly tagged with the right hashtags. I want to quickly see what other are saying and boost and interact with those people. And I want all other posts not about the event to fade in to the background.

But normal UI for micro blogging makes you re-type hash tags on every post. You can reconfigure some UIs to show a column of posts about a topic but you have to do the work to reconfigure the UI.

The Solution

No more. Liveblog is a tool 100% focused on quickly posting during live events. Hashtags persist for every post. Content Warnings persist for every post for perfect spoiler warning protection. Optionally you can toggle thread mode and auto reply to your last post for perfect thread creation. Below you can do a search to see what others are saying and it will auto refresh to always show fresh content to reply to, boost or favorite.

Security

Liveblog is deployed on vercel. It auths against your mastodon instance with minial permisions. All credidentials are stored in encrypted, httpOnly cookies. This means they are never stored on my servers. It also means if you login from different browsers or clear cookies it will register a new app on your account.

TVmarks - a new way to track your tv shows

Sun, 25 May 2025 15:00:00 -0700

I am excited to annouce a new project, Tvmarks, a personal website to track your tv shows. It is inspired by and shares much of the same code as Postmarks. Through the power of the tvmaze database Tvmarks lets you a build a selfhosted version of what you are watching, what you have watched, and what you plan to watch. Tvmarks is also fediverse enabled with shows added and episodes watched shared with your comments to activitypub.

How I Got Here

Postmarks launched in 2023 but I didn’t discover it till 2025. That still seems wild to think about since I am, or try to be, very pluged in to the fediverse. But one thing it taught me that I never really thought of is how an sqlite can juist be a file that node can access. I love web aplications but have never loved needing to care about servers and databses. Glicth with sqlite really solves so many problems that are needed but I rather not care about. With those obticals trivialized I was excited with the idea of owning my tv watching data.

A cousin of Postmarks

Is it clear I love Postmarks?! I forked it in Febuary and got to work. Most changes were pretty strightforward to support shows and episodes in the database. Tvmaze has great apis to source data from to host in your own database so you are never dependant of another website to host your data.

RIP Glicth

Though Tvmarks was built to run on glitch.com I have also been able to run it on a VPS and on Render.com.

Install it and let me know

If you try it link me to your instance -> @stefan@gardenstate.social

Active Forums

Sat, 12 Oct 2024 05:40:06 -0700

Great list of active forums from Aftermath. I’ve been looking for a search engine that just searches smaller sites lke these and I don’t think it exists!

What is a tweet called on mastodon?

Mon, 07 Oct 2024 05:54:55 -0700

A tweet on mastodon is called a “Post”.

Before Nov 14, 2022 they were called Toots. This was fun but mostly was due to a misunder standing of the english meaning.

this is in responce to this youtube video that arguest that all text posts on social networks should be called tweets which to me makes no sense. The idea that a post on twitter with an image and a image on instagram with text should have a different name because of some fundimental valuye of how it is displayed is wild. The only reason these things ever have different names is for corperate branding purposes.

In a federated world a text post with an image can be displayed differently on different platforms so the way a post is made has no bearing on how it is displayed.

Frameland: A Binary Tale - Upcoming pixel-art indie RPG

Sat, 28 Sep 2024 14:59:25 -0700

Frameland: A Binary Tale looks so cool! An indie rpg with a reto look and soundtrack and rich story is 100% my shit. I feel like it has so much of what made me really love Chained Echos.

it has yet to come out and I don’t like to promote stuff that has not come out but indie studios need more suport so here I am. Add it to your wishlist! I can’t wait to buy this day 1!

Twilight of the Gods

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 18:14:40 -0700

Season 1 Review:

This show was pretty good for a Zack Snyder which I usually don’t love. Many of the charcaters seem to start out pretty bland and hard to distinguis but I think it got better as the series went on.

Many episodes are very horny in a way few animations are and in a way different then any anime I have seen is. There is a lot of sex and nudity. Some nudity was not sexualized which is rare in any media.

While I had a hard time getting in to it by the end I was fully invested. The animation style is very nice.

movie reviews

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 18:04:38 -0700

Fantastic Mr. Fox

4 stars

just a very chill and nice movie.

Land of Bad

2.5 stars

little dose of American jingoism.

Polite Society

4.5 stars

What a amazing movie. Blending romcom and action movie seamlessly. Amazing writing, acting, production, and stunt coordination.

Baby Driver

4 stars

a fun movie with a lot of actors that have aged very poorly. I’ve wanted to watch this since Thomas Flight had his great opening breakdown of the movie. www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNGYsmTPWug

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Sat, 17 Aug 2024 19:21:43 -0700

3.5 stars

I love Fury Road. This movie had many many good parts but I don’t think it came together to make a compelling movie. Action was great. Characters were kind of weak. The the plot was uneven. The world building was great. I think this movie did sand better then Dune.

TV Shows That Didn't End At The Right Time

Sat, 17 Aug 2024 08:54:51 -0700

A Crime They Ended So Soon

Freaks And Geeks
Reservation Dogs
The Wonder Years
Single Drunk Female
Willow
A League of Their Own
The Carrie Diaries
Lovecraft Country
Vagrant Queen
Party of Five (2020)
Everything Sucks
Selfie
Don’t Trust the B in Apt 23
Happy Endings
The Middle Man
I Am Not Okay With This

A Misdemeanor They Ended So Soon

I’m Sorry
Other Space
Alone Together
Happy Together
Hollywood Darlings
Trophy Wife
Grand Crew
Shanara
Good Girls Revolt
Pitch
Life As We Know It
Privileged
Battle Ground
Suburgatory
Rutherford Falls
XO, Kitty

Had More To Give

Dickenson
Raised By Wolves
Single Parents
Santa Clarita Diet
Dark Matter
Review
American Dreams
Joan of Arcadia
Sports Night
Black Lady Sketch Show
My Boys
Tuca & Bertie
Home Economics
Colony
Not Dead Yet
Motherland: Fort Salem
Veronica Mars
The Carmichael Show

Ended At The Right Time But I Miss Them

Your The Worst

Went On Way Too Long

How I Met Your Mother
The 100
Orphan Black

Kamala Harris intros Tim Walz

Wed, 07 Aug 2024 19:51:28 -0700

This rally is wild. Probably no rally has been this pumped since Obama.

Flashing the Sonoff S31 with ESPHome

Tue, 06 Aug 2024 19:24:26 -0700

Great guide on Flashing the Sonoff S31 with ESPHome here.

How long does a Mastodon post take to federate between servers?

Fri, 10 May 2024 16:53:05 -0700

Recently Stefan Bohacek ran a poll to find out how long a post takes to appear to his followers. A great question!

There is no one speed a post is circulated. When a post is made it enters a queue on sidekiq (below) to be sent out to other servers. Those servers receive that message and it goes in a queue to be processed. At peak times these queues can grow thousands of entries depending on how it is provisioned.

My server, GardenState.social, is hosted on cloudplane at the medium level. It has 2 cpus and 8 sidekiq queues.

The Speed Test

To do my own test I wrote a script (code on github) to get all my followers, get all their servers, make a post and then check each server until that post appears. Because mastodon redirects you back to your server when viewing your own profile I instead generated a unique hashtag and then check to see if the page for that hashtag 404s or 200s.

I ran this code at 7:30 on May 10th. There is no way to know the queue status of other servers but my own servers had empty queues.

Results

My post made it to 251 servers over 240 seconds (4 minutes). The average time for my post to appear on another server was 8.6 seconds.

The top 5 fastest servers (in seconds):

0.959 - lostcreek.social
0.985 - social.giurdanella.it
1.045 - happyfedi.better-than.tv
1.068 - social.lugal.io
1.069 - blahaj.zone

The top 5 slowest servers (in seconds):

240.34 - climatejustice.rocks
54.134 - postchat.io
51.491 - mastodon.africa
18.53 - mastodon.acc.sunet.se
17.733 - mstdn.party

Notible servers (in seconds):

3.308 - beige.party
6.394 - mastodon.social
5.535 - mas.to
11.662 - universeodon.com
4.716 - fosstodon.org

see the full results dataset here!

I could imagine this being turned into a bot and report some kind of federation health check. Though this does spam the servers with web requests a bit so it seems like something we can just run occasionally to get a feel for the state of the fediverse.

Overall, federation seems to be pretty speedy!

Tidal track not available for streaming

Sat, 13 Apr 2024 13:38:13 -0700

I kept finding songs on Tidal I had added to my tracks list but were marked as “not available for streaming” but if you went to the artist page the song stil existsed.

For some reason Tidal’s backend seems to generate a lot of new track IDs when they update or need to make some change to a track. Really frusterating.

To fix this I wrote a script to find exact song title matches of songs from the same artist and swap them. Its been working really well for me and you can find it here on github.

React Context Provider Optimization

Sat, 06 Apr 2024 05:07:50 -0700

React createContext is a powerful way to to use react to communicate between components but there are a lot of easy mistakes to be made that will slow down your app. From memoizing everything to separating component with hooks and components with UI.

Yet even if you follow all of those patterns you can still find your app rendering components that could be expensive to render.

This is because providers trigger renders any time they render. It does not matter if a hook or parent triggers them to render or if it passes in a memoized value. If a provider renders it will trigger anything subscribed to it with useContext.

Consider this provider:

  const [activeModal, setActiveModal] = useState<string>('none');
  const show = useCallback((activeModal: string) => setActiveModal(activeModal), []);
  const value = useMemo(() => ({ activeModal, show }), [activeModal, show]);
  return (
  <ModalContext.Provider value={value}>
    {props.children}
  </ModalContext.Provider>
  );

Above the provider has two values. One to know what the current activeModal is. The other, show, will let components around the appo set a new activeModal.

Because the both values share one prodiver ALL components who access the show function will render when ANY component calls show().

When I learned that dozens of components were getting rendered simply because they wanted the option of possibly calling show() I was a little shocked. Fixing this is not immediately obvious. Memoization can not save you and this might make you start to look at react state libraries. But there is a solution that is architectural.

  const [activeModal, setActiveModal] = useState<string>('none');
  const show = useCallback((activeModal: string) => setActiveModal(activeModal), []);
  return (
  <ModalActionContext.Provider value={show}>
    <ModalContext.Provider value={activeModal}>
      {props.children}
    </ModalContext.Provider>
  </ModalActionContext.Provider>
  );

With values that change separated from function that do not change now any component can access the show() function and never have it trigger a re-render.

You can play with this below. The red components on the left only use one provider and calling show() or hide() causes all red components to render every time. On the right the green components are broken in two providers and calling show() or hide() only renders the components that need to know the activeModal. It doesn’t even trigger a render on the component with the button!

Play with this code on codesandbox.io

Separating the values and functions is a great start and can save many renders around the application. Depending on the data you can think of more ways to separate data. If some values update every time and others only sometime then it might make sense to break those in to separate providers as well.

Most Followed Mastodon Accounts

Sat, 09 Dec 2023 09:07:50 -0800

I’ve launched a new bot / website. Mastodon Most Followed tracks the top 10,000 mastodon accounts. At the moment to make the list you only need over 500 followers to make the list. The list is compiled though monitoring the federated timeline of mastodon.social as well as any mention accounts.

Tidal Music Metadata Csv Export

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 18:34:10 -0700

I never trust these music services to remember what music I love. Tidal doesn’t have an easy way to export this. I just want a CSV file to keep so Tidal doesn’t own the music I have found.

So here is a small repo you can clone to run against your Tidal and pull your favorites out.

# You need to install tidalapi using pip install tidalapi (more can be found here https://github.com/tamland/python-tidal)
# had to be fixed with https://github.com/tamland/python-tidal/pull/130

import csv
import sys
import pprint

import tidalapi

session = tidalapi.Session()
session.login_oauth_simple()
favorites = tidalapi.Favorites(session, session.user.id)

#
# Get Tracks
#
open('../tracks.csv', 'w').close()
f = open("../tracks.csv", "a")

f.write('track,album,artist\n')

getMore = True
limit = 1000
offset = 0

while getMore == True:

    tracks = favorites.tracks(limit, offset);
    offset += limit;
    if len(tracks) == 0:
        getMore = False

    for track in tracks:
        f.write(','.join([track.name, track.album.name, track.artist.name]) + '\n')


#
# Get Artists
#
open('../artists.csv', 'w').close()
f = open("../artists.csv", "a")

f.write('artist\n')

getMore = True
limit = 1000
offset = 0

while getMore == True:

    artists = favorites.artists(limit, offset);
    offset += limit;
    if len(artists) == 0:
        getMore = False

    for artist in artists:
        f.write(artist.name + '\n')


#
# Get Album
#
open('../albums.csv', 'w').close()
f = open("../albums.csv", "a")

f.write('album,artist\n')

getMore = True
limit = 1000
offset = 0

while getMore == True:

    albums = favorites.albums(limit, offset);
    offset += limit;
    if len(albums) == 0:
        getMore = False

    for album in albums:
        f.write(','.join([album.name, album.artist.name]) + '\n')

Mechanical Keyboards

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 18:00:09 -0700

Had a fun time getting in to mechanical keyboards for real this time. In the past I got a low profile keychron with Gateron blues and a air75 Nuphy with browns.

The low profile keychrone had flat keys and I couldn’t feel which key my fingers were on and I also didn’t like the blue switch but I didn’t know it at the time.

The Nuphy was much better but I need more room around the sift and arrow keys for me to type well. Also I didn’t like the brown switch though I didn’t know it at the time.

Keychron Q2 QMK - 65% with knob and Gateron G Pro Red

One I got this keyboard I realized why I had problems with the others. I really need that gap for the arrow keys and the linear reds made typing feel good to me.

Ajazz AK816 from Epomaker - 75% with gold knob and Gateron Pro 2.0 Silver linears

Once I hit on how much I love the Keychron and why I felt much better with this purchase. I know I like they layout. I was excited to try the silvers which are just like the reds but with a shorter travel distance. I really love a linear with a short travel distance.

Now that I know what I like I can go back to the original keychron and get better keys and switches and the Nuphy and get linear switches for that as well. It took some money but I’ve set myself up well to always be happy with the keyboard I have.

Mastodon Instance GardenState.social for all things New Jersey

Tue, 29 Nov 2022 21:24:47 -0800

I’ve started a Mastodon instance called GardenState.social for all of New Jersey. Come and join and escape twitter.

That Moment Saddam Hussein Took Power On Live Television

Sat, 22 Oct 2022 11:49:32 -0700

Wild and incredible and scary this was ever broadcast.