Dealing with death

My family has had to deal with the death of a pet and the death of a friend recently. In the pet case, we put down one of our cats (cancer), she was 11 or 12 years old. The friend had a terminal cancer diagnosis and was successful in fighting it for a long time, but got to the end of the treatment trail and died a few weeks ago.

For our cat, we worked with our vet to rule out other possible causes, but the cancer cause eventually became the dominant one. We worked to make her last days comfortable and gave her chances to be outside (we adopted her as a feral cat, and she loved sitting outside in the sun). As we approached the end, our vet had a notice on their door that they had a litter of kittens looking for a good home. We decided to get a girl kitten just before the passing of our older cat. She has turned out to be a real blessing for us – so cute, playful, and cuddly. This weekend, our male cat (we had two cats before) finally started playing with the kitten instead of hissing and batting at her. That was a real turning point.

Our friend’s funeral was this past weekend. There were 300-400 people there, almost a full church – I have never seen this many people at a funeral. The eulogy was given by our friend’s adult children (survived by his wife, two children, three grandchildren). There was so much I learned about our friend from the eulogy – I almost felt like I did not know who he was! I had sung in our church choir with him for most of the past 10-15 years. Still, I felt that he was a good friend to me, and me to him, in our way. The next day, I started crying at Mass during the communion song, it took a minute to compose myself and get back to singing. I shared this with my wife, she said it was ok to cry. I think it may happen again…

At the reception after the funeral, I visited with a number of people from our choir, remembering moments about our friend. As my wife and I started to leave, we stopped to have a hug with some choir members, and I said “See you tomorrow – 8 o’clock!”. This is when we are supposed to get to church to warm up for the 8:30am Mass. I was saying it to keep the faith, that we were dealing with sorrow and loss, but we can still get up the next morning and do the work (via Peter Rukavina), and that this was what our friend would have wanted. The other thing that I want to remember is when my friend’s wife returns to our choir, to not look away (again, via Peter Rukavina):

This doesn’t mean they won’t cry. Everything makes them cry but they are tears of loss combined with gratitude for days that are gone but not forgotten. Hold their hand, hold their gaze, hold their loss. Stay with them and for the briefest of moments make them feel less alone in their sorrow.

Managing memory usage for Node.js apps

When I moved my Node apps over to Opalstack, I was having some issues with the apps failing, getting a 502 error. My account has 1GB of RAM, and I saw my Feed News Archive app reaching 700-800 Mb before quitting. After some Claude sessions and good old fashioned searching, I found the –max-old-space-size parameter to use in Node commands. As an example:

node –max-old-space-size=128 river5.js

The value used in the parameter is in megabytes (MB). For the Feed News Archive app, I set the size to 256. With those limits, I have not seen any 502 errors/app quitting – yay!

Retirement Update – June 2026

I thought I was going to do this last month, but…..oh well, better late than never! I have been exercising more (which is a good thing), and did start some personal software projects (my Feed News Archive site is running nicely!). The other major effort over my first two months was to transition to a new hosting provider (Opalstack) from my previous provider (Bluehost). When I started with Bluehost, they had an “unlimited plan” (websites, storage, etc). Over the years, their cost increased, but I was able to keep adding sites without issues. In the fall of 2025, I found out that my plan “now” only covered 20 websites (I had 59). Although many of them were test sites, the ones I wanted to keep was still higher than 20 – grrr!

I did some looking around at other hosting providers, but got a good recommendation from Anton Zuiker (micro.blog, site), and made the move! A benefit of moving to Opalstack is that I can have PHP, static sites, and Node.js sites all on the same account. With that, I will be able to drop my Digital Ocean account for Node.js apps.

The other things that has happened is that I am slowly approaching each in a more relaxed way. When I started, I had a list, and worked to get everything done on the list, and updated it during the day. Now, having a list is not so important. I feel more and more comfortable being retired.

Test – power user post

The slow death of the power user:

There’s a certain kind of person who’s becoming extinct. You’ve probably met one. Maybe you are one. Someone who actually understood the tools they used. Someone who could sit down at an unfamiliar system, poke at it for twenty minutes, and have a working mental model of what it was doing and why. Someone who read error messages instead of dismissing them. Someone who, when something broke, treated it as a puzzle rather than a betrayal.

That person is dying off. And nobody in the industry seems to care. In fact, most of them are actively celebrating the funeral while billing it as progress.

This isn’t an accident. This is the result of two decades of deliberate, calculated effort by the largest technology companies on earth to turn users into consumers, instruments into appliances, and technical literacy into a niche hobby for weirdos. They succeeded beyond their wildest expectations. Congratulations to everyone involved. You’ve built a generation that can’t extract a zip file without a dedicated app and calls it innovation.

Disappointing results for RSS feeds from US newspapers

As part of my News Archive project, I am trying to add feeds from one major US newspaper per day. As a start, I used this Wikipedia page (which has a list of the top 10 US papers by circulation). Only 7 of 10 papers had feeds (Chicago Tribune, USA Today, and Newsday did not have feeds). Some of them have feeds by default because their sites are built using WordPress (there were no links to those feeds, but by going to sections and adding “/feed/” to the end of the URLs – voila! Feeds!

Another interesting possibility is the existence of sitemaps in XML format. It appears this is being done so that Google can index content. I used Claude to create a script for creating a RSS feed from a sitemap file (see Github gist here). I am going to start using this for sites that do not provide feeds.

I appreciate blogs and RSS

I use River5 to read feeds (see here). When I read feeds on my phone, I open tabs with posts I want to read/keep. At this writing, the number of tabs is 81. Why is the number so high? Because I read a lot of feeds, and these feeds are from blogs, not news websites. I check news websites, but I do not subscribe to many feeds from news websites (too much flow there).

I appreciate blogs because I would not be able to get the wide variety of information/viewpoints if I only subscribed to mainstream media. Also, I can drop feeds if they no longer are of interest. Finally. almost all blogs have feeds to which I can subscribe. Interestingly (or perhaps sadly), many mainstream media newspapers/news websites do not provide feeds – grrr!

I want to send out a big “Thank you!” to Dave Winer for his work in making blogging and feed reading available to all, and for developing and promoting the use of RSS to share the work of our blogs with the world.

AI News Archive Project – Report 2 (app now available)

In Report 1, I mentioned how I was able to get an app working locally on my laptop within several hours. To recap, this is an app to collect news items exposed through feeds and create a searchable archive that can be used in research. In my next iteration of the app, I changed the database (MySQL to MariaDB) and deployed it on a server. The app is now available here (URL is temporary, trying to think of something besides some form of “newsarchive.com”, but that may be where I end up). I also had Claude create some user documentation which is linked at the top of the app.

For the most part, Claude provided the instructions for how to deploy the app and connect to the database, and the instructions were mostly correct. If the instruction failed, I pasted the error into the Claude terminal, and usually Claude came up with a correction. The biggest problem was trying to get a cron job set up to check feeds once per hour – the provided job entry was not working. After some web searches and Gemini checks/fixes, Claude figured out that part of the command left out a dash on a switch option – ugh! I hope that has been fixed now…

Issues that I have seen have been due to the input feeds (NYTimes feeds have some duplicate stories across their feeds). Also, since I have only been collecting data starting today, the archive is someone small, and only has feeds from two sources so far (NYTimes and ABC News). It was disappointing to find that CNN does not have feeds any more…. I am planning to work up to adding at least one new source a day, but will need to find feeds!

All feedback is welcome – give it a try!

Here’s a task where AI did a poor job

In a previous post, I mentioned that I asked Claude to collect RSS feeds for US newspapers. Here was the prompt:

Create a list of RSS feeds and save them using the following steps:

* Review all of the newspapers linked from this page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_United_States ), identify if they have a website, and make a list of the RSS feeds available from the website.

* Identify which newspapers do not have RSS feeds

* Identify which newspapers do not have websites

* Create a OPML subscription list of all RSS feeds identified and save this file to C:\Users\sylve\Documents\Claude_Projects\News_Archive

* Create a text file that lists the newspapers that do not have RSS feeds and save this file to C:\Users\sylve\Documents\Claude_Projects\News_Archive

* Create a text file that lists the newspapers that do not have websites and save this file to C:\Users\sylve\Documents\Claude_Projects\News_Archive

* Add the OPML and text files created to a new repository in my Gitlab account called news-archive

The result of this prompt was an OPML file with 386 feed URLs, but only 22 of them had any items. I looked at the first 5 feeds, and saw that Claude had taken the root URL of a site and added “/rss/” to the URL. There was nothing there. Why did Claude do that? Why did it not search on the site to find a valid feed, and if there was none, to add it to the list of newspapers that do not have feeds? If anyone has any insight into this, I would love to hear it.