Obsidian Blog Publish Plugin

I've been publishing blog posts from an authenticated /admin page on this site using GitHub credentials to authenticate myself. This has always been concerning to me as a security vulnerability. I wrote the C# auth handler myself but I'm no security expert especially when it comes to OAuth. I've had a lot of exposure to it but have never considered myself an expert on it.

The second issue with the admin page is that it has been eating my blog posts lately. I would author a post in the admin page and when I hit submit, the form would submit and the post would just get silently dropped. I tried debugging it for a while but decided the complexity and security of the admin page wasn't worth it anymore.

In the spirit of simplifying the hosting (removing postgres and migrating to fly.io), I decided I could author posts in Obsidian instead and write a plugin to publish directly to the blog's storage blob store (using Azure blob storage). This is the first post being written in Obsidian!

I'm now realizing that I'm back to where I started back in 2023 when I first used Obsidian Publish to host a small blog. I rarely posted on it (even less often than this blog) and shut it down eventually.

One annoying thing with creating the obsidian plugin was that I wanted to use the official Azure JavaScript SDK for the blob storage uploads, but it thinks that Obsidian is a browser and blocks using a shared credential key as the authentication mechanism. It only allows it in NPM runtime environments. I understand why they have to add this check, but it did force me to write my own slim blob store SDK.

With this change, I used AI way less than in the past. Partly because I cancelled my Claude Pro subscription last month and partly because I wanted to learn and understand the Obsidian plugin API and TypeScript development. I originally started this blog to learn and that was happening less and less as I was relying on AI more. I didn't completely abstain however. I used OpenCode and OpenRouter for some parts such as the blob store sdk. I've written my own Blob Store SDKs in C# before and it's just tedious to set up the auth correctly. It was nice to use open router as it allowed me to try out different models, such as DeepSeek V4 and Kimi 2.5. However, there is a reason people flock to Opus and GPT5.5. DeepSeek was very disappointing, it actually felt like GPT 3.5 days in some ways. It would just quite in the middle of work with no notification. I ended up going back to Sonnet 4.6 to finish up some work and the increase in capability was so immediately clear.

I'm glad I got to try out some different tools. At work I use Copilot CLI and can choose between several different models. I tend to use GPT5.5 for planning and Opus 4.7 for executing the implementation specs as it plays to their strengths. I was using Claude Code at work until the licenses were cancelled.

note: I don't use AI to write posts and I don't ever plan to. Writing is sacred to me and helps me think. The point of authoring posts manually is to help me clarify my own thoughts.

Forum Post

The last.fm staff posted a small announcement that they are now independent. I've been on last.fm since 2008 and didn't realize they were owned by the CBS corporation that entire time. Apparently CBS bought last.fm in 2007. In that post about the acquisition is this line

CBS understands the Last.fm vision, the importance we place on putting the listener in charge, the vibrant and vocal community, the obsession with music stats, and our determination to offer every song ever recorded.

I imagine last.fm had huge ambitions in their early days. There was no Spotify or major streaming services at that time, so they were in a potential position to become the central place where people came to listen to and discover music.

Looking back at my own music habits at that time, I was either spending money in iTunes to buy albums or individual tracks for $0.99, but that was also locking me into the Apple ecosystem because all music on iTunes was protected with DRM (they later introduced music without DRM and thus increased the price to $1.29, which is still the price to this day). I remember signing up for last.fm for the ability to internet radio streaming and discovering music. It was pretty unimpressive looking back, but at the time it felt amazing.

I haven't used last.fm much since then, I had a brief time from 2014-2016 where I had scrobbling set up with Spotify, but something broke and I never noticed or bothered to fix it. With this announcement of them becoming independent, it's reignited my interest in scrobbling and tracking the music I'm listening to. I've also been working on moving away from Spotify and going back to manually managing my music like its the year 2006.

Here is my last.fm profile: https://www.last.fm/user/jmanator

BullWatt

I cancelled my Zwift subscription recently. It's not that Zwift is bad, I just don't use it often enough to justify the monthly price. I've been looking for a free alternative that I can use whenever I feel like riding inside (very rare these days).

But then I found BullWatt in a Reddit thread. It's exactly what I want, even though I didn't realize it at first. It runs locally in your browser and uses the Bluetooth API to connect to your trainer. Unfortunately, it appears that only Google Chrome has any decent support for this API so I had to install that first, which pains me to see it next to Firefox.

The best part is that because it runs locally in the browser, there are no accounts or sign ups. You can just start using it immediately. Absolute cinema.

I just finished a 25 minute session and it did exactly what it advertised. It let me pick a workout and set my FTP, and then it used the ERG mode of my trainer to automatically set the resistance.

The source is on GitHub. I'm going to poke around there later to see how it works in more detail.

Programming still sucks

AI didn't take our jobs. Greed did.

Now that Heroku is on the deprecation path, I've been looking to move this blog to another provider. One thing I quickly realized is that managed SQL servers are usually not this cheap. I'm currently paying $5 a month for the cheapest tier but I haven't seen another provider with that good of a price point. This got me thinking, why use SQL at all for this simple site? Why not just store posts as markdown with YAML frontmatter?

I've been wanting to try out the acclaimed superpowers plugin for claude code, and this was just the right feature to use it on. Did a long brainstorm session with the agent to flesh out the idea, then using the subagent-driven development method, had Claude implement it. A bunch of subagents got to work and had the whole thing working end-to-end pretty quickly. One thing I forgot to flesh out was the replacement of my custom image-upload JS from my old WYSIWYG editor, trix. We replaced it with EasyMDE and all I had to do was point it at my image upload endpoint and change a bit of formatting on the server side.

I'm very impressed with superpowers. I paired it with Simon Willison's Rodney CLI so the agents could test out their changes and "see" the actual impact of their code in a headless browser. I now have much less code running on the blog and no Postgres dependency, so I should be free to switch to another provider, such as fly.io and hopefully halve my hosting cost.

Tools reference - PowerShell

You can now opt-in to a new built-in PowerShell tool in Claude Code as of v2.1.84 by setting the CLAUDE_CODE_USE_POWERSHELL_TOOL environment variable.

Until this release, Claude Code on Windows would use Git Bash to run commands, which has caused some weird issues for me in the past, such as running the roslyn-language-server dotnet tool, because the entrypoint is a .cmd file which can't be run in a git bash shell.

Now, Claude Code will see an additional tool called "PowerShell"

  Built-in Tools

  - Read — Read files from the filesystem
  - Write — Write/create files
  - Edit — Make exact string replacements in files
  - Bash — Execute shell commands
  - Glob — Find files by pattern
  - Grep — Search file contents with regex
  - Agent — Launch specialized subagents
  - Skill — Invoke user-defined skills
  - ToolSearch — Fetch schemas for deferred tools
  - PowerShell — Execute PowerShell commands

It doesn't replace the Bash tool, it just adds PowerShell, so you may find that the agent defaults to using Bash for most things unless you ask it to use PowerShell explicitly.

You can also add { "defaultShell": "powershell" } to your settings.json file to make !commands run in PowerShell. This means you can now run cmdlets directly. For example: ! Write-Host "Hello" now works.

Brandon Sanderson’s Keynote speech

Brandon Sanderson offers his view on why AI art is not art. I highly recommend watching the whole video, it’s very entertaining and he makes a lot of good points from the perspective of those who make art.

I’m more of a consumer than a creator (although I do play guitar which scratches the itch), and my view on art and AI is that what makes art valuable to me is the context in which the art is made. It’s why I can hear the same song played by two different musicians and one version moves you more than another.

My example of this is listening to Townes Van Zandt play covers of songs, and they hit different. Knowing who he was as a person and the struggles he had throughout life really change how you experience a song. The pain is something you can hear in a raspy voice that is the result of years of smoking and hard living.

To echo, but slightly modify, Brandon’s point here, no matter how good AI gets at making art, it won’t have the same impact on me as a consumer because it’s completely void of any context that would give it meaning.

When scrolling to the bottom of the home page, you now should see an "older posts" button which will take you to the next page of posts. This feature has been on my TODO list since day 1 and am happy it's finally implemented. It's much easier now that all posts are cached in memory in the blog, so I can just use LINQ statements to "Skip" and "Take" over the full post collection to emulate paging.

My ~/.claude/settings.json with full solution

I've been looking for a way to get notified when Claude Code needs my input or is finished. Big shout out to u/Ok-Engineering2612 on Reddit for this post:  WSL Toast Notifications with Hooks in Claude Code : r/ClaudeAI. I had been trying to do the same thing with BurntToast but I forget the way WSL interops with Windows.

The settings from the Reddit thread did need a little tweaking ($PAYLOAD is no longer supported and now Claude Code sends the JSON structure via stdin). Here's my change to the command:

 "command": "input=$(cat) && powershell.exe -NoProfile -Command \"Import-Module BurntToast; New-BurntToastNotification -Text 'Claude Code Notification', '$(echo \"$input\" | jq -r '.message')'\""

Here is the full documentation for hooks: Hooks reference

File Pilot

It’s 2026 and you can buy a lightweight, super fast file explorer for windows for $250. I kind of love it.

The price obviously seems really high for a file explorer, but apparently it’s taken the developer 3 years to get to this point. You can also pay $50 but that only gets you a years worth of updates.

This project has got me thinking about an alternate reality where you have to pay for basic features of the OS. What if each program like notepad, paint, or task manager were priced this way? Or worse you had to pay a subscription! I’m actually shocked we didn’t end up in this world. Thankfully nerds write software for the love of the game and give it away. This puts downward pressure on the bugs corps to not nickel and dime software. All that said, I’m happy the file pilot dev values their own work and has priced this tool accordingly. If nothing else, I think it shows the windows team how software should run (fast) with few dependencies.