Jun 3, 2026: E-Bikes Costs

This one's more off the cuff than normal. I intentionally kept the scope of my argument narrow because ultimately I'm trying to convince myself, so I'm ignoring other considerations such as the high probability that petroleum products get even more expensive than they are now or the different ways in which a bike allows me to interact with the world versus a car. But, in short, an e-bike can totally pay for itself by offsetting not even a full oil change worth of miles I'd otherwise drive in my car.

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May 18, 2026: ECC Error Injection

ECC computer memory is a good defense against file corruption and system instability. However, it's generally impossible to verify if a system actually supports ECC, and the errors against which it protects are uncommon in practice. I replicated a research paper and verified that my servers do indeed support ECC while an old budget desktop that was rumored to actually does not.

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Welcome to Version 2.0!

Welcome to LIMITED IMMORTALITY version 2.0! I've been busy, but you probably can't tell because the site shouldn't look too different.

First, I've removed the three-column layout. I didn't like how I implemented it, and I didn't like that making the browser window wider could make the body of the page narrower. I also removed the page summaries from the pages themselves because more often than not they felt like they were arbitrarily there to take up space that I'd arbitrarily set aside.

Second, I've added a number of links in the header and footer. There are three external links in the footer for now, but that will definitely grow. I would like to point out The Cave of Dragonflies specifically because Butterfree's HTML guide was responsible for my first attempt making a website in 200X.

Third, I've introduced several small quality of life changes. Tables are now responsive and are reasonably legible even on narrow displays. Text flows around images. Figures and galleries have lighter backgrounds to help them stand out from the rest of the body. Tooltips positioned near the right edge of the screen should no longer cause the page to overflow; this requires JavaScript. Some blue elements have been recolored red in order to make them stand out better. Clicking an internal link such as a footnote or entry in a table of contents will now highlight the target element.

And fourth, you can now email me simply by clicking the email button in the footer. I should probably do a more formal, longer-form writeup about some of the scripts I've written, but this button uses a really clever mix of all kinds of techniques that should filter out the vast majority of bots. And it's going through iCloud's Hide My Email service anyway so I can wipe that address and replace it if it does pick up spam.

I think that's all the stuff you should be able to see, but I did not keep a meticulous changelog. Tl;dr there were some CSS changes and a short script.

That was the goal. The rest of the changes were for my sanity. Page headers and footers are now stored in a separate JavaScript file, which means I only need to update one global script file rather than go through every single page in the site manually or use a static site generator. Alas, Neocities is a bit basic, so PHP and SHTML are not supported and other tactics must be used instead.

Footnotes and references have been a colossal pain and make it a slog to wrap up pages I'm writing. This is largely self-inflicted because I've opted to create a quasi-academic style guide for myself to follow, but I've rationalized it because Wayback Machine links are right there next to the source. Tables of contents have been less of a pain, but I've still had to input them manually.

Version 2 changes this. I wrote a Javascript reference manager that parses JSON objects on page load and automagically populates the footnotes with sources in the correct order. It's written in such a way that I can update the style of all citations on every page on the site by changing one script. There is also a table of contents generator that works similarly, but it's much less complex. Because these are generated on the fly, I can move entire sections of the page or insert footnotes without needing to manually renumber every. Single. Note.

The script also adds anchor tags around images so you can click them and open the original image. This is a massive timesink when done manually and 14 lines of JavaScript when automated.

But what if somebody doesn't have JavaScript enabled? The header and footer are extremely important for site navigation, and footnotes and tables of contents are important for navigating pages.

So! For users who don't have JavaScript enabled, I've included backup options in <noscript> tags, which only render when JavaScript is disabled. An alternate header or footer can be loaded into an iframe. Additionally, because they're important to the page, I'm copying each page's generated table of contents and footnotes into noscript tags when I finish one up.

That's all the effort I'm willing to exert, though. If I keep this site going long enough, I'll probably migrate to a host that supports PHP, and then all of this will be moot.

Finally, I've tried to make the site a little more accessible. The medium blue that I'd been using for links, borders, and other elements does not actually contrast sufficiently against the light blue I'm using for the page background. The link, border, etc. color has been darkened a smidge to boost contrast.

Additionally, I'd hesitated to use animated gif buttons until now, but thanks to the prefers-reduced-motion feature, users who indicate—and I believe this works with operating system settings, not just browser settings—that they prefer to see fewer animations will see fallback static images.

Finally, I've replaced nearly all of the <div> tags in my template with HTML5 semantic tags. This is supposed to help with screen readers? I honestly did not read into the details; I just know it's considered best practice. I've also fixed alt text on images.