Month: December 2024

I have essentially moved all of my social media activity to Bluesky. This has had some downstream effects.

Gifs

For example you cannot upload your own animated gifs. So this cool animated gif:

Gets dumbed down to a static image

To work around this I have been exporting slides as short movies and uploading them to my YouTube channel and then embedding them into a Bluesky post like this

and this:

I like this better because audio!

Bookmarks

Bluesky does not have bookmarks. The best work around is to reply to a post with an emoji of your choice. Many people use  . Then when you want to look at your book marks, just go to the search panel and enter “from:me ” Consider bookmarking the results so you can get back there quickly.

There is no reason you need to use the push pins, and you can use multiple emoji to get organize you bookmarks. If you want to look at other people’s bookmarks replace “me” with their username. Here are Swap’s pins: from:hswapnil.bsky.social

Search

This page with search tips for Bluesky is useful.

Import

I imported my posts from Twitter into Bluesky using BluueArk.app. It worked great. A lot of my posts did not dome, but a lot did and it makes my Bluesky profile feel more fleshed out.

The imported tweets came in to bluesky recently but they are still ordered chronologically with a date created tag. So this post from 2018 was imported just a few weeks ago.

So this has resulted in a few of people replying to years old tweets which is simultaneously confusing and delightful.

What tips do you have for using Bluesky?

I was invited to speak at ApEx Pathshala this year and had a ball with the assignment. Conference organizer, Viswanath “Vish” Billa came up with the prompt “A numerical crime scene: When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable…must be the truth.” He gave Roger Rodby and I, a three-hour-block to put together the edutainment we could come up with.

I leaned into “whatever remains, however improbable must be the truth” and did all three of my cases on pseudo-XXX-emias:

• Pseudohyponatremia
• Pseudohyperkalemia (5 different flavors)
• Pseudohypobicarbonatemia

Roger went with a case of metabolic alkalosis from an ACTH producing tumor and a case of hypophosphatemic rickets. He had a third case of exercise induced hyponatremia that we didn’t get to.

Roger and I decided to ham it up and go full victorian detective. I had Chat GPT make us a victorian detective doctor icon that we used to brand the slides:

Here are a few of my slides

Here is a movie I made of a beat about the correct fluid prescription in acute pancreatitis

Then to full lean into the Victorian Doctor Detective theme we added costumes.

My slides are available, as always, at Sorry-My-Slides-Aren’t Done.

Thanks to Vish and the rest of ApEx for putting on a world-class nephrology conference.