Bubbles —a site I am increasingly fond of as it’s turning up some wonderful posts and sites and people— was recently mentioned on Hackernews. I’ve followed Hackernews for a long time as a way to keep some form of view on the tech world (to which I am adjacent) but only check it every week or so. So I missed the moment when it happened, but there were signs… Can you spot when Bubbles got popular and then direct a fair chunk of traffic to my blog?? According to Benjamin Behnke, the Bubbles…
5054 independent, personal blogs. One front page. Ranked by votes and freshness, shaped by you.
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So many things happened since the first day I released Town Square. I have been shipping a lot because people were genuinely having fun with it and naturally started imagining what else would make it even better. They were not just asking for features. They were playing with it, enjoying it, and saying things like how nice it would be if Town Square had this or that. There is now more room for people to make their own square feel like their own. You can customize colors, change the number of…
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A while back I read The Last Quiet Thing, a fantastic piece by Terry Godier, a piece about a twelve-dollar Casio watch compared to an Apple Watch, and why one of them is a product and the other is a relationship. I've been thinking about it ever since, keeping my eye out for single-use devices that just get out of the way. That's how I ended up with an Xteink X4 in my pocket.It's a tiny pocketable e-reader, smaller than a cell phone, with an E-Ink screen and no agenda beyond displaying books.…
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Since reading Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger and its parts about Covid and fitness influencer culture a while ago (especially the chapter "The Far Right Meets the Far Out"), I cannot help but see that “Pinterest clean girl fitness and fruit bowl gua sha yoga mat pilates in the forest” content as covert white supremacy and eugenicist ideals; dog whistles, shared far and wide by people who probably don’t know better and just think it looks good and want to be like that. I cannot quote the entire book…
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It seems like the older child totoro doesn’t get enough attention. I made this to help remedy that.I actually carved this before the Jiji stamp, but am just getting around to posting it. The detail on this one was more challenging than the carvings that preceded it. I was still using the Speedball tool, and did not have the smaller 1mm gouge yet.I used the Tsukineko VersaFine Clair Blue Belle stamp pad for this print.There is an 18-second totoro imprinting video on YouTube.
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Nice, quirky web projects are always a joy to stumble upon. I recently came across Daniel Janus’s old handwritten.blog which is (or would have been anyway) a blog that was entirely handwritten. And by ‘entirely’ I mean entirely, from the header to footer to every little thing you would see on the webpage; nothing was typed up, all of it was written on a reMarkable 2 e-ink tablet. As you might suspect, it was unsustainable and was abandoned rather quickly, but not before Daniel had catalogued…
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I’ve been using Git for so long and I just realized you can ignore files at three different levels and not just with .gitignore. The three files you can use to ignore files are: .gitignore .git/info/exclude ~/.config/git/ignore .gitignore .gitignore is the usual file where you write files you want to ignore. It’s checked into Git along with the rest of the code. Whatever files you add to it will not get taken into account when running git commands. .git/info/exclude The exclude file lives in…
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Shibuya and Harajuku can be quite a crowded placed to visit, and so I welcome any opportunity for a coffee in a more quiet place. Enter BAGGAGE COFFEE - a coffee store tucked away on a residential side street. It’s located halfway between Harajuku station on the JR line, and Omotesando station on one of the metro lines. If you are doing a walk between Shibuya and Harajuku, or checking out the shops along Omotesando or Cat Street, this can be a nice detour spot for a good cup of coffee. I’m not…
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I love Bear. It is one of the few places on the web that still feels calm, personal, and human. You write something, publish it, and it exists as a simple page on the internet. No algorithm. No follower count. No pressure to perform. For writing, Bear feels almost perfect to me. But I also take photos. Not professional photos. Not portfolio work. Just ordinary life: walks, family days, weekends, cities, small details, strange light, quiet moments I want to keep. And I never really knew where…
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I have a hypothesis that Linux and EVs have a similar characteristic: Once you switch, you’ll never want to go back. Nathan Edwards in The Verge: It didn’t take long for my Linux install to stop feeling new and exciting and start feeling like, well, my computer. It’s not exactly like a less annoying version of Windows, though it is less annoying than Windows, but it’s been a much easier transition than I thought it would be. There are a few extra steps sometimes in finding and installing apps —…
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There are colors that I want to show you, but I can’t. They exist in the real world. You probably saw some of them today, but I can’t show them to you on a screen. A digital photograph can’t capture them, and your screen can’t display them. No game you’ve ever played has contained them. Unless you have specialized equipment, they are entirely absent from the digital world. Most of them are cyans. On screens we live a life starved of cyans. It is shocking when you see one in person. They seem…
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I wear my favorite perfumes and body sprays at home. I used to try to save them for when I went out on a nice date or attended an upscale Event, then I realized I was hardly getting any use out of them. What good is it doing me to have bought pretty-smelling sprays if I just put them on a shelf and never wear them? So now, I wear them while I work from home. I spray perfume or body spray on myself after showering, and if I can't smell it on myself anymore around lunchtime, I spray some more. I…
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This post is secret; you can only find it via my RSS feeds (and places which syndicate them). It's okay to talk about it or link to it, though. Thanks for being part of RSS Club! 👋 Looking to change your name by deed poll without paying nor giving over your personal information? I suggest you use my website FreeDeedPoll.org.uk. Want an alternative? DeedPoll.lgbt is good too! FreeDeedPoll.org is okay, but be aware that it’s run by a company who also sell deed poll services, so they’re not…
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Now and then I need to upload something over SFTP (usually pretty large site backups) and I’ve been using FileZilla for this the last few months. As “retro” as the UI is, this app is still awesome and I am impressed with the speed of my file transfers every time I use it! The UI hasn’t changed much Just wanted to share some love for this venerable app.
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In March of 2007, I went with my friend Rain to the San Francisco ASPCA. I was in a transition period in a lot of ways; for the first time since I’d graduated college, I suddenly found myself without a full-time job or contract. The loss of a social circle from work, big changes in my personal life, and uncertainty about what I was going to do next meant that I was lonely and had too much time with my own thoughts. This was an exploratory trip to maybe consider someday getting a pet cat. Going…
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Don't worry, this post is not about zits, but something comparably annoying: Zen and Zed. One is a browser and the other an editor. Even writing this, I don't know which is which. Their names and icons are so similar that I keep getting them confused. I couldn't take it anymore; I had to take drastic measures. That's why I replaced the icon of the Zen browser application with a nice-looking e logo. Here's how to do it on macOS: Close Zen. Create or download an alternative icon. Highlight the…
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Link: https://derekhanson.blog/nobody-clicks-your-share-buttons/(Via rendezvous with cassidoo.)I've always wondered if anyone actually used the social sharing buttons embedded on news sites and (some) WordPress blogs.Derek Hanson digs into the numbers: The UK government ran one of the most thorough studies on this. When GOV.UK added social sharing buttons, they tracked usage for 10 weeks across 6.8 million pageviews. The share buttons got clicked 14,078 times. That’s a 0.21% usage rate, which…
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When you feel overwhelmed, slow down. I know this might feel like the exact opposite thing your system wants to do when you feel overwhelmed. But it's not... What if the feeling we associate with overwhelm is actually a message, sent by our system, asking us to please slow down? And what if the negative outcomes we associate with feeling overwhelmed are actually a result of ignoring that message—of working harder and faster and more frantically instead? I have a saying I throw at my children…
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I’ve increasingly been introducing the small web to my daily reading. The small web is a loosely defined concept, partly an attempt to refocus the internet on old school technology, on text websites with less or no JavaScript, and a mix of reactions against the increasing centralization and commercialization of the internet. Part of it is just regular people writing and creating communities for the joy of it, because they want to, rather than in the pursuit of profit, thought leadership, or…
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I was more than a little interested with flags as a kid. I loved learning about the history of their designs, what they represented, their aesthetics, and how they’re used in different settings. Point out a national flag (and even some supranational and subordinate flags), and I’ll almost certainly be able to tell you the political entity it represents, the symbolism behind specific features, and what flags upon which they’re based (where applicable). Have you ever wondered why the five pointed…
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Earlier this week I wrote about the newly announced under-16 social media ban for the UK. The post has so far been one of my most read on this blog so far (spotlight helps). This is unsurprisingly a hot topic, but has also got me thinking about my relationship with technology and the web around that age. Especially after speaking with a colleague who has a 16 year old son. I grew up in a rural area, so communication technology was always lagging behind the urban areas. TV signal could be spotty…
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Ticker tape, as such, has been defunct for more than 50 years. The machines were a form of telegraph connected to printers: since they wasn’t carrying general messages but only a constrained set of letters and numbers in series, a simple printer onto a roll of paper was sufficient. This led to Financial District offices being full of long pieces of narrow paper tape, and offices used to have operable windows… 1888, a political campaign parade, looking west on Wall Street towards Trinity Church.…
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Bubbles: functions a bit like Hacker News but specifically for personal blogs. You log in with a Mastodon or Fediverse account, upvote posts you like, and watch the good stuff bubble up. It is fantastic to see Bubbles getting some well-deserved spotlight in David Pierce’s latest Installer newsletter. This is a win for the Indie web and I am glad I had a minor part to play in this. The personal blogging community is thriving, and tools like Bubbles make discovering and participating in this…
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Here are 20 steps that I reconned somewhere on the internet. Even though I called them "steps," order of execution does not matter. Take yourself out for dinner. No phone, just a notebook. Go to the cinema alone. Stay in your seat after it ends. Pick a nearby town you've never visited. No agenda, just show up. Go a full day with no phone. Take a long solo walk and record voice notes as you go. Don't edit. Just talk. Write a one-page vision for your life. Read it every morning…
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Ever since I got my first mechanical keyboard, I’ve been able to turn caps lock, one of the most useless functions on a keyboard, into something actually useful. The keyboard came with a switch on the back that allowed it to act as another control key. It was great! Made for an easier ctrl+s shortcut since my left pinky already sat next to the caps lock key. Been using it for 12 years now. It’s basically second nature. Unfortunately, when I got newer version of this keyboard, they swapped the…
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I grew up in a Catholic family in Boston. As you can imagine, this was an especially Catholic upbringing. I loved being religious. For my first communion, my grandmother gave me a gold cross on a gold chain. I would kiss the cross before walking up to the plate at my little league baseball games, feeling the grooves of the gum I’d packed in my lip with my tongue to settle my nerves against a familiar texture. At night, in the room I shared with my two brothers, I’d sit crosslegged on the gray…
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This TIL post is basically an update to my three year old post “Hugo, meet Android”. I recently got a new phone and thus had to re-do the setup of my mobile blogging pipeline. So, basically, allow me to checkout, modify, test, commit and push the sources of this Hugo based static page under Android. While doing so I noticed some necessary changes and improvements, and also wanted to make use of my Taskfile which does most of the heavy lifting now, so here are my updated steps. Apps &…
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I recently learned about this fantastic project where visitors are able to "chat" with one another in a fun and private way. I had to try it! So now, at the bottom of every page on this site, you will see my little town square. Please take a look and have some fun with it. If you want to learn more about Town Square, you can take a look at this post from its creator, Cauê Napier. Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email, or leave a…
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I invented a fake hobby and then wrote a book about how you can take part in it (weird medieval guys)
Over the past few months, you may have noticed some etymology-related content creeping into my articles alongside my usual topics. I’ve been writing about how the myth of Theseus gave us the word ‘clue’ and the surprising origins of ‘currying favour’ in a medieval poem about an evil, perverted horse. This hasn’t just been for fun—I’ve written an entire book filled with quirky and fascinating stories about how many of our beloved English words came to be. The Wordspotter’s Guide is a compendium,…
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Link: W Social, Public Institutions and the Theater of European Digital Sovereignty, by Elena RossiniElena Rossini (rightly) calls shenanigans on what’s been happening in the European social world. I think what happened should be instructive for any pro-social technology movement.Here’s what happened:Earlier this month, the European Commission announced a technology sovereignty plan that included a reliance on open source software as a path to autonomy.Eurosky, a non-profit fork of Bluesky that…
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