Blog post: https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1154/why-drawing-tablet-brands-wont-collaborate-on-linux-floss-drivers

I can't stop thinking about this stupid interaction I had while playing an online game with strangers. For context, my username is very obviously feminine and I don't hide the fact that I'm a woman when talking to strangers. Somehow, in the chat, the topic of operating systems came up and I mentioned that I use Linux. This man proceeded to tell me that I must be a man because women don't use Linux. It might just about be the stupidest thing I ever heard. As if I'm only capable of thinking about…

Consistency serves a purpose in visual design, but it seems to have become the purpose of a lot of visual design. Look no further than these evolutions of macOS icons (image courtesy of BasicAppleGuy): The Creator Studio icons are undeniably consistent visually: rounded rectangles, controlled gradients, simplified forms, restrained depth, etc. In contrast (and by modern standards) the originals seem heretically inconsistent. They lack coherence in visual details like shape, material, and…

Read time: 4 minutes. 927 Words I'm old enough to have seen the Internet become a thing. From the early days (for me) of simple emails and web pages, and squealing dial-up modems connecting to the web, to what we have now. Over that time things have gotten much more complex, useful, pleasing, and fast. We now have almost everything at our finger-tips. The CostWith this current incarnation of the information super highway, we have come to accept certain hindrances. I prefer to call it Friction.…

The high schooler who developed everyone’s forums and guestbooks in 1996 didn’t really think about security when he was building all that software. But Matt’s Script Archive was more than exploits.Currently, I’m in the midst of writing a big post about the roots of web forums, but I hit on an aside weird enough that I decided to stop writing that and work on a separate post. Because I think it actually explains a lot about the way people use the internet.Essentially, here’s the deal. Around…

Democracy Design Lab asked Sarah Mirk to adapt Hamilton Nolan’s essay, Confiscate Their Money. They made the resulting zine available as a PDF to download, print, and distribute. Since the work is licensed CC-BY-NC 4.0, I’m reproducing it here in a format suited to reading on the web.

Here ya go, folks — check it out here. Thanks to the aforementioned RAM and memory apocalypse happening due to so much of the current pipeline of RAM and storage being pre-purchased for AI data centers, the pricing is a tough pill to swallow. You’ve got the base Steam Machine, 512GB of storage, no controller, for $1,049. If you want to add the Steam Controller (normally $99), that combo is $1,128. Want 2TB of storage? $1,349. Want that one with a controller? $1,428. But at least the 2TB models…

We've seen these for Batman, Superman and the Justice League before (I posted about the latter here), and now, in this so-called "Summer of Supergirl", Superman's cousin from Krypton has got her own over-priced, magazine format collection of four comics stories available outside of comic shops, just in time for her new movie. I heard about the magazine online, and so when I found myself in a Walmart, a place I avoid ever being as much as possible, I figured I might as well see if they carried…

I don’t know if you play video games, but it’s likely you enjoy games in one form or another. Maybe you play a cozy game on your phone, a card game on your work computer (definitely only during breaks), or a cute adventure game on your gaming console. And table top games count, too, of course! NoteThere is no such thing as a real gamer or not, only gamers and gatekeepers. I mostly play on PlayStation, and a bit on PC, but also play a lot of sudoku on my phone (yes I am 400 years old), and the…

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.…

Exploring GIFs, flexiGIF and LZW compression

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…

Another entry in my not-a-travel-blog - this time sketching out the start of our Namibia odyssey. We flew into Windhoek and picked up our rental - a large Ford Ranger....

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…

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…

In my “Open sourcing a quiz maker” blog post, I frame my quiz maker as a step toward what could be something better: a script that you can use, but where I see a vision for something more robust and reliable.This got me thinking about how blog posts can, in many ways, be a starting point. A blog post can start a discussion, help build community around an idea, be a written representation of one’s foundational thinking on a topic, contribute an idea to the commons that needs further development,…

This is the sort of book I usually hate. By law books about writing are so desperate to explain the world to me that I struggle to keep my eyes open. I don’t have much patience when I feel someone’s talking down to me, with them having figured the universe out already. Isn’t it always more exciting when a writer is on the tip of their toes just a half step ahead of you? When you’re invited to participate rather than being yelled at? Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several short sentences on writing slips…

I’ll leave it to Ed Davey, of all people, to sum up what I think. “The British people are sick of being let down by an endless merry-go-round of prime ministers while nothing really changes,” Davey writes on X.“This time must be different. It can’t just be about changing who’s in Number 10, it has to be about changing our broken politics so we can fix our country.” Amen. Once again the UK will be led by someone NO-ONE VOTED FOR. Yes yes, you vote for a party but let’s be honest, you vote for…

I used to live above a corner shop and when this corner shop changed hands the new owners had new signage put up. Revealing, in the interim, a ghost sign. Painted onto the corner of the building, covered by the modern external signs. Just hanging out there all that time. I love that they are called ghost signs because that's exactly how they look and feel. There are a few I see regularly in my city and I think I might cry if anything happened to them. I really ought to check they are on a…

Earlier this month, I discovered more Bear blogs that I haven't seen before via the platform's Random blog link feature. Compared to those found via the Random post link, many more empty blogs appear, as well as the rare oddity. This time, the latter caught my eye. Behold prettiestgirltoday. Instead of an empty blog, it's a barebones single-serving site with a nearly white background, a selfie of a woman puckering her lips, and this header text featuring the current date above the selfie: today…

Almost everybody I know is doing some math on longevity in their current role. Whether it’s moral math (should I go work for a place that’s doing more good in the world, despite it being less money?), retirement math (can I go all-in at an AI corp and retire early?) or figuring out a backup plan (our jobs are all going away, have you heard?), it can feel near-impossible to make decisions about what you want to do next. Six years ago, I built a worksheet for this! It’s here to help you identify:…

Made an anonymous confession board that lives in your terminal. Go ahead and post your confession 🫶🏼 $ ssh eipi.boo

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…

Have you ever wondered how best to summarise your character as a member of the blogging community? If so, this quiz is for you! Answer the following questions to find out which blogger archetype best suits you. Question 1 When you are spending time outdoors, what do you like to do best? Watch the world go by. Stay busy with activities and friends. Take a book and read. Go to something new (art exhibit, concert, cafe, etc.). Mentally organise my week. Question 2 What do you do when you are in…

Biked in Zuid-Kennemerland National Park with a distance of 31.34 kilometres. Zuid-Kennemerland National Park sits on the North Sea coast in the province of North Holland, between Haarlem, Bloemendaal, and IJmuiden. Its dunes, woodland, and open grassland are grazed by European bison and Highland cattle, and a web of cycling paths threads through it within easy reach of Amsterdam. Ride report

A social engineering attack disguised as a freelance NFT staking project. The zip file contained a typosquatted npm package (pretie_x1) that drops a multi-stage, AES-encrypted info-stealer targeting browser credentials, crypto wallets, SSH keys, and OS login passwords.

Web developers crave cross-browser compatibility, but browser engines don't always implement the same features, or not always to the same degree of quality. This page shows the number of tests (from the web-platform-tests project) which fail in just one browser engine. It also lists those tests. Fixing them would improve interoperability for web developers, and make the web a better place for everyone.

Last week, Cuba’s Prime Minister Manuel Marrero announced a package of free market reforms, including the legalization of private businesses in agriculture and tourism, that “significantly expand the private sector six decades after Cuba’s communist leaders forbade all private business—even frita stands—and adopted a centrally planned economy model that ended up ruining the country and dragging Cubans into a severe humanitarian crisis.” Source: Nora Gámez Torres, Miami Herald (19 June 2026),…

I’ve always liked to play. There’s this saying “We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” — if that’s true I’m definitely a young person albeit having been here for 41 years. Making running more fun by introducing games into it has been a guaranteed bringer of joy to me in these past 17 years I’ve been a runner. There have been several different games, such as collecting all streets in my city, going on a run streak, and I consider the tough long races…

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…