The latest anti-feature from Automattic—now infecting Gravatar. Photo by: Unattributed, License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0. Happily Imperfect posted Bye bye Gravatar a short while ago, and I have to say, I've had a similar thought about deleting my account on there as well. My feelings towards WordPress and Automattic started changing some time ago, back when they introduced the Gutenberg editor. Ever since this “improvement” it's been a downhill slide…

I just read that a couple of days ago Pika announced the ability to add custom code. You can’t do too much, but a few things are possible. So today with a little bending of some (coding) rules, I was able to add the Bubbles upvote widget to my posts. The Bubbles embed widget is this… <div class="bubbles-vote"></div> <script src="https://bubbles.town/vote.js" defer></script> But there is no way to add the bubbles-vote div/class within Pika. So I had to change the Bubbles script and utilise a…

I love reading. I caught the bug as a middle-schooler when I got caught skipping school, and as punishment, I had to read The Chronicles of Amber and do a book report about it. Even today, opening a book and fanning the pages to get the paper smell activates very fond memories and emotions. I remember a time before e-readers came out. I always thought reading on one seemed very futuristic. In military sci-fi books, characters are reading on their data pads, and reading on an e-reader makes me…

Intro This is going to be a very long rant. And by the end it's going to get a bit depressing and overdramatic. But also revelatory, I hope. If you think I am going off the rails here, let me know. I would love to hear your arguments. I have a job now I have been trying to get a job for a while now and I just got one. Why did it take so long? Because in just a few years, the market for software developers - and I have to assume almost everything that doesn't require physical presence - has…

I'm somebody who writes a lot—half a million words and 200 blog posts in the past 8 months. I'm also someone with an unrelenting curiosity to better understand our world. Beyond that, I also graduated with a degree in English literature with honours, with a 3.8 GPA. So, it should be no surprise I've done extensive research on how best to do research, which resulted in me diving into the world of personal knowledge management systems. These are the systems and methods of keeping track and…

I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and it’s impossible to have rational conversations with it about them. I can’t name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out. – Mitchell Hashimoto, of HashiCorp and Ghostty fame Over the past year, I’ve run point on all of our company’s sales, led the technical components of all but two of our engagements, and over the lifetime of this blog…

The recent fiasco involving Linus Torvalds running Linux like the privileged man that he is and entirely missing the central points of the arguments made by people who don’t enjoy his kind of privilege reminds me that there are some OSS projects that have become so large, so important, and so monolithic, that the behavior of their project leadership becomes indistinguishable from a monopoly/monopsony. Turns out, OSS is not immune to monopoly/monopsony after all, and I think one big part of a…

I’ve been following the development of rss.chat on Dave Winer’s Scripting.com for a while. Dave set up a limited example at chat.rss and now an open one at https://demo.rss.chat which I joined. There dosen’t seem to be a promise that this particular server will stay up, but it offers the chance to try and explore. rss.chat is a social network: Every user has an RSS feed with all their posts. The whole community has an RSS feed. There is an OPML file that lists all the users. You can subscribe…

A while ago, I built Lingua (project post), a small app for practising a language through conversations and everyday scenarios. It corrects your mistakes, explains them, and lets you translate, simplify, or listen to sentences when you get stuck. The project has been sitting mostly untouched for a while, although I still use it every now and then to practice my Swedish. The problem is that I never really tested it with other people. So I do not know whether it is useful only to me, or whether…

Wolf looking directly into a camera at close proximity. There is a bit of an issue I have noticed lately: websites actively blocking Reading Mode in Firefox, and derivative web browsers. I was stunned to find out (just a minute ago) that Reading Mode doesn't appear to be a default feature in Chromium, but instead an add-on. So, I don't know if this is an issue for Chrome based browsers. This is getting frustratingly annoying for me. Why? There are multiple reasons that Reading Mode is a…

To summarize my answer to Antonio's post: good! I don't read posts in my feed reader to look at styles, I do it to consume content - to read their thoughts. I use my feed reader because it's configured exactly how I like it. The colors are tweaked to a palette that's pleasing to my eyes and doesn't cause strain. The font family, font size, and other elements are customizable and configured exactly how I like them. I can't tell you how many times I've opened a great blog post and struggled to…

I’ve been using Photoshop since the mid-90s. First at school, with Photoshop 3, then through work. I bought my first boxed copy of CS2 in 2005, then upgraded to CS5 in 2010. I subscribed to Photoshop Creative Cloud on day one. Today, I uninstalled it. I hope I never have to use Adobe software ever again. Photoshop used to be a joy to use. Whenever I got access to an upgraded version, I’d always have fun exploring the new features. I got really good at using it. When Adobe launched the Creative…

Why is this an “app”? This summer, the kids’ performing arts school are singing and dancing in a show at Disneyland. We’re all very excited, but my excitement, at least, was muted a little when I was told to install the “Travelbound” app in order to get access to the itinerary, travel arrangements, and accommodation details. Fuck that noise. This should have been a webpage. Why do you want me to install a(nother) shitty app just to tell me something that could have been a (smaller, faster, more…

Absolutely ripping your hair out reading Claude referring to everything as “honest takes” and "load-bearing seams"? You’re not the only one. But what if I tell you there’s a way to take this massive source of frustration and make it so ridiculous you can't but laugh at it? Or just simply fix Claude's vocabulary. I present to you, the MessageDisplay hook. First you need a little script with some replacements set up: #!/usr/bin/env python3 import json, re, sys replacements = { "seam":…

Just saw this over on Bubbles and had to reply because I so understand how this blogger feels! Gavin writes about his Photoshop frustrations in An Infuriating Goodbye to Photoshop. I had also been using Photoshop for years. I admit that way back around the mid-90s, when it was totally unaffordable for skint bloggers like me, I used a pirated version. I didn’t feel bad about this as I would never have paid for it anyway. Let’s just say that while I don’t pirate software anymore, Adobe is one of…

We're paying A.I.'s hardware tax on everything we buy, and most people don't even know it's happening.

“Why am I paying a consultant for something AI can do in 15 minutes?” I’ve heard variations of that question several times over the past few months. On the face of it, it’s a perfectly reasonable one. Generative AI can draft documents, analyse data, write code and create presentations in a fraction of the time they once took. If the work now takes minutes instead of hours, why should customers still pay the same? The answer is that they were never buying your time in the first place. Rewind a…

The internet didn’t become broken overnight, it drifted from being a network of communities into a marketplace dominated by platforms whose purpose is extracting value. This is the logic of #dotcons most of us invested our lives and community into. How did we get into this mess? The problem isn’t only bad companies, it’s that our digital lives depend entirely on proprietary #dotcons paths and software, commercial interests end up controlling our reality. This is why #FOSS (Free and Open Source…

Gareth's been in a mood all week. Turns out it started with a hosting bill. Not his own, mind. He doesn't have a website. Gareth thinks websites are for people who've run out of pub to shout in. But he heard about someone switching platforms, and it set him off on one of his tangents, the kind that starts with "you know what really gets me" and ends forty minutes later with him accusing a cookie banner of moral cowardice. Apparently someone had moved from a platform that wanted to squeeze money…

In my 2nd ever post on this blog - 2 years ago! - I wrote about tending to my music collection, so on the anniversary of that post I figure now is a good time for an update. I am still using Navidrome, I enjoy its simplicity and focus. When I started with it spun up several instances: A small curated collection I built from the ground up of my current favourite music A lossless collection of all my FLAC files, mostly CD rips of my own CDs made during lockdown A big bucket of everything else,…

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay Introduction A few years back I became interested in the idea of getting a smartwatch. However, what I found when I started doing research into them was nothing short of horrifying. Take the journey with me as I talk about why I thought a smartwatch would be a good fit in my life, to the realization that there was no chance I would ever buy one of them. The level of enshittification that exists in this market segment is stunning. It is so rampant that in the…

In a highly uncharacteristic move, I recently purchased a brand new device: an Xteink X4 e-reader. The X4 is a minimalist e-reader that is the size of an old smartphone, but much thinner and lighter. Speaking of smartphones, a portable e-reader is great alternative to absentmindedly unlocking your smartphone and vanishing alarmingly large chunks of time. I feel much better about finishing reading a book than I do about finishing reading a list of misleading headlines. Here's what the X4 looks…

If you read this site regularly, then you’ll know in the past year there’s been a marked increase in “AI” spam and scams designed to try to con writers (generally, and in the emails that come here, me specifically) into sending money off to strangers for various marketing services. At this point these emails are so predictable that the vast majority of them are immediately sent to my spam folder, and those that still manage to show up in my email proper are recognizable by their subject lines,…

Two boats docked behind a berm. Introduction Many years ago (over a decade) I wrote an article about RSS Feed reader alternatives after Google announced they were killing Reader in March 2013. That article attracted a fair amount of attention, including a request from RedHat to republish the article on their blog. On the ten-year anniversary of the death of Google Reader, the Verge published Who killed Google Reader?(pay-walled article), indicating (to me) that even a decade on there was still…

If you've tried installing Windows 11 recently, you'll know Microsoft really wants you to sign in with a Microsoft account. Unfortunately, the old method to bypass adding a Microsoft account stopped working. However, there's another trick to skip that and set up a local account instead. When you reach the "Let's sign in" screen (or any network/account screen during setup), press Shift + F10. This opens a Command Prompt window. Type the following and press Enter: start ms-cxh:localonly The…

At Homebrew Website Club this week, Thomas mentioned the term “tag healing” during a discussion about tags. The definition I caught was that tag healing is related to reviewing and, if necessary, consolidating, tags used for blog posts or documents. Someone (Tabitha?) said that “tag healing” sounded like a superpower, which inspired me to ask: if you could have a website-related super power, what would it be?At first, I wanted my superpower to be instant recall of all the URLs on my website,…

If you woke up on 15 July feeling a strange sense of relief, you aren’t alone. After months of posturing, rhetoric, and vaguely defined threats toward privacy tools, the UK government has officially confirmed, they will not be limiting access to Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). The headlines are, predictably, framing this as a “major victory” and a “gracious decision” by ministers to listen… Source

You share your blog post on X, Facebook, Bluesky, etc and you know it will be presented so much better if it has an image. Sometimes it's easy. You blog about something that has a visual element and it's easy to use a diagram, a product photo, a landscape —you would have done it anyway. But many times, you just want to share a thought or an idea, or some code. In the past, the only way for most of us was to hunt for images under Creative Commons licenses. Writting a post about the history of…

I’m obsessed with this “laptop” our 7 year old made: I asked him what the different features were. Check out these specs: Ghost button unleashes a ghost from the laptop Crossed-out ghosts buttons bring ghosts back in DO NOT PUSH button activates his laser hand (i.e. an empty cup from a local ice cream shop that turned into a laser hand during a playdate with his friends) Green drips are slime Brown thing is rope Colored buttons when pressed in different orders activate different powers He just…

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg: OpenAI’s much-anticipated push into consumer devices is slated to begin with a mobile, screen-free smart speaker designed to be a new type of home computer for the AI era, according to people familiar with the matter. The product — still under development — is meant to serve as a humanlike AI companion that lives in the home, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the project hasn’t been announced. It will help control smart-home…