One person or team to get it, paid any way you want. Good luck, fellow archivists!

I'm announcing the launch of my application "Tabaway" today, after nearly three full months of constant work, debugging, testing, and daily personal use.

Hello RSS reader! This post contains interactive features. Please visit the canonical web page for an optimal viewing experience :) “They don’t make ’em like Sublime Text anymore” resonated with a lot of folk. Software these days is garbage. That got me thinking; I’m good at building garbage!Why can’t I build my own text editor?VS Code is built upon Monaco Editor which is a <div> soup hellscape. I was late to the VS Code train because for years my Intel inside™ Mac was too slow. That issue was…

Chat GPT and Claude continue to drive down my blog traffic. How-to posts and technical coding posts have been on a downward slope since Gen AI has gotten more popular.

You can now hide posts by keyword 🙈 Recently Brennan wrote about [four months of using Bubbles](https://brennan.day/bubbles-town-four-months-later/), thanks Brennan! He wrote: > I'd love the ability to filter out genAI posts rather than all tech posts Which I think is a good idea. Switching Tech off in the Filter menu costs you the Linux posts, the e-ink readers and the Photoshop rants along with the AI takes, and lots of the AI writing on Bubbles is listed under Culture, Life or Politics…

There is a particular feeling some old software has that is hard to explain without sounding sentimental. You open it, it appears almost immediately, and it does the job it was built to do. The menus are where you expect them. The file is yours. The program is not asking you to sign in, sync, subscribe, accept a new policy, dismiss a promotion, or wait while it talks to six remote services before showing a blank document. That does not mean old software was always better. Plenty of it crashed.…

It was near the end of April when I interviewed the creator of Bubbles.town, Benjamin Behnke, and I feel as though I've been using the platform for enough time to give a more long-term review of it now. Here are some of my thoughts, and if you disagree with any please drop a comment! The Good I want to start with the positive, which is that I've discovered and continue to find new blogs on a wide variety of interesting topics thanks to Bubbles. Blogs about family genealogy, wonderful…

The Bridge Over “Content Marketing” Bulls*** Introduction I went down a rabbit hole recently, or at least I tried to. I found it difficult to come up with the information needed to write about the topic I was researching. But while I did my research a different topic came up: Why People Quit Blogging. Then, as chance would have it, a post crossed my attention on Bubbles: Bye, bye, Bear Blog!1. I, of course, responded to the article and attempted to inspire the author to keep going. But, as an…

For a long time, I simply did not see the point of smart telescopes. The first generation of devices I really noticed were instruments like the Unistellar eVscope or the Vaonis Stellina and Equinox. They were technically interesting, but they also cost several thousand euros. And at that price point, I inevitably compared them with what the same money could buy in conventional astronomy equipment. That comparison never really worked for me. Some of those early devices tried to preserve the…

There is a lot of doom and gloom about the current rampocolypse, coming just after the GPU craze of the crypto hype train. However, not all is bad in the current tech landscape - yet. There is alot of things that are undeniably better and cheaper than before. Let's go hope (cope?) posting. Cases Cases used to be expensive. I built my first computer back in ~2015, and my first case was a metal box. No window, no smart cable management holes, no preinstalled cooler - only a boring metal box. It…

★★★★☆ /e/OS is an open-source Android fork based on LineageOS. They replace some of the default apps with their own, add microG for compatibility, and offer a set of cloud services (which I haven’t tried yet) to fill in for Google’s sync capabilities. It can run on a lot of Android devices, including Google’s own Pixel phones. Murena is the retail company that runs the cloud features and sells phones with /e/OS pre-installed. They’re also Fairphone’s only US retailer, which is why it’s running…

A process is a chain of steps, and it is tempting to improve the step that is easiest to see, or the one that seems most obvious. But making a step faster only helps if that step is the bottleneck. If it is not, the work piles up in front of the next step, which is still the real constraint. The question that matters is not how to make one part faster, but what a change does to the whole flow. Skip that question and you optimise inside an illusion of progress: a fine result at one station,…

The monkey-punchers at Google never quite seem to finish any of their apps. There's always some useful bit of work left undone, or showstopping bug which remains unfixed, a thousand jagged edges as yet unsolved by the greatest minds of their generation. I wanted to subscribe to an events calendar. I had a URl. I had my Google™ Pixel® phone running the latest Android© 17 with an updated calendar app. Is it possible to click on a calendar link and add it to my phone? No. Here's what Google has to…

Yesterday, I finally removed the last vestige of Microsoft cruft from my life: Windows 10. For the last two years, I have been slowly decoupling myself from the Microsoft ecosystem - an ecosystem I have been seeped in my whole life, having grown up in Seattle and also working for microsoft for half a decade. The first Microsoft product I eliminated from my life was OneDrive - even with a free terabyte of OneDrive from Microsoft as a legacy customer, the lack of linux compatibility was a major…

As you may be aware if you're a regular reader of my blog, I love learning, studying, and academia. And I've been thinking recently of how to take the opportunity to better intersect this with my knowledge of web development and technology in general. You see, for many years there have been free, open-source resources for people to use if they wanted to learn programming, such as the Odin Project which maintains a Discord community of 708,000 learners, and freeCodeCamp, which has helped more…

We recently came across your site — the personal website of a real human being. That’s exactly the kind of real-human personal blog we built ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒ for — an AI content team that keeps creating for you. Tell it what to make — newsletters, videos, podcasts, or articles — and how often; it researches fresh sources, picks what matters, and produces editable content on schedule, so posts arrive with drafts ready. Talk about emails with threatening auras. If an actual person had written this email,…

Portuguese Some blogs are ugly. Fact. But there's nothing wrong with that! Our blogs are forms of expression, from the text to the appearance. Sometimes, some aren't so… aesthetically pleasing? I say this, but even the "ugly" ones have their charm. You can see the person's personality shining through in the cracks of blogs with background colors that burn the eyes and illegible fonts. Having expressed my opinions here, I also want to make it clear that I would never tell anyone to their face…

Eric Bailey has a fun little post about how we need more than a few icons to express the nuance of our shared human experience. For example, he suggests Netflix provide some feedback buttons to indicate the kinds of experiences we all share consuming and rating media: “Just because I expressed interest in this show does not mean I want to be inundated with recommendations for its genre” “Disregard [that I pressed ‘thumbs up’] my cat walked over the keyboard” “I am making bad choices and…

QR Codes are a well-supported enough way to transfer someone onto a website on their phone.But how do you make QR codes that don’t require a large surface area to scan correctly? (The answer probably won’t surprise too much)Once I saw a QR code that looked something like this:I saw this in a magazine, printed at a size of about 1 or 1.5 cm side-by-side. This naturally did not scan.But of course, if you look at the actual URL it leads to you might notice a couple of problems very…

Apple Maps added ads. When I see one, I give the place a thumbs down. I want to give in-app ads negative value by making them actively lose money for the businesses. Sorry not-sorry, tax guy who popped up when I started to search for breakfast restaurants.

Luke James, writing for Tom’s Hardware: California’s legislature has passed Assembly Bill 1856, exempting open-source operating systems from the State’s Digital Age Assurance Act months before the law is due to take effect on January 1, 2027. It’s good news, but Linux, and other open source operating systems, are just, you know, too weird, and probably no one uses them, so, like, why bother with age-verification. SteamOS is a Linux distribution favoured by gamers, some of whom might be minors.…

Continuing the series on distributed Elixir, let’s talk about how to safely run a single instance of a process in a cluster. Well, as safe as we can make it. There's also an incredible cluster related murder mystery story if you continue reading! But first, if you haven’t read Chris Keathley’s The dangers of the Single Global Process you should probably do that before you continue, to tackle the caveats of trying to run a single global process. If you’re into that kind of reading, also take a…

In the past few days, Debian has held a lengthy and rather bureaucratic vote on how the project will handle genAI and LLM contributions moving forward. There were eight possible options, ranging from an outright ban to full acceptance, decided by Debian's Condorcet voting system. The winner was for permissive usage, #5 "Responsible Use of Generative AI" proposed by Marc Haber. Disclosure of AI use is encouraged, not required, and the policy explicitly ducks the copyright status question. To get…

I like building things: it makes me happy. Learning and discovering things is a close second, but building is more satisfactory. Since I’m not that good at actually, you know, building things, the thrill of “building”, in my case, has mostly come from writing software. Software is one of the easiest ways to create something satisfyingly useful out of nothing. For a long time I’ve known, at some level, how much joy building gives me. [1] But it really sunk in while working on two recent hobby…

When you buy a domain name, your registrar will typically offer to provide you with a collection of DNS nameservers. For most people, most of the time, that’s plenty sufficient. A trip back to 2006 My secondary domain danq.dev has three nameservers, operated by its registrar Gandi. This wasn’t always the case. In the long-distant past, I’ve registered domains for which I’ve had to run my own nameservers. Or else, where I’ve chosen to run my own nameservers in order to gain more control, or…

✨ In This Edition ✨ 📟 Short-Form Content: Random word choice watermarks in chatbot output; Getting "opted in" to Google scanning your stuff; Meta settles; Books are destroyed to feed the chatbots; EU mandates driver-facing cameras. 🌞 Good News!: More transparency in online shopping; Mastodon 5.0; AI-free, digitally sovereign document editing; Your old phone as a NAS. 📯 The Post-Script: Reading There's no such thing as Just a Tool by Iris Meredith. Original image by Natalia Y. on Unsplash,…

For a long time I thought it’d be nice if there was a simple way for people to interact with my posts. When you write something it’s nice to know that someone took the time to read what you wrote and maybe even got some enjoyment out of it. I’m glad for those who let me know on Bluesky or Fedi <3 Bear Blog has an unintrusive upvote button at the end of each post. But I’m not using Bear Blog – my blog is statically generated and I’d like to keep it that way. So last weekend I got the idea of…

In this second Forgejo Hack installment I'll tell you how to connect a git repository that lives in your self-hosted Forgejo instance to Read the Docs, so that commits to the repository automatically trigger documentation builds, exactly like it works with GitHub.

I don’t know how to reply or contact Brad Barrish, so I figured I’d answer his inquiry about moving away from Google on my own blog. Docs and Sheets might well be impossible, or at least the trade-offs might be too great. I’m not entirely sure what I’ll do there yet. I’ve been experimenting with Proton Drive, which has its own version of Docs and Sheets. I’m using it for my own projects at the moment, and I like how it’s worked so far. The sharing and normal collaboration seems to work just…