This blog post is not about passkey attestation. I have no strong opinion on the subject that has inspired a controversy over the past few days. However, the controversy did inspire me to write about passkeys again, and passkeys do currently feel like a trap to me, for reasons other than attestation. Admittedly, my reasons may be specific to the Apple ecosystem, as someone who stumbled into a career writing software for Apple devices, with no financially viable alternative. Three years ago I…

Do you manage email for your family? Do you run Home Assistant at home? What happens if you're no longer around to manage it? Will your family be able to cope or will they resent your "smart home"? Documenting all of this makes everyones life just that little bit easier when shit hits the fan. This topic might seem a bit morbid to you but I honestly do feel like it's one worth talking about. Passwords and two-factor authentication The biggest problem has to be passwords and two-factor…

IMMEDIATE SHUTDOWNMy Final Announcement About Independent PublishingThe complete statement is proprietary content and is available only at unstory.eu.All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction or syndication is not permitted.

Blur, the NFT marketplace that overtook OpenSea in trading volume shortly after its 2022 launch, announced it will shut down its website in a month. They also announced that Blend, Blur's NFT lending platform, will stop matching new loans on the same day. Borrowers have until then to repay their loans or let them default.The announcement comes days after the Blur team said it would also shut down Blast, its Ethereum layer-2 blockchain, because it cost more to run than it earned. Tweet thread by…

I made a tiny e-readerI saw this video a while ago and it absolutely ticked all my weird boxes.It's smallIt's pretty DIYIt's cheapI get to learn something newIt was honestly one of the simplest DIY projects I've done in a while. I had never 3D printed before, so I got my buddy to help me out (thank you Mason!). And otherwise, it was just sourcing parts using a very well manicured how-to from the creator's website and an active Discord. All in all, it took me and Mason like an hour and a half…

🚛 Bear blog migration in progess, moving everything to Pika, as I did not renew my subscription with Bear. 2026 and most popular articles have already been migrated, and URL redirects are in place so people visiting those old entries will not end up on a 404. All other entries will be migrated in the next days/weeks. It’s a lot of work as I have entries for a few years, but it allows me to clean and update according to my new setup. Follow-up is done old-school 😁

Twelve years ago, I was complaining that IoT devices were too expensive. Last week I bought a colour changing Zigbee lighbulb for £4. Not a typo - less than a fiver. While the aipocalypse is devouring RAM with its insatiable appetite, Moore's Law appears to be keeping up its end of the bargain when it comes to domestic gadgetry. This blog posts compares today's prices with those from a little over a decade ago. Some of the changes are startling, others less so. I'm basing the prices on what a…

I try to avoid writing about AI when I can because I know all of us are already drowning in it. Stick with me here, because there is a point to this and something I want you to take away that’s not just AI doomerism. If you want one thing to blame for this post of mine, I suppose it would be Epic Games going “all in” on AI. But really, this is bigger than that and something I’ve been feeling for weeks. I don’t like preaching like this, but I think you need to understand my thought process for…

I’m completely in love with my Remarkable 2 – in fact I have slight cold sweats about the fact it’s now discontinued, and the closest replacement is £370. But – that’s a worry for another day… The point is, I love sketching and writing and reading on the Remarkable. I’ve built (well, me and some robot friends) a whole bunch of tools for the Remarkable that I use all the time – a parser for my journal entries, a weekly “newsletter” that arrives with my unread articles, and other bits and bobs.…

I recently read JP’s article, “Things Are Still Worth Doing Yourself”, and while I agree with some of what he’s saying, I think he’s placing AI usage into one rather narrow category. I agree that there’s value in creating something yourself. I also agree that relying on AI to do everything for you, without understanding the process or learning anything along the way, can be detrimental. Particularly when we’re talking about creative endeavors like writing, art, music, or game development. But I…

A great little collection of accessible interactive components: dialogs, tabs, accordions, stuff like that. Best of all, the components come with documentation: what problem is solves; when to use it; when not to use it; where to use it, and more. adactio.com/links/22803

I’ve blathered before about how hard it is to do traffic stats these days — AI scrapers run full browsers via VPNs with consumer endpoints. So you can’t distinguish them from real traffic, really. I mean, none of this matters, but… One trick that really helps weed out scrapers from the stats is to just not “count” a web page visit until the page has been open for more than ten seconds. Yes, you lose real readers that bounce fast, but whatevs. However, there are scrapers (as shown in the above…

I've been getting weird e-mails for quite some time now, and this got me thinking about the future of the internet. LLM-generated e-mails are becoming harder to spot, and some of them are landing in my inbox. We are at the point where generating such messages is cheap, and a lot of people think it is a cool idea to spam you with personalized messages that were not written by a real human. Their agents gather some info about you from the internet and make them look personalized. What happens…

To turn off the Firefox rounded Tabs: In the browser address bar type: about:config Then search for: nova Then change the boolean value of: browser.nova.enabled to false If you can’t find the setting you can add it.

I've been intermittently taking part in Weird Web October, this year. My first contribution, last week, was Move the mouse across the screen, from the prompt of skeu(o)morphism. Here's my entry for day 14: origami: Today's distraction can be found at origami.danq.dev and ought to work well across all modern desktop and mobile devices. Go have a play with it and let me know what you think. Features include: It's all open-source, under the Unlicense (but bits of this code are hacky as hell;…

Andrew Deck and Hanaa’ Tameez, Nieman Lab: Meta can use web scrapers to crawl and collect content from websites “associated with” business accounts on its platforms, according to its new commercial terms of use. […] The new terms broadly cover business accounts that manage pages and groups, run advertisements, push marketing messages, and use the platform’s business account dashboard. As written, the new terms could be used to argue that Meta can scrape content from news sites and use that…

heya! every now and then, I'll see a post complaining about how narrow the focus of the small/indie web is. today, that was this post, by Yunzi, where they talk about non-tech topics being absent from the indie web... using kagi small web search results as an example. despite the name, kagi small web is in no way representative of the small web. they're an opinionated link aggregator pulling mainly from places like hacker news. yknow, that tech focused link aggregator run by a tech focused…

The command line should probably have disappeared by now. It comes from an era when computer displays showed little more than text and users were expected to type instructions rather than point at icons. Since then we have had graphical desktops, touchscreens, voice assistants, mobile apps, web applications, and several decades of attempts to make computers easier to use. Yet open a terminal on Linux or macOS, connect to a server, work with development tools, or administer a network device, and…

Someone emailed recently to tell me that they like the idea of Pure Blog, but they thought the admin interface was "really ugly" so they can't use it. Fair enough - beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that, but I don't think that was a fair evaluation of Pure Blog's admin UI. When I built Pure Blog, I wanted it to be different from the rest of the crowd. The whole point of it was to have just enough features, and no fluff. So to me a more brutalist/utilitarian UI made sense. The likes…

So this is a little unprecedented. I wrote this post and sent it on to Ben as a heads-up. I’ve included a summary of his excellent, well-reasoned reply and have to agree with all his points. And for the eagle-eyed, you may have noticed that he’s already made a change, with the Random view moved to the top of the page, whereas before it was buried down in the footer. Ben is passionate about this project, and I can only applaud him for his response and immediate action! Now, read on for my…

You've been handed a new AI tool at work. It drafts the reports now. Your job is to read every one, catch what it gets wrong, and put your name at the bottom. The volume has tripled. The deadline hasn't moved. Somewhere along the way you stopped doing the work and started supervising a machine that does it badly.Cory Doctorow has a name for you. A Reverse Centaur. The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI skips the usual extremes of effortless abundance and mass obsolescence. He looks at…

Reddit announced yesterday the end of RSS support: Because RSS is now a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse, we'll stop supporting RSS feeds on November 13, 2026 while preserving moderation workflows that depend on it through supported alternatives. For common mod alerts, we recommend Devvit apps like Discord Relay. If your mod team relies on RSS, review your setup and migrate workflows before November 13 to ensure your needs are uninterrupted. If you use RSS for feeds…

How bots used our sign-up and forgot password pages to bomb real people's inboxes, and what we did to stop it. A practical guide to subscription bombing for founders and developers who think CAPTCHA is an "I'll do it later" task.

Friendly fraud is the laundered name for something that the payment system is not really able to prevent. Even though I’m pretty sure they can do way better. Particularly big and sophisticated payment providers like Stripe, with a mountain of signals. I had a customer buy my product twice. It’s called Ciglue. It’s cigar glue.… The post Stripe seem friendly to “friendly fraud” appeared first on Gingerlime.

In which Kami extols the virtue of static sites while telling cloudflare to fuck off.

🗞️ I’m all for supporting good and free press, but it’s not actually cheap. My free trial of our newspaper ran out and if I continue I’m paying 372€ per year, for only the digital version. How are prices elsewhere?

A while ago, Lea Verou argued that in a website, a dark mode toggle only needs two states: light and dark, and a "system" preference. Many other experts wanted to give their take on the argument. Vale found it "a tad too magical" to have system as an additional option, and proposed that the system would set the colour scheme from the get-go. Bramus was in the 3 button side of the debate, and didn't "... believe that being able to force a site into a specific mode should be dependent on the time…

In short: from my experience, people like map and filter, but not reduce. I use functions like map and filter all the time. When I put that code up for review, my peers rarely complain. I get plenty of feedback about other decisions, but not about my use of map and filter. I cannot say the same for reduce. Often, when I’ve submitted a patch with reduce inside, I get a comment like, “this part is hard to read.” And I see reduce way less than map, filter, some, and so on. Anecdotally, I have come…

As web developers, we’re constantly working with websites with different types of content and ways to craft that content. Whether it’s a handcrafted blog, a WordPress site or a web app, these days you likely have a bunch of images out there: some decorative, others with meaningful messages. I built Alt text debugging bookmarklet (ATDB among friends as it rolls off the tongue nicely), a quick tool for website developers and authors to check the status of alt texts of images on a site. I use it…

LibreOffice 26.8, released on August 26th, became the software’s most popular update. LibreOffice is a free alternative to Microsoft Office that’s been around for nearly two decades. In one week, the installer was downloaded more than 1 million times — not counting updates via Linux distribution repositories. Someone might say the improvements to the writing system and typography are a hit among NGOs, government agencies, and offices that use LibreOffice. I’m putting my money on a…