The thing about my way of teaching stats is that my cool, novel examples get old really fast. Like, pop culture is on a thirty-day cycle.Anyway, YEARS ago, 2014 to be exact, I blogged about illustrating bimodal data distributions using baby name data from the Social Security Administration. Specifically, when an older name comes back into vogue, it has a bimodal distribution when you plot time on the X axis. I stand by this example. However, all of the data illustrations come from 2014. When…

This blog has moved from WordPress.com to self-hosting. If you were following it via WordPress, you should use an RSS reader pointed at nolanlawson.com/feed instead. WordPress has served me faithfully for 15 years, but I think it’s time to move on. A few things have nudged me in that direction: The recent drama surrounding WordPress has left a bad taste in my mouth and eroded my confidence that it’s a good long-term bet. The WordPress interface keeps nudging me away from the old-school…

It's been over a year since I mostly broke up with GitHub. In that year, I've been running my own public Forgejo instance for my personal projects. It's important to stress the public part, as most of what I'm going to discuss is directly correlated to that. This isn't a post to critique Forgejo vs. alternatives, either. I found Forgejo to be great. My only gripe is that I very much prefer GitLab runners and AWS CodeBuild to GitHub Actions, which Forgejo Actions is modeled after. With regard to…

On Friday, I did a Reddit AMA with the r/WebScrapingInsider subreddit about the law of web scraping. You can see the entire discussion here. I posted an introduction to the AMA, which I am sharing here: __ Hi everyone, and thanks for joining this Reddit AMA on web scraping! I thought it would be helpful to start with some introductory remarks. First, and most importantly, a reminder about the ground rule. Nothing in this AMA constitutes legal advice. I will discuss some general legal…

I have been noticing a couple of disturbing trends this year outside of the AI/LLM bubble. Has anyone else noticed them? First, domain registrars seem to be raising domain name prices like never before. Every couple of months, I get an email from Porkbun or Cloudflare saying that the registry controlling a domain's TLD is raising prices on such-and-such a date. I can't remember the last time I saw domain name prices decrease. They only seem to go up. That is why I try to renew domains for more…

I have written before about how to link to a specific segment of a youtube video, and how to link to specific words or paragraphs within a webpage. I even knew, vaguely, that you could link to pages of PDFs. But, all in the course of a normal workday researching a blogpost, I found myself wanting reference a specific ~30 second chunk of a Marx Brothers movie from 1935, and the last page of a PDF about a piece of public art. The PDF was easy, using the #page=n syntax. As for the scene from the…

This morning, I killed my Gumroad stores. I hadn’t been watching Gumroad. I kept them around to support VAT, and a handful of you used them. This morning I learned that gum road has gone fully AI. I can’t trust them with my intellectual property. Their support is also managed by AI, so I can’t trust them with money. This is disappointing, but mostly it’s a reminder that I need to keep a better eye on my retailers. European folks, I’m considering other retailers that will support VAT.…

I started this project before the massive boom in Claude-enabled decomps started rushing the scene, so this may now be mostly of historical rather than practical interest. I planned on comparing more applications but see little point now; I’m publishing more or less as it was last time I touched it. It should also be noted that when I wrote this, the Pi 5 was a lot more affordable! Windows On Intel dominated the late PC era, and there’s a wealth of software available for the platform,…

I have a quick question for regular readers: did you ever start reading an article on this blog, found the topic interesting, but then had to give up halfway through because you could make heads or tails of it?The reason I’m asking is that I want the writing to be accessible — probably more accessible than it is today. Without an editor, it’s sometimes hard to predict which terms may be unfamiliar to most readers, or notice an ambiguous “this” or “it” that makes a key sentence hard to parse. On…

In light of recent events I've canceled my 1Password yearly subscription, after 10 years as a loyal user. This was not a decision I made lightly, I’ve got everything in my password manager and the muscle memory for using it is deeply ingrained in me. After much procrastination I finally took the plunge a month ago and it turns out, it was actually pretty easy to switch. And it came with some upsides too, Bitwarden is almost half the price of 1Password on the yearly plan. Migration guide There…

Last month I did the IndieWeb Carnival and before I get to write the roundup post, I need to shortly write about this new phenomena. During the month I received about as many submissions from AI agents as real bloggers. They all came from this service called iLands and sounded very similar. A short, very polite, e-mail saying they are an AI agent and they have written a submission to the blog carnival. I have deliberately not included them and will not link to the submissions, as I belive the…

I increasingly am downloading YouTube videos I like - using ytdlp - and putting them on my NAS. This is for several reasons: I do not trust that the internet will exist in its current form in several years. It's not that I think the internet will vanish or implode, but that I suspect that Google's relationship to users (and my relationship to Online) will change so much that I won't want to even look at YouTube or Online as much as I currently do. Maybe I'll just want to stay home and watch the…

I was fairly certain that I am done with Apple, Xcode and their developer experience. Yet here we are, having a CI job that needs to sign a binary. One thing I noticed using mostly web apps for my personal assistant is that I actually miss native apps. They just look and feel nicer. So, given that I cannot delete my dev account, why not use it and get a little app for my coding assistant going? I did most of my work for macOS and iOS in Objective-C, but I was there when Swift was released and…

Link: Two 23-year-olds used AI to create a daily audio briefing. It’s now the top news app in Argentina., by Hanaa' Tameez in Nieman LabI think there are several notable things about this story.The first, most obvious one is that two 23 year olds were able to create a news app that rose to become the top-ranked news app in their country, using AI. There is no way they would have been able to build this with the time, team, and resources at their disposal otherwise. From an engagement…

If you subscribe to a Meta One plan, you can add links to a set number of posts and reels each month based on your plan: Meta One Advanced plan: up to 4 posts and 4 reels with links per month Meta One Expert plan: up to 8 posts and 8 reels with links per month Meta One Max plan: up to 12 posts and 12 reels with links per month Meta is trying to sherlock Linktree. But I can't stop and think it's completely bananas that the internet was built on hypertext and openness, and Instagram created a…

Most Fridays, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.Did someone forward this to you? Subscribe for free.I've been blogging since 1998. A while back, I was very privileged to be interviewed about my journey writing on the web for 28 years as part of the Wonders of Web Weaving series. I think it's a great audio conversation; here it is in its entirety.Two 23-year-olds used AI to create a daily audio briefing. It’s now the top news app…

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…

Since my (surprisingly popular) blog on Gemini protocol I've continued to poke around with it and these are some very unstructured thoughts. Seriously - I'm typing this as I go, its not a coherent blog, its just me rambling. First off - gemtext, the text format used with the gemini protocol seems to be utterly pointless. Its neither one thing or another. I understand the need to minimalistic, easy to parse text handled by this minimalistic protocol, but you might as well just use just text. The…

I recently sold something on eBay UK. The buyer was in the Channel Islands. And apparently that means you need to affix a customs declaration to the parcel. Handily, eBay provide a customs declaration label for you. And so I wanted to print that out (along with the postage label).1 Until recently, I had been using the free version of Adobe Acrobat to do this. That was simply as I trusted it to print labels and barcodes properly (which includes being able to print at the original scale – that is…

I have decided to start donating a small amount of my fun money to open source projects. After some research, the initial set of recipients are Magit Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund XMonad These are important to me, they need more money, and I believe they can use donations well. If you disagree, I’d genuinely like to hear what mistakes I’ve made in the analysis below. I hope it shows that this is important to me. (Continue reading the full article on the web.)

I'm a Linux user. I am a huge fan of free and open source software in general. For the most part, FOSS is all I use and it's all I want to use (with a few rare exceptions). I also have empathy and a solid theory of mind. Sadly, I can't say the same for many of my fellow Linux users.Allow me to explain.YouTube ReactionsI posted a video on my YouTube and PeerTube channels this week. In it, I reacted to Corridor Crew's "Free Software" challenge. Four visual effects artists had to use free (as in…

So, let me first say that LibreWolf is a very decent browser. Maybe it’s just old, crotchety me stuck in his Netscape Navigator ways (OK, thats not totally true since a lot of features I rely on now where not around in Netscape), but things did pop up that have led me back to Brave… for now. So the pro’s are still there: The install on Debian 13 was simple, it is clean, familiar and renders sites with minimal issues. Bookmark import from Brave was a piece of cake and setting up a default…

Andros Fenollosa on why we want small systems instead of decentralized ones when talking about online communities. There are no commercial interests and people know each other. It’s like a shoe shop in a small town. The shop can only serve a few customers because there is little space, you know the owner’s name (maybe even his wife’s) and the shelves don’t offer much variety; and yet you know you will be well served and the owner wants you to leave with what is best for you.

For a long time, personal computers tried very hard to explain themselves. You had a desktop. On that desktop were files and folders. Programs opened in windows. Commands were grouped into menus. If you wanted to move something, you dragged it somewhere else. If you wanted to throw it away, there was usually a trash can or recycle bin waiting for it. None of that was accidental. Early graphical interfaces borrowed heavily from the physical office because computers were unfamiliar and needed a…

Firefox 157 has a slick new interface. And the internet is losing its shit. The updated interface has been dismissed as “round” and already you can find instructions on how to roll back to the old look. And that’s a mild insult compared with “needless and ugly.” Such drama! At first the only difference I noticed was the tabs. They are more of a pill shape now and have an outline around them. The background has a subtle gradient that you can customize. After clicking around a bit, I discovered…

Apple Newsroom, during Tuesday’s “Welcome Home” press briefing in New York: Apple today introduced Apple HomeView, designed to be central to the home and personal to everyone in it. With a stunning 7-inch Liquid Retina display, HomeView brings entertainment, connection, and smart home management together in one place, from playing music and making FaceTime calls to home monitoring and hands-free automations with voice control — all designed with privacy and security at the core. HomeView…

There’s never been just one way to buy software. In ye olden times, if you liked some shareware, you’d mail off a cheque, or call up a hot-line, to get the full version. Later on, you could walk into a store and walk out with a shiny box, manuals, and disks. (source) MS Windows 1.0 These were some expensive boxes: Name Year Price 2025 Equivalent Adobe Photoshop 3.0 1994 $895 ~$1,956 ...

We now know how the seeds of the NIST elliptic curves were generated: they’re not the hash of some saucy sentence, but the output of drand48 seeded with the time, which was indeed in 1997–98. John Wood, Henry de Valence, Ava Howell, Zack Voase, Lucy Sweet, Amir Omidi, Paul Crowley, Iain McGinniss, Nicholas Carlini, and Steve Weis from Anthropic solved the riddle and on October 15th, 2026, at 01:07:51 UTC, claimed the full bounty I announced three years ago. They chose to donate the prize to…

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