This blog is hosted on Cloudflare Pages. The build has been wired up to Gitlab, so when I git push, the site is rebuilt in a Cloudflare Worker. I chose Gitlab because GitHub seems to be notoriously unreliable lately. But Gitlab has been worse for me. Specifically, I’ve been having the following issues, all of which are intermittent. Gemini sent me down a few rabbit holes but eventually agreed that the problems are on Gitlab’s side. Latency. Simple pull and push commands will sometimes take 15…
A return to form and function Image: Apple. In 2009, at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Bertrand Serlet walked onstage and presented an audacious claim: “Zero New Features,” the slide read. Serlet, Apple’s then-senior vice president of software engineering, was introducing OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, a release Apple claimed would emphasize small “refinements” and major updates to internal technologies. But to the public, it really was “Zero New Features” — a quote forever cemented in…
People often ask which messaging platform they should use. Matrix? XMPP? Signal? Something else? The honest answer is there is no perfect option. At the #OMN we’ve tried running #XMPP servers for years. From a #4opens prospective it’s probably the strongest foundation. Socially, though, it’s still trapped by the #geekproblem, despite years of outreach, we never found any implementation simple enough for normal communities to adopt at scale. #Matrix is in meany ways worst, but for different…
I am the proud owner of a lightly used bread machine.It’s a white appliance about the size of a microwave, and it sits on my kitchen counter,It cost about a hundred bucks.The ingredients for a basic loaf are flour, water, yeast, and salt. A bag of flour costs two or three dollars and yields maybe ten loaves. A jar of yeast lasts for months. Salt costs almost nothing. The machine does almost everything: it kneads, it proofs, it bakes. I dump the ingredients in, press a button, and three hours…
We all consume online content by different means. The majority of the people prefer mainstream social media while a small number of people use newsletters or RSS/Atom feeds. I am in the latter group. Those who are not familiar with RSS feed, please have a look at it here. It is a fantastic way to subscribe and read your favorite articles, news and blogs. You can even subscribe to Youtube channels using feeds. However, to access them you need a feed reader. Thanks to the open source community…
They have too much data.#Contents Footnotes Every now and then I come across something that reminds me just how much data Meta has on us. A friend pointed me to this option in Meta Accounts Center called “Activity from other businesses”, which shows “activity sent from other businesses or organizations to show you relevant content.” Their main help page doesn’t even work in my region :/ I thought I’d already turned off all the data-farming settings, but apparently not. To my surprise, I found…
Over the years I've built quite a lot of stuff for Bear Blog. Themes, add-ons, plugins, fun little widgets, and more. I've always had the same approach: make it "complete and perfect" before publishing. Investing a lot of time, tweaking and testing, then hitting the publish button. Now I feel like trying something new to challenge that OCD way of doing things. Instead of "perfecting" things, whatever that means, I'll just put it out there and build it up piece by piece. I've had an idea for a…
Unless we save it. We have traded a free internet for a collection of walled gardens. Today, a handful of digital landlords use algorithms to dictate our reality, while closed AI threatens to change the ways we connect. We are at a breaking point: we can either let gatekeepers continue to consolidate their power, or we can reclaim the open source spirit that built the web in the first place. — https://codeforthepeople.com/
The article you are currently reading has been written in a markup language of my own design, called JAMES. It’s a line-based language that borrows ideas from Gemtext (itself inspired partly from Gophermaps and Troff though it’s not a programming language like Troff is but a markup language. The rest of this article discusses my motivations for a new markup language and provides a tour of JAMES syntax. You can read the source code of this page and the JAMES program online. Why another markup…
Have you head of the Swiss Cheese model? You see it sometimes in descriptions of how complex systems fail. The visual usually goes like this: The whole idea is: even if you have multiple layers of safety – like many slices of cheese – there are always holes in each slice. Typically, a hole in any slice is covered by a non-hole in the previous one or the next one. (For example, a car might not allow you to grab your keys if you have not shifted to park – or, if you start driving with a handbrake…
On my quest to own my software, one foundational piece kept itching… the X server. The underlying graphics engine, the thing that puts pixels on the screen. X11 is 4 million lines of code, a beast very few can claim they understand. So I did the reasonable thing. I wrote my own, in Assembly. It is called frame. No dependencies, no libraries, no garbage collector. No hot paths, no unnecessary wakeups. When it is idle, it sits still. It shuts up unless spoken to. My kind of software. It clocks in…
Setup a Simple, Self-Hosted Web Server with OpenBSD 2026-07-18 This website is being served to you from my HP T630 thin client, running OpenBSD and httpd. Pretty cool, right? And best of all you can do the same! I’m going to walkthrough how to host your own websites locally on OpenBSD. This guide is going to be kept simple on purpose, so feel free to expand on it as you see fit! Requirements Getting Started Wireguard The VPS The Local Server Basic Web Server Give Back to the Community…
Hello, loves! OK, let’s do the thing we love: find something to improve, and improve it. Shall we start where we left off? Result: Not as joyful as some days. We pared down the RoomView by removing its references to layout, dungeon, and dungeon view, passing them as parameters when they were needed. Pretty much what the received wisdom would suggest and I’ve done it many times and don’t recall ever regretting it. There is a place for encapsulating a bunch of objects that need to be processed…
AI-drunk companies love to trumpet their millions or billions of users. What they don’t tell you is that most are forced to use such features. Think of the AI overviews that Google Search forces on you, whether you asked for it or not. Samsung seems to have taken this tactic to the next level. According to How-To Geek, the Samsung Health app will delete users’ health data from the company’s cloud — making sync between devices impossible — unless they agree to hand it over for AI training and…
I came across Martijn’s post on Bubbles today and would like to take this opportunity to answer his question… I can already hear you complaining that you shouldn’t use tables for layout. Why exactly? CSS is simple, stop making it hard Or: how to embrace 1997 CSS blog.brixit.nl All of us (with 40+ years under our belts) used tables in the late 90s to achieve the holy grail of layout … HEADERNAV | CONTENT | ADSFOOTER … BUT … back then, on the one hand, we had no other options, and on the other,…
Good morning, programs. I'm currently at a conference (Day of Data), but thankfully one just down the road. I'll be back tonight, and thought I'd take a break between sessions to share some links. I'll be presenting later today one of my favorite talks, "A Beginner's Guide to Wrangling Asynchronicity in JavaScript". I love the talk, but given I'm up against eight other talks at the same time and I'm not talking AI... well it may be a small personal affair. We shall see. Building a Blog with…
An excellent interview! From deleted government records to disappearing music, our digital culture can be erased overnight. The Internet Archive’s Mark Graham and Chris Freeland explain what it will take to save it. adactio.com/links/22660
In the fediverse, there is no central authority that can verify you. Instead, you link to your fediverse profile from your website, blog, or even some of the larger platforms, like GitHub, in a way that proves that these online identities are connected and controlled by you. This then serves as one of several signals about the authenticity and authority of your fediverse account. And you can also automatically include an author link when people share your site or an article. I’ll walk you…
I’ve made a few tweaks to the Mac menubar app I vibe coded the other day. Sidenote: I really ick on the term vibe coded. But what else would I call it? Largely driven by a change to the BBC Radio 2 lineup with Sara Cox now (finally) getting the breakfast gig. It does put her in direct competition with Grimmy on 6Music but at least now I have a choice in the morning, before Laurene on 6Music mid-morning. Largely inspired by the app I used to build something similar(ish) myself before which my…
Hello RSS reader! This post contains an interactive feature. Please visit the canonical web page for an optimal viewing experience :) When I redesigned my website earlier this year I removed dark mode. I never liked the colours, and the light switch toggle was so 2010’s.Personally I prefer reading with a dark theme for long-form content. Dark is not my brand though and I don’t believe every website needs to support colour scheme preference automatically. A good browser has reader mode, I use…
The internet you grew up on isn't dying. A commercial veneer glued on top of it is. A visual essay about the protocols, federations, and quiet machinery underneath everything you actually use — and why the boring parts are the parts that survive.
With AI tools there's more software shipping more than ever. The thread across my talks with other leaders are consistently being told to scale beyond adding headcount. The model of the trifecta and design being embedded in every piece of work on a single roadmap just isn't scaling for this new world. If we don't adapt we end up being either overwhelmed with work or only overseeing part of the product. Watch enough work go out without design and you notice what's slipping: quality. Not some…
The AYN Thor is an Android handheld with two screens and, out of the box, no opinion about what either of them is for. The upper screen is wide and bright and obviously wants to be where the game happens. The lower screen is smaller, nearly square, and close to the controls. It wants to be a menu. The hardware makes this arrangement feel inevitable. Android does not. Android sees displays, activities, tasks, focus, and a default screen. It can put software on both panels, but it has no idea…
Yash Garg: A friend pointed me to this option in Meta Accounts Center called “Activity from other businesses”, which shows “activity sent from other businesses or organizations to show you relevant content.” Their main help page doesn’t even work in my region. If you dig around in your Meta account privacy settings, you can turn this feature off. While you are there, though, you might take a scroll through the audience-based advertising list. These are companies that have, most often for me,…
A few months ago I finally got around to switching my Google Pixel over to GrapheneOS. The install was refreshingly painless, the bootloader re-locked without complaint, and the web installer made the whole process feel almost suspiciously easy. It was the sort of experience that makes custom Android ROMs seem a lot less intimidating than they used to be. For all my enthusiasm about FOSS… Source
I wrote before about my (mis)adventures in photo backup along with some technical musings about bit rot which can lead to corruption of old files across backups. Ever since I wrote those posts I have been working on a solution custom built for my use case: an Apple Photomator and Apple Photos user who wants an easy way to backup albums into external storage (including cloud backup) while ensuring integrity and with built-in error correction. The outcome of that work is LumiVault, a macOS app…
With several developers and a great deal of production servers we need access to, managing SSH keys and access across them all was getting complex with potential for mistakes and missed authentication. Instead, we decided to set up a bastion/jump host (with a redundant backup) - this means the client servers need just 2 SSH keys added and we manage authentication and access for the team in a central location. Note: This post has been sitting in my drafts for years and I'm posting it out of…
praeobscura:I am cross-posting my resource list for the Noemata zine here. Alas, if you lose this post, you must endure the long journey of searching for where else* I have linked them.(*The updated description of the zine page.)——ConlangingPolyGlot: Spoken Language Construction Kit - Free software for keeping track of multiple conlang projects in a single database.Quothalinguist - The personal website of Jessie Peterson, the professor of linguistics who created the well-known Conlang Year…
Ukraine has turned drone warfare into an engineering feedback loop. A crew flies a system until Russian electronic warfare finds a weakness. Operators report the failure. Engineers change the radio, navigation or software, then send a new batch back to the front. I spent years building teams that shipped software several times a day. The mechanics feel familiar: release something small, inspect the result and fix what broke. The consequences in Ukraine sit on another scale. A failed software…
A couple of months ago I wrote about making my Eleventy build five times faster by fixing a handful of embarrassing filters. I wrote about developer experience and the feedback loop of "I write a line" and "I see the result." Why am I writing a sequel already? Well, the answer is money. Or more accurately, keeping things free. I'm on Netlify's legacy free plan, which gives me 300 build minutes a month. Right now, despite my previous optimizations, the build time averages around 2 minutes, 45…
