Now and then I need to upload something over SFTP (usually pretty large site backups) and I’ve been using FileZilla for this the last few months. As “retro” as the UI is, this app is still awesome and I am impressed with the speed of my file transfers every time I use it! The UI hasn’t changed much Just wanted to share some love for this venerable app.

Status: Quite soon after I woke up this morning a trip to Kings Heath was suggested. My sister and her family were going to Queens Heath, a small local Pride event with market stalls and the like, and would we like to join them. I was wary but decided fuck it, I need to start getting out there again. I managed to walk the length of it with earplugs in and then we went for a coffee in a slightly quieter area. I have no idea what the event was like. Everyone seemed happy. Good for them. One of my…

In the past few weeks I've been thinking a lot about game structure. I feel quite safe in running a dungeon crawl1 since it's the easiest one, and also with running mysteries, but there is the "scenario" structure of games that isn't as intuitive. This is the structure you find in pretty much any non-D&D game, from your average RuneQuest session that does not involve delving a perilous place, all the way to more modern games like Apocalypse World and its family. For that purpose, I have tested…

There are colors that I want to show you, but I can’t. They exist in the real world. You probably saw some of them today, but I can’t show them to you on a screen. A digital photograph can’t capture them, and your screen can’t display them. No game you’ve ever played has contained them. Unless you have specialized equipment, they are entirely absent from the digital world. Most of them are cyans. On screens we live a life starved of cyans. It is shocking when you see one in person. They seem…

Bubbles: functions a bit like Hacker News but specifically for personal blogs. You log in with a Mastodon or Fediverse account, upvote posts you like, and watch the good stuff bubble up. It is fantastic to see Bubbles getting some well-deserved spotlight in David Pierce’s latest Installer newsletter. This is a win for the Indie web and I am glad I had a minor part to play in this. The personal blogging community is thriving, and tools like Bubbles make discovering and participating in this…

Here are 20 steps that I reconned somewhere on the internet. Even though I called them "steps," order of execution does not matter. Take yourself out for dinner. No phone, just a notebook. Go to the cinema alone. Stay in your seat after it ends. Pick a nearby town you've never visited. No agenda, just show up. Go a full day with no phone. Take a long solo walk and record voice notes as you go. Don't edit. Just talk. Write a one-page vision for your life. Read it every morning…

Life Notes Jack had his Nursery Graduation on Friday, cape, tasseled mortarboard and all. I still feel a bit emotional about it, a milestone and all that. He is still very much not into participation and performing though, which is a-ok because neither is his Dad! Scotland vs Morocco was excruciating to watch. At least we showed some attack intent, even if the result didn’t go our way. A draw with Brazil? I don’t see it. It’d have to be a 0-0. But then, stranger things have happened. Ditched…

If you don’t speak French, you might never have heard of the AZERTY keyboard — the weird cousin of QWERTY with its shifted number row and a scattering of accented letters across the board. Even if you do speak French, you might not use AZERTY — the Swiss and Luxembourgers type on a QWERTZ-based layout and French Canadians use their own QWERTY-based layouts. And even though i’m French, i don’t use AZERTY either. QWERTY already loads up the left hand, but AZERTY makes things worse by parking the…

Ever since I got my first mechanical keyboard, I’ve been able to turn caps lock, one of the most useless functions on a keyboard, into something actually useful. The keyboard came with a switch on the back that allowed it to act as another control key. It was great! Made for an easier ctrl+s shortcut since my left pinky already sat next to the caps lock key. Been using it for 12 years now. It’s basically second nature. Unfortunately, when I got newer version of this keyboard, they swapped the…

I was more than a little interested with flags as a kid. I loved learning about the history of their designs, what they represented, their aesthetics, and how they’re used in different settings. Point out a national flag (and even some supranational and subordinate flags), and I’ll almost certainly be able to tell you the political entity it represents, the symbolism behind specific features, and what flags upon which they’re based (where applicable). Have you ever wondered why the five pointed…

Shibuya and Harajuku can be quite a crowded placed to visit, and so I welcome any opportunity for a coffee in a more quiet place. Enter BAGGAGE COFFEE - a coffee store tucked away on a residential side street. It’s located halfway between Harajuku station on the JR line, and Omotesando station on one of the metro lines. If you are doing a walk between Shibuya and Harajuku, or checking out the shops along Omotesando or Cat Street, this can be a nice detour spot for a good cup of coffee. I’m not…

When you feel overwhelmed, slow down. I know this might feel like the exact opposite thing your system wants to do when you feel overwhelmed. But it's not... What if the feeling we associate with overwhelm is actually a message, sent by our system, asking us to please slow down? And what if the negative outcomes we associate with feeling overwhelmed are actually a result of ignoring that message—of working harder and faster and more frantically instead? I have a saying I throw at my children…

It has been two days since I posted about the release of Town Square, and I thought it would be nice to write a quick report. My post got automatically posted on Bubbles and I shared it on Hacker News. Someone also posted it on Lobste.rs, which I had never heard of before. Later it got posted on some other sites I don’t even know. All of that generated a big traffic spike. Lots of people visited the site and explored the town square at the bottom. Things got crowded quickly, but it was fun.…

This TIL post is basically an update to my three year old post “Hugo, meet Android”. I recently got a new phone and thus had to re-do the setup of my mobile blogging pipeline. So, basically, allow me to checkout, modify, test, commit and push the sources of this Hugo based static page under Android. While doing so I noticed some necessary changes and improvements, and also wanted to make use of my Taskfile which does most of the heavy lifting now, so here are my updated steps. Apps &…

But then I don't really have a topic of passion in mind. Today, I had that itch. I read a few trending Bear posts. I thought about a reply post. I thought about a singular post replying to multiple posts in-short. I thought about writing about porn & how maybe porn actors should have to be 21+ instead of 18+. I considered trying to come up with an insightful thing to write about. What if I made a second blog where all my posts are quality? I don't know. I need a shower. I have had this feeling…

I've been scrolling the Bubbles new feed for a few weeks now. I think of it like trolling[1] for good feeds. This is a pretty high-volume feed so I can't click through every post so I end up just reading the title and trying to decide if it's something I'd be interested in reading. As a person on the internet, I have opinions about what makes a good title. Prebuttal # Let me start my list by saying yes, I understand each person can write whatever they like on their blog and in whatever manner…

Why read the book? Nick Needham wrote 2000 Years of Christ's Power Volume 1: The Age of the Early Church Fathers. It is the first book in a five-volume series on church history. This volume covers the period from the time of the apostles in the first century up to the Council of Chalcedon in the year 451. Needham explains how the early church faced persecution, false teaching, and internal debates. He shows how Christian doctrine developed through the writings of the Church Fathers and the…

PSA: Bubbles.town has a widget I am a big fan of bubbles.town, a relatively new website to make it easier to discover the indieweb of personal blogs. Sounds familiar? I run indieblog.page where the idea is that you can discover new blogs one random post at a time. Bubble's approach is a different one. Instead of showing you random posts, they want to “bubble up” the best posts by user votes, similar to what Reddit or Hackernews do. However unlike on those sites, the posts are not user submitted…

Many file formats are suitable for representing e-books, but most are complex, and many are proprietary. This article puts forward a proposal for a new format, somewhat like EPUB, but hugely simplified.

Over the past few months, you may have noticed some etymology-related content creeping into my articles alongside my usual topics. I’ve been writing about how the myth of Theseus gave us the word ‘clue’ and the surprising origins of ‘currying favour’ in a medieval poem about an evil, perverted horse. This hasn’t just been for fun—I’ve written an entire book filled with quirky and fascinating stories about how many of our beloved English words came to be. The Wordspotter’s Guide is a compendium,…

Photo by Darafsh via Wikimedia CommonsAs birth rates fall and countries turn to immigration to address their labor shortages, a lot of countries around the world are struggling with crises of national identity. Japan is one of them. Over a decade ago, Japan began opening itself up to mass immigration:Because Japan did this later than other rich nations, immigrants aren’t yet as numerous as in Europe or the U.S., but the percentage is rising fast. And so discussions about what it truly means to…

A quiz! About blogging! Count me in. Apparently I’m: You are a AuthorYou love writing and have a growing backlog of posts on your website! Words are your best friend and you’re always thinking about what to write next. And… You are also a ExplorerTo you, the web feels like a library that’s open all hours and has everything you could ever imagine! You love reading others blogs, and know how important readers are to the whole of the indie web community! What type are you? Thanks for reading and…

As you're already aware if you've been reading my blog posts for the past couple weeks, I've been getting into self-hosting. fanfiction.lol has passed 200 users and is running smoothly (knock on wood) on hardware that's old enough to legally drive in some provinces. And somewhere in the process of watching Caddy serve requests through Cloudflare Tunnel on a machine I built myself, something clicked into place. I realized I had more capacity and no good excuse not to use it. And so I want to put…

Today is the anniversary of the first blog post on this website from two decades ago. It was about client side JavaScript to automatically (albeit blindly) select the "active" navigation. Ironically, I'd probably do this on the server side these days. Admittedly, it's imported from my prior blog and the first time I posted on on this domain was in September, but the post in June counts! But then, my domain was registered a full year before on 13 June 2025 (which neither myself, nor the Internet…

Another day, another blog post responding to a blog post. For what else is the Internet for? I stumbled upon Hakkerman's article, "No, I Won't Buy You a Coffee" and felt a strong urge to correct a fundamental misunderstanding. Because this topic isn't just about blogging or the IndieWeb, it's about figuring out how we can create a liberated future of independent art. I've already written an article about how you can support indie creators, and why you need to. I'll try not to be redundant here.…

A few weeks ago, I added a silly, funny experiment on this website. I talked about it on this blog post. It was a tiny Town Square at the bottom of every page 2. When you visit the site, you'll see a small strip populated by stick figures. Each figure represents another visitor currently browsing the website. You can see what page people are reading, walk around and send messages. For example, you could see someone reading the same article as you and start a discussion about it. The goal wasn't…

Ticker tape, as such, has been defunct for more than 50 years. The machines were a form of telegraph connected to printers: since they wasn’t carrying general messages but only a constrained set of letters and numbers in series, a simple printer onto a roll of paper was sufficient. This led to Financial District offices being full of long pieces of narrow paper tape, and offices used to have operable windows… 1888, a political campaign parade, looking west on Wall Street towards Trinity Church.…

I bought my laptop for 350€ on Backmarket. I bought it because it was a decent price and looked sturdy. Well, actually this price wasn't for nothing. Ok you need to picture it. When I turn my computer on, it makes a buzzing sound, the kind of sounds old PCs used to make. When I hold it from the wrong corner, or put it a certain way on my lap, the whole thing freezes and needs to be rebooted with the power button. A laptop that is, indeed, not to be put on lap. One time, I don't know what…

You know that feeling when you feel like you’re gonna sneeze but then it never comes out? I sometimes feel like that with blog posts. I think I have a post coming out of me so I sit down to start writing. But nothing coherent comes out. I recently joined a new writer group and we had a small discussion about this. What I wrote there, verbatim: When I run into a situation where I have a vague idea but writing it doesn't quite happen right away, I usually take my notebook and go to a pub to write…

I recently learned about this fantastic project where visitors are able to "chat" with one another in a fun and private way. I had to try it! So now, at the bottom of every page on this site, you will see my little town square. Please take a look and have some fun with it. If you want to learn more about Town Square, you can take a look at this post from its creator, Cauê Napier. Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email, or leave a…