It’s a little surreal watching Kevin recap the current CSS-Tricks situation. It’s been rollercoastery after DigitalOcean’s acquisition. Thoughts: DigitalOcean bought the site. They can do whatever they want with it. At the very least, I hope it stays online. Aside from a general distaste for bitrot, a lot of people have bylines on that site, and they deserve to have those online to benefit them in perpetuity. DigitalOcean should be clear and honest in their communications about the site,…

Welcome to my third post on Gemini and the alternative Internets and smallnets! This is going to be my most helpful and detailed article on the topic yet—and it's something I'm excited to get into. If you'd like a history and explanation of what Gemini is, read my first post, "Gemini, Gophers, and Fingers. Oh My! Alternative Internets Beyond HTTPS". My second article, "Oldnets and Altnets: A Guide to Building a Low-Spec Daily Internet Out of Gemini, Gopher, and Terminal Tools" was aimed more at…

I don’t usually check analytics on my website, but the hosting I use on Vercel does provide the ability to check referrals, and I have to admit, every once in a while I enjoy to see those! It’s not because I am obsessed with people who visit my website (although I kind of am), or because I want to write according to what my readers view the most (although I sometimes do that too). I simply love to see when someone links to a post of mine for the first time, and I see their website on my…

I like long reads and deep dive educational videos. I wanted to list the youtubers that provide value in my life. I’ve never been a short video person, it hurts my brain. I use uBlock Origin to ban the shorts section of YouTube when they push it on me, buh bye. Here are some amazing long content educational YouTubers out there that I think are worth your time. Climate PBS Terra Shoutout to Maiya and her ‘Weathered’ series for covering the climate crisis. She discusses how it impacts local…

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.…

Two new additions to my back garden in anticipation of a scorching summer this year. I thought last summer was going to be killer, but I was wrong…it was warm, and sometimes hot, but remained manageable and without the environmental impacts I had (glass-half-emptily) expected. This year is forecast to be different. The developing (super) El Niño is making meteorologists uneasy, with predictions of severe storms and extremely unsettled weather patterns. In some sort of micro-prepping response,…

Have been doing a trial of FB’s Muse AI app for Mac desktop. And call me old-fashioned but in my time we didn’t ask for full disk access on the first date, along with credit card verification, and no expiring chats. You can deny it full disk access and still seemingly have it run things on its cloud virtual machine (VM), but you can’t assign it individual folder access like you can with ChatGPT Work/Codex, which I have also been testing and enjoying a lot more than Muse. I also find I guess the…

sorry for the negativity. I just went and touched grass (not literally but I went for a run outside). Life is not that bad. Sometimes I just forget to go outside. Hope you are staying sane out there; I know it’s not easy. Happy Sunday.

If I were to look back at the early days of me messing around with the internet - we're talking the late '90s here - it's that I didn't pursue my interest in HTML and CSS, let alone programming in general.Much like many of that era I spun up my first website on GeoCities (I was part of the SouthBeach crowd), quickly figured out how to have the requisite "Under Construction" banner, and gave everyone's ears an 8-bit blessing of Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On" on auto-play.Yup, the good ol'…

Gordon posted that he received an AI email the other day. Hey, me too: Figure 1: The email from "Emily (AI agent, iLands)". What an annoying email to receive. Just the new wave of spam, this time powered by pedantic LLMs. Hopefully the next iteration can actually understand context and realize I don't need someone to give me a "close reading" of my work. Imagine paying $25 to reiterate that I have poor writing skills. I already know that, I don't need to pay to hear it.

For the second part of the study, the researchers relied on detection dogs. They placed cameras where the dogs alerted to possible weasel presence, resulting in 16 new camera locations. The researchers captured 77 weasels on camera in just over 200 nights. That’s a camera success rate of 81% compared with 1.5% without dogs. Not only was the camera placement more successful in detecting weasels, but it also cost about 10 times less than traditional methods. The study is among the first to…

Spend enough time with LLMs and you start noticing certain patterns. Maybe you’re working on a codebase and you want to upgrade a dependency or language version, redesign some component, or add new features. You ask the LLM how to do it, and it gives you a brief description and then finishes with “Do you want me to start?”. Sometimes it doesn’t even bother responding, it just edits the code for you. You ask it for the commands to look up DNS records for a domain, and it responds with the DNS…

source: sourceive been wanting to make this kind of post for a bit but of course a larger blogger got to it first...anywayswhile i do agree with forced account-making on the Large apps, i also think its a larger issue for Everythinglike, everything seems to demand an account and its driving me crazyevery fast food place seems to have a rewards programevery product nowadays seems to demand an app and account to even functionwhat benefit does having an account serve for you, the person???rewards…

Democrats just ensured that billionaire Trump ally Larry Ellison (a right wing oligarch who doesn't really believe in democracy) will be allowed to own the lion's share of whatever's left of U.S. corporate media.After months of growing lobbying, media, and political pressure, 12 state attorneys general have agreed to settle their antitrust lawsuit against Paramount/CBS with what sounds like flimsy conditions, allowing the company's unpopular $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers (CNN, HBO)…

The …one likes to take a longer look Flickr group is pretty great.

Since January 2025, the United States has deported at least 25,447 people to countries that are not their own. According to The Guardian those deported 'include those who spent most of their lives in the US, parents detained on the school run, (and) the adult children of elderly relatives who depend on them for care.'The Deportation Project Map lets you explore the Trump administration's global network of deportations. Click on a country on the map and you can see the number of people who have…

This is gonna be the most personal post I have ever written. These past two weeks have been the month of Elul,with the Jewish High Holidays. Due to the cult I grew up in I have extreme anxiety panic attacks and nightmares during this month. Sunday night Monday were Yom Kippur so I got my typical panic attack and nightmares yay(would be cool if hyperventilating for an hr wasnt such a given , ha). Anyways today was mostly good but I have been in higher fight or flight mode than typical. Anyways…

John Gruber personal PR for Apple is again excited about his ad revenue: It doesn't matter that Samsung and Google and a bunch of Chinese companies have made foldable Android phones for a decade. Almost nobody cares. The Duo is a fucking iPhone. That makes people care. Nobody cares about Chinese companies. They just magically filled half the marketplace. That means more than Apple and Samsung together. Probably sold to aliens. If you mean foldables, Apple sold zero of them. Why is it strange…

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…

I remember back in the days of the early internet in the 1990's the concept of news, information and things that where beneficial to being a well informed person, being behind a paywall would have been a very foreign idea. How did we let that happen? Why should I have to pay for information, unless the goal is to keep us from being truly informed. This should not be a new concept — people like Plato, Niccolo Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and of course, George Orwell, warned us that…

In a culture obsessed with optimisation and presentation, where everything has to be extraordinary and flashy to have a change of being noticed, the mundane image serves as quiet resistance. It suggests that unoptimised life, imperfect spaces, and unguarded moments have value worth documenting.—- Photoni.st

An essay version of the video is below – not just a transcript but a text that I’ve rewritten thoroughly to work as text. You can subscribe to the audio-only podcast feed over on Apple’s Podcast app and other apps if audio is more your speed. It’s also available as a raw podcast feed if you want to subscribe to it directly in the podcast app of your choice. For fans of video, there’s both the YouTube channel and the TikTok account. Overview # Why do jokes fall flat online? Why is it so easy to…

I used to have a three screen setup on my desk. At some point, I removed the third screen because I felt weirdly overwhelmed. There was always something to see, to keep track of, to click on, to watch or to adjust while I played or chatted. I wanted more focus on fewer things. Removing the screen really helped me because it restricted what I see at once, but now, maybe two (?) years later, I notice I am running into a similar issue again with just two screens. The way I have been using my…

After quite a lot of wine fuelled reading of Brennans Blog I got a little interested in the Gemini Protocol designed as a new internet protocol for "supporting an electronic library of interconnected text documents". Sounds good to me. I don't often write about tech, because everyone else on the smallweb does. But I've been a Linux obsessive since Redhat 5.2. If you search my real name, there are contributions I made to the Fedora project back when I had free time. I have made my living for 20+…

If you haven't looked at the Napster website lately, get ready for some major AI-related indigestion. The former music-sharing rebel is now peddling AI digital twins of teachers and serving the Saudi market.I’m a strong advocate for doing things to keep historically relevant websites and companies online. But not like this.Recently, word broke that Napster, a company that you once knew as your primary method for downloading mislabeled Phish covers, had pivoted to AI educational tools. Which is…

When the redesigned Mac Mini was announced I had hoped for it to be USB-C powered. But a Mac Nano (or Mac Neo) would be an even better fit for a USB-C powered Mac that could be used in all the ways you can use a Raspberry Pi. I bet they could beat the old Mac Mini pricing for a device like this, and ship it at $299-399. Source: Caleb Hailey This is a neat idea. The A20-Pro might just be the perfect low-power-always-on-computer without a screen (unless absolutely needed) that could run quite a…

Your phone is not the problem Jeff says that he is a better person without his phone. Widdershins says they’re the same with or without their phone. I think they’re both right because when Jeff gets on his phone, he doomscrolls. When Widdershins uses his phone, he contacts his family, uses it as a digital planner, music and taking photos. Jeff is a better person without his phone because Doomscrolling on X (formerly called Twitter) has no benefits. News outlets and social media make more money…

Since writing my article on DHH, I've been getting an above-average number of emails in my inbox decrying my stance and public advocacy. And I have to be honest, I find it so weird, more than anything. It's confusing to me how many typical people—men of the same ilk as myself—want to play defence for the handful of millionaires and corporate executives and weird little guys. A lot of the time, religion will be invoked, specifically Christianity. I'm a Christian myself, I've written my testimony…

You know what I'm still irritated about? Video-game companies giving up their offering of physical media as an option. I know a lot of PlayStation and Xbox users go with digital formats, but even having the choice to use a disc--that you own--is good. Physical games help with making it possible to preserve games, rent titles, resell them, and they give consumers a lot more rights than it seems companies want them to have. Sony has already made its intentions clear and Microsoft is going through…

One thing I didn’t appreciate growing up in Australia was just how beautiful its birds are. They are such a colourful bunch, especially in comparison to the birds around Tokyo which tend to be in varying shades of brown and black. I was recently down in Sydney for a week visiting my Mum and there was plenty of opportunity for bird-watching, even without leaving her house. First up is this absolutely gorgeous kookaburra. Look how pretty its feathers are! Kooky with a friend Another visitor was…