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…

Link: W Social, Public Institutions and the Theater of European Digital Sovereignty, by Elena RossiniElena Rossini (rightly) calls shenanigans on what’s been happening in the European social world. I think what happened should be instructive for any pro-social technology movement.Here’s what happened:Earlier this month, the European Commission announced a technology sovereignty plan that included a reliance on open source software as a path to autonomy.Eurosky, a non-profit fork of Bluesky that…

A few days ago I was introduced to someone. It was a brief encounter while I passed through a room of people with a friend. My friend introduced me: "Hi Colin, nice to see you again. This is my friend David" Colin: "Ah, good to meet you Dave". I immediately stepped in, "Hi Colin, please call me David". I've never liked Dave as a name for me. I just don't think I am a Dave, or cool enough to pull off a Dave. haha It often happens that people naturally shorten my name, but I always politely…

I wear my favorite perfumes and body sprays at home. I used to try to save them for when I went out on a nice date or attended an upscale Event, then I realized I was hardly getting any use out of them. What good is it doing me to have bought pretty-smelling sprays if I just put them on a shelf and never wear them? So now, I wear them while I work from home. I spray perfume or body spray on myself after showering, and if I can't smell it on myself anymore around lunchtime, I spray some more. I…

Ever since 2017 I’ve made at least one long walk or hike per week. I love walking, and shared that passion by organizing several walks via meetup, eventbrite, in my local community, in my company, and with friends. I’ve accumulated a fair amount of miles under my feet and progressively built a catalog of favorite trails, and an opinion on what makes for an enjoyable walk. I think many others could benefit from this knowledge, hence why I’ve opened the Out N’ About Walks Store, which is…

A while ago I was reading about Wayland and this quote stuck with me: A stated goal of Wayland is “every frame is perfect”. And I think this is a goal we should all aspire to. Wayland is talking about the technical side of things (modern GPU stacks are very complex and Wayland is trying to take control back) but it could be applied to UI too. The rule of thumb is: If I take a screenshot of your app at any moment, it must make sense Why care about every frame? It builds trust. Users can’t see…

The appeal of living in a small town is being surrounded by the right number of people whom you can care about. On the other hand, living in a big city might make you feel lonely in huge crowds. Being a blogger in smallweb (or IndieWeb) is akin to living in a small town with one big exception: there’s no square in the middle of town, no town hall to gather around. In this sense maybe the proper analogy is a small island rather than a town. Smallweb can easily be an isolated experience. Contrary…

I was asked to give a workshop on “AI” at a PhD conference (being a professor of “AI, Language Diversity, and Communication Technologies” is asking for trouble, of course). I decided to write back to say the workshop I could offer was one on how not to use it. Abstract: In a time when it seems impossible to escape talk of the endless “opportunities” and “possibilities” of using “AI”, in this workshop we take a step back and think about how NOT to use it. I will cover a bunch of joyful…

YouTube sent me an email informing me that they were demonetizing my channel because I haven't been posting any new content. I recently wrote about my decision to quit YouTube, even though I had 5700 subscribers and made some very good side income from affiliate sales. Now most of you know you need 4000 hours of watch time and at least 1000 subscribers to get monetized. People put a ton of emphasis on this when they start a channel, but the truth is that if you don't have tens of thousands of…

They move through the night as if stitched into it, seamless and soundless. You don’t hear an owl arrive. You feel it—the brief shift in the air above your head, a whisper of movement. It always feels me with a sense of awe. The silence is part of the hunt. Each feather, soft-edged and velvet-fringed, pulls the air apart without letting it stitch back into a sound. It is the most

Don't worry, this post is not about zits, but something comparably annoying: Zen and Zed. One is a browser and the other an editor. Even writing this, I don't know which is which. Their names and icons are so similar that I keep getting them confused. I couldn't take it anymore; I had to take drastic measures. That's why I replaced the icon of the Zen browser application with a nice-looking e logo. Here's how to do it on macOS: Close Zen. Create or download an alternative icon. Highlight the…

In March of 2007, I went with my friend Rain to the San Francisco ASPCA. I was in a transition period in a lot of ways; for the first time since I’d graduated college, I suddenly found myself without a full-time job or contract. The loss of a social circle from work, big changes in my personal life, and uncertainty about what I was going to do next meant that I was lonely and had too much time with my own thoughts. This was an exploratory trip to maybe consider someday getting a pet cat. Going…

Hi hello. Happy #Caturday! I would like to introduce you to our sweet boy, Linus. Linus in his natural environment. If it fits, it sits.Richmond, VA · April 2026 We brought Linus home from the local Richmond SPCA at the end of November, 2024. At the SPCA, he had a lot of personality and was reaching through the cage, trying to play, and that drew my attention immediately, which sealed his fate. ;) Linus' origin story was told in the form of a letter, penned by the people who found him. I can't…

When I decided to take a career break to "just" go sailing, many, myself first, wondered how long it would take before I got bored and started craving the excitement of drug discovery. A year later: bored? Not once. I was recently reminded of this when I accepted a work assignment for the European community, convinced I had plenty of spare time. There is the planning. It starts long before casting off. Deciding where to spend the next season is not simply dropping a pin on a map and buying a…

Yesterday I posted this on Mastodon (post link) I'm building a new habit here on Mastodon: instead of liking, I try to reply to at least 3 posts, especially on those that don't have comments yet and I love it. It's so much more personal! and boy, the response was overwhelming, at one point it took me half an hour to respond to everyone.Most of the comments were roughly as followsgroup a: I love this idea and I'm going to do this toogroup b: I would love to do this but I don't know if people…

You cannot grow a pumpkin. You can, however, put a pumpkin seed in earth. You can feed it nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. You can moisten it (but please don't drown it). You can erect barriers to prevent folks from walking on it. You can dig a swale to fight erosion. A sprout appears -- it's so small, so vulnerable. You can drench it in ovicides and larvicides and fungicides. You can shield its hungry new leaves from excessive sunshine. You can take a photo of a pumpkin flower and share it…

Happy Summer Solstice and Father’s Day! The grayness of everything is slowly fading away but it’s still there. Reading, writing, coding… they all feel drab these last few weeks. I attribute this to our upcoming apartment move. I hope I’ll be able to rekindle the fire within once we’ve moved. I spent ~10 hours in the studio working on the female torso. It’s not far from the finish. I also decided on the next two sculptures I want to make: a male arm holding a hammer and a full-size female leg.…

One of the most irritating developments of modern life is the way companies keep improving things that were already working. Nobody asked for New Coke. Nobody asked for cars that require IT support and 3 sub-menus to lower the air conditioning. (Screens are cheaper to install than buttons and knobs.) Nobody asked for a monthly...Read More

i mostly wanted to reply to this one to make the title joke :Panyways, there was a post here that discusses blog post titles and boy do i have thoughtsfirst of all, the prebuttal, i do think *some* people might be submitting their blogs to be more connected to thespace they care about and possibly get some replies and general attention and stuffthe problem might kinda be the sheer volume making it difficult to find the majority of peoplebut anywaysdescriptive titles, i sorta agree, but i can…

I give Apple a hard time. That’s mostly due to how they treat the web on their own mobile devices. Though iOS ostensibly supports the ability for websites to be added to the homescreen, they make it so difficult for users to do, the functionality is practically worthless. It’s dispiriting to see the web so hamstrung by that decision. The Webkit team has come in for other criticism too. For a while there, Safari was lagging so far behind in features that people were calling it the new Internet…

Lately I've been entertaining romantic relations with someone I'd already established a good friendship. As I mentioned in my last blog post, he has been through some pretty horrifying shit. He also was kicked out of his home as a teenager, and his mother told his sister that he moved to a different country (when in reality he still lived in the same city as them). He moved to the United States a few years ago to start over and earn a degree here. Naturally, we developed a close emotional bond.…

Miscellaneous bits of news and fun stuff from around the Internet......Shortly before I left on my recent trip, the Warner Archive Collection announced a whopping 12 new Blu-ray titles. Initially the entire dozen were due to come out July 28th, but then half were pushed back a few days, to August 3rd. The terrific list includes THE KEYHOLE (1933), A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM (1935), RANDOM HARVEST (1942), COLT .45 (1950), MACAO (1952), and CRIME WAVE (1953). Visit Blu-ray.com for the complete…

I get it - it's hard to see good things happening in the world today. Hard not to be cynical about the world, about people, and about our future as a species. There is a lot to be worried about, and the world is more chaotic and unpredictable than ever. Despite all of this, I choose optimism. I choose to hope that humans can be better, imagine a world where things can be greater than what they are today, and work hard to create a world where new and exciting things are happening for all people,…

“We’re all better than AI. AI is just better at pretending it can do the job.” The post “Don’t You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?” first appeared on Correr Es Mi Destino.

Hakkerman over at HakkerBlog doesn’t want to buy you coffee. Coffee here refers to the “Buy Me a Coffee” or “Ko‑Fi” buttons you might have seen around in other blogs. He comes off a bit grumpy, so I like him already. He has this disclaimer in place: Do note that this is a slightly negative post, there is alot of negativity on the internet at the moment. Take a moment to reflect if you want to expose yourself to more negativity. There are plenty of positive posts out there as well :) I like this…

I recently moved this website away from NextJS as the static generation engine. The site was working, but it had become heavier than what I needed. Most pages are static. Most content is markdown. The build was doing a lot of framework work for a problem that had become much smaller than the framewo…

I was very late to the Markdown side of things, however text files were always my jam, certainly professionally (there is not a callcenter agent in the world that didn’t have a thin Notepad window taking up a small slice on the left or right hand side of their screens jotting notes and copying and pasting things in their tools.) In a tech news cycle dominated by trillions of dollars of personal wealth to a single person, and technologies that are probably making us more stupid, it is easy to…

I was chatting to JTR about our shared experiences of being openly polyamorous1 bloggers. Both JTR and I observed that it’s something that we don’t write about often. We don’t say much about it… even though it’s probably something that, to some readers, would seem interesting and unusual. And also, perhaps, still sufficiently “taboo” that they wouldn’t feel comfortable asking us about it outright, either. Why is that? In my case, the single biggest reason that I don’t often write about it is… I…

I can't help but wonder whether we will look back on this AI hype in the workplace with confusion and embarrassment. If we indeed progress into a future where the bubble will burst, models will further close up, become too expensive for the average user, enshittified, or really specialized for specific fields and most promises end up not fulfilled, how will employers everywhere play this off? How will employees recover from witnessing this cultish environment suddenly dropping off as if nothing…

It’s been a year since I retired — my last working day was June 6, 2025 — and I like being able to say that I’ve spent the year adding nothing, not one penny, to shareholder value. 🌴 * * * My hope for retirement was to get a lot of work done on NetNewsWire. A year ago it was in sore need of modernization, tech debt pay-off, and bug fixes. People were asking for features, but the foundation needed a ton of work before I could get on to adding new rooms. Here are some highlights of what we’ve…