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…

On Wednesday, President Trump threatened to block the extension of the surveillance program, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or FISA, which expired on Saturday, unless a measure to reauthorize also included his beloved elections bill, the SAVE America Act. Trump has called passage of the SAVE America Act his chief legislative priority and has continually applied pressure on Senate Republicans to force the passage of the bill. Why does the President care so much about…

Let me tell you a story I go to check my email in Gmail’s web UI. I see a few new messages regarding feedback on a project I’m working on. I click through to read one of them and the first thing I’m greeted with is a message summary I didn’t ask for generated by a language model. I focus the message box to draft a reply, but there’s already one there. It was also generated by the language model. I delete it, replacing it with my own. Afterward, I go to compose a new message. A colorful…

Remember when Austria's otherwise respectable Belvedere Museum sold 10,000 NFTs representing postage-stamp sized sections of Gustav Klimt's The Kiss for like $2,000 a pop? No? Don't worry, I've got you.Only about a quarter of them ever sold, leaving about 7,200 of them on the digital shelves. That is, until they were stolen (or, as the museum put it, "transferred from the wallet without authorization"). If valued at their sale price the stolen NFTs would be worth €13.32 million (US$15.3…

OK maybe it's probably just me but, I often want to "Like" other peoples blog posts after I read them and find something I enjoyed. For me, it is a simple way of saying: "hey I read this" and also "hey I like your post"! In the indieweb/smol-web this …

I am geek adjacent. I lie probably slap bang in the middle of two extremes; the uber-geek/dev coder who knows internet coding and all the web server dark arts like the back of their hand, and the ‘Facebook is the internet’ person who uses the flash on their phone when taking a picture of a landscape in the dark. I have nothing against either person. Well, that’s a lie, I have criticisms of both but they are of no importance here. Who is it for? I’ve been blogging for a long time and I’ve seen…

It's been awhile since I've written a technical breakdown looking at specific functionality on my site. I actually wrote that I would post a tutorial on how Webmentions work on my site... but then never did. And that was all the way back in March! It's June now, somehow. It's actually almost July. What the heck? Anyways, my friend Melo runs a blog using a custom Rails solution (which is far more impressive than my simple static blog) and I hope this walkthrough can help her and anyone else with…

Ooooh and Aaah at the new KDE release, KDE 6.7! With PlasmaLogin instead of SDDM...

Decades before smartphones turned every traveler into a documentarian, a single American academic carried his camera through some of the most closed cities on earth, quietly building one of the most revealing visual records of Soviet life to ever reach Western audiences. Thomas T. Hammond was a professor at the University of Virginia, where he […]

Andreas blogged about adding the bubbles.town widget to his blog. He used the vote widget provided by bubbles.town, which is just a bit of JavaScript you put on your pages. It's well documented and dead simple, so if you just want this on your site with no fuss, that's the way to go. I use 11ty as my blogging platform and I could just use the same JavaScript snippet on my site but I wanted to make something that's a bit more in the spirit of a static site. It's a tiny script, so yeah, I'm being…

Welp, I'm doing it. I'm canceling my Pinboard subscription. I've actually been a Pinboard customer for a very long time. I found Pinboard way back in 2010 when Yahoo said they were sunsetting Delicious. It's my second longest used service with first going to Last.fm. My first scrobble was all the way back in 2005: 🎸 Metallica – "Damage, Inc." on 13 February 2005, 11:59 PM (UTC) Anywho, I've noticed for a while now that there isn't really anything new happening with the site, which I thought was…

As mentioned before, I’ve been heading to Bubbles more and more to get my little blog fix every day. Hey, I’m an addict, I’ll happily admit that! Bubbles is great, and is definitely having a moment given how often it drives traffic to this silly little blog, but it does have some limitations. I don’t know if there is a way to even adjust for these but I do occasionally find myself wondering if there was a way it could flag more about the content of the post lying behind the title. This is…

Gordon McLean and Case Duckworth had a good back-and-forth about typography and layout. Gordon says you should make your website uncluttered and easy to read. Case says there are reasons why you might not want to do that. Read for yourself: Gordon: Sort your sites out! Case: Your sites are fine! Gordon: Your sites are OK I guess As you can see from my own recent posts, I’m with Gordon. Check out Go big (with serifs) or go home or How to make your blog or forum post hard to read. But I do…

Twin Peaks fans are a lucky bunch. Whether printed in magazines, compiled in oral histories, or presented on stage at fan conventions, just about every cast member has shared unique memories of life on the set. But as much as I love to hear from the actors, what I long for are stories from the... The post Dave Robinson – The Process of Twin Peaks’ Prop Master & Painter appeared first on TWIN PEAKS BLOG.

Blogs. The curated, written looking glass into someone's perspective. That's what I love about them. Blogs. Waking up in the morning and spending a little time reading over the carefully chosen words of another human being. Truly astounding. Blogs. Poured time and energy, someone distilling themselves into this personal, sharable medium. Blogs. Excuse the ramble above (and below). This was partly written fairly late on a Wednesday night. Lectures tomorrow and assignments and tests on the…

This post is secret; you can only find it via my RSS feeds (and places which syndicate them). It's okay to talk about it or link to it, though. Thanks for being part of RSS Club! 👋 Looking to change your name by deed poll without paying nor giving over your personal information? I suggest you use my website FreeDeedPoll.org.uk. Want an alternative? DeedPoll.lgbt is good too! FreeDeedPoll.org is okay, but be aware that it’s run by a company who also sell deed poll services, so they’re not…

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 aswell :) Something that puts a bad taste in my mouth are blogs with this text: Did you like this post, please buy me a coffee? Buy me a coffee, it helps keep the lights on :) This irks me primarily because I'm so tired of rampant capitalization and constant…

The UK government wants to ban social media for under-16s. The goal is reasonable, but there are more effective alternatives that don't require sacrificing privacy and anonymity for the rest of the population. | Read full post >>

Well, not to be left out of the great buy me a coffee debate, I thought I'd add my two cents. The original, at HakkerBlog, No, I Won't Buy You A Coffee, is a pretty cynical take on the topic of asking for contributions. I hardly think that someone posting their buy me a coffee link on their blog qualifies as "rampant capitalization". That's silly. Gordon posted a response, Yes, buy me a coffee which takes the other position. The Buy Me a Coffee links in general feel a bit like a throw back…

I was inspired to create this list by recent conversations and questions I've seen on Mastodon. More and more people are sharing and asking about blog aggregators, wanting to discover new sites and authors. It's a great example of how the blogosphere is thriving and how much it interests us - its own creators.That's why I decided to gather blog aggregators in one place. This is likely an incomplete list, and I'll try to update it over time. If you know of a blog aggregator that isn't on here,…

The nature of fatherhood is that you’re doing something that you’re unqualified to do, and then you become qualified when you do it. – John Green Remix Sunday 176 Zipped Up. (120mb zip) pw: palmsout TRMA – “Little Pieces” (Remix) Kelela – “Rewind” (Tony Quattro Bootleg) Youngstar – “Pulse X” (DJ ADHD Refix) Mez – “Woiya” (Kami-O Remix) KARAN! & Mc Mary Maii – “VAGABUNDO” (Izumo Remix) ASAP. Rocky – “Praise the Lord” (Frythm Reprise) MAV – “Drift” (BOP Remix Instrumental) Mona Matsuoka x Tim…

This week I bought an iPod Classic 4th Generation (Mono) and I’m planning on daily driving it. It might seem a strange thing to do, but hear me out.

I read a post the other day about why many men don’t want to celebrate their birthday. I am one of those men. I’ve never really given why I feel that way much thought. I’m pretty sure it’s not related to any traumatic birthday from years gone by, so it’s definitely wrapped up in a general dislike of being MADE the centre of attention and/or a dislike of enforced participation in “fun”. That makes me sound like a miserable sod, which I am not. Fathers Day holds the same kind of focus, a…

"Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth Unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep. All these with ceaseless praise his works behold Both day and night: How often from the steep Of echoing hill or thicket have we heard Celestial voices to the midnight air, Sole, or responsive each to others note, Singing their great Creator? oft in bands While they keep watch, or nightly

The sunlight stole softly around the edges of the blinds and drew me, gently into the morning. My son had risen before the day itself seemed properly awake, appearing at six o’clock with the certainty only children possess. It was far too early, and with little persuasion he surrendered once more to sleep. Two and a half hours later he descended the stairs, still heavy with dreams, and declared that Cheerios would be required. Obedient to his lordship’s wishes, I filled a bowl with said cereal,…

I currently use three laptops: a work-issued Windows machine that I use every day, a personal 17-inch Windows laptop that I used at my previous job (and subsequently bought from my employer when I left the company more than five years ago), and my trusty MacBook Air. My Mac is a 2017 MacBook Air - Intel i7, 8GB of RAM, and a 500GB SSD. It’s almost nine years old now. The battery gives me a few hours at best, it’s occasionally sluggish, and it doesn’t support multiple external monitors the way…

I depend on this daily/weekly routine to be as productive as I can be. This is an update from a previous workflow which used Trello. Now, I use Google Tasks in tandem with Gmail and Google Calendar. Tools I Use Google Calendar Gmail Google Chat Google Tasks Jira Trello (for personal tasks) Gemini and Google Workspace Studio (for AI agents) My Step-by-Step Planning Flow Preparation: Choose a single “inbox” for workPreviously, I was overwhelmed by notifications from too many sources: Jira, Google…

Dual Subways and Flushing – Flushing, New York I got off at my destination in Queens, one stop from the last stop on the Number 7 line, which is a big hint of where my wife and I are going. Have you figured out the destination? Looking east along the subway tracks, I timed a shot as two trains passed each other. The train on the tracks closer to me is heading towards a cluster of buildings that have also sprouted over the last decade. Although not as impressively tall as Long Island City,…

It's finally summer out here in the prairies. The lilac bushes outside my townhouse are blooming with deep purples. A rich, powdery aroma comes from the plant. The softness of roses and jasmine with warm, nutty hints of almond, along with a crisp, slightly green freshness. Lilacs carry the meaning of being the harbinger of renewal. It's been fifteen months or so since I graduated university and my life has been going by so quickly. It's hard to grasp that an entire year has now passed me by.…