After a multi-year detour wading through the quagmire of bloatware that is modern software I’m back to coding in Sublime Text.I am finally at peace! Do you know how relaxing it is without the daily “update available” and “view release notes” ritual? There is nothing I dread more than release notes. Between VS Code and Zed, I must have glanced at a million lines of sloppy commit summaries. Can I remember seeing anything of value? Nothing comes to mind…Modern software sucks. It’s built by…
If Emily Dickinson had written her poems on her Wordpress blog, her host would have deleted them outright when the bill came due. Instead, her sister found 1,800 poems written on paper and stored in a drawer. Words written on paper take an intentional decision to destroy them whereas words written online usually require an intentional decision to keep them. In this modern blogging age how do we make our writing last? I do not have any important writing on this blog but I do want my family to…
I do not do any Phoneblogging. Zero. None. Zilch. The closest I get is reading my RSS reader and saving posts to a blog ideas list. As I get older, I just don't want to mess with my phone for in-depth things, and blogging, for me, qualifies as something in depth. I scroll Mastodon, I scroll my RSS reader, I get Home Assistant alerts, and I scroll Instagram reels for fun. That's pretty much the only things I use my phone for. Oh, I guess I use it to ask Rachelle questions when I'm grocery…
It's already been almost a month (how??) since I deleted all my corporate social media accounts. Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Discord, among others. And as a result I've found myself looking at other social platforms and communities to fill my time with. Because social media is not inherently bad—it only starts becoming bad when multi-billion dollar businesses are created around using people as products and extracting as much information and value as possible out of every single one of them.…
Owning media again This year, one of my aspirations is to rely less on the big streaming services for my entertainment. Why? Well, for one thing, if we give too much power to large corporations by getting overly attached to their services, that leads to monopolies, inequality and ultimately, democratic decline. How’s that for a positive opening? Finding alternatives is easier said than done, because Tech Morality is Hard, and I would generalise that to “Corporate Morality is Hard”. Namely,…
Blog post: https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1164/when-online-commenters-detect-my-art-as-ai
Photo by Олег Мороз on Unsplash Introduction Michael Harley wrote a piece called How I make my blog posts more resilient a couple of days ago. There are a lot of good ideas and principles that he covers for maintaining a blog, or just about any website. Reading his article made me think back to a situation from nearly ten years ago where I went through a fairly major incident with one of my sites. While I documented the issues broadly at the time, I only partly talked about one of the issues…
It's not a new bike, its from 1993 but it's in flawless shape. My birthday is at the end of the month but I didn't want to get outbid on the ebay listing for it lol. It came with different handlebars and tires which I swapped on to my sons bike so he can take it to college. His is an old Raleigh we had in the garage I took the liberty of putting on new click shifters (It had grip shifts which I hate, everyone hates, ew ew ew), chain, and tires. It's also too big of a bike for me or else I would…
I cannot understand Mozilla. We took time off of X, but we’re back. The internet is changing again, so we’re here as an independent voice for our users and the open internet. @firefox · Jul 20, 2026 They either do not know who their user base is, or they know but those are not the users they want. I care about the open web and I care about privacy. I'm much more in the LLMs are a tool camp, but I still don't want "AI features" shoved down my throat or baked into everything these organizations…
Blog post: https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1163/authenticity-problem
If the title was "Meta developers accessed the internet and hacked another firm", the reactions would have been different. There would be some lawsuits at least. Why not now?
Since doing an awful lot of thinking about the value of books my brain has gone down some weird rabbit holes. 20 odd years ago, in a different life when I was a different person, I very briefly worked for a company involved in book data. At the time, as now, I had a deep love of books, but the company and life moved in other directions and I was only there for about 9 months. In the same period I spent a lot of time on sites like LibraryThing and Bookcrossing. My use of the later especially…
Hello again. It's your boy Mike here, blogging about blogging (glances at Wouter). Today, I'd like to explore the topic of making my blog posts more durable. I recently completed importing a backup of some of my old blog posts. These posts were from 2012 - 2019 and required a fair bit of editing because I was using embeds from other sites, some of which have since been purchased and shut down. Here are my lessons learned, focusing on my posts only and not the hosting problem of keeping a site…
Last edited 7 minutes ago. I don't have contact with small children in my daily life anymore. It's kind of a bummer honestly. I liked working with children when I was interning at a local community library back in my college days, and when I worked as a teacher at a private English course. I don't miss teaching at the school though. That shit was wild. Also I had a class full of 12-year-olds... Not the same as small children, let me tell you. Anyways. All of that to say that lately I finally…
MÖWE COFFEE ROASTERS is a small coffee store and cafe in Koenji. Once inside the store, you can grab a seat and take a look at the menu - the barista will come over and take your order when you are ready. Rather intimidatingly, the front cover of the menu had a rather long series of instructions. To translate and summarise - it mentions that MÖWE is mainly a roaster, and not a cafe. You are limited to 1 hour per drink, and to only talk in quiet voices. Standing up to take photos and taking…
The producerist vision of AI seems to assume an endlessly expanding market for reading. And reading. Well. It is rather more than a market. Warning: this post is a little more sweary than usual. If that bothers you, maybe read something else. We read aloud in our household. A lot. We always have. When my daughter was five years old (she’s now 26) she and I once squished into a beanbag and read Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen aloud. When we got to the end of the story I realised to my…
As I’ve mentioned before, we now live in a world where creative people have to prove they created the thing they created. Sit with that for a second, because it’s genuinely deranged. I have been writing fiction since 2014 — unpublished, because getting published is the hard part and I am bad at the hard part — and the thing that keeps me up at night isn’t the rejection. It’s that some stranger is going to read my perfectly normal writing tics, feel that they’re AI, and torpedo the whole dream…
It's about Groudle, so therefore, brilliant. What more is there to say? OK, there is a bit more. This latest version of the guide, at 70 pages, is far more than a simple stock list. The text takes the reader from the earliest days of the Glen, and then the railway at the end of it. It introduces the steam locos, then their electric replacements, and exactly how badly those worked out. We go through dereliction, and gradual restoration before coming up to the present day. Only after this, do we…
In the late 20th century, there was a gorilla named Koko who made waves by displaying an apparent ability to talk to humans in sign language. This would've had shocking implications for life as we know it, but the science determined that what she was doing wasn't actually "using language". Through reinforcement learning, she had come to realize that mimicking the hand signals of her human handlers would result in certain outcomes. She knew that making the hand signal for "food" might convince…
I do these things to make the VPS this blog runs on less palatable for internet bottom feeders.
Original post at space • time • tech by Jake. I've been sitting on this post for weeks, but thought it was time to share now. The fragile nature of digital media has been in the news quite a bit recently, and the physical vs. digital debate is as old as...well I'm not sure, but at least since the late 90s and Napster vs. The Music Industry. Here are two of the latest articles, both about Sony: -- Sony erases digital content from libraries; we're reminded we don’t own what we buy - Ars Technica…
The best thing that happened this week This week has been all about wrapping up the last bits of work before I head out for a one-week holiday. It's always very hectic to get everything done, because there's no pushing things to next week. But I'm 99% of the way there now and it's nice knowing I left things nice and tidy for the team. After a lot of waffling and research, this week we took delivery of our new treadmill. We went for the Flow Fitness Runner DTM400i and so far it looks like a…
The current wave of wildfires across Europe is not simply a natural disaster, it is also exposing a deeper mess, the failure of our information systems. Instead of explaining why Europe is burning, significant sections of the corporate media are either ignoring #climatechaos or distracting by blaming rewilding, net-zero policies and environmental protections. Rather than confronting the #KISS scientific evidence that fossil fuel combustion is driving global heating, they redirect public anger…
TALKIN SHIT Not my finest entry in the series but I'm nothing if not a bird photo opportunist. Speaking of - I'm pretty sure this is our resident red tail (we named them Tobias) but I can't be 100% certain since I don't have all the tells yet and only got these two very brief photos. The tail feather coloring though I think sells it? Would love to be wrong though! Like the whole poison ivy / berry thing, I'd love to be wrong and learn how to better tell things apart. As a sidenote but…
Emacs has a built-in way to save and restore sessions: the desktop.el library. As the Emacs manual says, putting this in the init file enables automatic save and restore of sessions: (desktop-save-mode 1) But, I wanted a different behavior: Automatically save the session But don't restore it automatically I wanted to only use the session feature to restore sessions that I closed by mistake, or where I forgot to finish something before quitting Emacs. By default, I wanted a fresh session every…
After Iceland, we traveled to Oslo, Norway. Summers can be hot in Atlanta, so we wanted to visit another country with cooler temps. Norway is amazing! So much natural beauty and quiet. We took a tour of the islands in Oslofjord (and learned it’s not technically a fjord because it was created via tectonic plate separation rather than glaciers). Here we learned about cabin culture in Norway: I think it’s around 80% of people either own or have access to a cabin. July is the main month for folks…
It's the final day of July, and I'm in a contemplative mood. Tomorrow begins Blaugust 2026, a fun event where bloggers are challenged to write 31 blog posts in 31 days. Will I participate? Well, every month has been Blaugust for me since November 2025, as I've written at least 23 posts every month since then. Although I haven't yet had a month where I've successfully blogged every single day, so maybe I will. What I want to talk about, though, is not blogging. At the start of the month, Dan Q.…
Of course, for my first post of Blaugust, what would I be writing about other than blogging? In all seriousness though, this is far more about UI/UX and accessibility, and I think it touches on something both important and neglected by the IndieWeb community. In some webweaving circles, you'll see websites created that only work properly on a desktop screen. Sometimes this is due to coding difficulties—I've been there many times myself, media queries in CSS can be a difficult beast to tame! But…
I occasionally come across people who call themselves “almost vegan” “practically vegan” “99% vegan” and similar descriptions. The reasons for that are usually casual in nature: They still want to enjoy grandma’s great cake, they don’t wanna cause a ruckus at the company barbecue, and when it’s pizza night, they can’t say no to a good cheese. But other than that - plantbased. And they quickly want to convey that to someone. I still want to urge others to be precise with language. We have words…
Wombat sent me the above picture: A physical ad by Apple on a big canvas. Pictured is a person hiding their face with their iPhone, but therefore actually pointing the camera at the people seeing the ad. It says: "Safari. A browser that's actually private." and "Privacy. That's iPhone." It's accidentally perfectly demonstrating the limitations in current popular privacy discourse and movement: The fact that devices or software may claim to keep the users private, but not people in general,…
