We all love to travel, especially after the advent of social media, where drone shots make us believe we could stand in that exact frame ourselves. Travel has surged tremendously post-Covid — salaries have exploded for some, and for others, the influencer economy has erupted into a viable livelihood. But amidst all this fanfare, we have forgotten the essence of travelling. When we move from our home to a different place, we forget that for the people living there, that place is their home. We…

ive been coding for QUITE a long time at this point, i was basically forced into a CS career from when i was youngbasically every coding language has some bit of annoyance tied to it making me not want to mess with it for small projectsc and java have the annoyance of compilation and compilation switchesphp requires a server and all that to just get a script running, and is more designed for server stuff (like this page is rendered with it :))lua is a pretty strange language and supposed to be…

My knowledge journey started with listening to audiobooks. This is what gave me the bug for learning new things and to become an autodidact. I realised that in order to recall all the amazing things I'd been learning, I needed to take notes. Doing so helps me feel like I'm participating in the knowledge that I'm learning.However, as time passes, I found that I was forgetting what I'd made notes on. I want to recall aspects of the books that were really important to my understanding of a topic,…

I am simply and passionately Done with people telling other people that what they do to survive is unethical. The argument is always based in "alternatives" that not everyone has. "Just eat plant-based foods:" because those are freely and cheaply available everywhere? Because grain, fruit, and vegetable farming isn't exploitative of sentient beings or the environment? Because you can overcome your allergies and aversions if you care enough about cows? "Just get a better job:" because jobs that…

Sometimes I am quite annoyed that I have lived my entire life in a digital age. Everyone around me has their heads in their screen. I can't really say much, I spend just as long on my computer each day as some of my friends spend on tik too. If I am bothering to ratify that then most of my time on my computer is productive and the leisure I do get from it is healthier than watching tik toks(it should be noted that technology can be used for leisure and productivity simultaneously, eg:…

You have seen the ad. It appears on Facebook between your cousin's holiday photos and a video of a golden retriever learning to open a door. A device. White plastic. Red lights. A countdown timer. It claims to reset your vagus nerve, decompress your spine, and cure everything from chronic fatigue to tinnitus. It costs €69.95, marked down from €140. You are saving fifty percent. The timer says there are only eight left. You click. You buy. You wait. The collar arrives. It warms up. It vibrates.…

You've no doubt come across memes about how the PlayStation 5 doesn't have any games on it. It's been extremely persistent throughout the past few years despite the fact that by all metrics, the PS5 is absolutely dominating it's primary competition, the Xbox Series X/S, and also despite the fact that it, you know, actually does have games on it. People treat it as though a game getting ported to PC or to another competing platform as though they're somehow "losing" them, even though it's…

The car we were using on our long trip to South Carolina this year is old enough that connecting my phone required a cable and a bit of fuss, and one afternoon I didn’t feel like bothering with it. I just wanted some music, so I reached for the radio and began twisting the dial. Most of what I heard was exactly what you’d expect. Polished, predictable, professionally programmed stations delivering familiar formats. They weren’t bad. They were just interchangeable. I moved past them without…

it is one week until may day, and the workers have already started snorting ants 👃🏽🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜

my neck/shoulder is still not 100% better but it has improved. in my own untrained amateur medical opinion, i think it's a pinched nerve in my neck or shoulder. i've had similar pain/numbness in the past when i used to play tennis and it usually took 3-4 weeks to get better. i'm in week 3 now so hopefully it doesnt last much longer (￢_￢;) this means i've been trying to go easier on myself whenever i can between dadcare duties. mainly, that just means not as much sitting at the computer, doing…

It is a slightly cold and damp autumnal day and I am in a park in Scotland, following my toddler discovering the wonders of trees, bushes and grass. Suddenly he points at a small cluster of mushrooms and looks at me curiously. I tell him, “do not touch,” and, for some reason, I take a photo. Snap. He laughs. We find more mushrooms. Snap. He laughs. That was how my journey with mushrooms began. Mushrooms have now become an interest of mine and the more I learn about them, the luckier I feel for…

I’ve had this post in draft since March 2021, no doubt triggered by an article about iPods or MP3s ‘back in the day’. As is the case with these things, I’ve recently stumbled across a few different posts which all harken back, and touch upon, some of my own thoughts that I never fully fleshed out. So I’ve dusted this off. Ohh and I’ve marked where the original draft ended too, more for my own knowledge than anything. As a self confessed geek I take some pride in being reasonably well organised.…

“Lenore, did you say you don’t CARE about kids and phones?” That’s what a child psychologist just emailed me. MY RESPONSE: It’s NOT that I don’t care about phones. It’s that this is how kids are growing up (from an article I just read): Last week, my grandson asked permission to walk to the store 3 blocks away. His mother checked the GPS tracker on his phone, reminded him about stranger danger, and set a 20-minute timer for his return.” That childhood would depress ANYONE. Being treated like a…

Someone accused me of using AI to write my Reddit comments a while back. Not because of what I said. Because of how I presented it. I'd used bold text. And italics. To make the argument easier to follow. This, apparently, was suspicious. The person making the accusation teaches at a university. I'll let that sit for a moment. I formatted my replies carefully because I was trying to construct a clear argument and I had the basic courtesy to make it readable. This is, or was, when I attended…

One Month of Bubbles Bubbles turned one month old today. I launched it on March 21 with a short [Mastodon post](https://troet.cafe/@viermalbe/116297302547554995) (original in German): > ... So I built Bubbles. For me. And hopefully for a few thousand others too. On that evening just 4 weeks ago, writing "hopefully for a few thousand others too" was a joke. I put it there because I genuinely assumed this would be a personal tool that maybe a dozen people liked and used. 6,500 visitors in the…

While checking my blog stats today, I found a surprising new source of traffic. Apart from the usual search engines, I found Hacker News, Kagi, Minifeed, and Bubbles. I knew about Minifeed. But Bubbles was new. It’s like Hacker News meets RSS for IndieWeb. They both solve the discoverability problem of blogs. More power to personal blogs! But blog aggregators should be like newspapers. When you open one, you’ll only find news from yesterday, or previous days if still relevant. You’ll have to…

I’m sure a lot of people on here go through bouts of trying to be more productive. Thinking there has to be a winning method, a perfect app or something they are missing that’s causing them to be non productive. What if all of that is just procrastination? While trying to find the perfect to-do app I will find myself going back to previous ones in case that was the best one for me. All while looking at other ones. It's a crazy cycle that needs to stop. The one digital tool that seems to hit the…

I wanted to quickly highlight a new blog discovery platform I’ve just learned about called Bubbles. It uses a community voting system similar to sites like Reddit, Hacker News, or Bear Blog. Signing up is super easy since you just log in with a Fediverse account (with read-only permissions). I think it’s an interesting alternative to other blog aggregators which typically only show you the most recent posts. You can also sort by new posts in Bubbles, but the ranked view seems like it’ll be ni...

I feel like I’m loosing touch with my religion. I’m starting to question everything. I’m stuck between I know this is the correct religion and what the fuck am I doing? I feel like I’m either a very good Muslim or I’m just someone who larps being Muslim. Like genuinely idk what to do or think. I don’t even know how to put my thoughts on paper. I can’t seem to grasp what is happening. I wanna try everything and see what I think of it. But with my environment that’s literally impossible. I hate…

I love drawing these dumb little things.One thing I never get tired of is making hand-drawn favicons for my side projects. I have an old iPad and Apple Pencil I use with Procreate, where a thick marker brush and a few minutes yield something playful and unique. I went to design school so we should probably be expecting me to come up with more sophisticated and polished work—but in this case I don’t really care. It’s fun to draw and keep something simple enough that it’s legible at a tiny size.…

Datassette presents a series of mixes intended for listening while programming to focus the brain and inspire the mind (also compatible with other activities).

I love the idea of Record Store Day but I no longer have a turntable, cassette deck or CD player despite the hundreds of vinyl records going mouldy in my garage (wanna buy them?). These days I want less stuff, not more. You’ll understand when you’re in your fifties. I love to buy albums digitally on Bandcamp (or Qobuz/7digital/Juno if it’s a major label) after using Spotify to try-before-you-buy, but it’s an underwhelming experience. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to do this...

Godot games are known to be easy to reverse engineer. Simple tools can extract assets and source code from the packaged files. If you are making commercial games you probably want to take some steps to avoid this. Photo by Jorien Loman Godot RE Tools The most popular Godot reverse engineering software is gdsdecomp aka Godot RE Tools. It’s very multi-platform, simple to use, and even comes with a GUI. In a few clicks, you can “Recover” a project from an executable or .pck file. G...

Any new way of interconnecting websites and users on the IndieWeb is not only welcome but also vital for a stable counterbalance to Big Tech’s shitty walled gardens. Yesterday I stumbled across a really good and new one, that integrates also the Fediverse: Bubbles from Ben. We monitor thousands of independent, personal blogs via RSS. Every new post appears on Bubbles automatically. Nobody submits individual links.The blogs were hand-picked from various curated sources and individually reviewed.…

Last edited 11 minutes ago. Reddit gets a bad rap for a very good, valid reason. It's filled with karma farming or whatever it's called, and if you let yourself be overtaken by the "basic" algorithm over there, very little good can be taken from it. But there are a few good, curated spaces that I really enjoy over there that don't offend basic human decency and aren't filled with bots and slop. I don't use Reddit as a "social" space, it's more of a resources list for me, and with a few…

today at the library, a man was wearing my hat. i should clarify: he wasnt wearing the same hat as me; he was wearing The same hat, as in, my hat - a hat i had lost three years ago. the hat was a blue and red hat from the 1980s, a hat they sometimes call "a cap", and on the front of the hat was a german word, the german word being "Budweizer", which in english translates to mean "tub of wheat", and the hat, i always wore the hat because it suited the shape of my head, it still would suit it…

Two new RSS feeds 🫧 Two small additions. **Full content feed** [`/feed/full`](https://bubbles.town/feed/full) is a variant of `/feed/new` that also includes the full article text for each entry, as long as the blog author put it into their own feed. Nothing gets scraped, so if the source feed only has a short summary, that's what you'll see in the `/full` feed too. I added this one to my feed reader, so I can quickly scan all new posts. **Personal feed** A personal feed is now also listed on…

One day I was walking through the office and noticed a coworker’s laptop sitting on their desk, unlocked and open. The little devil on my shoulder whispering “do it! do it!” won. I looked around, made sure they weren’t walking my way, opened their Slack to our #random channel, and typed the first silly, innocuous, non-fireable, and outlandish thing that crossed my mind. That’s how “milk bath’ing” became a thing in our office. If someone leaves their laptop unlocked, odds are one of their neig...

I’ve been making liberal use of planets since I did my last RSS cleanup, and have discovered dozens of new blogs and people in the process :). Many large technical projects aggregate blogs from multiple people and sources into a single site “planet” and RSS feed, letting you easily subscribe en masse. It’s a great way to dive into a world without committing to subscribing to hundreds of separate blogs at once. Some are officially sanctioned by their titular projects, others are maintained by…