I stopped by a Filipino/Hawaiian (mostly filipino) restaurant/bar that was recommended to me a few months ago by someone I met at an AANHPI event. One of my friends that was eating with us had gone many times before and said they enjoyed the menu. We looked up the menu before heading over. As a Filipino-American I always get curious about Filipino restaurants because a lot of our dishes are family-style/comfort food, so it’s always interesting to see what foods will be on the menu. To our…

Yesterday, Unattributed posted a long response and dissection of my article What have note-taking PKMs accomplished, really?, analyzing the lack of intellectual rigour, nebulous wording, and poor research I did throughout. I already added an update to the post in question, so I won't get into the weeds here. I tried my best to respond graciously and with appreciation towards the author of the response. The writing was critical, but it was also fair and written in good faith. That said, seeing a…

Reading through an RSS feed can dull the experience of enjoying a blog's unique style—try visiting the site directly for the full effect.

Shoreline with lights. License: CC-0 So, Brennan Kenneth Brown wrote about the experience of my response to one of his posts topping the Bubbles list for most of a day. To that, I have to apologize, and hopefully provide a little context. Brennan wrote at the beginning of his post: The writing was critical, but it was also fair and written in good faith. That said, seeing a 3,500-word article about me on the top of Bubbles.town yesterday certainly did give me anxiety—but that's par for the…

You've probably run into some Obsidian evangelist espousing some convoluted system of organizing all their notes, and building some knowledge base. Heck, I was just involved in a conversation about Personal Knowledge Management. This isn't that article. My personal use of Obsidian tends to be simple. I build into it the tools that I need to get things done, to make things easier. There is a saying (which I can't locate, so I'll paraphrase) that a system should only be as complicated as needed,…

Two boats docked behind a berm. Introduction Many years ago (over a decade) I wrote an article about RSS Feed reader alternatives after Google announced they were killing Reader in March 2013. That article attracted a fair amount of attention, including a request from RedHat to republish the article on their blog. On the ten-year anniversary of the death of Google Reader, the Verge published Who killed Google Reader?(pay-walled article), indicating (to me) that even a decade on there was still…

The first time I saw Michelangelo’s David in person, I wept. Never in my life have I witnessed a more beautiful piece of content. I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. Museum patrons all around me were looking up from their phones to admire David as well. Despite it being legacy content, David was so scrollstoppingly captivating that it generated stronger engagement than TikTok and Instagram combined, despite those platforms offering fresher, more personally relevant content.

Earlier this month, I talked about a rotation button in photos that behaved really nicely in iOS, and not so great on the Nothing Phone. Here’s a story of a similar fumble iOS once made that might bring the point home even more. The calculator app has been preinstalled on iPhones ever since their debut in 2007. For the longest time it hasn’t been anything more than a standard four-function calculator with a decades-old feature set. If you’re not careful, however, you can mess up even that. Ten…

Table of Contents 1. Infrastructure 1.1. Server 1.2. Network 2. Software 3. The Outcome It's true. I don't maintain my homelab… it maintains itself. Have I reached nirvana? Is this the ultimate goal of homelabbers? It seems that I've somehow automated myself out of a job (hobby?) by building a resilient homelab. Let's figure out where it all went "wrong". 1. Infrastructure 1.1. Server I have used a few different servers over the years, but have since consolidated all of my services onto a…

Wolf looking directly into a camera at close proximity. There is a bit of an issue I have noticed lately: websites actively blocking Reading Mode in Firefox, and derivative web browsers. I was stunned to find out (just a minute ago) that Reading Mode doesn't appear to be a default feature in Chromium, but instead an add-on. So, I don't know if this is an issue for Chrome based browsers. This is getting frustratingly annoying for me. Why? There are multiple reasons that Reading Mode is a…

Bridge heading into the smokey landscape. License: CC-0 I read Brennan Kenneth Brown's What have note-taking PKMs accomplished, really?, and found myself writing a lengthy response. But, after I wrote my response I reread Brennan's article and found myself in a bit of a quandary. I found myself asking a simple question: was it intentional that he presented both arguments and counterarguments in his piece? That seemed to have a simple answer: yes. Any good piece of writing should undertake to…

Absolutely ripping your hair out reading Claude referring to everything as “honest takes” and "load-bearing seams"? You’re not the only one. But what if I tell you there’s a way to take this massive source of frustration and make it so ridiculous you can't but laugh at it? Or just simply fix Claude's vocabulary. I present to you, the MessageDisplay hook. First you need a little script with some replacements set up: #!/usr/bin/env python3 import json, re, sys replacements = { "seam":…

✨ In This Edition ✨ 📟 Short-Form Content: AI & the job market: The cognitive dissonance of "Oh no, recent grads used AI in college!" vs. "New hires will absolutely be required to use AI once on the job"; Job applications from people that aren't real; and why is replacing human labour with AI so expensiiiiiive 😩 <insert crocodile tears here> 🌞 Good News!: Librarians are still cool; AI overview opt-out is becoming a thing; and lawsuits may be happening. 📯 The Post-Script: Reading Karl Bode's…

I'm somebody who writes a lot—half a million words and 200 blog posts in the past 8 months. I'm also someone with an unrelenting curiosity to better understand our world. Beyond that, I also graduated with a degree in English literature with honours, with a 3.8 GPA. So, it should be no surprise I've done extensive research on how best to do research, which resulted in me diving into the world of personal knowledge management systems. These are the systems and methods of keeping track and…

The latest anti-feature from Automattic—now infecting Gravatar. Photo by: Unattributed, License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0. Happily Imperfect posted Bye bye Gravatar a short while ago, and I have to say, I've had a similar thought about deleting my account on there as well. My feelings towards WordPress and Automattic started changing some time ago, back when they introduced the Gutenberg editor. Ever since this “improvement” it's been a downhill slide…

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay Introduction A few years back I became interested in the idea of getting a smartwatch. However, what I found when I started doing research into them was nothing short of horrifying. Take the journey with me as I talk about why I thought a smartwatch would be a good fit in my life, to the realization that there was no chance I would ever buy one of them. The level of enshittification that exists in this market segment is stunning. It is so rampant that in the…

When I was a kid, my father bought a family home computer and placed it in the living room for all to see. When guests came to our house, they would stop by the computer and admire its marvel without even turning it on. While everyone else was careful with the computer, treating it like an important investment, I quickly started inserting discs and installing games. One thing we take for granted today is how cheap and abundant storage is. Our family computer had a single hard drive with a…

I'm not pretentious when it comes to coffee. I like it slightly weak and bitter with a ton of milk or cream in it, and that's it. Go to any cafe in America and this is the kind of coffee you find: drip coffee, bitter but weak, with a splash of milk (some people even push it further with pumps of sweeteners, but fortunately I'm not that uncultured). However, it wasn't until the first time I left the US (I went to London over a decade ago), when I ordered "just a small coffee, please" and watched…

AI-drunk companies love to trumpet their millions or billions of users. What they don’t tell you is that most are forced to use such features. Think of the AI overviews that Google Search forces on you, whether you asked for it or not. Samsung seems to have taken this tactic to the next level. According to How-To Geek, the Samsung Health app will delete users’ health data from the company’s cloud — making sync between devices impossible — unless they agree to hand it over for AI training and…

One thing I’ve noticed over the last few months is how my OmniFocus has become a bit of a black hole. Over the course of a week I’ll input a bunch of tasks, but beyond moving them out of the inbox and into their relevant projects not much happens. Either I’ll completely forget to do the thing or I’ll come across the task days or weeks later, after it’s already done and I’ll check it off then.This is clearly not a useful system.How exactly I’m going to fix this issue I’m still not sure, but it’s…

To summarize my answer to Antonio's post: good! I don't read posts in my feed reader to look at styles, I do it to consume content - to read their thoughts. I use my feed reader because it's configured exactly how I like it. The colors are tweaked to a palette that's pleasing to my eyes and doesn't cause strain. The font family, font size, and other elements are customizable and configured exactly how I like them. I can't tell you how many times I've opened a great blog post and struggled to…

I love reading. I caught the bug as a middle-schooler when I got caught skipping school, and as punishment, I had to read The Chronicles of Amber and do a book report about it. Even today, opening a book and fanning the pages to get the paper smell activates very fond memories and emotions. I remember a time before e-readers came out. I always thought reading on one seemed very futuristic. In military sci-fi books, characters are reading on their data pads, and reading on an e-reader makes me…

Book review for The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann. I rated it 5 stars The Wager is a non-fiction book covering the improbable story of the 1741 shipwreck and mutiny of the crew from the English warship HMS Wager. Remarkably, after the crew mutinies and split into two groups, both manage to make the long voyage home to England. Along the way they live as castaways on an island, traverse dangerous seas on a tiny boat, and some even end up being captured by the…

We are currently looking to get a new washing machine. Looking online at the usual big stores and every single one has an awful AWFUL website experience. These are large companies who are typically owned by a large conglomerate who should, somewhere in the depths of their organisations, have people who know how to build websites well, and certainly they’ll know how to code things so they work well on a mobile device. Right? RIGHT? Wrong. The worst, so far, is Curry’s. I’d clicked through to…

Last year, my wife and I went on a 5,025 Km Interrail adventure. We got the month-long unlimited pass and saw 10 Countries in 30 Days. That was a bit too intense. So this year we got the 15 travel days in 2 months package. We grabbed the 1st class tickets when they went on sale in December. Here's how our journey ended up: The trip included two ferries - one overnight - which had a small Interrail discount. In total we spent approximately 40 hours on trains over a 7 week trip. This blog post…

Pretty hard to write an intro for this post that consists of anything other than ‘Holy fucking shit this is hot’, so I won’t even try. Please welcome the phenomenal @jamiebear – who has contributed stunning guest blogs here before on being a proud sub, and the sexiness of smell – to share an outrageously […] The post Guest blog: Are you a dirty fucker? appeared first on Girl on the Net.

I came across this article by Panayotis, for whom “AI-generated blog post images are not cool any more”. It’s not the first article on that topic I have read1, and I feel particularly targeted, since I use AI-generated cover images for most of my articles, this one included. I’m totally fine with that. I think it’s a usage of AI which is fun and even creative. I think it’s more original and personal than looking for and using an image I would not have created myself. For that matter, I…

I love taking notes, but one problem that I have is that that I start cherishing every notebook that I start. I can't seem to keep my notes messy. Eventually, I start structuring the notes, doing cleaner handwriting, adding a cover or some stickers ... and before I know it, the notebook is too well-organised for simply scribbling into. This, of course, raises the hurdle for taking more notes and makes me start a new notebook, where the same process repeats again. It's a vicious circle. It won't…

I’ve decided that Archive sounds dry and musty. It’s a rare reader who would venture into a section of a blog called Archive. So I’m rebranding to Explore. All my hundreds of post titles are still listed by date and you can click on them to read the articles. But you can also filter those titles, do full article searches and, best of all, roll the dice for a random post. I’m having a blast reading posts from ye olden times. Some are about hot new apps that have since disappeared without a…

In a highly uncharacteristic move, I recently purchased a brand new device: an Xteink X4 e-reader. The X4 is a minimalist e-reader that is the size of an old smartphone, but much thinner and lighter. Speaking of smartphones, a portable e-reader is great alternative to absentmindedly unlocking your smartphone and vanishing alarmingly large chunks of time. I feel much better about finishing reading a book than I do about finishing reading a list of misleading headlines. Here's what the X4 looks…