Over the last few weeks, I’ve kept wondering how I would describe summer in our region with just one picture. Maybe a day at the lake? The old town flooded with sunlight? Then, on one of our evening walks, it suddenly became obvious. The harvested fields on the hills. The smell of freshly cut fields, the scattered straw bales, the blue sky, and swallows calling overhead. That’s my perfect summer scene. I already loved these kinds of summer scenes in the old Michel aus Lönneberga films when I…

Today, Instagram updated its logo wordmark. CNET had a nice image of the before and after, presented below as after and before: Instagzam vs. Instagram Although I don’t think AI was used in the creation of the new logo, it still smells of it in the way AI messes up things, like: Goofy kerning Goofy mix of cursive and non-cursive letters (apparently trying to call back to the previous logo the same way someone riding a bike off a picnic table and crashing calls back to Evel Knievel) Goofy…

I understand the argument that if you don’t like what Big Tech is doing, you should vote with your wallet. It’s a simple equation after all. Stop buying Apple products, de-Google your life, and delete your Meta accounts. And if you can —trickier for us knowledge workers— move away from Microsoft. Alternatives abound and, if enough people do it, the companies will get the message. Except I’m not entirely convinced it works like that. — Gordon McLean, Tech sucks? Really? Oh man, I've been writing…

Leaving sucks. But there’s no other way. As long as you keep throwing money at the corporations who treat you badly, why would they change? Andreas on 82MHz Apple got the message from me: I’m done with it, its products, and its services. I’m just one little drop in their trillions-valued bucket, but I’m content with that. Stan on Creolened I love a provocative title —so clickable!— and what better a topic to get our teeth into but technology, and Big Tech at that. To be fair, Big Tech companies…

“The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in what one pays for it - what it costs us." - Friedrich Nietzsche LLMs are incredible tools for generating code, and the frontier models can often build complete end to end apps with very little direction. We can have all kinds of conversations about whether the software they create is good, and what the definition of good is. But it is a fact that today software can be mass-produced by paying for tokens. You don’t…

My college at Cambridge e-mails its members notices regularly and I woke up to one today telling us they would be changing the signage on the toilets. The new EHRC guidance came into force in the UK last week stipulating that 'trans people should use either gender-neutral facilities or the ones that match their biological sex'. I would not have chosen to write about this questionable piece of legislation in this context were it not for the fact that it affected one of my favourite toilet…

I’m just starting out with bird photography, and I’ve compiled a short-list of birds I want to take photos of, to have some sort of goal when I’m out there and what to look out for. It also helps if I have a few birds I’ve looked up to be able to say “oh cool, that’s a gray kingbird!” I went on my first outing today dedicated to bird photography and after a few shots I realized it was the same feeling as encountering wild Pokémon in Pokémon Legends: Arceus. I’d never been excited about pigeons…

I mostly use my web stats service because I get a lizard-brain kick from watching numbers go up, but it also provides some fun insights. For example, it’s how I found out about bubbles.town. At first I thought this might be a Mastodon instance. I get a lot of referral traffic from Mastodon, but each instance has its own URL. You can guess at mas.to, but dice.camp doesn’t provide many clues. Bubbles, as it’s known, is a very nice service. It aggregates a curated list of indie blogs. People can…

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…

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…

The Fediverse is exciting, I’ve formed genuine connections with interesting people. GoToSocial got me hosting my own presence. And I hope littleFedi is what gets to hosting a community. Thoughts/context on Fediverse The federated universe (Fediverse) is awesome: different applications, networks, sub-cultures all able to interact with each other via a rather lightweight protocol, ActivityPub. It’s this very lightweightness is interesting because not all the servers are architected to be…

While you're here, please keep the following in mind: Be kind to people (except fascists) Stop feeding the patriarchy until it starves to death Talk to real humans and spend more time without being numbed by a screen Much love 🫶🏻 Reply by email

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…

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,…

aka the LLM agent productivity boost is a trap As the tech startup scene continues to find more and more advanced ways to use LLM agents to build software, complete tasks, do research and marketing, and anything in-between, I’m wondering if we’re losing track of what matters. While people are posting about whether or not you still need to do (or should do) code review, or how they’re building their software factories, I’m starting to struggle to see how it relates to actually accomplishing the…

I'm bullish on AI, but I also feel this pull to leave tech behind entirely, and I've been struggling to figure out why. This is my attempt to crystallize my feelings.

"Thank you for using RSS." "I love RSS." A badge in the footer. A little heart, a blogroll. Community. Belonging. I love TCP/IP. I love HTTP 1.1. I love DNS resolution. Where is my badge. Where is my directory. Nobody forms a tribe around plumbing. You use it. You don't announce it. You don't put a sticker in your footer that says "I love packet switching." RSS is plumbing. A transport format. XML with angle brackets and escaped HTML and a version attribute and the CDATA hack. You don't love…

Andreas tells a story of seeing an image of cats on social media with several many comments decrying it for being "AI generated". Do we now have the obligation to check each and every picture, video, quote, text, post, etc. that we come across for whether it's human or AI generated? Do we have to apologise profusely if something slips through and we accidentally share slop? Do we have to police each other and check other people's posts and point out to them (with proof!) that they posted or…

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 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…

Someone says something true and sharp. The response is never "you're wrong". Never "here's why". Always "your language is inappropriate". The content vanishes. The tone becomes the trial. The person who said the thing is now defending how they said it. The person who did the shit walks free. IRC, fediverse, the office, corporate email, academia. Same script. No argument required. The tone was the crime. Someone gets censored. Their response: "it just felt weird". Not "this is nonsense". Weird.…

POSSE. Webmention. ActivityPub. AT Protocol. Fediverse. IndieWeb. Micro.blog. Bearblog. Pika Pulse. /now page. /uses page. Discovery feed. Own app . Own icon. Own font. Same rats, smaller cage, better lighting. You didn't escape the cult. You just found one small enough to feel like a founder.

Idiot challenge, #shitfest, stupidity festival. Post every day, link something, reply to someone, send 100 emails. Every day, every month there is some circus. A man announces a challenge, thirty people link to it, they all post about posting, they link each other's posts about linking. The circle closes. Until next call. Peasant writes because there's something to say. Member who sends 100 emails or writes 100 posts doesn't have 100 things to say. He has one thing to say 100 times: "Look, I'm…

The other day I saw this post about "Stolen Buttons". It is a browser extension that "steals" a button from every website that you visit. You can see the creators collection of "stolen" buttons here: Stolen Buttons | Anatoly Zenkov If you scroll through the list there will likely be a few that catch your eye, as they are a little bit different. It might be the shape, the colour, or the font used that makes them stand out. The majority of the buttons though are flat and pill shaped. They are…

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…

screenshot from video from afarTV on YouTube 31 July 2026 This week a massive iceberg floated into webcam view at Ilulissat on the west coast of Greenland. It was so massive that it filled the camera screen (screenshot above). Greenland map from Wikimedia In less than three hours — from 5:03am to 7:47am — it collapsed, flipped and largely disintegrated. Then its remnants floated away. The video below from afarTV on YouTube condenses 2 hours and 44 minutes into just over 10 minutes by speeding…

mv gives you no progress output at all, which is not much fun when you are moving 100+GB of Google Takeout archives and cannot tell if anything is happening. Two tools fix this: watch and progress. With your move already running, open a second terminal and enter the following: watch progress -w This refreshes every 2 seconds and shows a live view of the running process. Progress probably needs installing first, but it is a quick job with your package manager. On Bazzite, I installed it using…

Almost a year ago, I decided to give blogging a try. I thoroughly enjoyed researching and writing my posts (I put a lot of effort into them), but seeing how little traction my writings got was usually disappointing. My best-appreciated blog post was very short; I suspect that was part of its appeal. What I consider to be my best post was very niche, so I understand why it didn't get many upvotes. After that one, though, I tried to write about things that I expected to be appealing to a larger…

Hugo is an open-source static site generator. Building websites with Hugo is much easier than creating dynamic websites that are far more complex.