Last Sunday Margaret and I were driving home from church when an old Buick passed us. Within seconds the smell hit us — marijuana, punching through two sets of closed car windows. In that moment, I decided: Indiana is circling legalization, and I’m against it. I know that puts me on the wrong side of where this is heading. I’m putting my stake in the ground anyway. I’ve gotten a preview of what legalization looks like in practice. We have family in Michigan, where it’s legal. On a visit last…

A few months back, Ars Technica published Password managers' promise that they can't see your vaults isn't always true. I haven't used an online password manager in 5 years. Previously I had been using Bitwarden, which is fine, I just prefer to take ownership of as much of my digital life as I can. My setup is KeepassXC to manage all my passwords in a database and Syncthing to sync all my passwords across my smartphone, laptop, and server. I read a comment on HN recently about how a couple…

I find the trend of people posting about the way they use generative AI to be fascinating at an anthropological level. I do not remember the last time a piece of technology pushed so many different people into writing about the way they use it, or not use it, or abuse it, or misuse it. To me, this is way more interesting and intriguing than the technology itself. I obviously do not know why so many people are doing so, and I suspect they must all have their own specific reasons, but I currently…

We've been living in our new house for just over a month now. I wanted to look back and see what we've learned about the renting process - particularly when you move out - and share our findings in a blog post. This is a fairly general guide, but please note any legal bits will be specific to the UK. What we did wrongWe learned a few harsh lessons and they largely amount to being too trusting. This is a shame as our new landlord is very casual and yet we will need an element of formality to…

This is how I start new blog posts: $ ./new.sh permalink-for-new-post This sends a command to Hugo, the static site generator I use, to create a new file with that permalink, and generate the requisite front matter (dates, default categories, etc). It also derives the title of the post from the permalink. For example, this is how I started this post: $ ./new.sh i-just-realised-something I don’t normally do clickbait titles. But in starting this post with such a title, I forgot what this post…

there's something just so pleasing about lowercase text. when i'm not writing for my blog 90% of the words i type are lowercase. the letter i is one of the few i actually regularly capitalize. writing this blog without doing that feels incredibly weird. every text message i send is lowercase, every discord message is lowercase. big letters are scary, capital letters are intimidating. same goes for punctuation. when someone ends a text message with a period, i think they're mad at me. not always…

I came across several games during my trip to the Philippines for the Asian Board Games Festival in Manila. I played some, and I listened to an overview for others. Here are some of these games. This is the Combatron game, based on the Filipino superhero which was created in the 1990's. I forgot to ask the actual game name. It is in the final stages of development. I played a near final

I haven’t done one of these in a while! Here are some books I’ve read so far this year that I enjoyed. I don’t think I have especially wild or interesting taste in books and mostly read science fiction and fantasy, but maybe you’ll discover something new to read at your local library or indie bookstore. Links usually go to Bookshop.org, which directs a little bit of revenue to your local bookstore of choice and not Amazon. Sorry this is so long, I’ll do these on a more quarterly basis in the…

In the fediverse, there is no central authority that can verify you. Instead, you link to your fediverse profile from your website, blog, or even some of the larger platforms, like GitHub, in a way that proves that these online identities are connected and controlled by you. This then serves as one of several signals about the authenticity and authority of your fediverse account. And you can also automatically include an author link when people share your site or an article. I’ll walk you…

Right now, it's too easy to let AI write the code while you skip the learning. The bug gets fixed. Your mental model doesn't move. We are silently trading future capability for present-day speed, and the tools won't force us to do otherwise. That part has to come from you.

Let's say you're someone who wants to learn about an academic discipline. Perhaps advanced Physics, Sociology, Early-Modern History, or Cognition Science. Of course, there's YouTube pop-sci videos (which I love) and no shortage of products and services that purport to teach you the basics. But what do you do when you want to go beyond those basics? I'm not an expert, but I have been on a few of these journeys myself and so I want to lay out the paths I've taken and offer some advice to those…

The thing nobody tells you about watching democracy die is how much of it happens on a Tuesday afternoon while you’re trying to remember if you took your meds. It’s not dramatic. It’s not lightning splitting the sky. It’s a press release. It’s a redistricting map that looks like someone let a “toddler” loose with a Sharpie and a grudge. It’s a state legislature passing something at 11pm that nobody read, and somebody explaining it to me in a voice that I think is supposed to be calming but…

If you're having speed problems, I feel bad for you son / I got 99 problems, but fibre ain't oneWhat follows is a brief overview of how I'm hosting most of my websites and the tools I've created using a Mac Mini M1 (8GB) and Cloudflare Tunnel. This means that, instead of paying £30/month for a VPS, I'm paying nothing other than the cost of the electricity to my Mac Mini.Here are some slightly ironic caveats given what we're trying to achieve through TechFreedom:Your internet connection needs to…

Googlebook is announced! A Gemini AI-powered ChromeOS/Android/Aluminum OS evolution to the Chromebook (and Pixelbook?). With a Glowbar! But what will it cost…?

I’ve heard of people saying that when they were in school they took part in an activity where they found a penpal and connected with some stranger in a different state or country. I’ve heard of that at least two times in my life. I surely cannot relate. Can you imagine any decent school in the early to mid 2010’s encouraging children to reach out to strangers?? To give them your information and possibly even your address??? I don’t know about other zoomers out there but my schools were dripping…

As I wrote recently, I Love Bubbles. The new blog post aggregator (based on the RSS feeds of a curated list of blogs) has become part of my morning routine: making coffee, browsing my blogroll, opening Bubbles, and discovering new posts from blogs I’ve never heard of before — though that’s about to change ;) Since my blog is also included in Bubbles’ list — and I imagine others are in the same boat — I suspect the reach of my posts will increase somewhat. Previously, I could only achieve this…

I should start by saying that Kagi is a paid product. For those who want to look at what other search engines are out there, Startpage and DuckDuckGo both offer great services free of charge. Why pay for search?As the oft-repeated adage goes: "if you're not paying for the product, you are the product". We all know that there's a reason Google can provide the services it does for free. We also all know that this is a bit of an oversimplification, but it's probably a good heuristic to apply to…

Following the previous post about my brand new media library, I’ve decided to dig a bit further on an idea I had a long time ago, but gave up on implementing: scrobbling my listens on LastFM. I tried to scrobble music years ago, but always ended up forgetting to use a player capable of doing it, and had some issues doing from my phone. It’s after switching to Navidrome that I’ve discovered the software will actually scrobble to LastFM and ListenBrainz for you, as shown in the documentation. Now…

Bubbles on the Fediverse 🦣 You might already know that every new article on Bubbles is also posted on the Fediverse by the **[@bubbles](https://social.bubbles.town/@bubbles)** account. If you reply to any of these posts your comment shows up under the article on the Bubbles website. Articles with recent comments show up on the **[hot](https://bubbles.town/hot)** page. Naturally following the @bubbles account is not the intended way of keeping up with the small web. It posts over 500 entries…

I stumbled across this great post by Spencer Mortensen yesterday, which tested different email obfuscation techniques against real spambots to see which ones actually work. It's a fascinating read, and I'd recommend checking it out if you're into that sort of thing. The short version is that spambots scrape your HTML looking for email addresses. If your address is sitting there in plain text, they'll hoover it up. But if you encode each character as a HTML entity, the bro...

The internet you grew up on isn't dying. A commercial veneer glued on top of it is. A visual essay about the protocols, federations, and quiet machinery underneath everything you actually use — and why the boring parts are the parts that survive.

Last evening, a short blog post appeared in my feed reader that felt as if it spoke directly to me. It is Chris Morgan's short and excellent post called I've banned query strings. Wisdom on the Web Chris is someone whose Internet comments I have been reading for about half a decade now. I first stumbled upon his comments when he left very detailed feedback on one of my collections of CSS rules on Hacker News. I am by no means a web developer. I have spent most of my professional life doing…

Lately, there’s been a lot of buzz in my tech bubble about good old RSS/Atom feeds. Not only are people rediscovering them and making them available on their blogs, but new services are also popping up around this 30-year-old technology. It’s just so wonderfully independent and fits the trend of moving away from increasingly terrible platforms at the protocol level and returning to the free, open internet. A good example of this is, of course, my new daily companion Bubbles by Ben, but also…

I have recently had the domain renewal notice for skryblans. It is set to auto-renew annually, it's just they let me know a couple of weeks before it's due to happen. Even though I haven't blogged for more than a month now, I have let it renew, so I'll continue to own skryblans.com for another year. But I have had a blog wobble. I warn about the likelihood of this happening on my about page. I do have a tendency to delete my blog on a whim, with a simple, quick, and impetuous flourish of the…

A story that I often think about.

Two C++ code snippets. A good interview question would be which one to pick, and why. And what they would change. Or you could just ask which one is AI.

I made an automation in n8n to extract the value from newsletters and blogs and convert them to a private podcast feed to save time and enable me to learn more. Here are my build notes and demo.You need about 3 minutes to read this.Subscribe nowNewsletters to Private Podcast Feed flowchartI first published this on www.harshal-patil.com on Mar 26, 2026.Related:Multitasking for Text to Speech Arbitrage

Yeah yeah, I know, data-point of 1. I recently read Susam's blog post where they said that "most of the traffic to my personal website still comes from web feeds" - I wondered if that was true for my site. I've been writing this blog for a while. I've never much bothered with "aggressive" SEO - I have a fairly semantic layout, all my reviews have metadata, and stuff like that - but I'm not cramming in keywords, using AMP, or whatever other chickens Google requires to be sacrificed for a higher…

I'm working on a new application called TinyFeeds, it's a native RSS feed reader. Sure there's thousands of those, but this one is mine and as such I'm being extremely intentional about how it's built. I believe constraints breed innovation, and as such I've outlined a few constraints for myself in this project. First off, the file size has to be 5MB or under for the shipped binary. This is inspired by Matt's Fits on a Floppy manifesto. I'm also inspired by the Palm Pilot apps I use on a daily…

I've always been quite minimalist regarding blogging. I'm not a part of any webring, I don't have any newsletter, no comments or such. Not that I am fundamentally minimalist, syndication is hard, and I've started to bubbles quite heavily. It's mostly because some blogs can be exhausting to just look at, with how much is happening on the page. I initially thought that human.json was a bit of a fad, but after reading a handful of slop posts in a row, I get it know. Also since most of the blogs I…