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…

One thing I find myself doing quite often is that I’ll sit down to write a blog post about something that interests me or that I’ve been thinking about, and before I even get through the first paragraph I find myself thinking: “There is no point in this. This has been written about hundreds of times before by people a lot smarter and more competent than me”. And then I’ll delete what little I’ve written and move on to something else. Why should anyone care what I have to say about insert topic…

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 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.…

Part of the motivation behind some of my top-level pages like my ideas lists is that I feel some things should have a URL. Giving something a URL gives it a place on the web. One area where I feel this could be applied more is in newsletters. I wish email newsletters had corresponding web feeds to which I could subscribe, and a URL-first approach to content.I prefer to use my email inbox for receiving notifications, account management, and correspondence. I like to sort my inbox such that all…

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…

This newsletter is free to read, and it’ll stay that way. But if you want more - extra posts each month, no sponsored CTAs, access to the community, and a direct line to ask me things - paid subscriptions are $2.50/month. A lot of people have

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…

“find out if they’ve ever knitted poems comprised only / of loose strands of sadness, / or painted ballads of overflowing joy” — Ifeanyi Ogbo Related posts: [Remarkable the litter of birds] by Emily Skaja forgive me for the parts of you i’m yet to kiss by Ifeanyi Ogbo Self-Portrait as Tiona by I.S. Jones

Much to my own disappointment, I'm not a journal-in-a-notebook-with-a-fountain-pen kind of guy There’s something aesthetically appealing about notebooks and fountain pens. I love the feeling of resting my hands on real paper, of my pen effortlessly gliding over it. The paper in my notebooks is great for the ink I’m using. My fountain pen fits my hand just right, never dries out prematurely, and was a gift from my partner for my birthday. I’d love to be the kind of guy who journals, has a s...

I was in the office today, working away, and I often have my personal laptop, a Framework 13 next to me so I do things like check notes and emails, listen to music, etc. I reached over to grab something on the other side of my desk and managed to knock an entire fucking cup of coffee all over my beloved laptop. It immediately died, I assume because of some kind of safety net built into the device. I cleaned my desk up, and headed straight home to strip it down, clean it u...

Show Bubbles Votes on Your Own Blog A small thing I've been wanting for a while: you can now drop a snippet on your blog that shows the live Bubbles vote count for each post. Scroll to the bottom of this post to see it in action. The full guide lives at https://bubbles.town/embed but here's the short version: It's one line of HTML and a script tag: ``` <div class="bubbles-vote"></div> <script src="https://bubbles.town/vote.js" defer></script> ``` That's everything you need. The widget figu...

Yesterday, Sveriges Radio (the state-run Swedish Radio) released an exposé1 of the biggest digital-healthcare providers in Sweden. They focused on Kry, but they also investigated Doktor.se and MinDoktor.se2. I listened to their two-part podcast series yesterday. Part one3 revealed a lot of information, for example: Kry earn 500 Swedish crowns (50 USD) per digital doctor visit; this money is taken from the Swedish state The tests performed by Swedish Radio reporters averaged 2.5-visits with ...

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Just another post with links and things that caught my interest lately.

People are always talking about “finding joy in the little things.” Which sounds lovely, until you realize the “little things” are doing most of the heavy lifting. I mean, no one’s out here being sustained by life’s grand moments. Those happen, what, twice a year? If you’re lucky and someone else planned them. The rest […]