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.
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…
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'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…
This past month, I did not buy anything from Amazon or Ebay... and I saved some money doing it. Fortunately, I have a good salary, but I still do not want to spend my money in useless stuff. I've kept my account because there is stuff one can find in Amazon that cannot be found locally, and it might cost me a fortune at another online site, because of shipping costs. But with so many scams happening lately, I'm strongly considering it. Additionally, this guy is too rich and too powerful for me…
I read a company-wide announcement yesterday congratulating us on delivering something hard we’ve been working on for months. As I was reading it, I started noticing words my boss would never use… and then a few em dashes. I stopped reading. I’ve enjoyed my job a lot this last year, it’s a relatively small company, so there’s good laughs, work’s interesting, not overly corporate or anything. But it certainly feels that AI has been stealing more and more of the human parts of it and is slowly…
I hate typos. Everybody does, but I think it occurs to me way too much. It only gets worse because english is not my first language, but I’m a failure in portuguese too. I consistently get words wrong, not always the same, but it took me years of me writing (in portuguese) “nascional” instead of “nacional” to discover I as wrong. I think writing late at night when I’m supposed to be sleeping isn’t helping. What is unfortunate, I feel my thoughts flow better at night, but I guess my brain can’t…
Side-note: Who doesn't love puns for titles? I liked the thought of being an artist 1, yet it isn't the path I'm meant to be on. It's said a picture paints a thousand words, yet I'd rather use words to paint a million pictures. In that respect, my passion for creativity hasn't been phased in the slightest, it's been... Focused is probably the best word I could think of. There's also a sense of me no longer wanting to try and fit in by forcing the act of creating art. I'm a firm believer that…
Need a website? Your first thought is probably WordPress. For a lot of people in the field however, the name sends shivers down their spine. It is both loved and hated in the webdevelopment industry. It's used on about 40% of the visible web, and it is the most attempted-to-hack blogging platform.
Don't forget to take regular backups of your blog. You've put a lot of effort into writing your content. Don't rely on your blog provider to take backups for you. If you self-host, the backups should be part of your regular backup routine. If you are relying on a third-party blogging platform you should keep your own backups. It may be a manual process, but it's vital you have your own copies. How do I backup?It depends on what blogging application you use. Here are details of a few popular…
I found out about human.json so I added it to my page. I thought it was rather interesting idea, and might as well participate to it. I do not plan to use "AI" tools for the ethical reasons alone, so it seemed fitting to have that. Now to find more people to vouch for. :) And I'm interested seeing if others have it added now that I use the extension too.
