If you followed along with the recent joyful celebrations of the Artemis cruise around the moon, and took a moment to dive into the photographic archives of the mission, you might have noticed that all of the original images were shared by NASA on the venerable photo sharing service Flickr. What you might not know is… why? Here’s the TL;DR: Flickr comes from (and helped start!) the Web 2.0 era, which was based on users having control over their data Tools at that time began giving creators the…
From The Art Of Not Asking Why: I discovered another person to follow this week, and as I reached out via email, I realized this had become somewhat of a habit for me: writing emails to other bloggers. I’m not sure when I started doing this more, but I’ve been doing it more in the last year or so. This is one of those things I always think about doing when I discover a new blog to add to my RSS feed, but very rarely do I actually follow through with it. I’m going to make an effort to reach out…
I struggle with how humiliating it feels to talk about and point out misogyny; how the general regression into conservative values makes addressing misogyny come across as a last resort card you can pull out to make yourself look like a victim or get brownie points, while vilifying someone else. Like a thing you only do if you have no better arguments and want to shut discussion down, as the only people coming to challenge you further are seen (or even are) misogynists who don’t believe you. It…
Two days ago, in my article where I talk about genAI comments and human, messy art, I briefly mentioned a new community-driven aggregator for independent personal blogs called Bubbles.town, with blog posts ranked by votes and freshness and shaped by users. Think Hacker News or Reddit, but exclusively for the indie blogosphere. You sign in with a Fediverse account to vote, and posts bubble up based on community upvotes combined with recency. It has categories like Writing, Tech, Culture, Life,…
I got a call at 11:03 PM last year. A client. Panic in his voice. His website was showing a phishing page in Chinese. Every URL redirected to a fake login screen. His customers were messaging him on Facebook asking if he'd been hacked. He had been. An outdated contact form plugin — one he'd never asked for, installed by the previous developer because it was "free" and saved an hour of custom work — had a known vulnerability. The attacker automated the exploit, dropped a backdoor, and replaced…
Introducing Bubbles Briefing 📰 Yesterday, Cesar Aguirre [published a short post](https://canro91.github.io/2026/04/21/Aggregators/?ref=bubbles.town) with a simple wish. Blog aggregators should feel more like newspapers. You open one, read yesterday's news, reach the end, and come back tomorrow. Less endless scroll, knowing when you're done. I was not even finished reading, but my brain was already in implementation mode. That's how much I liked the idea! I already came up with measures to avoid…
I was sad today! I love discovering, and reading new, personal blogs. I'm always interested in people and opinions. Imagine my sadness when I stumbled onto a new (to me) blog, only to discover that the author had an AI Generated Summary at the top of the post. In my opinion, this is devaluing the work. All that effort infused into researching, planning, writing, and editing. And then thrown through the sausage-machine for it to summarise the work in about three sentences. It probably vacuumed…
We all love to travel, especially after the advent of social media, where drone shots make us believe we could stand in that exact frame ourselves. Travel has surged tremendously post-Covid — salaries have exploded for some, and for others, the influencer economy has erupted into a viable livelihood. But amidst all this fanfare, we have forgotten the essence of travelling. When we move from our home to a different place, we forget that for the people living there, that place is their home. We…
ive been coding for QUITE a long time at this point, i was basically forced into a CS career from when i was youngbasically every coding language has some bit of annoyance tied to it making me not want to mess with it for small projectsc and java have the annoyance of compilation and compilation switchesphp requires a server and all that to just get a script running, and is more designed for server stuff (like this page is rendered with it :))lua is a pretty strange language and supposed to be…
My knowledge journey started with listening to audiobooks. This is what gave me the bug for learning new things and to become an autodidact. I realised that in order to recall all the amazing things I'd been learning, I needed to take notes. Doing so helps me feel like I'm participating in the knowledge that I'm learning.However, as time passes, I found that I was forgetting what I'd made notes on. I want to recall aspects of the books that were really important to my understanding of a topic,…
I am simply and passionately Done with people telling other people that what they do to survive is unethical. The argument is always based in "alternatives" that not everyone has. "Just eat plant-based foods:" because those are freely and cheaply available everywhere? Because grain, fruit, and vegetable farming isn't exploitative of sentient beings or the environment? Because you can overcome your allergies and aversions if you care enough about cows? "Just get a better job:" because jobs that…
Sometimes I am quite annoyed that I have lived my entire life in a digital age. Everyone around me has their heads in their screen. I can't really say much, I spend just as long on my computer each day as some of my friends spend on tik too. If I am bothering to ratify that then most of my time on my computer is productive and the leisure I do get from it is healthier than watching tik toks(it should be noted that technology can be used for leisure and productivity simultaneously, eg:…
You have seen the ad. It appears on Facebook between your cousin's holiday photos and a video of a golden retriever learning to open a door. A device. White plastic. Red lights. A countdown timer. It claims to reset your vagus nerve, decompress your spine, and cure everything from chronic fatigue to tinnitus. It costs €69.95, marked down from €140. You are saving fifty percent. The timer says there are only eight left. You click. You buy. You wait. The collar arrives. It warms up. It vibrates.…
You've no doubt come across memes about how the PlayStation 5 doesn't have any games on it. It's been extremely persistent throughout the past few years despite the fact that by all metrics, the PS5 is absolutely dominating it's primary competition, the Xbox Series X/S, and also despite the fact that it, you know, actually does have games on it. People treat it as though a game getting ported to PC or to another competing platform as though they're somehow "losing" them, even though it's…
The car we were using on our long trip to South Carolina this year is old enough that connecting my phone required a cable and a bit of fuss, and one afternoon I didn’t feel like bothering with it. I just wanted some music, so I reached for the radio and began twisting the dial. Most of what I heard was exactly what you’d expect. Polished, predictable, professionally programmed stations delivering familiar formats. They weren’t bad. They were just interchangeable. I moved past them without…
it is one week until may day, and the workers have already started snorting ants 👃🏽🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜
my neck/shoulder is still not 100% better but it has improved. in my own untrained amateur medical opinion, i think it's a pinched nerve in my neck or shoulder. i've had similar pain/numbness in the past when i used to play tennis and it usually took 3-4 weeks to get better. i'm in week 3 now so hopefully it doesnt last much longer (￢_￢;) this means i've been trying to go easier on myself whenever i can between dadcare duties. mainly, that just means not as much sitting at the computer, doing…
If you have not discovered Bubbles yet, then I suggest you go and have a look.
despite all their drawbacks, mobile phones are the only fully programmable camera systems available on the market, and that makes them extremely exciting to me as a designer and photographer — Héliographe As I continue to avoid or put off buying a “proper” camera and stubbornly use my phone as my primary camera, the above quote really does raise my spirits about phone photography and the possibilities it unlocks. Using your phone allows you to explore the weird side of photography with a really…
I’m sure a lot of people on here go through bouts of trying to be more productive. Thinking there has to be a winning method, a perfect app or something they are missing that’s causing them to be non productive. What if all of that is just procrastination? While trying to find the perfect to-do app I will find myself going back to previous ones in case that was the best one for me. All while looking at other ones. It's a crazy cycle that needs to stop. The one digital tool that seems to hit the…
It is a slightly cold and damp autumnal day and I am in a park in Scotland, following my toddler discovering the wonders of trees, bushes and grass. Suddenly he points at a small cluster of mushrooms and looks at me curiously. I tell him, “do not touch,” and, for some reason, I take a photo. Snap. He laughs. We find more mushrooms. Snap. He laughs. That was how my journey with mushrooms began. Mushrooms have now become an interest of mine and the more I learn about them, the luckier I feel for…
I’ve had this post in draft since March 2021, no doubt triggered by an article about iPods or MP3s ‘back in the day’. As is the case with these things, I’ve recently stumbled across a few different posts which all harken back, and touch upon, some of my own thoughts that I never fully fleshed out. So I’ve dusted this off. Ohh and I’ve marked where the original draft ended too, more for my own knowledge than anything. As a self confessed geek I take some pride in being reasonably well organised.…
“Lenore, did you say you don’t CARE about kids and phones?” That’s what a child psychologist just emailed me. MY RESPONSE: It’s NOT that I don’t care about phones. It’s that this is how kids are growing up (from an article I just read): Last week, my grandson asked permission to walk to the store 3 blocks away. His mother checked the GPS tracker on his phone, reminded him about stranger danger, and set a 20-minute timer for his return.” That childhood would depress ANYONE. Being treated like a…
Someone accused me of using AI to write my Reddit comments a while back. Not because of what I said. Because of how I presented it. I'd used bold text. And italics. To make the argument easier to follow. This, apparently, was suspicious. The person making the accusation teaches at a university. I'll let that sit for a moment. I formatted my replies carefully because I was trying to construct a clear argument and I had the basic courtesy to make it readable. This is, or was, when I attended…
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…
