I'm picky about what I keep on my phone, and pretty obsessed with how well-made apps look and work. I want them to be beautiful and useful, and only a handful of the ones I have on my iPhone manage both. In alphabetical order: Classycal. The most recent addition to my iPhone. A beautiful calendar that integrates with Apple Calendar and Apple Reminders and includes natural language input. It has just launched and, for now, doesn't offer much more than those two native apps, but it combines them…

We recently undertook a bit of a rail tour of what was titled five capitals. I suppose if you include the brief stop in Brussels it was. I've already mentioned the cafe in Brussels in a previous post, but while that was just fine, it was a very short visit and all the more welcome because of my beer free week that preceded it. So, let's start with Cologne. Not a capital obviously, so a bit of an outlier, though also somewhere I know reasonably well. We had the usual central visits to the…

I’m not one to yearn for the past. What we have today is an unimaginable leap in capability and features when it comes to development. Instead, I thought it would be fun to catalogue a few things that were normal back then. It might be funny. I couldn’t recall everything anyway. My mind probably won’t let me. For safety reasons. #Unfettered Internet Access My first memory of contributing to the web was in the early 2000s, on phpBB forums. There were these short codes, or BBCodes as they were…

This week I had a fascinating conversation about disabling paste into a text input. You might see this UX pattern when a form requires a user to type “confirm” before taking an action. I believe it’s a UX anti-pattern. It breaks an expected behavior of a web form without an obvious benefit. What I learned is that even if it were good practice, you can’t reliably enforce manual typing anyway.

You know, sometimes I get this feeling of wanting to write or share something. Trivial things: a song that I enjoyed, a feeling I had. But I get the feeling it's not important, and most of the time I even forget about the thoughts I wanted to share. Just, sometimes I don't. I wonder if here I can collect these tiny thoughts, written without much thinking? Just jotting something down, getting them out of my head.

The rise of generative Large Language Models has made me write less, as the friction to write has reduced and also the large scale LLM generated slop across the internet made it less appealing to indulge in the hobby. Everywhere I look now are Claude-coded websites with all too perfect writing that takes away the joy of both reading and writing. I didn't think much about the loss of this creative faculty for me, until someone reached out to me after reading this website and their words were “I…

For many years, I signed up for a gym and worked out on my own. The pandemic interrupted that for over a year, and I struggled to return to the gym. What eventually worked for me was to hire a personal trainer for a few months. That worked out really well, but it was very expensive. Nowadays, I work with a semi private personal trainer. They’re often working with a couple of other people at the same time. Sometimes they pair us up for exercises together, like russian twists. I have no problems…

Simon Beattie sends via the SHARP listserv a link to a nice post of his about Kiebitzpapier, a speckled brownish paper which was apparently quite common in German book manufacturing in the eighteenth century. Kiebitz is the German word for a lapwing (Vanellus vanellus), a peewit*, and he explains the name by a resemblance between the paper and the coloration of lapwings’ eggs. The website buntpapier.eu, in addition to lapwing paper shows us several examples of their Sprenkelpapier, and goes on…

Yes! It’s here! The brown cardigan I bought that looks like I skinned Fozzy Bear for his pelt! Oh, and also, the finished hardcover copies of Monsters of Ohio, which look terrific, and which officially go on sale one week from today (which is November 3rd, in case you are reading this on a day other than October 27, 2026). There is still time to pre-order the book from your favorite bookseller! Or (today and tomorrow) to order a signed/personalized copy from Subterranean Press! You can even…

Ever wanted to build your own app without knowing how to code? See how I vibe-coded a fully functional iOS app from scratch in just a few days using AI - and managed the entire process right inside Nozbe! In this episode, recorded live during Nozbe’s annual company retreat in Gdynia, together with Magda I dive deep into the world of AI agents. Learn how I used Claude to build the Prezbe presentation app and connected local MCP to Nozbe for seamless, structured asynchronous collaboration. Listen…

For some reason the Spotify media controls that appear with Android’s notifications and lock screen have become more persistent and thus more annoying to me for the last few weeks. I went into the phone settings, searched for media, found an option for Pin media player and turned that off. I understand the media player there when I am playing music, but it was constantly appearing even when nothing is playing and I found that annoying.

At the northern tip of England is Goswick Golf Club, just outside of Berwick-upon-Tweed. The course is beautiful and it’s in a lovely setting. The fields marram grass extend for miles along the coast. The most memorable holes for me were one, two, fourteen, and fifteen.Subscribe nowHole One: Copse CornerIt takes a 200-yard drive (highlighted in yellow) to get past the grove of trees.The opener is probably the most strategically interesting hole on the course. The hole is a sharp dogleg right. A…

A couple of investigation boards appear in The Butterfly Effect 3: Revelations (dir. Seth Grossman, 2009). ▲ The Butterfly Effect 3: Revelations (dir. Seth Grossman, 2009) ▲ The Butterfly Effect 3: Revelations (dir. Seth Grossman, 2009) ▲ The Butterfly Effect 3: Revelations (dir. Seth Grossman, 2009) ▲ The Butterfly Effect 3: Revelations (dir. Seth Grossman, 2009) ▲ The Butterfly Effect 3: Revelations (dir. Seth Grossman, 2009) ▲ The Butterfly Effect 3: Revelations (dir. Seth Grossman, 2009) ▲…

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While Ana is celebrating the end of pen show season and a few months recuperation time from all her travels, the rest of the world is pulling together its 2027 dates! That’s right, we’ve updated the Pen Show Schedule with all the dates we can find for 2027. The dates for 2026 shows still to come are there at the bottom, but it’s time to plan for next year. We hope to see you there! As always if we’ve missed any shows, please let us know!

The Phantom Blow: John Evelyn and the Mysterious Stigmata of a Deptford Maid (1670)We all know John Evelyn for his legendary forty-five-year devotion to the gardens at Sayes Court, or as the landlord who had his estate completely trashed by Peter the Great in 1698. But there is a much darker, weirder side to Evelyn’s time in Deptford.John EvelynAside from being a diarist and a gardener, Evelyn was a prominent member of the Royal Society—a group of pioneering minds dedicated to using science,…

The current Morning sun is shining nicely on the guitar.

Well the web filter must have finally switched the categorization of micro.blog to social networking because it’s blocked on my work laptop now. Boooo!

Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports. Disclaimer: I am a shareholder in Anthropic. That position has absolutely no bearing on what follows. For the past year, I've tried to timestamp my thoughts…

Note to the Referee on Statistics: Statistics are intended for the 2nd edition of Boot Hill, but, by dint of being written in natural language, are readily interpretable for any system. NPC stats are formatted as below: Speed / Gun Accuracy / Throwing Accuracy / Bravery / Strength / Shootouts Survived From the Great Western Port to Pueblo SocorroYou're promised work in Socorro, farthest point on the inland frontier. Weeks down the Great Eastern Road, your boots eat hundreds of miles of clay.…

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about how I clean my house: how i clean my house In that post, I noted that Step One is "put everything back where it goes." I also noted that this can be hard to do when some things do not have a designated Place Where They Go. Here's how to make sure everything in your house has a Place Where It Goes. At least, this is how I did it. There are lots of methods out there. Mine is heavily influenced by KonMari, because that's what worked for me. you will need A clear…

We either trust people too soon or hesitate forever. As emotional beings, we have no instinct for balance. When we are frustrated, we voice our disapproval without a second thought. Almost too soon. That disapproval can then be twisted and turned against us. So we explain that we didn't mean it. That is an even worse strategy. Now you are forced to choose: either your word carries no weight, or you meant exactly what you said. Our deep distrust of people is nothing new. It is precautionary. A…

I’ve been talking about this stuff for a while, ever since the extreme backlash against LLMs grew into a new sect of right-wing and left-wing mindsets, where both have begun to look so similar you’d almost think there’s an entirely new political party forming in the United States. I’ve been talking about it a lot, because, when this backlash grew into constant death threats all over the timelines, wishes of death, and murder, and then the tamer stuff: People basing everything they know about…

Canonical is resuming work on their modern, immutable, secure desktop: Ubuntu Core Desktop. Work based on a previous demo has already been rebased on core26, with three clearly defined initial use cases over the coming months. The project aims to become the default for a future release of Ubuntu.

Now as the PHP calamity is temporarily over and the sites are back online, it’s as good time as ever to make a release. I’ve come to realisation that I don’t have enough non-gaming video formats in store to reverse engineer, so instead of waiting indefinitely until I discover enough of them I’m making a release now. Half a dozen new formats are enough for 0.1.5 by my standards, and maybe it will be useful as a reference for somebody. Since the reason for this point release is the lack of…

Maxwell Tani, Semafor: The globally-minded tech news startup Rest of World is scrambling to find a new home — or faces the prospect of shutting down. The six-year-old digital publication has seen the social and web search traffic on which it depends evaporate. This sharp decline has prompted the organization’s founder and primary financial backer, Sophie Schmidt, to explore other options for its future. This is disappointing. Rest of World is one of my favourite publications with a scope unlike…

How do you do security engineering when the code is being changed in real time by a swarm of coding agents? We went all in and did the same. At Synthesia we strive to move fast and be efficient. We recently released Syren, taking it from internal proof-of-concept to external release in a very short timeframe, turning a prototype into a product-grade system that meets all our quality and compliance requirements. The product was being built the way a lot of software is built now: by engineers…

I firmly believe that we still need to read some of the code.1 It’s suboptimal to read all of the code, but I consider it irresponsible to read none of it. I won’t explain why now because that would fill several more articles. I just want to share this upfront because it clarifies where I’m coming from. But I am trying to be smart about it2, and I’ve found the quote in the title very useful: “...

Willis Alan Ramsey - Kerrville Folk Festival, Kerrville, Texas, May 23, 1980A couple months back I mentioned that I had seen Willis Alan Ramsey play a terrific show in Boulder. And in a nice coincidence, a couple weeks later, the Antarctica Starts Here label announced that they were releasing the first-ever vinyl reissue of Ramsey’s classic debut. That’s called good timing. So! I hopped on the phone with Willis for a chat about that LP, as well as his 55-years-in-the-making follow-up. “I always…

While on vacation in Oregon, I did what everyone does on vacation, start thinking about what needs improvement on my web site. And when I came home, I actually worked on those improvements rather than sticking them back in the “maybe someday” todo list.There are a few small updates here on the site:First, it really annoyed me that the way Squarespace handles blogs older posts essentially disappear and are hard to find. I spent some time with Claude exploring ways to find those older posts and…