TIL The Bandcamp iOS app runs fairly OK on macOS.

TIL You can set Finder to auto-size columns. I turned this on immediately. /via DF.

Darice de Cuba:

It’s perfectly ok to go to another country/city and just take it easy and enjoy oneself.

I completely agree with Darice’s take on traveling. Go somewhere, get comfy, and explore. That is exactly what we do also. As little an agenda as possible.

What should I post here? What should I post there?

I’m struggling to find a balance that I like. My deepest self says post everything here, right on my own personal website. As broken and beautiful as it is (I’m constantly fiddling lately, sorry).

But if I do that should I take the time to share the same posts across some or all of the services I’m currently signed up for? Unfortunately, POSSE just isn’t for me. So that isn’t the answer.

There are two factors at play; friction and reach.

The friction (or, amount of work and time) to publish can be a good thing and a bad thing. It is good because it may slow me down just enough to not publish too much drivel. Then again, drivel can be fun. At least for me, publishing something silly online is fun. Publishing on my website has much more friction than quickly tapping out a toot.

Reach (and with it, engagement) are important too because I sometimes want feedback or replies from other humans. Because I don’t have comments on my blog I do not get many replies when I publish here. The replies I do get, however, are usually awesome and via email. I love it.

Why is this a struggle? No one else cares. Why do I care? Why do I even spend any time thinking about it? Why am I now writing about it? Should I delete this post?

I’m publishing it here on my blog and not sharing it anywhere else.

Maggie Appleton, in a post titled simply January 2026:

You might suggest that I spend less time on X, but I’m not inclined to look away just as the train gets up to full speed. Sure it’s a distorted reality, but it points to real ground truth: even if progress on language models slows this year, we are still far behind in using what already exists to reshape software design and engineering.

Her thoughts pair well with the aforelinked from Taranis. Even if progress slowed or stalled, we’d still have more than enough headroom to continue to reshape how we do what we do.

In fact, just this week I Slacked a colleague that I hoped OpenAI doesn’t change 5.2-Codex because I’m incredibly productive at the moment. It is a bit absurd.

I’m happy to see someone as thoughtful as Appleton on the GitHub Next team.

Nearly a dozen of the NerdPress team recently enjoyed a beautiful week in downtown Los Angeles sponsoring Tastemaker Conference. We met with old and new customers, enjoyed good food, pet some puppies, gazed upon the cosmos at Griffith Observatory, took a tour of LA’s black history, vibe coded and were driven around in Waymos. We’ve got a great team.

All photos shot on iPhone 17 Pro Max using Snapseed’s new camera feature in Kodak Portra 400 emulation mode.

I’m happy to see the younger generation of programmers joining us older folks in experiencing imposter syndrome and constantly feeling of being behind. It persists. It never goes away. You’re likely doing fine, and likely not behind. If you don’t feel these feelings you likely think too much of yourself. Work on being OK with these feelings while at the same time trying to do your best at your job without burning out.

Clear your calendar, pour a favorite beverage, and immerse yourself into the year in music with reports from Simon Collison and Jon Hicks. Fantastic every year.

Comments from Mozilla’s new CEO have brought up the topic of ad blocking. With some going so far as to switch their browser. In 2023 I wrote about why I do not block ads but I do block ad tracking as best as I can.

Chris Glass, on his cat blog:

I’ve turned off comments and other minor features to improve site performance here because I think AI bots are hogging things.

The scourge of internet traffic currently are data scraping bots slurping up the web. I don’t know why there are so many, why the requests are so often, or if there will ever be an effective way to block them. But it stinks that one must now live in fear and turn off features of one’s website to exist on the web. Sort of like installing bars on our windows or building tall fences to keep out the neighbors.

I don’t know if what Chris was experiencing was all data scraping bots… go look at his comments section for that post. Looks like he was also getting inundated with comment spam as well.

Every now and then YouTube will suggest a film photography related video from years and years ago. I’ll watch it and think, hey, YouTube, why didn’t you suggest this sooner?

Pretty rich that I am extolling the virtues of boredom while at the same time reviving a recently discontinued series of posts on my site called, of all things, Diversions.

But hear me out.

These diversions aren’t the bad kind of diversions. I mean, my most recent post in this series talked about growing garlic for farmer’s sake.

So what have I been filling my time with?

I started building an all-new static site generator for WordPress, of course.

You may recall I built Tuff, an SSG that gobbled up directories full of Markdown files and spewed out a website in just a few seconds. But then, I decided to switch back to WordPress (in part, because I build a product within it, but also in part because I do like the Gutenberg editing experience).

When I jumped back into WordPress I very quickly wished I was serving my site statically and so I found Simply Static, a plugin that turns a WordPress website into a bunch of static files. I use it for Good Migrations and The Watercolor Gallery. But when I tried to use it for my website, it choked. I made do for a while, but it took well over an hour to build my website even for very small updates that should have taken seconds. I emailed them, several times, sent in log files, explained the situation — I even read their code… but, they were borderline unwilling to try to help.

I know how hard it is to provide support for a WordPress product. The ecosystem is so vast, the environments across all installs so diverse, it is nearly impossible. So I do not blame them for pretty much leaving me on my own to figure it out.

But that led me to wonder if I should port Tuff to WordPress? I didn’t. I ultimately started over from scratch and, in a few quick sessions, and admittedly, with the assistance of an LLM, I had my own plugin that built my website in… wait for it… seconds. Not my whole site (that still takes a few minutes, and I hope to improve this) but only the parts that need to be updated when publishing a single post.

If you’re reading this in an RSS reader or on my website, you’re reading a file that was created by this new plugin.

I’ve also been drawing up plans for a pretty extensive renovation of our basement to upgrade our laundry area and to build a better darkroom. After a year of construction on our home, adding a mother-in-law apartment, decks, new porch, roof, etc. I’m not too eager to have more work being done. But, at the same time, once you’ve done these larger projects smaller ones do seem easier.

In #6 I mentioned making grape jelly in the fall of 2024. Well, we made a batch again this year and it is some of the best jelly I’ve ever had. Long story very short; we picked our grapes on the same date in 2025 as we did in 2024. But the grapes were very different. Less sweet than 2024, more tart. This gives the jelly much more character and a tart finish that I really love. I’ll be aiming for this same profile in 2026.

• Signboard – A bit of a shameless plug for a project I’m working on in my spare time here and there. I use this app every single day to manage my side business. I love it.
• Immich – I’m giving strong consideration to moving to Immich for all of my personal photo management. If you have experience with it, please let me know. Via Jack Baty.
• Hopewood Baskets – Gorgeous handmade willow baskets.
• Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers on Tiny Desk – I don’t think I need to say anything more.
• Adrianne Lenker and David Byrne – Two artists I’ve been diving into recently.

What do you do with your time? I think the modern world has afforded us all more time than we know what to do with and we’re squandering it. I know this isn’t true for everyone, and certainly not true of people everywhere, but many of us live in a time of abundance and we’re not spending enough time being bored.

When we’re bored, we think. We get ideas. We let our mind wander. We ask ourselves; what if? We remember. We imagine. We relive. We learn. We reprioritize. We plan. We decide.

People of times past wished they could have spent as much time being bored as we now have the opportunity to.

And yet… so many are wasting valuable boredom time on countless hours of video entertainment. Have you watched the latest popular streaming episodic content?!? The first 3 hours are boring but if you stick with it the next 12 are amazing. How about that famous TV series from a decade ago? You have to watch that! It is only an 81-hour epic that you’ll want to watch twice. Have you scrolled through 72 hours of people dancing to a song from the 90s in the palm of your hand this week? Oh, and don’t forget your favorite sport has 9 games this weekend that you must watch every minute of. The broadcasting for which starts 2 hours earlier than the game.

Lately, I’ve been prioritizing boredom. I’m still learning how to do this but one way that has had an impact has been to do boring tasks without media playing.

Usually, if I’m mowing the lawn, showering, shoveling snow, working in the garden, driving, doing the dishes, etc. I’ll have a podcast on. I listen to podcasts and watch YouTube videos that I learn from, so I thought that would be a net positive use of my time. But that only goes so far. I kept shoving new information in without letting myself have the time to use the information that I already collected. So, for now, I’ve been doing these tasks in relative silence… allowing my mind time to work, to distill, to create.

I almost always end up coming back to a work session or my bullet journal with tons of ideas for something new or something I’m working on.

Quoting Jeffrey Davis in a 2022 post in Psychology Today:

In a series of studies, researchers found that subjects who were asked to do mundane, boredom-inducing tasks were more creative afterward. Boredom is a “variety-driving emotion,” meaning that it primes us to seek out new and different — therefore creative — experiences and solutions.

I can say from first-hand experience, this is definitely true.

I plan to write more about boredom in 2026. Until then, stop reading this and go get yourself bored.

Anon Taranis writes that LLMs are, in large part, a failure and that all AI companies have hit a wall that they’ll never surmount.

I believe it is always good to read both sides of debates. If I find myself overly positive or negative about a topic or technology, I seek out those that disagree. Hopefully, this has helped me to have a more balanced opinion. I don’t know.

There are many parts of this post I agree with and a few I do not. Here is one I agree with:

A good example is transformers used to assist in programming, or to generate code from scratch. This has convinced many non-programmers that they can program, but the results are consistently disastrous, because it still requires genuine expertise to spot the hallucinations. Plausible hallucinations in code often result in really horrible bugs, security holes, etc., and can be incredibly difficult to find and fix. My own suspicion is that this might get you close to what you think is finished, but actually getting over the line to real production code still requires real engineering, and it’s a horrible liability to have to maintain a codebase that nobody on the team actually authored.

I agree with the above and wrote something similar recently. This is what I wrote:

In my experience, LLMs are very good at helping me with my job but they aren’t very good (yet) at doing my job. Most code written by agents (meaning, LLM tools that have a bit more autonomy to do more than just suggest code updates) takes nearly the same amount of work to fix than it would have been if you wrote it yourself. It also has the added drawback of the programmer not being intimately familiar with the codebase. Which, in the longterm, could be a real issue. But perhaps this will be improved upon and go away and we’ll never need to see code again? I’m not sure.

Taranis post largely makes the case that the underlying technology of modern LLMs (transformers, primarily) are a dead end. That the initial progress made by throwing enormous amounts of compute at the problem has stalled and won’t improve even if, somehow, you could throw ten times as much compute at it again.

I’m not an expert enough in this field to know if that is true or not. But, I think progress may come from areas yet unexplored. It is really hard to say that something will never make progress. Never say never, they say. So while it could be true that the current technology for LLMs has already peaked, we may very well see an entirely different approach emerge soon enough.

Naz Hamid, writing on his personal blog, about forming a small company called Latent Co.:

Driven by the creative tooling we’ve cut our teeth on and drawing on our product and imaging experience, we’re making a product for Mac.

His partners are Ryan Carver and Julio Pablo Zambrano. I’ve exchanged many a message with Carver while he was building Series.

When a new company is formed by someone you admire, it is exciting. When they say they’ll be building something for the Mac it is doubly so. When you mix in that it is related to photography, my ears pop off the side of my head with excitement.

Elizabeth Spiers, writing on her own blog again finally, about how blogging is better than social media platforms because it is harder to pick a fight. I’m generalizing off course, go read her post.

I think of this now as the difference between living in a house you built that requires some effort to visit and going into a town square where there are not particularly rigorous laws about whether or not someone can punch you in the face. Before social media, if someone wanted to engage with you, they had to come to your house and be civil before you’d give them the time of day or let them in. And if they wanted you to engage with them, they’d have to make their own house compelling enough that you’d want to visit.

Getting a toot boosted on Mastodon is good. Getting your blog linked to by a fellow blogger? The best.

Note: Spiers writes about blogging in the past tense. I have to remind myself not to do that. Blogging is alive and well. Like the old forests, blogging will still be here when the social media landscape has withered and died.

I don’t know if I can directly tie this to uninstalling social network apps from my phone… but I can say that I had a thoroughly enjoyable and productive offline weekend.

Andre Franca:

The small web persists not because it’s winning any battle against platform dominance, but because some things are worth doing regardless of scale. These independent voices, scattered across their own domains, linked through blogrolls and RSS feeds and word of mouth, create a version of the internet that still feels human.

This is both the most powerful part of the web and the part that is currently most at risk.

I’ve uninstalled all social network apps from my phone; including Ivory for Mastodon. I’m really trying to force myself into boredom. To allow my mind to wander. And force-feeding myself information (even good, high quality information) is stifling my mind’s ability to wander.

Manuel Moreale, encouraging us all to follow all the links in his seminal series People & Blogs…

This series lives on my blog but has nothing to do with me. It exists to connect you, the human who’s reading this, with all the other wonderful humans that are still out there, spending their time making sure the old school web, the one made by the people, for the people, is not dying. And see that bump on Nic’s analytics made me so happy. Because it means the series is working and doing its job. And it’s all because people like you are taking the time to read these interviews and click on those links to visit those blogs. And maybe you’re also taking time to reach out to those people and connect with them. This is the web many people are missing, a web that is, in fact, still here, very much alive.

I’ve directly connected with many people Manuel has interviewed for his series and they’ve reached out to me (presumably because they’ve come back to my website and read my posts or subscribed to my feed).

I’m really, really worried about the web. The combination of AI web browsers and agentic coding may just change the entire model of how the internet works. And I’m struggling to see how the parts of the web we love the most will even be accessible in the future. For example, web browsers are very difficult to build and I’m worried they won’t all ditch the document model for the agent model soon. I’m likely overthinking it but I’m super worried.

So yes, please, click all the links, read all the blogs, tell each other that you’re doing so. Keep the web alive and filled with human thought. And, whether you use AI or not, be sure to keep a copy of a version of your favorite web browser software without AI built in handy, you may need it in the future.

Simon Willison comments on creating new programming languages with AI:

My hunch is that existing LLMs make it easier to build a new programming language in a way that captures new developers.

My take? Likely an unpopular one. Most modern programming languages were made to be human readable; yet, LLMs don’t need us to make new languages human readable at all. In fact, much of the features, structures, and methods built into them could likely be removed all together.

I know Simon’s comment wasn’t on how LLMs could make all-new LLM-only programming languages — but I think we’re going to start to see that happening at some point.

A quick business trip to Boston with the NerdPress team. We shared some excellent meals (particularly at Sarma). I had very little free time but I did manage to saunter over to the Leica store (just before the gallery exhibition of the work of Maria Guțu) and to stop into the Cheers gift shop.

This was also the last trip I took with the iPhone 12 Pro Max. It served me well (these images, were _very_ quick snaps while on the run, but I did manage to take some very nice images with the iPhone 12 over the years).

If you’re reading this in RSS or on my website, it means that it is being statically delivered yet again. I’m so happy about this.

I’ve wanted to write a follow-up to my April 2023 post How I’m using ChatGPT as an accelerator for several months. I want to share how I’m using AI today, what I think about it, and what I think we’ll see in the future. But I will admit I hesitated because people I respect and admire on the web have expressed that my use of or writing about AI would make me a very terrible person.

I understand why some are choosing to boycott the use of AI due to how the information to train the models was gathered … which is that much of it was most definitely stolen. There are models, such as Common Pile, and others that have only been trained on openly licensed and public data … but even then, what is public data?

I think a lot also about the profound amount of energy and other resources needed to create all of these model training datacenters.

So it leaves me in a spot in my career so far that feels unique. I can’t remember a time that aligns with this one. The licensing, piracy, DRM, and crypto periods that the web has seen all had their challenges but this feels different because, so far at least, it feels like LLMs and the skills to use them deftly might become vital for what I do.

I don’t think I could write it better than Frank Chimero said in a recent talk he gave in Brooklyn.

The believers demand devotion, the critics demand abstinence, and to see AI as just another technology is to be a heretic twice over.

So, with hesitation, doubt, confusion, and also intrigue and excitement, here are some random thoughts about AI as I see it in the fall of 2025.

I’m going to focus mostly on AI use as it relates to programming. But I will say this; I believe this technology is going to be applied to every single thing we can imagine from our refrigerators, water pumps, cars, lights, healthcare, yard tools, and every piece of software we use. Whether we like that or not. (I’m personally not a fan of the “add AI to everything” moment we’re having.)

In early 2023 I was using ChatGPT to make me quicker at doing things I was already doing. It was a shortcut. It saved me from typing something mundane that I already knew what I was going to type but ChatGPT could “type” it faster. It wasn’t long after that I began to use models locally, rather than relying on cloud services like ChatGPT, to both keep my data more private but also to be less reliant on a paid service. It also allowed me to test many different models that were created in a variety of different ways and with different goals.

It is my hope that there is a model or set of models that everyone agrees was ethically sourced, trained, and distributed. It is arguable some of those already exist. Even if it isn’t as good at some things as the leading models, I would use that in a heartbeat.

The rate of updates to the models, tooling, features, etc. to LLMs between my post in 2023 and somewhat recently was neck break. Agents, MCP, CLI, APIs, all improved rapidly. And I tried just about everything.

In my experience, LLMs are very good at helping me with my job but they aren’t very good (yet) at doing my job. Most code written by agents (meaning, LLM tools that have a bit more autonomy to do more than just suggest code updates) takes nearly the same amount of work to fix than it would have been if you wrote it yourself. It also has the added drawback of the programmer not being intimately familiar with the codebase. Which, in the longterm, could be a real issue. But perhaps this will be improved upon and go away and we’ll never need to see code again? I’m not sure.

Let’s say you were going to build a weather app against an API of weather data. You asked an agent to show various bits of data in an app view; temperature, humidity, wind speed, etc. But let’s say the API you’re using doesn’t support humidity levels it may just plop in what looks to be correct code to do so — even though you knew that it wasn’t supported. I see this all the time.

For APIs I know well, it isn’t too big of a deal. But for those I don’t, it is a huge time suck. Again, something that will no doubt improve until it no longer happens… but it is still very much happening.

Summarization, translation, transcription… these seem like solved problems at this point? They are incredibly useful.

My muscle memory has changed a bit (which is something I mentioned in that original post). I do use an LLM very early on in the process now where before I used it only after I got stuck on something. However, because of the setbacks and inconsistencies, I’m still reading the docs, doing the research, etc. before I jump into an LLM.

Recently we’re seeing AI browsers, like Dua and Atlas and others, pop up. I have no intention of ever installing these. In fact, I think the web browser landscape is dire. Mozilla seems lost, Safari is great (I use it daily) but locked on Apple platforms, and everything else is a version of Chromium which is supported by an ad-based business. Bleh! I think this is going to be a real problem.

One last thing, I think the hype and speed of improvement is about to ebb on the text-based solutions and perhaps flow on the video-based solutions for awhile. The tooling and communication across all of the platforms will likely improve greatly, agents likely will, and other things… but I think the text-based models and chats are going to stagnate for a little while. The focus is going to shift to image and video generation.

Spending time, slow time, meaningful time… looking through Paris Photo-Aperature 2025 PhotoBook Awards Shortlist. Added to Unmark (of course) so that I can spend several comfy chair, cross legged sessions doing so.

Giving Obsidian a try again for two reasons; file over app (or database) and I want my notes to be more cross platform to use on Linux machines. Based on what I’m seeing from Apple, I’m starting to see a future (albeit distant) where I’m on Linux full-time.

Just released Signboard 0.4.0 that adds due dates to cards and lays the foundation for labels and other card metadata. I’m so happy to have due dates since Signboard is now my daily driver. The next build will be a code refactor and bug fixes from this release.

Over the past few months of weekends, I managed to fix several longstanding bugs in Unmark. In fact, a beta of version 2025.2 is now available and will be released this week and is already running on the hosted version.

Kyle Ruane and I have been keeping the lights on the hosted version of Unmark at Unmark.it for years. To be able to continue to do so, we’re going to remove the free tier (you can use the open source version for free, of course) and increase the yearly plan to $30 per year.

Unmark is far from a successful product but we both love it and plan to keep it around for as long as we can. If you’d like to support its development as an open source alternative, you can donate or submit some code, or sign up for the paid service.

Recently purchased a few tracks from A Unicorn Masquerade on Bandcamp (who also goes by Bread on Penguins on YouTube).

Merlin Rebrović on personal websites being like tending a garden:

Sometimes I put in more time and effort, sometimes I neglect it for a bit, depending on the season and other pressures on my life. However, I always come back to it because it’s a space that is occasionally helpful or entertaining to others but always nourishing to me. Tinkering just for the fun of it, even when it’s cognitively challenging, is a meditative experience. It gets me into flow. I always learn something new.

Recently finished reading Into The Storm by Skylar Holt – the pseudonym of my niece. Fun to read a full fiction book by someone I know so well.

I’ve wanted this for a long time – a kanban style productivity desktop app that writes Markdown files to disk. And that is what Signboard is.

It looks like this.

And here is this board represented on disk as directories and files.

You can grab a copy for macOS or Windows today and give it a try. Or, you can download the source and modify it if you’d like.

I have tried a few apps like this; such as the Obsidian Kanban Plugin. Which works but is fairly limited and doesn’t do exactly what I’d like. Also, it is inside Obsidian and I’d prefer a standalone app.

So a few weeks ago, after thinking about it for far too long, I decided to give it a try. But I had a few goals in mind.

• Be open source
• Be fast
• Write pretty good Markdown (meaning, as little “front matter” as possible)
• Use web languages HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
• Don’t use an enormous framework like React (in fact, I’d like to not use a framework at all)
• Use as few dependencies as possible

I realize how ironic that last one might seem. Signboard is an Electron app, so right out of the gate it has that as a dependency. That also requires code signing for desktop apps (which come with their own needs). It reads and writes Markdown, and of course I’m not going to rewrite ways do that in JavaScript, since it has already been done by better programmers than me. So, it has some dependencies, but – where possible – Signboard has those built right in as static files.

In fact, the Signboard app makes zero requests to the web. It runs locally and privately.

This app is also very early and basic. It doesn’t even have an icon yet! I figured that the less I build before making it public allows for more people to shape the app. I still hope the app stays opinionated, but that it may include things that I would have never thought of.

I’m already using the app everyday and I’m looking forward to seeing more people give it a try.

I recently had the privilege of recording an episode of Happy Subscribers and representing the team at NerdPress.

Allea Grummert, of Duett, and I cover the topic of being ok with constant change, a never-ending to-do list, and finding peace even though publishing online can be hard work.

Of course, I found a way to work in an illustration about gardening and a plug for Hubbub.

My thanks to Allea for the invite.

If you’re like me; you like files, you like web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you like markdown, you like kanban, you like pomodoro, and you like apps. If this sounds like you reach out. I’ll be open sourcing something in the coming weeks and I’d like some early testers.

Hey, you. Are you an expert in vanilla JavaScript? Electron? Building apps with JavaScript and Electron? I could use your help. I’d be happy to pay you for an hour of your Zoom time. Reach out please!

I was gifted a Nikon FG with a few lenses and fun Speedlight SB-15 from a friend. It was gifted him by his parents when he graduated high school. This is my favorite way to get a new camera – when it comes from a friend with a story. I put it through its paces this evening, dialing everything in. I’m looking forward to putting a roll through it, making a few prints in the darkroom, and gifting a framed print back to my friend in return.

As of today I’ve deactivated the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress. I just can’t get it to work the way that I want to. It is a complex problem, I don’t envy the team working on it. And they are doing a great job so far. I hope development on it continues.

I don’t know the ramifications of deactivating it yet. I’m sure I need to do some more work but for now, it is simply offline.

The world of computer keyboards is… a little confusing. I have a Keychron K2 75% (non-backlight, brown switches) that I picked up a few years ago. I really like it. In fact I bought two of them – one for the office and one for home. But now I just work at home. So, I have a backup! I wouldn’t mind an alternative set of keycaps. But I have no idea what will work and what won’t. I’m guessing any OEM set? If anyone knows, send me an email. Thanks.

Update! Thanks to those that emailed in.

TIL on macOS > System Settings > Desktop & Dock > Widgets > Widget style > Monochrome. I have a few widgets on my desktop and I don’t like that they switch between monochrome and color when the desktop is in focus. This is a nice setting that I wish I had looked for earlier.

Poking around on Halfway.

Went glamping. Hammock naps. Bike rides. Cool crisp nights. Puppy time.

Molly White recently wrote about how publications are moving to publishing newsletters because their search traffic is dwindling. One downside to us readers is that managing a bunch of newsletter subscriptions creates a lot of clog in our inboxes.

She then goes on to detail how she uses RSS to create her own “newspapers”. Which frees her up to read whenever she’d like and keeps her inbox clean.

[…] at least I could choose when to read the news, go to the newspaper and get my fill, and then put it away. No pings in the middle of my workday pulling my focus away from my writing. No notifications during my planned relaxation time, alerting me to some new horror. No threats to my inbox zero, requiring me to choose between staring neurotically at the unread emails notification or marking an email as read only to lose it forever. Maybe there was something to be said for the newspaper.

I’ve been doing something similar for years. I have a “Newsletter” folder in NetNewswire and, rather than sign up to newsletters via email, I subscribe to them with RSS. In fact, if they don’t have an RSS feed I seldom subscribe. I love reading the posts that I have in NetNewswire and do so nearly every morning for over 20 years!

But it isn’t all perfect.

As Molly also mentioned, some publishers have no idea they are also publishing an RSS feed. This is an issue because many publishers use their stats to sell ads. So the more people that subscribe to an RSS feed without the publisher knowing, the less their analytics show their true reach.

Like Molly I wish more people used RSS. It isn’t as easy as following someone on a social network (it should be) but it isn’t much harder either. Her post describes how to get set up.

If you have a website of any kind, check to see if you have an RSS feed for your posts. If you don’t, see if you can enable one. And then, add a /subscribe page to your site and explain RSS to your readers. Help more people learn about RSS.

I sometimes feel that I have so much to do that I don’t know where to start. This is when I remind myself; make a list, start at the top. It works every time.

I love my favorite toots page which shows toots that I favorited on Mastodon recently. It is a nice showcase of people doing awesome things and sharing them on Mastodon.

But it was broken for a while. I only looked into the issue very briefly months ago and I wasn’t able to determine the fix. Well, this morning I decided to ask an LLM for some help and I was able to fix the issue in minutes. As with most programming problems, I was overlooking something very simple. Do with that information what you will.

So, Favorite Toots has been updated to 0.2.5 and now works again. Enjoy!

It is starting to look like I’ll delay updating to Apple’s “26” family of OSes this fall. Not only because of the obvious waffling on the Liquid Glass UI that I’m seeing in the betas, but also because it really seems like they are lost as a company.

Perhaps it is time to go to Linux? (I’ve done this in the past, it is more possible today than ever.)

Switcheroo, the default browser that I use everyday, just had a new release over the weekend thanks to Zhenyi Tan.

The 1.2.0 update includes a new profile picker UI (seen below) and a new “switch tab to profile” feature making it easier to move tabs between Safari profiles.

Switcheroo’s new profile picker UI.

What is Switcheroo? I wanted a way to be logged into all of my various services for each context I find myself in each day; work, personal, a side project, etc. I do this by having a Safari Profile and Safari window for each profile. Whenever I click a link, Switcheroo lets me quickly choose which Safari Profile to open the link in. I love it and I don’t know what I would do without it!

I’ve recently started using macOS Spaces for each of my contexts. I had tried this in the past and I could never get it to work right. It isn’t perfect, but with Switcheroo this is now possible.

Did some wildflower picking.

Florian Ziegler:

I tried to do these monthly posts for a while because I like to read them when others post them. But I always forget to write down things I’ve been watching or doing, so at the end of the month, it feels like too much work to try to remember everything and then write a post about it. I tried to make it a habit to log my thoughts for these posts, but it does not come naturally to me. So I am renouncing any further monthly posts.

Man I feel this. I’ve said in the past, I really like to read other’s weeknotes type posts, and I wish I did my own. I envy those that are so good at it. I thought Diversions would be something I stuck with but writing them feels like a slog.

Oddly, when I did my what I saw series of posts, for some reason I stuck with that through 100 posts. So, sometimes we can’t tell what will stick and what won’t.

The moment a personal blogging project feels like work is when I drop it and move onto something else. When it comes naturally is when it is really fun. So I think Florian is right to discontinue his monthly posts and he’s inspired me to also state publicly that I’m discontinuing Diversions.

That feels good.

Zhenyi Tan:

Technotes is a Safari extension that adds user-contributed notes to the Apple documentation website. The notes can include sample code, warnings about common pitfalls, and other useful stuff.

The Safari extension being for all sane, well reasoned individuals. There are, of course, versions of Technotes available for other browsers used by miscreants and ruffians.

A commenter on Michael Tsai’s blog singely named Matthew says: “This is a great idea, but the problem with all of these approaches of in-place supplementing of documentation and commenting, is one of critical mass.”

Let’s get Zhenyi some mass.

Note: Zhenyi is the majority contributor to Switcheroo, an app I could not live without.

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