High in the hills of Assynt, these caves contain traces of animals that roamed the landscape between the ice ages
I can't stop thinking about this stupid interaction I had while playing an online game with strangers. For context, my username is very obviously feminine and I don't hide the fact that I'm a woman when talking to strangers. Somehow, in the chat, the topic of operating systems came up and I mentioned that I use Linux. This man proceeded to tell me that I must be a man because women don't use Linux. It might just about be the stupidest thing I ever heard. As if I'm only capable of thinking about…
When I was a kid in the 1980s, it was quite common for “My friends” books to make their rounds on the schoolyard. These books consisted of two page questionnaires for your buddies to fill out so you could remember them all. One of the more common questions was “What are your hobbies” and I can’t remember when I started putting “learning” in there but I sure did. Rather early in my life I noticed that learning new things was a lot of fun for me! Reading up on things in my parents’ lexicon…
Blog post: https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1154/why-drawing-tablet-brands-wont-collaborate-on-linux-floss-drivers
Read time: 4 minutes. 927 Words I'm old enough to have seen the Internet become a thing. From the early days (for me) of simple emails and web pages, and squealing dial-up modems connecting to the web, to what we have now. Over that time things have gotten much more complex, useful, pleasing, and fast. We now have almost everything at our finger-tips. The CostWith this current incarnation of the information super highway, we have come to accept certain hindrances. I prefer to call it Friction.…
Democracy Design Lab asked Sarah Mirk to adapt Hamilton Nolan’s essay, Confiscate Their Money. They made the resulting zine available as a PDF to download, print, and distribute. Since the work is licensed CC-BY-NC 4.0, I’m reproducing it here in a format suited to reading on the web.
14 hours ago · 6 min read1145 words · Tech · 0 comments
The high schooler who developed everyone’s forums and guestbooks in 1996 didn’t really think about security when he was building all that software. But Matt’s Script Archive was more than exploits.Currently, I’m in the midst of writing a big post about the roots of web forums, but I hit on an aside weird enough that I decided to stop writing that and work on a separate post. Because I think it actually explains a lot about the way people use the internet.Essentially, here’s the deal. Around…
A while back I read The Last Quiet Thing, a fantastic piece by Terry Godier, a piece about a twelve-dollar Casio watch compared to an Apple Watch, and why one of them is a product and the other is a relationship. I've been thinking about it ever since, keeping my eye out for single-use devices that just get out of the way. That's how I ended up with an Xteink X4 in my pocket.It's a tiny pocketable e-reader, smaller than a cell phone, with an E-Ink screen and no agenda beyond displaying books.…
I don’t know if you play video games, but it’s likely you enjoy games in one form or another. Maybe you play a cozy game on your phone, a card game on your work computer (definitely only during breaks), or a cute adventure game on your gaming console. And table top games count, too, of course! NoteThere is no such thing as a real gamer or not, only gamers and gatekeepers. I mostly play on PlayStation, and a bit on PC, but also play a lot of sudoku on my phone (yes I am 400 years old), and the…
5 days ago · 8 min read1507 words · Culture · 0 comments
Since reading Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger and its parts about Covid and fitness influencer culture a while ago (especially the chapter "The Far Right Meets the Far Out"), I cannot help but see that “Pinterest clean girl fitness and fruit bowl gua sha yoga mat pilates in the forest” content as covert white supremacy and eugenicist ideals; dog whistles, shared far and wide by people who probably don’t know better and just think it looks good and want to be like that. I cannot quote the entire book…
Koriander CMS on PyPI Open in new tab (full image size 81 KiB) Try installing Koriander CMS from PyPI. All you need to run is the following, provided that you've installed pipx: pipx install koriander You can use Koriander CMS in your terminal with the koriander command. For example, to access Koriander CMS in your browser and create or edit new pages, use the following command: koriander serve You don't have to worry about which directory you start Koriander CMS from as it stores your site in…
I love Bear. It is one of the few places on the web that still feels calm, personal, and human. You write something, publish it, and it exists as a simple page on the internet. No algorithm. No follower count. No pressure to perform. For writing, Bear feels almost perfect to me. But I also take photos. Not professional photos. Not portfolio work. Just ordinary life: walks, family days, weekends, cities, small details, strange light, quiet moments I want to keep. And I never really knew where…
Here ya go, folks — check it out here. Thanks to the aforementioned RAM and memory apocalypse happening due to so much of the current pipeline of RAM and storage being pre-purchased for AI data centers, the pricing is a tough pill to swallow. You’ve got the base Steam Machine, 512GB of storage, no controller, for $1,049. If you want to add the Steam Controller (normally $99), that combo is $1,128. Want 2TB of storage? $1,349. Want that one with a controller? $1,428. But at least the 2TB models…
Bubbles —a site I am increasingly fond of as it’s turning up some wonderful posts and sites and people— was recently mentioned on Hackernews. I’ve followed Hackernews for a long time as a way to keep some form of view on the tech world (to which I am adjacent) but only check it every week or so. So I missed the moment when it happened, but there were signs… Can you spot when Bubbles got popular and then direct a fair chunk of traffic to my blog?? According to Benjamin Behnke, the Bubbles…
On this page You can now pre-order Valve's Steam Machine! Fortuitous timing as I drafted this as a follow up to my post from December where I wrote about using Linux for PC gaming. At that time Steam ran well on my desktop and I chipped away at lighter games on the Deck. I ended that post by saying: I don't think I'll buy a Steam Machine, but I'm very happy it will exist. I've been testing out dual booting Bazzite on my desktop and I'd love to replace that with SteamOS proper. If I can pick up…
I’ve been using Git for so long and I just realized you can ignore files at three different levels and not just with .gitignore. The three files you can use to ignore files are: .gitignore .git/info/exclude ~/.config/git/ignore .gitignore .gitignore is the usual file where you write files you want to ignore. It’s checked into Git along with the rest of the code. Whatever files you add to it will not get taken into account when running git commands. .git/info/exclude The exclude file lives in…
In my “Open sourcing a quiz maker” blog post, I frame my quiz maker as a step toward what could be something better: a script that you can use, but where I see a vision for something more robust and reliable.This got me thinking about how blog posts can, in many ways, be a starting point. A blog post can start a discussion, help build community around an idea, be a written representation of one’s foundational thinking on a topic, contribute an idea to the commons that needs further development,…
Have you ever wondered how best to summarise your character as a member of the blogging community? If so, this quiz is for you! Answer the following questions to find out which blogger archetype best suits you. Question 1 When you are spending time outdoors, what do you like to do best? Watch the world go by. Stay busy with activities and friends. Take a book and read. Go to something new (art exhibit, concert, cafe, etc.). Mentally organise my week. Question 2 What do you do when you are in…
Earlier this month, I discovered more Bear blogs that I haven't seen before via the platform's Random blog link feature. Compared to those found via the Random post link, many more empty blogs appear, as well as the rare oddity. This time, the latter caught my eye. Behold prettiestgirltoday. Instead of an empty blog, it's a barebones single-serving site with a nearly white background, a selfie of a woman puckering her lips, and this header text featuring the current date above the selfie: today…
1 day ago · 5 min read1098 words · Writing · 0 comments
This is the sort of book I usually hate. By law books about writing are so desperate to explain the world to me that I struggle to keep my eyes open. I don’t have much patience when I feel someone’s talking down to me, with them having figured the universe out already. Isn’t it always more exciting when a writer is on the tip of their toes just a half step ahead of you? When you’re invited to participate rather than being yelled at? Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several short sentences on writing slips…
I have a hypothesis that Linux and EVs have a similar characteristic: Once you switch, you’ll never want to go back. Nathan Edwards in The Verge: It didn’t take long for my Linux install to stop feeling new and exciting and start feeling like, well, my computer. It’s not exactly like a less annoying version of Windows, though it is less annoying than Windows, but it’s been a much easier transition than I thought it would be. There are a few extra steps sometimes in finding and installing apps —…
Made an anonymous confession board that lives in your terminal. Go ahead and post your confession 🫶🏼 $ ssh eipi.boo
Link: https://derekhanson.blog/nobody-clicks-your-share-buttons/(Via rendezvous with cassidoo.)I've always wondered if anyone actually used the social sharing buttons embedded on news sites and (some) WordPress blogs.Derek Hanson digs into the numbers: The UK government ran one of the most thorough studies on this. When GOV.UK added social sharing buttons, they tracked usage for 10 weeks across 6.8 million pageviews. The share buttons got clicked 14,078 times. That’s a 0.21% usage rate, which…
Nice, quirky web projects are always a joy to stumble upon. I recently came across Daniel Janus’s old handwritten.blog which is (or would have been anyway) a blog that was entirely handwritten. And by ‘entirely’ I mean entirely, from the header to footer to every little thing you would see on the webpage; nothing was typed up, all of it was written on a reMarkable 2 e-ink tablet. As you might suspect, it was unsustainable and was abandoned rather quickly, but not before Daniel had catalogued…
I’ve increasingly been introducing the small web to my daily reading. The small web is a loosely defined concept, partly an attempt to refocus the internet on old school technology, on text websites with less or no JavaScript, and a mix of reactions against the increasing centralization and commercialization of the internet. Part of it is just regular people writing and creating communities for the joy of it, because they want to, rather than in the pursuit of profit, thought leadership, or…
Consistency serves a purpose in visual design, but it seems to have become the purpose of a lot of visual design. Look no further than these evolutions of macOS icons (image courtesy of BasicAppleGuy): The Creator Studio icons are undeniably consistent visually: rounded rectangles, controlled gradients, simplified forms, restrained depth, etc. In contrast (and by modern standards) the originals seem heretically inconsistent. They lack coherence in visual details like shape, material, and…
It seems like the older child totoro doesn’t get enough attention. I made this to help remedy that.I actually carved this before the Jiji stamp, but am just getting around to posting it. The detail on this one was more challenging than the carvings that preceded it. I was still using the Speedball tool, and did not have the smaller 1mm gouge yet.I used the Tsukineko VersaFine Clair Blue Belle stamp pad for this print.There is an 18-second totoro imprinting video on YouTube.
After CalAction I wanted to experiment a bit with SpriteKit and try to make a small game for iPhone. I don't usually play any games on my iPhone myself, because most are overrun with garbage like ads and loot boxes. With Burst I wanted to do things differently. The bubble shooter genre (if you can call it that) has a lot of games in the App Store currently, but again most are either overrun with ads and scammy in-app purchases, or they haven't been maintained in many years. Burst has zero ads,…
Bubbles: functions a bit like Hacker News but specifically for personal blogs. You log in with a Mastodon or Fediverse account, upvote posts you like, and watch the good stuff bubble up. It is fantastic to see Bubbles getting some well-deserved spotlight in David Pierce’s latest Installer newsletter. This is a win for the Indie web and I am glad I had a minor part to play in this. The personal blogging community is thriving, and tools like Bubbles make discovering and participating in this…
I just read an article on ExtremeTech that the new Windows Media Player uses 3.5x more RAM than its predecessor, and it now charges users for third party codecs. This is asinine. What are you doing Microsoft?? I am trying to imagine what the managers at the helm are doing here. There's only two possibilities: Either they are completely blind to this issue and are asleep at the wheel, or they are aware of the requirements and have actively signed off on a worse product for reasons that are…