bubbles.town

  1. 16 hours ago · 7 min read1371 words · Politics · hide · 0 comments

    In early February 2011 Egypt was in the middle of a political revolution. One morning, everyone's phones suddenly pinged with an alert. The Armed Forces asks Egypt's honest and loyal men to confront the traitors and criminals and protect our people and honour and our precious Egypt. A series of messages arrived all ostensibly from the network provider Vodafone. All pro-regime and all with the undercurrent of violence. Why did Vodafone send these messages? Earlier in the week, all Internet…

  2. 4 hours ago · 7 min read1370 words · Life · hide · 0 comments

    Reflections on the impending closure of iconic independent San Francisco music venue, Bottom of the Hill from a dude who both played there AND went to shows there a lot Earlier this year I was sent an article by bandmates, friends, family, and members of bands we've played with over the years about something I knew would happen eventually yet reading it gutted me. The owners of iconic music venue Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco announced they'll be closing at the end of this year. Our…

  3. So there I was, standing in the paper goods aisle of the Piggly Wiggly at 8:45 on a Tuesday evening, having a full-blown crisis over two ply versus three ply. Now, when you’re seven, you think adulthood is going to be magnificent. You imagine staying up until midnight, eating chocolate cake for breakfast, and buying whatever cool stuff you want. Getting yourself a pony, 15 cats, and a mongoose named Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. Standard kid dreams. Nobody tells you that 80% of actual adulthood is just…

  4. → 404 Media

  5. 1 day ago · 9 min read1709 words · Tech · hide · 0 comments

    A couple of weeks ago, Fabrizio of Passo.uno dropped me a message on LinkedIn and told me that my article was No.2 on Hacker News. I thought he was pulling my leg. My article, “Substack writers, you need a website!” was something I wrote out of frustration from what I’ve been seeing. I checked Hacker News and indeed it was true: I was on the front page. By the time I checked, I had dropped to No.6, but I visited hnrankings.info to check the historical movement of the essay and saw that I was…

  6. 13 hours ago · 6 min read1225 words · Tech · hide · 0 comments

    For over a decade, I've been a proponent of writing detailed Git commit messages. I find it a valuable use of my time, and continue to double down on it, even in a world where you can get a Large Language Model (LLM) to write it for you. In the past, I've written about at least 89 strong feelings I have about Git commits, so I'm naturally biased to the benefit of commit messages, but why does this still hold in the current age, where a lot of people are delegating that to an AI agent, if at…

  7. 17 hours ago · 8 min read1547 words · Film & TV · hide · 0 comments

    I saw Spider-Man: Far From Necessary over the weekend and, like everyone else in the cinema, I sat through the entire end crawl to watch the ‘post-credits scene’ that has become so ubiquitous among superhero movies.On the one hand, it’s great to see so many people get the recognition they deserve for working on such a big endeavour. On the other hand, I just wanted to get home.But it reminded me of some research I conducted earlier in the year that I haven’t yet published. I built a system to…

  8. In the late 80s, a manager at Microsoft named Paul Maritz sent an email to a colleague suggesting they “eat their own dogfood.” What he meant was that LAN Manager, a product he oversaw, should get more internal use. How could they build a tool that others trusted if they didn’t trust it themselves? The term spread through Microsoft and later the tech industry. “Eating our dogfood” or simply “dogfooding” has come to mean precisely what Paul meant: using our own products. (Paul was likely…

  9. 1 day ago · 21 min read4267 words · Tech · hide · 0 comments

    A week ago, when I was working on my project for HTML Day 2026 I stumbled upon this passage from an essay on blink and marquee tags: At the time, there was a new breed of web professionals proudly labeled “webmasters.” Part designer, part developer and part evangelist, webmasters held enough esoteric knowledge about the web to manage, edit and create websites, both large and small. — Jay Hoffman (August 28th, 2017) And that's when everything clicked for me. Over the past year, I've written…

  10. The computer I use the most is my couch laptop. It's a MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015) running Debian 13 and sits on a little roller table thing that I can pull up to me while I'm sitting or push out of the way and the top of it tilts up; it's a pretty nice setup. Day-to-day, I'm doing normal web browsing, reading my RSS feed, checking social media in a web browser, typing up blog posts with Typora and interacting with Claude Code via VS Code to work on my various personal projects…

  11. Finding a better way to waste time.

  12. 1 : something devised or contrived: such as a(1) : a piece of equipment or a mechanism designed to serve a special purpose or perform a special function Merriam-Webster Dictionary I'm not, it must be said, the worlds most practical man. I can do a few things however, and have enough practical background to recognise when something is a truly beautiful example of a tool. Something made to be used, but also made itself of metal and wood and human ingenuity and a thing of beauty in its own right.…

  13. What is it? An aggregator for non-commercial personal blogs! How does it work? Log in with your Mastodon account and you can upvote (no downvotes) blog entries. There are multiple view types akin to Reddit but unlike reddit, there are no user submissions here. Entries are all automated, after the blog has been manually approved by the moderator. Why? It’s a good way for your blog to get discovered AND a good way for you to discover new blogs! And you can even get daily or weekly “newsletters”…

  14. 1 day ago · 10 min read2088 words · Life · hide · 0 comments

    I was born and raised in Australia, which has some of the best coffee in the world (I'm not biased, I swear!) so finding good coffee can be a bit of a high bar for me. But Japan doesn't disappoint, and if you know where to look there are so many good coffee spots in Tokyo. There's a big range too, from your traditional kissatens to espresso-based drinks to pour-overs. Usually if we have a free day on the weekend, my husband and I will hop on the train to check out a new cafe somewhere in Tokyo.…

  15. My daughter gets stung weekly and still told me to write this. My daughter, Jennifer, hates bees, wasps and anything that might sting her. I don't blame her. She's a magnet for them. They'll ignore everybody else present and make a beeline (see what I did there?) straight for her. She'll start waving her arms about and jumping around, inevitably hitting one, which will immediately retaliate and do what bees do. Of course she doesn't really hate bees, she just hates getting stung by them. I love…

  16. Sony took away digital movies that people paid for. Streaming services keep raising rates. Amazon bricked old Kindles. Sounds like the LA Clippers broke salary cap rules. Sports teams use tax payer money to build stadiums. Billionaires and VC just bought the Lakers, I guess. See also, The American Sports Plutocracy Is Bullshit. People will start turning their backs on all this. Back to buying books, borrowing movies from the library, going to local sporting events. I can see movie rental places…

  17. 3 days ago · 6 min read1152 words · Art · hide · 0 comments

    On Monday, I came back to my day job from a weeklong vacation wherein we did birthdaversary stuff and packing / moving related activities. I rarely if ever talk about work here but one of the first things out the gate when I logged in was that I apparently missed a companywide meeting on how Claude use is now mandatory for all departments, and I was going to have to watch the missed session on how to implement it into my workflow. On top of that, the company has repositioned itself as an…

  18. 18 hours ago · 9 min read1747 words · Tech · hide · 0 comments

    This week my guest is James Sweeting. He’s a lecturer/researcher in Game Studies with a focus on nostalgia, hauntology, and media form. He manages a blog and also Relative Nostalgia. You can follow him on Mastodon, Bluesky or subscribe to his RSS feed. Today, here are his topics ⤵️ Bluesky Given how Threads is apparently used daily by millions of users and somehow X still has a strong core userbase I would say that Bluesky is still underrated. Sure, in practice it’s basically a copy of what…

  19. Robert Kingett tooted that indieweb folk are saying RSS readers are flawed, I'm here to say that feeds are ESSENTIAL to the web, all of it, and if any web gardener/creator/writer folk are indeed saying this, they need to re-evaluate.

  20. 1 day ago · 9 min read1883 words · Writing · hide · 0 comments

    Don’t let the absence of a flying car in your garage distract you: we are definitely now living in a version of the future out of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson. Every day I notice a news story that startles or alarms me, that feels like pure cyberpunk, nestled between reports about council bin collections and cabinet reshuffles. “The first ever IV Drip clinic to appear in the centre of a shopping mall, our Westfield clinic is a must-stop shop when doing a bit of retail therapy. From Vitamin…

  21. When I was young, you told me the scientists couldn’t agree. I argued when you blustered, that one volcano meant our emissions didn’t matter. I plead when you complained, it was hotter when you were younger. I whined when you joked, that China produces more than us so don’t bother. I despaired when you claimed, that global warming was fake because it was cold today. I cried when you asserted, that you had had enough of experts. I shrugged when you postured, we need to acclimatize when no rain…

  22. GitHub has been having enough outages lately that people are starting to ask whether it makes sense to look elsewhere. Ever since Github got acquired by Microsoft it started getting bloated and enshittified - it lost its direction and doesn't seem to care about its customers. And Github is probably not the only one - there are many other examples. We got to have a kill switch for this - when do we as a community say enough is enough and switch from GitHub. If a tool constantly proves…

  23. Today, Instagram updated its logo wordmark. CNET had a nice image of the before and after, presented below as after and before: Instagzam vs. Instagram Although I don’t think AI was used in the creation of the new logo, it still smells of it in the way AI messes up things, like: Goofy kerning Goofy mix of cursive and non-cursive letters (apparently trying to call back to the previous logo the same way someone riding a bike off a picnic table and crashing calls back to Evel Knievel) Goofy…

  24. First, a warning. This post contains pictures of spiders. Big spiders. If this worries you, perhaps consider reading something else - I suggest my previous post: Borneo - No Spiders.We...

  25. It’s a great topic. AI. Easy to dismiss. Easy to praise. But it isn’t everything. Not everything needs to be in comparison with it. Not every thought shared needs to take a stand for, or against, it. Not every article has to include a reflection on it. Sometimes you can just forget AI exists. Post the photo. Publish those thoughts. But don’t say that AI couldn’t have done this. Or AI wouldn’t do that. Or that it would be better with AI. Just let it go. Stop moaning about AI. Find a different…

  26. 7 days ago · 9 min read1813 words · Tech · hide · 0 comments

    Welp. My Forgejo instance got popped with an RCE two days ago by CVE-2026-60004. Luckily, I noticed the following morning and had the day free to figure out what happened. Let's dive in! The IncidentI woke up on Saturday morning to several Pushover notifications from Komodo warning me that my server's CPU usage was quickly spiking to 95%, then dropping back to 80%. That machine has an i5-10600K that normally idles at ~4% usage. I checked Komodo and found that it'd been at a sustained 50% CPU…

  27. This is my 8th blog post for the Blaugust 2026 community blogging project. Join me all this month for more blogging. Today I am celebrating the one-year anniversary of the next chapter of my life: retirement. I am having a great retirement. In the years approaching, I gave it a lot of thought and was prepared for it. The way I see it, I am no longer employed, but I have a job: be retired. I had an experience back around 2009 that showed me what a bad retirement could look like. It scared me,…

  28. Privacy and compliance theatre, with its endless acts and elaborate productions, is getting exhausting, to be honest. The latest performance comes courtesy of Amazon:“As customers shop with us more frequently, including on their phones, and use the ‘Your Orders’ page in the Amazon app to get real-time, consolidated order details and delivery status, we’ve simplified several order-related emails to direct customers to our app and website for the latest information on their orders,” spokesperson…

  29. Urban Pickleball – New York, New York It looks like the Pickleball craze has hit New York City as well. I saw another Pickleball court at Hudson Yards, but it wasn’t nearly as interesting visually. It looked too clean and corporate. This one, located in an inner-city park, has a much grittier urban appearance, complete with a chain-link fence. Back when I grew up in New York, we played paddleball or handball on these courts. When I was picking up tennis, I would use the wall to practice. Times…

  30. 5 days ago · 8 min read1652 words · Culture · hide · 0 comments

    Introduction Gordon, Gordon, Gordon… I think you should look back at what you have written in Tech sucks? Really? and reassess your thoughts. Your conclusion shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between technology, companies, and customers in my opinion. Technology doesn’t suck. I think the problem is that we’ve allowed a handful of enormous companies become the gatekeepers to the extraordinary technology that many of us can’t imagine living without. You can’t separate the…

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