The personal webpage of Blake Watson
I just like saying that. Clearly you should use whatever you want. “What is the SLAP stack?” you ask. Well, I just invented the name on Mastodon a few days ago. I don’t even want to do a web search to see if it’s already taken because that will take the wind out of my sails and I won’t finish this blog post. But first, there’s something you should know about me. I have this aphorism I live by:…
On my (retired) disability blog, back in 2010, I wrote a post called The tangible world wherein I ruminated on how I felt less and less able to interact physically with the world around me. I noted that many of the physical interactions I was missing out on were subtle, almost ephemeral, things that able-bodied people take for granted. I knew that much of my life was being spent at, and lived…
I consider myself a newcomer to D&D, based on my age. As someone born in the mid-eighties with a tendency toward video games, board games, and fantasy, I ought to have learned about—and probably loved—Dungeons & Dragons as a kid in the nineties. But somehow it took the airing of Community’s Advanced Dungeon & Dragons episode in 2011 for the venerable tabletop roleplaying game to appear on my…
Back in July of last year, I blogged about breathing new life into my freeform digital character sheet app . Well, I’ve been paying it more attention these past few months and I’m happy to say that (to my own surprise) I’ve added enough new features and quality of life enhancements that it warrants another post. There’s dice rolling, Open5e integration, character management, and more coming soon.…
I stumbled across this set of questions on Shellsharks’ website (which is a cool personal site oozing with inspirational indie web vibes). I thought it was a pretty cool, if not somewhat ridiculous thing to do. So here is my stab at answering 100 webmaster questions. If this is something you’d like to do too, I put all of the questions in this GitHub gist (with each question bolded in markdown) so…
Update 2026-07-31: TL;DR don’t install the GSD that I’ve linked to in this article. Something happened with the creator and people are saying that a crypto scam took place. I don’t really know what happened and don’t really care to research it, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that you shouldn’t let an LLM read a bunch of random instructions that you got from the internet. I said as…
A bit of website housekeeping. I’m constantly finding cool things on the web. Usually I end up sharing them with different group chats or via direct messages. But I figured I’d start off the new year by finally adding a link blog to my website—something I’ve been itching to do for a while. RSS feeds I started by publishing my link posts on my main feed, but I think that is a bit noisy. So I’ve…
I first published this list after seeing a similar post by Robb Knight ( 2023 , 2026 ) and many others . For each category, I’m listing the app I’m using now, plus my response in 2023 for comparison. Mail Client 2026: Fastmail.app 2023: Mail.app Mail Server 2026: Fastmail 2023: Pobox (Pobox has been owned by Fastmail for a while; they eventually discontinued it and migrated all the accounts to…
You may already know about tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) like D&D. They typically have a lot of rules and mechanics and one player serves as the game master, adjudicating these rules as the players describe their actions and roll dice for their various abilities. Solo RPG is when you play games like this by yourself instead of in a group. This sounded kind of depressing to me when I first…
I always feel like I didn’t accomplish much during the year until I start looking at my notes and commit history. Then I find myself pleasantly surprised. I’m eternally intertwined in a battle against routine. I need it—routine—but as the years fly past me, I feel an urgent need to break up the monotony. I want to slow time down. I tried to embrace some spontaneity this year. I managed to push…
Back in October, I had the pleasure of speaking at MagnoliaConf 2025 . I was thrilled that the organizers decided to put it together this year after skipping last year. It was perfect timing because I had the chance to talk about something that has been increasingly bothering me: our industry’s addiction to complexity. My talk was titled No build tool? No problem! ( notes and slides here ). If…
National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) entered my life in 2010. I was fresh out of grad school and unemployed. I was talking to a friend of mine who had picked up writing as a hobby in retirement. He described this wild writing challenge where thousands of people across the world would each attempt to write a 50k-word novel during the 30 days of November. As daunting as it sounded, I was…
Now that LLMs have been around for a little while, we can discern what they’re good at and what they’re not. Clearly they are good at using a lot of energy and resources and tend to make things up. But they have also demonstrated to be good summarizers, decent coders, and helpful teachers. But that’s not what I find truly novel about LLMs. They can generate a lot of content, much of which you will…
For years, I’ve used Hoefler&Co.’s webfont service, Cloud.typography , for several of my websites—including, until today, this one. I purchased Operator Mono in 2017 for my code editor and I still use it today. [1] I’ve long admired Hoefler&Co.'s work, although I was a bit bummed when they were acquired by Monotype . I used Ringside when I redesigned my website in 2019 , and that has been the…
Nowadays I’m used to signing up for services and discovering that the username blakewatson is already taken—yes I’m one of those people who uses their real name everywhere. But that’s okay because I have something the other Blake Watsons don’t. Back in 2005 when I was learning HTML and obsessed with the incredible knowledge that you could just upload a file to the internet and everyone could see…
My first foray into digital character sheets was the 5th edition form-fillable PDF, the official ones from Wizards of the Coast. Those quickly became annoying as there just wasn’t enough space to write everything down, even though it was typed instead of handwritten. I wasn’t planning to print my character sheet, yet I was being bound to unnecessary physical constraints. That’s when I began to…
I don’t know how it got here so fast. I feel behind in life for many reasons, not the least of which is my late start to being employed . But many people feel behind. And there’s no reason to. It’s not a rule that everyone do the same things by a certain age. Everyone’s different. Overall I’m happy where I ended up, even if I have a few regrets. The past decade has brought with it the increasingly…
May 4 is a special day. Not only because it’s Star Wars day , but because it was on that day in 2015 that I was hired for my first full-time job. Today marks one decade of being employed. I don’t suppose ten years of being employed is a milestone most people think about. And why should they? Most people work for many years—decades. One decade isn’t so special. But it’s a sentimental milestone for…
I’m fascinated by videos and other visual mediums that compare the sizes of objects and structures in the universe. I can’t get enough of them. And I’m not exclusively talking about planets, stars, black holes, etc. There is also the vast, yet tiny microcosmos. Unfathomable sizes and distances reign supreme in both the microscopic world and the universe at large. Just for fun I thought I would…
I’m coming up to a curve in the road. If I’m honest, I’ve already started the curve. My ability to use a hardware keyboard left me a long time ago, but fortunately I’ve retained my ability to use a mouse, albeit with more and more difficulty. I’ve taken to using SteerMouse to push the sensitivity, acceleration, and speed of my mouse past what most people would be comfortable with. I use an…
Chrome Web Store banner image In my last post I mentioned that I was working on a rewrite of my *checks notes…* eight-year-old (!) browser extension. In fact, I called it the final rewrite . Well, that rewrite is finished and A Fine Start is out on the Chrome, Firefox, and Edge stores (and at https://afinestart.me/bookmarks for everyone else). I started this rewrite in December and worked my long…
I’m nearly done rewriting my browser extension, A Fine Start , moving away from Vue 2 and using vanilla JavaScript. I’m calling this the final rewrite, as I’m trying to make it as easy for me to maintain going forward as possible, using as few dependencies as I can get away with. A Fine Start is a new tab page replacement. It shows columns of text links on your new tab page, which you can organize…
Sometimes it surprises me how things that I consider essential in my life—things that form parts of my identity—might have never found me. Only though happenstance did I learn about these things. People happened to enter my life and introduce me to these things I love. I thought it might be fun to call out a few of them. I’m indulging in a bit of nostalgia here. But that’s ok. When you have your…
Well, here we are again—another year. They seem to go by faster and faster, and this one in particular did. I’m just now getting used to the number 2024. The idea that it will be 2025 is surreal to me. This next year holds several sentimental milestones for me, which I’ll be writing about when they get closer. I accidentally started a tradition in 2022 of listing out some goals for the new year.…
I’m a big fan of home-cooked apps—a term I first heard from author Robin Sloan and have since run with. A home-cooked app is one that you create for yourself, friends, or family. It’s typically not something you are releasing to the general public. For me, this takes the form of various web applications. I gave a talk on home-cooked apps , which you can check out if you want to deep dive. Here are…
On Thursday, October 10, I released HTML for People into the wild. I emailed the 300-ish people who had signed up to be notified and then posted on Mastodon . The response blew me away. In a couple of days, my post got boosted over 2,000 times. The URL made it to the front page of Hacker News. Analytics shows tens of thousands of visits to the site. Moreover, I started getting messages, not only…
I switch notetaking apps constantly. It’s a problem I’ve had for a long time now. Unfortunately, I’ve probably spent more time hopping around notes apps than taking good notes. I’ve written about some of those times. There was that time I got into rich text , and the time I picked Simplenote out of several options at the time. [1] Here’s a quick list of notetaking apps I’ve used (the ones I…
Spinal muscular atrophy is pretty rare. There aren’t many of us out there relative to other conditions. I always enjoy connecting with people that have SMA, so I thought it would be nice to list out a few of the communities that are available. I imagine that the biggest one is the Living with MD group on Facebook. I’m no longer in this group because I deleted my Facebook account in 2017. Last I…
The following is a modified version of a writeup I did for my players in a play-by-post game we’ve just started on Discord. I wrote it to give the players a brief summary of the game and also to help myself understand the game, as I am also learning it for the first time. When I finished it, I realized it might be useful for other folks, so I’m posting it here. It has absolutely nothing to do with…
I did a bit of a design refresh Two years ago this month, I decided to make my own little app for keeping bookmarks. I’m a longtime customer of Pinboard , but I was becoming frustrated with errors in its archival functionally and, in general, it felt cumbersome to browse the way I wanted to. I decided I wanted to make something myself to fill this role. I didn’t originally plan to release the code…
For several years now I have been wondering how I might fit an e-ink display into my workflow. It’s not as simple as just getting one of the cool e-ink tablets that exist. For example the recently announced DC-1 from Daylight Computer looks amazing. Unfortunately, I do not possess the hand strength to handle a tablet. No, I’m stuck with using a Mac with a single-button mouse . I could purchase an…
Screenshot of the homepage for posterity. Try changing the color theme :-) This website began life as a typical personal homepage in the mid-2000s. Having dabbled with WYSIWYG programs for a few years prior, I had finally started learning HTML and CSS. And it wasn’t long until I decided I needed my own domain name. It was a static website because most websites were. At least the personal homepages…
My brother, Matt , and I decided to explore our fairly different musical tastes and do a song swap. What follows is my reaction to a song of his choice from his collection. Go check out Matt’s reaction to Lilac Wine by Jeff Buckley. Song: Kayama Artists: Karl Jenkins, Adiemus, et al Album: Adiemus https://song.link/i/1447107151 This track exudes 90s new age, which makes sense as it was released in…
No one is ever going to invent a Blake’s Life Simulator. Well, probably not. I can imagine some quantum computer of the future that allows you to simulate any person given known details of their life and AI-powered estimations. Short of that, this blog post will have to suffice. I’m now going to transport you to a place of wonder. A place of limitless creative possibility. A place to hang with…
I don’t link to it often but I do have an archive of my old disability blog . It used to have its own domain and everything. I did my best to make sure that old domain and any URLs still work and redirect to this static archive—because cool URIs don’t change . But I don’t link to them much anymore because the posts are old and I am slightly embarrassed by some of them. But every now and then I…
For two years in a row I’ve taken some time off at the end of the year to rest and relax and, most importantly, to work on personal projects. I’ve begun calling it my annual holiday sprint. This past year I ended up building two apps. One is a writing app built on omg.lol . It deserves its own blog post, but that’ll be another time. The other thing I built was a home-cooked collaboration with my…
I always feel like nothing much happened during the year. I’m not a super active person in terms of getting out and doing things so when I try to think back over the year it all feels kind of same-y. Work, eat, sleep, repeat. But when I push myself to come up with a list of accomplishments I end up pleasantly surprised. I believe it’s helpful to take stock of how you’re doing in life and write it…
In the fall of 2022, I started using Twitter more. I don’t know why; probably a curious desire to see how bad Elon Musk would screw it up. To make it bearable from a user interface perspective I alternated between the Twitterrific [1] and Tweetbot macOS apps. It was fun at first—getting back into Twitter and using a chronological timeline rather than an algorithmically generated one. But the fun…
I’m supposed to be frantically writing a story for National Novel Writing Month . But I also have a streak of posting to my blog every month this year and I want to keep it going. To that end, I’m taking inspiration from Robb Knight and the Hemispheric Views podcast and posting a list of default apps I use for various purposes. Mail Client: Mail.app Mail Server: Pobox Notes: Bear, Tot, Bike, iA…
Links and stuff Here’s quick list of links to the stuff I mention in the talk. Scroll down for the full text. This page is also accessible at . PDF slides An app can be a home-cooked meal by Robin Sloan Start (no longer maintained) A Fine Start - my side hustle My DIY bookmarks app Writer Emergency Pack National Novel Writing Month Finishing side projects Home-cooked app submissions: Scout’s…
I’m not a functional programming guru by any means, but I have a passing curiosity and I’ve been trying to learn more about it. I recently dealt with some annoying, repetitive code at work [1] by applying some functional programming concepts. Here’s a boiled down example that’s similar to what I ran into. First, suppose you have an API that gives you a list of TV shows. We’ll store them in an…
In late October 2019, I desperately scoured the NaNoWriMo forums searching for creative inspiration ahead of November’s big writing event. [1] At some point, I decided to write down as many ways to generate a story as I could think of. This was the result, which I just rediscovered in my notes. Steal the plot of another story Adopt a plot on the NaNo forums Combine a fairy tale with a different…
One web browser is plenty for most folks but you might find yourself needing more for various reasons. For instance, here is a handful of activities I can think of that you might want to perform in separate browsers: Work activity. Maybe you have a time-tracking extension for work. Or you are logged into your work Google account. Etc. Development. Maybe you love to develop in a particular browser…
I had an annoying situation where, when my AirPods connected to my Mac, they would take over as the active input device (ie, microphone). I didn’t want that because I already have a nice microphone setup. So I set out to find a way to prevent that behavior. I failed. The only solution I’ve been able to find is to change the input device back to my good microphone after AirPods connect. The easiest…
In high school, I still had the ability to handwrite, albeit with some difficulty. Toward the end of high school in the early aughts, I was given use of an ancient computer for completing some of my assignments. At that time, typing on a keyboard was easier than handwriting. After starting college in fall 2003, I continued to experience muscular atrophy in my hands. I was still able to type, but…
On June 16, 2023 a storm rolled through Mississippi. Violent straight-line winds and, possibly, a tornado caused several telephone poles in my subdivision to snap and fall, knocking out the power and blocking the only way in and out of the subdivision. Unfortunately, whole swathes of Mississippi’s power grid failed, overwhelming repair crews and leaving many residents without air conditioning…
One of my favorite game developers, Zachtronics, released their final game, Last Call BBS , a little while back. And in true Zachtronics fashion it fuses programming, retro futurism, and nostalgia to great effect, resulting in a fun, educational, and visually enticing game. Last Call BBS is interesting because it’s a set of mini-games. The game boots up like a retro computer and you dial in to a…
I don’t talk about this often, but I use a team of caregivers to help with all of my daily personal care needs. I’m fortunate enough to be on a program in the state of Mississippi that provides me (and my brother, Matt) with a certain amount of hours of personal care assistance per day. The program requires that I find my own caregivers, which is great in one sense because I have control of who…
Pretty soon after learning CSS and building my first few websites without table layouts (yes I’m old) I stumbled across the world of CSS frameworks. The oldest one I can remember using was the 960 Grid System . I guess calling it a framework is a stretch. It’s just a grid really. But at the time it was a breath of fresh air. I was trying to learn about design and grid systems and the 960 grid was…
I’ve noticed an alarming UI trend over the last five years or so. Apps are neglecting, misusing, or outright omitting the scrollbar from their interfaces. Notice isn’t the right word. I’ve been living this trend. I have a physical disability that, among other things, makes it difficult for me to scroll by using a typical scroll wheel or touch surface. That means I often scroll by clicking and…