Blog by Nicholas Boyd Isacsson
Introduction I started writing a Mastodon post earlier today, and it quickly grew too large for Mastodon’s post limit. Naturally, instead of simply posting it as a thread, I spent most of my day rewriting my website to support blog posts. The world of blogging is very much new to me. I’ve read countless blogposts over the years, yet never felt I had enough to say to justify having one of my own. I…
I’ve been spending a lot of time on Mastodon lately, and as much fun as I’m having, I’ve also been struggling to unify my enthusiasm for open, federated software with my more or less lifelong dislike of social media. Truth is, I don’t think I’ve ever been as active on any social site as I am on Mastodon (which is still only a couple posts a week), but I’m coming to realise I’m more in enthused by…
First generation In mid-2020, stephen304 developed a simple bash script called CastBlock which leveraged the SponsorBlock API and go-chromecast library to monitor Chromecast devices on your local network, finding community flagged sponsor segments in the videos you watched, and tell the Chromecast to skip past them. This first generation of SponsorBlock for Chromecast wasn’t without issues. One…
I recently blogged about my experience of social media in Social Media, Mastodon and Me . My initial outline of that post was quite a bit wider, also discussing my thoughts on today’s digital landscape and our increasingly smartphone-dependent society, but I decided to rein it in and focus on a single topic. This post is somewhat of a sequel, expanding on those thoughts and chronicling the first…
For a few years now I’ve been buying tea calendars each advent. At first, it was mostly the novelty of having a new (often flavoured) tea to drink each day, but as my interest in tea has developed, it has become more about expanding my horizons and trying out different kinds of tea. In 2023, I got the pure tea advent calendar from Tee Kontor Kiel , and kept a daily log on Mastodon for each tea.…
It’s now been several months since I posted about giving up my smartphone for a dumbphone . You may remember I promised an update “in a few weeks” but, while I did start it shortly thereafter, I ended up having to put it on hold to focus all my writing energy on my thesis . Having finished that up and graduated last month, I can finally commit to providing some insight into how things have gone,…
One of my goals since the very start of this blog has been to make that classic post, seen on nearly all personal blogs, where the author apologises for the recent lack of posts and promises to do better in future. It seems that time has finally arrived, as more time has passed between my latest blog post and now, than between the blog’s creation and that previous post. Apologies for the radio…
After almost 5 years of the ASCII art, terminal-like design of nichobi.com, I decided to redesign the site from scratch. My main goals have been: Cosy up the place with some nice pleasant colours, hopefully more in line with what I’m writing about. Make reading long form content a bit more pleasant. Have a less restrictive theme, so I can add some more fun elements. The first goal lead to me…
2024 was my fifth year running of tea advent calendars, for most of which I’ve been trying to sample as large a variety as possible. This year, rather try a little bit of everything, I decided to narrow the scope and try a large selection in a small niche. I was a little nervous going in. While I really like matcha, I haven’t drunk that much of it before. I started drinking it seriously a couple…
For the past 5 or so years, I’ve been getting a tea advent calendar every Christmas, and this year was no exception. Following up on last year’s matcha calendar , I ended up picking a Japanese green tea advent calendar , also from Nio teas. I’d say Japanese greens are my favourite category of teas, so I’ve got high hopes for this year’s teas, and can’t wait to dive in! Each tea comes in a 5g…