🫧 Open on Bubbles 
 I’ve always wanted a typewriter. Will I use it? I think so. Will it be practical for my purposes? Probably not. Logical questions aside, I think I’ve just always saw it as the height of cool. I like the idea of me having one. I like who I am, sitting at a typewriter. Will I write a crime novel or just journal? Who knows. I think I’m going to do it though. Now to figure out…
🫧 Open on Bubbles I store all of my important (and many not so important) documents in my
 Paperless-ngx instance running on my homelab.
Given this importance, I wanted to add an additional backup of my documents and
the metadata. Having them in cloud storage, while not ideal for privacy reasons,
would also give me a way to access the documents easily if I am unable…
🫧 Open on Bubbles We had a visa appointment at the US Embassy in the capital city, Ankara, on Friday. We were supposed to go there by the sleeper train on Thursday night but unfortunately my wife, in a way very out of character for her, made a mistake and bought tickets for Friday night instead. We needed to find a bus ticket in a rush to make the appointment (very early in the morning) on time.…
🫧 Open on Bubbles 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. 



 
…
🫧 Open on Bubbles As a race, humans are really bad at doing cost benefit analysis. We might try and weigh up the pros and cons but we all have a tendency to exaggerate the pros if they are beneficial to us and downplay the cons that we can't directly see. This is also the case if the downsides are not immediate but will affect us at some point in the future. 
 We see this pattern throughout…
🫧 Open on Bubbles It finally happened - I lost access to my stupid Microsoft account and have now lost access to all my One Drive files too. It was my fault. Well, mine and the chaotic digital mess of usernames and passwords and emails we have to keep track of in the 21st century. I won't even bother to go into the stupid details. 
 After going through the recovery process many times and even…
🫧 Open on Bubbles Wanted to respond to one of the top blog posts in the Bear Blog Discover feed recently. The author says it would be nice to be able to limit a phone's ability to access only one app and to hide photos. Both of these features exist, the author simply imagines them in too an abstract manner. The first feature can be achieved through IOS's Guided Access features where you can set a…
🫧 Open on Bubbles I haven't seen an AD on YouTube in at least a decade with various forms of ad-block, most recently Adguard on my router and uBlock Origin on all of my devices. So why do people pay for YouTube premium when all of its features can be achieved for free? I acknowledge uBlock Origin has been limited on non-Firefox browsers in recent time but it isn't a challenge for those that try.…
🫧 Open on Bubbles I recently had the pleasure of speaking with MagiGamer (whose name is Jiayu!) for my AYN Thor Lite article where I wanted to highlight some of the people who have taken AYN's hardware and made it their own. Her handmade resin buttons won me over instantly: they're colorful, glittery, intricate and, frankly, just beautiful things to make your AYN Thor your own! I ended up having…
🫧 Open on Bubbles This piece was originally published in Waging Nonviolence . Last September I made a short video that was by far the most viral piece of content I’ve ever put out. I can’t trace all the views, but at least a million people watched it across Instagram and TikTok, and possibly elsewhere. Neighbors in Athens, Greece told me they’d come across my face in their feed; Chinese accounts…
🫧 Open on Bubbles 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 H acker News and indeed it was true: I was…
🫧 Open on Bubbles 
 UC Berkeley researchers have identified regions of DNA that humans inherited from two unknown ancestors as a result of long-ago interbreeding among modern humans and at least four other archaic human relatives. 
 New technique pinpoints human DNA inherited from ‘ghost’ ancestors 
 We are a melange.
🫧 Open on Bubbles 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…
🫧 Open on Bubbles “I Want You” by The Silencers 
 Listen on Apple Music 
 Your browser does not support the audio element. 
 What song makes you want to dance alone in your room? 
 Many songs make me want to dance. Plunder my playlists for Basement Jaxx, Chemical Brothers, Disclosure. Visit my memories of 90s rap blaring from my car stereo. Grab my love of disco and my rendition…
🫧 Open on Bubbles 
 Note This was supposed to be one post, but it grew so long that I had to split it up. Here are/will be the others . 
 
 In July, I visited the Vienna Museum which reinvigorated my love for museums which is why I decided I needed to visit more museums this summer. The Vienna Museum was such a brilliant start for me because a) the permanent exhibition which…
🫧 Open on Bubbles 
 This one should be more fun than yesterday's Blaugust post 
 
 You know those moments where you're going about your day, brushing a cat and they're like, leaning into it and purring and then suddenly you're hit with an intrusive thought about the existence of Might No. 9 ? And how you once foolishly gave money to it? 
 This morning after giving the diabetic…
🫧 Open on Bubbles 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.
🫧 Open on Bubbles 
 Antiperspirant without aluminum 
 Toothpaste without fluoride 
 Mouthwash without antiseptic ingredients 
 Food without salt (and don’t get me started on msg!) 
 Food without seed oils 
 Fat-free mayonnaise 
 Lip balm without petroleum 
 Hand sanitizer without alcohol 
 Acetone-free nail-polish remover 

🫧 Open on Bubbles 
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…
🫧 Open on Bubbles Last year, I made a
 rudimentary attempt to capture some Perseids on video 
from my London home. Inspired by the fact that I managed to get something, I
decided to try again this year. 
 I was better prepared this time. I knew what camera settings I used on my Canon
EOS R5 Mark II last time, so I didn’t need to spend much time thinking about
those. And I…
🫧 Open on Bubbles Dave Rogers’ Nice Marmot 
 
 Republicans, “conservatives,” always, always like to make a big show of “supporting the troops.” 
 It’s bullshit. It’s performative bullshit by people who never served anyone but themselves. Republicans and conservatives and the MAGA crowd are unacquainted with the notion of honor. It’s absent from their lives.
You reap what you sow.…
🫧 Open on Bubbles 
 
 
 
 The eagle-eyed among you may have spotted that I've add an upvote button above the comments section. Don't worry it's an IndieWeb thing not CorpoWeb thing. If you haven't heard of bubbles.town then where have you been this past few months? 😉 
 It's a place for discovering IndieWeb content a bit like a HackerNews for nontechnical blogs and articles.…
🫧 Open on Bubbles 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…
🫧 Open on Bubbles Published in 1953, Paycheck dares to ask the question, how much of your life would you sacrifice for money? It reminds me of Johnny Mnemonic , the Johnny Depp film/William Gibson short story, where people carry sensitive information for corporations in their brain, but lose their memories as a result. In Paycheck , individuals are rented for a certain amount of years to complete…
🫧 Open on Bubbles 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…
🫧 Open on Bubbles 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Broken Cellphones 
 
 
 
 Introduction 
 So, I had planned to spend a lovely evening watching the returns in the Clacton by-election, but it seems that there are a few things I need to address on the topic of technology and voting with your wallet. (I actually did take a break and watched the results of the…
🫧 Open on Bubbles 
 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…
🫧 Open on Bubbles I’ve been thinking lately about what happens to my online writing and photographs after I die. To be clear, at my current age I expect to last at least another 20 years. But I’ve entered the time of life where my death isn’t an abstract someday — I can see it from here. 



 I’m not kidding myself that my work is so important that it must go into the National…
🫧 Open on Bubbles 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…
🫧 Open on Bubbles It’s been a few months since my post on leaving Gmail which sparked a lot of discussion on Hacker News . Email isn’t the most exciting topic in the world, but I figured I should give a little update on how things have been going after the move to Fastmail since so many people saw the original post. 
 The quick version is that I think I picked right with Fastmail. You can…
🫧 Open on Bubbles 
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…
🫧 Open on Bubbles 
Just after I talked a little bit about my adventures with YouTube this year, and my quiet hopes to maybe one day earn a little bit from my work, YouTube drops the bomb on all small channels by increasing the requirements to unlock monetization in the future.

🫧 Open on Bubbles 
 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…
🫧 Open on Bubbles A few weeks ago I finished reading Leviathan Falls , the ninth and final book in The Expanse series by James S.A. Corey. 
 I started the series all the way back in October 2024. Not long before that, in May, is when I got my first e-reader to try to get into reading a little more seriously. I’ve read plenty of other books since then, but The Expanse has been somewhat of a…
🫧 Open on Bubbles 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 Incident I 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…
🫧 Open on Bubbles I’m just starting out with bird photography, and I’ve compiled a short-list of birds I want to take photos of, to have some sort of goal when I’m out there and what to look out for. It also helps if I have a few birds I’ve looked up to be able to say “oh cool, that’s a gray kingbird!” 
 I went on my first outing today dedicated to bird photography and after a few shots I…