A variety of interesting things
First, I love the title and the cover art. Basically any reference to "black sun" gets me, because as a teenager I loved Soundgarden's Black Hole Sun , and one of my favourite books was Black Sun Rising by C.S. Friedman... So there's some aspect of nostalgia there. And, indeed …
“There’s no point in having fuck-you money in the bank if you never say ‘fuck you’!”
I find everything about Gina Trapani's website Note to Self inspiring, including this post about simple programming projects she's done for herself. I'm definitely going to crib this idea; both the making of simple scripts and apps for myself (which I'm already doing), and the sharing of them here.
Having just gotten my winter boots repaired, I once again had recourse to Ian Fieggen's indispensible database of shoe-lacing tutorials . But this time I ended up on his homepage and his site is such a joyously retro collection of interesting things (sort of like how I aspire to have this …
I just came across musician Teddy Swims, from hearing Lose Control in a hair salon and looking him up. I just listened to his album I've Tried Everything But Therapy (Part 1.5) 1 and I love it. Sound reminds me of discovering Gnarls Barkley 2 and Fitz and the …
Austin Churton Fairman (15 November 1924 – 4 April 1997), who used the name Churton Fairman but was more widely known under the pseudonym Mike Raven in the 1960s and early 1970s, was a British radio disc jockey, actor, sculptor, sheep farmer, writer, TV presenter and producer, ballet dancer, flamenco guitarist …
The most obvious example is user accounts. In most cases, I, as a user, don’t need an account. Yet programs keep insisting that I, not them, “need” one. I don’t. I have more accounts already than a population of a small town. This is something you want, not …
This is a free app that lets you download entire websites as single files for offline browsing (their headliner is downloading Wikipedia). Not sure this is immediately useful, but it feels useful. Bookmarked to try sometime.
So much of enjoying something involves knowing how to enjoy it. This is a post about books, but that there is a truth about everything. Via Subscriber Writing, September(ish) 2025 - Freddie deBoer
I've been a long-time user of Plex , and a happy one. I have a lifetime Plex Pass from back before it was a subscription. There are great client apps for Plex, like Prologue for managing and listening to your audiobook library. And yet... Plex is closed-source, and some things about …
A frog has no trouble grabbing a fast-moving fly in midair. But the same fly, sitting on a leaf, is safe, essentially invisible to the frog. We’re a lot like frogs sometimes. We choose to pay attention to things when they’re changing, not when they feel normal. If …
As I gradually rebuild this website up from nothing, it amused me to have no stylesheet for a while, and just see black text on a white background with blue links that turn purple when you visit them. Talk about a throwback! But now it’s time to add some …
nb is a command line and local web note‑taking, bookmarking, archiving, and knowledge base application I came across this the other day while researching plaintext/CLI-based workflows, and my eyes bugged out of my head like in those old cartoons where a wolf sees a pretty woman 1 —this …
It’s so funny, all the ways I come up with to hold myself back from just making stuff and sharing it with the world , to wit: I’ve written, or drafted and half-written, lots of posts over the last many, many years that I never posted on my various …
I often feel like a failure. But you can’t fail at your life. The pain comes from our need for narrative: you tell yourself a story of how your life is gonna go, and then, when it refuses to go that way, you hate it. Or you hate the …
I was thinking about the Peloton guy who drinks water out of his hand: Daring Fireball: Somebody Tell This Guy He Can Just Buy a Cup to Keep Upstairs And how I’d read about it through the lens of people mocking him, and someone said somewhere that he doesnt …
I never remember what plastics I can recycle and what I can’t; this is a handy reminder.
I’m a huge fan of people who dive into arbitrary corners of pop culture in insane amounts of detail. Therefore, I couldn’t be happier to have found this deep dive into the ending of The Sopranos, inspired by the discussion of the scene found in episode 462 of …
This is cool. Coming to you from The Village. 😎 Direct link to scalable image (via Tim Ferriss's 5-Bullet Friday newsletter)
our lives are held together with thoughts of where we might be tomorrow. And of disappointed yesterdays. (via Tim Ferriss's 5-Bullet Friday newsletter)
I've been looking for guides for how to do .NET development in Vim, because Vim has long appealed to me for a variety of reasons too esoteric to get into right now. And, despite it being what I'm using to write this post, I'm hungry to get away from Visual …
Someday. Yes, someday. Someday I'm going to spend a lot of money on a mechanical keyboard. ...Probably this one . This guide is a good quick-reference that summarizes some of the many, many, ridiculous number of options available. 😂
“The most important thing to remember is this: To be ready at any moment to give up what you are for what you might become.” — W.E.B. Du Bois (via @patrickrhone )
Great little essay by Patrick Rhone, making the argument against relying on a piece of software to hold your journal: The history of computing has copious evidence to back me up on that bold statement. The evidence shows that Day One (who I will note bills themselves as a “journal …
I've added this to my workouts to start building the strength and stability I'll need to do full overhead presses eventually. Bookmarking for ease of reference.
Setting up Visual Studio Code for F# Cool: you can open a Terminal in VSCode with ^ + ` Do I need to install an extension to use F#? Syntax colouring is built in, looks like Let’s try creating an FSX script file Ok, I can do that, it has syntax highlighting …
Love this brief post from Rick LePage, especially the bit from Seinfeld. And the bit about the work being hard, and that being by necessity and design. It goes with something I've been thinking a lot lately: that my mood and self-image and maybe mental health in general improve a …
I always try to do sudo cd /some/restricted/dir and it doesn’t work and I always forget why. sudo cd won't work because the cd command is built into the shell. So you are saying become root and then run this command. You become root and then the …
It gets complicated . I wanted to read some Hellboy comics, after watching the first movie last year 1 . So, the other day, I got myself some comics and tore through the first half of the main Hellboy set of stories. I usually like reading my comics in print, in trade …
OMG, you guys… MegaZeux still exists! I used to fool around with this ASCII-art game/game editor 25 years ago! It was a new, more-advanced version of ZZT, which might technically still exist, too . A week off + quarantine has made me nostalgic for the games of my youth, and today …
I want to switch away from CloudApp to a host/domain under my control, and DropShare looks like a great alternative, because it lets you pick a back-end. They have instructions for setting up SCP/SSH using your own server via nginx on DigitalOcean. I’ve already got danj.ca …
Nice collection by James Clear. Reading material. ...Point off for incorrectly hyphenating "all time" in the title, though. 😏
Highlights/Notes: After I wrote the item “do something nice for a friend” – because being a good friend and having good friends is important to me. I completed the pair with the item, “do something nice for myself”. A secondary thought, but still, a thought. This understanding started reading Burnout …
A lot of good potential resources for IndieWeb/decentralized/non-siloed social media tools in here.
Well, half a day, really. Yesterday, I wrote about how I took a week off of wearing my Apple Watch, to see what it would be like to pry myself away from the technology that rules my life. While I was writing that, I had the idea to toss my …
After closing my rings every day for over 200 days, I stuck my Apple Watch in a drawer for a week, to see if I'd be happier without it running my life. I've been wearing it again for a few days now, and... I think I'm keeping it. It's occurred …
Everything he says about what it's like to be brought up male—the lack of connection with our own emotions, the devaluing 1 of femininity, both in ourselves and in women—it all strikes a chord with me. And really that's not-strong-enough a word but a better one escapes me …
Like in most other areas of my life, I've been privileged to come at the question of body weight without undue stress or anxiety: I'm male, and naturally skinny, so "lose weight" has never been a thing I felt the need to do. Having good problems isn't the same as …
I always find Seth's posts insightful. And he posts so many of them, and they're so concise... that basically he's a walking example of why writing and publishing every day is the only way to get great at being a writer and a publisher. This post captures so well why …
This is an excellent—and harrowing—look at the downsides that come with being well-known. Various measures of "success" in today's world seem to bring some measure of fame along with them—insofar as you have to create content to get people's attention, for a lot of small creators especially …
In a similar post a couple months ago, I talked about taking an app I've had for a long time (OmniFocus, in that case) and "doubling down" on it—making it a more regular part of my daily life. It occurred to me today that Instapaper is another such app …
I've been wanting to take up gardening for a long time—in particular, growing some of the veggies I use in my everyday cooking. This is both a health thing, a sustainability thing... and just a nerd thing. There's a lot about the idea of growing crops that appeals to …
Patrick Rhone shared a link to his /reading page , where he posts short notes on all the books he reads. I saw this page, and immediately thought two things: I love that! I should have a /reading page on my site …It’s too bad the hyperlinks he provides to …
It's a stunning thought, to the point of vertigo, how much time and energy and sweat and blood we invest in a life we don't actually want. [...] It is no surprise that the people we admire took alternate paths. Both Coulton and the sadly-defunct The Last Psychiatrist blog were essential …
I love both of these, but I was particularly drawn by the one about anxiety, that being one of my things . Anaïs Nin on Love, Hand-Lettered by Debbie Millman – Brain Pickings "Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It creates the failures. It makes others feel as you might. When a drowning …
OmniFocus is one of these accessories for my 'aspirational' life. You know, I want to be this disciplined, highly-organized and productive person, and this tool should help me do that. But really, I've owned a license to this app on both the Mac and iOS for years, and never really …
I have really mixed feelings about this massive article, which I'm bookmarking because I'm only part way through it. The good: it's full of extremely tactical actions you can take right now, while you're reading it. The bad: it's on Medium 😛 ; the writer is, um, rather pretentious and self-satisfied; the …
It's obnoxious that this is even required—and who knows how effective it is to opt out of any of these companies. Are they trustworthy?—But it's worth taking a look, for the sake of your online hygiene.
I like Curtis's post about finding open alternatives to even excellent apps like Ulysses: in the longish run, I'd like to do the same. Bookmarking this for reference (and props).
I've had a tab for this 2014 Ars Technica article open for ages, let me collect the series here: How to run your own e-mail server with your own domain, part 1 Taking e-mail back, part 2: Arming your server with Postfix and Dovecot Taking e-mail back, part 3: Fortifying …