Recent Posts on Digging for Fire
While Joshua has been busy vibe-coding his own to-do app, I've been making my own brand of mischief over in hardware land. To-do apps are a right of passage for any programmer. But I'm feeling jaded and old. I don't want yet another slice of software asking me to pick up my phone. So instead, I decided to build some custom firmware for the LilyGO T-embed. The main menu. My spin on the classic…
I realize that some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where I'm willing to absolutely put my foot down as the top-level maintainer. Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it. Or just walk away. AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it's clearly a useful one.
Hey, Turnis. Not sure if you noticed, but the iPhone mini is having a moment. In January, search traffic for the term "iPhone mini" peaked1 – six times more search traffic than when the iPhone 13 Mini was released. The traffic continued throughout the year, dwarfing interest in "iPhone Air".2 When the iPhone 17 was released, Luke Guillory's review for Esquire started by noting his devotion to the…
The killer use case for personal computers is text editing. Typesetting, typewriting, handwriting – these produce text, but they can't edit. Sure, computers can do a lot of things. Games, maths, file management. But the magic lies in .txt files. Plain text – the Platonic ideal of a file, a foundational discovery that justifies the utility of a home computer. The internet was built by plain text.…
GenAI is not a bubble ready to burst. It's an elastic band, pulled taught. Stretched by frontier AI companies pushing a doom and disruption narrative. Pulled by spammers and scammers and ex-crypto-grifters, polluting with web with truckloads of slop. Ratcheted further by a tech industry pouring AI sauce all over their products, blind to their customer's distaste. But normal people don't like AI.…
I love teaching. I love code. And guess what… I love teaching code. That is why I joined the WordPress Plugin Review team. Because, although we get our fair share of know-it-all plugin authors, and no small number of submissions from developers better than me, I often found myself in a position where I could teach, coach, or mentor. Gently, carefully, so as to not be obtuse or belittling. Helping…
Every Friday night we invite guests for Shabbat dinner. Whenever I pass on the details to an invitee, I'm careful to always ask: Do you have any dietary requirements? We cater for all sorts in our house, because all sorts are welcome. Gluten free, dairy free, nut free, egg free, vegan, tone down the spice, we've catered it all. We don't ask why a guest has their particular requirements. Maybe it's…
I'm writing this blog post using a JOMAA F01 folding keyboard with an Xteink X3. It's a brilliant, cheap, no fuss writer deck. A simple, cheap, no fuss writer deck. A few notes on each component: The JOMAA keyboard was such a great find. The design is a little out there, but I love it. You can get it in black, if the Y2K aesthetic bothers you. The most important part is that it's BTLE (AKA BLE) –…
I turned off all notifications on my phone. A position of privilege perhaps. But also, something I’ve willshaped. The world puts up roadblocks, doesn’t make it easy. Determination and a little chutzpah required. I don’t get immediately notified of messages, emails, sales, events, or anything else. Not a ping, not a red dot, not a single bubble in Notification Centre. It can all be turned off in…
One of the major mental models that informs my sense of place in the world is Input and Output. What Input am I giving my brain, in terms of social media, news, books, film, television, passive-exposure? What creative Outputs do I put into the world? Is my information diet balanced well between the two modes? I’ve amended this in the past week. Sometimes, Input. Sometimes, Output. And sometimes, ……
Since 2021, I've recorded every Book, Film, and Television series I've seen each year. 2021 2022 2023 2024 Here are the best and worst of my Inputs for 2025.
I have been thinking a lot about my use and adoption of AI. You've probably been doing the same. For me, there are two questions that keep popping up: How can I use AI to make me a better person? (Intrapersonal) What is responsible use of AI? (Interpersonal) This post deals primarily with the first question. Specifically, how can I use AI to be a better learner? Learning is such a huge part of my…
A great podcast depends on the natural rapport of the hosts. Social chemistry comes from mutual trust, respect, friendship, and experience. It also comes from your environment. More often than not, my podcasts are recorded over video chat, or even asynchronously. But the Pirate School podcast has a different kind of magic. Talia and I record it on the couch. There's something about sitting on a…
This is a deeply personal post. I'm actually not sure how to end it. I'm still processing, to be honest. So it doesn't read particularly smoothly. Please read part one and part two first. By now, you know about my strange experience at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. You've also met my grandfather, Ron Fabri, and heard about my Italian-Egyptian ancestry. Here's how it comes together.…
I was in a very demotivating university tutorial yesterday. We're learning about Education Standards. ATAR scores.1 How most schools reconfigure their entire senior syllabus to optimise for university entrance exams. Teachers are expected to teach specifically for a good ATAR result. Test performance becomes competitive – not only for students, but for schools, and the broader community. ATAR…
When something doesn’t work the way you’d like, what’s your first inclination? Scrap it and look for a better one? Or, are you the kind of person who would rather build it again from scratch? You’re a founder. A maker. A hacker. A smith. We are founders. We learn lessons the hard way. We don’t easily take advice, but we often to surround ourselves with subject matter experts and develop deep…
I tried Dia. It's a new browser from the Browser Company that's all about AI-assisted browsing. Verdict: Hard no. First up, this was the first time I've ever experienced a sign-up form that refused to accept an iCloud address. Rude. Second, I just can't switch to a browser that misses all the native integrations which Safari enjoys. I can't touch my fingerprint to my keyboard to sign-in, or…
I've been reading John Gruber's work since I was in high school. I've listened to every Dithering episode to date. I once started a blog about inspired by Daring Fireball (it petered out, as blogs sometimes do). And for the past five years, I've been recording Crossword with Jonathan Wold. It's a podcast about WordPress and the Open Web, with 15-minute (Dithering inspired) episodes. We recently…
I don't speak much about WordPress on this blog, but it's a very important part of my life. I've been working in WordPress for nearly 20 years! I've contributed to core, run releases, spoken at WordCamps, built and sold businesses on WordPress. I recently spoke about the WordPress Plugin repo at WordCamp Brisbane 2025. The session was recorded and is now available to watch on YouTube. The…
I’m excited to announce Pretty Good Podcasts, a podcast network I’ve founded alongside Joshua and Jonathan Wold. The network right now is no more than a website which lists our podcasts. Our goal is to grow the list, grow an audience, and cross promote our shows. The website is pretty good, too. I hand coded it in HTML and CSS. No dependencies. No build. No AI. Took about 3 hours. Had a lot of fun…
Just a few quick thoughts on my first real experimentation with on-device Apple Intelligence. My project started out as a game where you are imprisoned, and you need to convince the jail guard to free you! The guard's dialogue would be AI generated on the fly, as well as set of possible responses for the player to select from. I felt that giving the player options to respond with, instead of…
I've been working on some family genealogy, tracing back my maternal grandfather's line. There's quite a mystery there!1 Ronald Fabri's Baptism record from Alexandria, Egypt. The best part of family research is talking to family about all the old family stories. They're unlikely, maybe even impossible tales, but surely some parts must be true! Here are two of my favourites. Budelli A Fabri of old…
Bloom's Taxonomy is a mainstay in education circles. It provides a structure for thinking about cognition, and how we learn. Basically, we structure knowledge by refining information through a process. This starts with lower-order thinking, and moves through to higher-order thinking skills. Wait! Forget Bloom for a moment. Those two concepts, let's focus there: Lower Order Thinking Skills (LOTS)…
Ugh. Facebook. There's a lot of us out there. Those strange, backward people who refuse to use Facebook or Instagram. Ads? algorithms? influencers!? ick! Unfortunately, those of us who prefer to stay signed-out of such social media platforms often find ourselves attempting to access a business Facebook page, or some Instagram post that a well-intentioned friend found amusing. In such cases, we're…
I believe AI is a multiplier. AI tools multiply: The quality of the work The speed at which the work can be done The competency of the operator But! You can only pick two. Speed Quality If you are already very competent at producing the work on your own, you can leverage AI to increase the speed of your work while maintaining a high standard of quality. It won't make you any better at what you do,…
Pursuant to my previous post regarding the en dash (wherein I beseech readers to consider British style selections for the dash parenthetical), I further propose the adoption of a little non-standard grammar to more plainly distinguish human writing from that which was contrived by large language models. I'm not suggesting we simply make up new rules! However, we might consider leaning a little on…
Very important announcement. I've been using the em dash wrong. On this blog, ranges will now be correctly represented by an en dash. 0–9, 1987–2025, א–ת. Additionally, I'd like to invite readers to join me in adopting the Guardian / Economist style of using spaced en dashes for asides – just like this. Of course, I'm predisposed to a more British format. But the reason you should consider…
I've been trying to reconcile the way I feel about AI. (It's been a hot topic on Async recently.) On the one hand, I see so much shitty code submitted to the WordPress plugin repo. It's easy to see how AI is making things way worse for the web – in terms of security, homogenisation, and long-term maintainability. There are legitimate concerns about loss of craft, content scraping, and…
I started out the year (or rather, finished last year) with the goal of writing, and publishing, regularly. I have been writing. A lot! Publishing, less so. I've recently dropped some big commitments that will allow me a little more time to write and reflect on this blog a little more often. I'm going to experiment with taking a break from adding audio episodes to each post. You can continue to…
I have a deeply personal post I need to write, but it won't make sense without the context. So I'm going to break it up into multiple parts. They might seem disconnected to begin with. This is part two. Part one is here. On the 22nd of September, 1949, Ronaldo Fabri got on a boat, leaving behind a country on the brink of revolution. Egypt in 1949 was a country with a long history and fresh wounds.
I have a deeply personal post I need to write, but it won't make sense without the context. So I'm going to break it up into multiple parts. They might seem disconnected to begin with. This is part one. In 2009, Talia and I went on a Contiki tour of Europe. Despite being the only married couple (we were only 22!) on a Contiki tour, we managed to have a great time touring Europe without getting too…
We're spending the last days of pesach in Mullumbimby. There's an amazing Jewish community here, full of young families and friendly faces. The Rabbi was kind enough to let us park our caravan in the yard of the shul, so we'll be very close to services over the next two days. This morning I was up early with Zohar and we went for a 6am walk down Burringbar Street, which is the main street of the…
When was the last time you were offline? Like, really offline. Not just signed out of Slack. Not Do Not Disturb. Not even airplane mode. I'm talking phone entirely off for a good 24 hours. Stay at home, with no internet, and no screens. It's a forcing function for your mental health. I challenge you to try it. Once a week, or once a month, or once a year. Some sort of schedule helps set the right…
Out of sheer curiosity, I applied for a job that had a really interesting cross-over between Education and AI. I flubbed the interview. I felt very out of practice, but also, the CEO had very silicon valley vibes. She was operating at a way faster speed to me. Come to think of it, people often say that I'm calm or relaxed. Do they mean it as a compliment? It only happens when I'm on work trips.
I received a proposal today. Someone asking me to invest a decent chunk of money into their work. But the proposal was kind of hard to parse. It was written well, but the concepts weren't well organised. The structure was too complex, and poorly formatted.1 Of course, it was AI generated. I spent 30 minutes going over it with a colleague, call it an hour between us. The damn proposal probably only…
Normally I start with a blog post that I then convert that into a podcast. But this is a podcast first, and I'm going to turn it into a blog post later. I don't have a script that I'm reading from. This is all sort of off the cuff. There's something that I've been meaning to talk about. To speak out loud. And I hope you find it interesting. I've been thinking a lot about academic integrity lately.
Welcome to Pirate School! A new podcast hosted by me and Talia Carbis, about the chaotic, messy, wild world of home education. This podcast is basically just a chat about how we homeschool. We're both trained as teachers, so we do know a lot of those foundational education principles. And, of course, we have opinions. We just released episode 9, which you can find on Apple Podcasts, or wherever…
Say something profound Say something profound Say something profound Say something profound Pull it down from the heavens Pull it up from the ground Say something, Say something profound Say something oblique Say something oblique Some obscure reference Something antique The less that they get it The better it sounds Say something obscure and profound Say something brand new Say something unique…
Pebble is back!1 I wrote about it, Eric Migicovsky wrote about it, even John Gruber wrote about it, and it's now available for pre-order. But… iPhone users like myself have been warned. The experience will be hamstrung, due to Apple's lack of interoperability between iOS and third-party devices. Some features will appear first on our Android app, and then eventually we’ll add them to the iOS app.…
I've been interacting with quite a lot of Americans, Europeans, and Brits the last few days. I've learned two new things about the USA, and for once, neither comes from my typical sarcastic, antagonistic disposition toward "the land of the free". First, Americans share a common cultural temperament with Aussies, which is that they're not afraid to call bullshit. They're inclined to stand up for…
It's pretty rare to find people who live an Orthodox Jewish lifestyle where there's no Orthodox Jewish community. But I do. Because I'm recognisably Jewish (I wear a kippah), I often encounter people who have questions and pre-conceptions about Judaism, which I'm more than happy to oblige. There is one particular misconception about Judaism that I encounter time, and time again. For some reason,…
My previous post was a little dense and academic. Sorry about that. We're not all educators, but we are all learners. Even though Ecological Dynamics was a little hard to parse, there's some really helpful learning advice contained there. I'm going to sum it up here in a more casual tone. And before you read this point I want you to pause. Think about something that you are trying to learn right…
I was recently introduced the sports psychology methodology called Ecological Dynamics. It's an approach to skill acquisition for physical activities which is becoming widely adopted by contemporary coaching practices. Elite coaches across the globe are leveraging these strategies to achieve remarkable success in top-tier sports. I believe Ecological Dynamics can apply broadly to skill acquisition…
The dragon is closing in. The cleric is out of spell slots. The rogue is unconscious. The barbarian is bleeding out, and the wizard has one last chance to pull off something, anything, that might turn this around. The dice clatter across the table. Don't we all live for moments like this? We’re drawn to the thrill, the drama, the high-stakes decisions. But Dungeons & Dragons isn’t just about…
Soundtrack for this post. What Satie is teaching me. Fast and quiet It's very natural to play allegro forte, fast and loud. It's much harder to play allegro piano, fast and quiet. Just because my days are busy, quickly moving from one task to another, that doesn't necessitate stress. It's possible to play quickly and quietly. So I endeavour to move through my day with calm alacrity. Crossover is…
In order to, maybe, reach a wider audience, I’ve decided to change my position on social media. I recently ran into an X profile which declared itself “write only”. My plan is to create social profiles that do the same, auto-posting words and clips from this blog. l-w------- I've chosen four networks: X, Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads. These are all primarily text-based platforms, which suits my…
Inspired by Matt Webb's Unoffice Hours, I've opened by calendar for 30 minutes every week. Whether you'd like to chat about a recent blog post, how I organise, homeschooling, podcasting, film recommendations, or anything else, I'm available. All you need to do is book a call. You will need to be contactable via FaceTime. When you book the meeting, you will be given a FaceTime link to join the…
Whenever I'm working on something new, my end goal is to distill it into the simplest version possible. Clean, readable, minimalist. Usually, that process starts with chaos and complexity. Whether it's a coding project or a TTRPG concept, the genesis is the same. Throw together a whole mess of ideas, goals, questions, and inspiration. Then refine. Find parts that fit together nicely, trim the fat,…
Derived from the Old English Wōdnesdæg, Odin’s Day. A Norse god of complexity and contradiction, war and wisdom. In the Romance languages, mercoledì, miércoles, and mercredi, named for Mercury. A Roman god of trade and travel. These gods, it seems, aren’t on my side. Wednesdays have been a struggle for me. I could use a little wisdom, a lot more focus, maybe some guidance on Wednesday. German…
This is a special audio-only episode of Digging for Fire, where I discuss Brandon Sanderson's latest Cosmere novel Wind and Truth with special guest Lior Carbis. Spoilers!