Track Star*
One of my favourite recent YouTube discoveries is the Track Star* channel. While they also produce longer podcast episodes and showcase live performances, the videos I've been enjoying the most are the street interviews with celebrities.
matthewpennell.com RSS feed
UK-based UX designer and developer with over two decades of experience and a passion for writing, music, and gaming.
Latest posts
Standard.site and ATproto publishing
The newest thing that one should be using is Standard.site, a shared lexicon for long-form publishing on AT Protocol, making content easier to discover, index, and move across the ATmosphere. Sounds cool, right? Wasn't as easy as I thought it might be.
Cycling: Fakenham-Sculthorpe-Barsham-Walsingham
I decided the warm weather and light winds this weekend justified my first bike ride of 2026, up to the historic pilgrimage site of Walsingham and back.
So I bought a Raspberry Pi
A few weeks ago I purchased a Raspberry Pi 5, and I've been spending my weekends slowly expanding the roster of tiny services running on the tiny computer sitting on my windowsill.
On vibe coding
I've "vibe coded" two web applications now. I don't think I like it very much.
The necessity of imperfection
The necessity of imperfection: Designing for distributed ownership in BackstageImagine an internal engineering platform — tooling that is accessed by thousands of developers every day — where every new feature, every piece of critical functionality, is designed, built and maintained by a different, autonomous team. For years, that was the reality of our internal tooling at Booking. com; a…
Comparing 7 popular email clients to replace Gmail
I recently found out that Google's Gmail service is dropping support for third-party account connections. I've been trying out a few different desktop and mobile clients to see which might suit me best.
Becoming a sports guy
Slowly, in fits and starts over the last few years, I've rediscovered my love for a sport that I honestly haven't followed with any passion for over 20 years. And then this year I started following another sport - one that my interest in goes all the way back to my childhood.
Detroit: Become Human
I didn’t play Detroit: Become Human when it was first released in May 2018 on PlayStation 4, or when the PC version came out a year and a half later. I came to the game late, via Steam’s 2025 Black Friday sale, and so for me it’s impossible to divorce the characters in the game from today’s pervasive and omnipresent AI. Detroit: Become Human is a narrative adventure game in which the player…
2025 Retrospective & 2026 Resolutions
It's certainly been a year.
2025: My year in books, movies and music
For the nineteenth year in a row - literally the only consistent part of this website at this point - here is my annual look back at almost everything I read, watched, or listened to over the last twelve months.
Fantastically painstaking trawl through the life and (to a lesser extent) work of the great Alan…
Giant of the Attic Fantastically painstaking trawl through the life and (to a lesser extent) work of the great Alan Moore.
Purposeful attention
Just about eight weeks ago now, I decided that I wanted to be more deliberate about the ways in which I spent my spare time. I had found myself wasting hours every day, idly surfing YouTube in the morning or Reddit in the evening, compulsively checking for new news stories, or distracted at work by the constant pinging of Slack. So, I implemented some changes.
“If a society improves, the experience of growing up in that society should be less taxing and more…
“If a society improves, the experience of growing up in that society should be less taxing and more comfortable; if technology advances and efficiency increases, emerging generations should rationally expect to work less. If new kids aren’t soft and lazy, something has gone wrong.
Redesign 2025
Back in March I published a post about the thought process and technology behind this newly rebuilt personal aggregation site. Now, six months later, I've finally completed a redesign -- one that ended up incorporating bits and pieces of UI that have been rattling around in my head for almost fifteen years at this point.
To live deliberately
More and more frequently these days, I feel as though I'm rushing through the things I consume in order to reach a goal that does not actually exist.
going minimalist (for 7 days, anyway)
This last week I've been trying out the minimalist phone, a custom launcher for Android that is supposed to turn your smartphone into a significantly dumber one, all in the name of productivity and reclaiming those wasted hours we apparently all now spend in doomscrolling.
The Shape of the Habit
When I sat down to write this article, I assumed the question I needed to answer was straightforward: "Why don’t I ever feel like blogging anymore?" But as soon as I looked at the kinds of things I used to publish, the answer became painfully self-evident.
“It always does seem to me that I am doing more work than I should do. It is not that I object to…
“It always does seem to me that I am doing more work than I should do. It is not that I object to the work, mind you; I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.
Need a job? Read a comic
For my 50th birthday, a family friend gifted me a framed set of comic book covers all of which were released during the week in 1974 that I was born, together with copies of the original comics themselves. Flipping through the stories is entertaining enough, but it's the adverts that appear every few pages that really caught my attention.
And all that jazz
You tend to discover your musical tribe around the time you enter your teenage years. For me, it was rock, which led to hair metal, and then eventually 'real' metal: from Bon Jovi, Poison, and Guns N' Roses, to later Megadeth, Metallica, and Pantera. But I never listened to any jazz.
Quarterly review
I've written about my personal productivity process before. Considering that original article was published over seven years ago, I've been remarkably consistent in applying that same process; virtually nothing I talked about has changed in the intervening time. This year, though, I have introduced a new process into the mix. And, so far, it's proving very beneficial indeed.
if you’ve never engaged with a creative art on a regular basis you need to understand that it…
transhuman-priestess:if you’ve never engaged with a creative art on a regular basis you need to understand that it requires concerted effort to get into “the groove” to make something and every second that it takes to get into that groove causes physical pain, but the only thing worse than doing it is not doing it.
The final platform
I ve lost count of the number of times I ve redesigned and/or relaunched this site (or its predecessor). Over the 21 years it has been active, my personal blog has run on Blogger, Textpattern, ExpressionEngine, WordPress, Ghost, Jekyll, and probably some others that I m forgetting, plus at least one hand-crafted service. It s to the last of [ ]
“…he got a glimpse of Paris during the war, and I can’t blame him if he was captivated by the only…
“…he got a glimpse of Paris during the war, and I can’t blame him if he was captivated by the only city in the world fit for a civilized man to live in.