Paul's blog
Not to brag too hard, but I did a "podcast" before the term was invented. It was called "Skippy Republic Radio," it was published in 2001-ish, and it was me and my best friend Geoff breaking down the important anime and video game news of the week. I don't remember how we found microphones, or what audio interface we used, or what exact anime we talked about, but I do remember cringing when I…
Well, it's been 10 years since I finished my "year without the internet." So what's changed since then? I use the internet a lot. My screen time is dialed up to the max. I'm obsessed with YouTube. I flip over to Hacker News or the Rust subreddit anytime my mind wanders. I pop open Twitter a couple times a day, don't find much that resonates, then scroll Damus for a few minutes for the good Nostr…
This is a writeup I did of a solo podcast I recorded two years ago . My attempt was to gather together some of my ideas on how computers could be better. Because I often find myself referencing "that skateboard blog" I did, but actually never posted, I figured I would post it here in my grand tradition of posting well-aged and somewhat discarded content here. The computer is "a bicycle for our…
The Mechanical Turk was a chess-playing robot unveiled in 1770. A major leap in technology at the time, the robot featured an articulated upper torso controlled by a large box full of cogs and clockwork and was capable of playing a game of chess against a human opponent. Just one problem: the Mechanical Turk wasn’t a robot or in any way an automaton, it was a puppet controlled by a guy hiding…
This began as a subtweet of the Bitcoin Book Club discussion on "Maps of Meaning," if you're curious who are these generic Bitcoiners I'm arguing against in my head. I've recently enjoyed the book Thank God for Bitcoin . It's a book that makes the moral case for Bitcoin and serves as an easy introduction for Christians of the importance of money and the qualities of Bitcoin. But what should a…
This the newsletter I wrote to accompany a May 2020 episode of my podcast . I love to complain about censorship on Twitter because it's a way of shaming the assholes who cheer for it and want to pretend they're being moral. But in my heart, I think Twitter shutting down speech is probably the best thing that can happen for speech, because it forces us to build new and better platforms that can't…
Want to build a desktop app? You probably want to use Electron or Qt or GTK or a native toolkit. Want to build a thing that you could (maybe) someday use to build a native desktop app? Contribute to Druid ! Druid is a work-in-progress, open source "data-oriented Rust UI design toolkit." You can use it right now to build very feature-incomplete desktop applications for macOS, Windows, and Linux.…
This article has been corrected to correct for its lack of capitalization and to fix some broken links. The price was ~10k usd when I wrote this. These days I recommend bitcoin-intro as a nice guided tour if you're looking to get started. OVER THE PAST YEAR I'M SURE YOU'VE NOTICED ME STEERING NEARLY EVERY CONVERSATION INTO BITCOIN. I'LL SAY SOMETHING LIKE, "AND THAT'S WHAT'S SO GREAT ABOUT…
Last month I created a plan for myself : instead of just tinkering with various projects, I would bring four projects to a point of portfolio-worthiness. One project a week. The result? I did three of them! And, also, did other things as well. Here's what went right, and what went wrong. Code on tape The moral of this story is: write your own components if you can. I've always approached…
Here's my idea in a nutshell: make it more like WordPress. Take any popular service you use from The Big Bad Tech Boys and make it more like WordPress. I'm giving you the least glamorous version of my idea up front to build trust. Is it working? Please don't leave. I understand that very few people love WordPress, especially not the people who work with it on a regular basis. WordPress is slow,…
The Keyboard In The Front Club manifesto.txt , presented without modification outside of appropriate line breaks. A Keyboard Placement Manifesto by Paul Miller We have sweaty palms. And we did not ask for this. A "laptop" is for laps only if you have no more imagination than a dictionary. I want a portable computer. I want my palms to remain at an acceptable temperature. I want you to join me.…
I want to get a programming job. So far I've taught myself programming, but I've always wanted to try programming collaboratively with other people in a job place. I think I'd grow a lot, and I think I could be involved in more ambitious projects that way. To get a job, I need to have a portfolio so that when prospective employers skim my work they see evidence of some amount of desire and ability…
I wrote this last year, whenever it was The Verge was doing that series on breaking up big tech. Now that The Verge is hanging out with politicians at southy south, some of whom who are talking a big game , I thought I'd share one of my arguments as to why breaking up big tech might be unnecessary. Oh, and also, Microsoft is a gross patent troll . That is all. I don't know if it's lame to say…
iOS 9 came out yesterday, and Apple snuck in a functionality called "content blockers" for Safari. Developers can make content blockers do all sorts of things, but mostly what they do is block ads. As of today, three of the top four paid apps on the app store are content blockers. For obvious reasons, many of my former colleagues in the online, ad-supported content-creation industry, have been…
I wrote this post almost a full year ago (the text file is timestamped May 27th, 2014). Pro play just started up again, and everything in here is still relevant. I realize now that this article probably has the wrong balance of jargon and dumbed-down-ness. Like, if you understand half of the RPG slang I have in here, you probably know more about League of Legends than I do. Still, I had to try.…
Editor's note: I wrote this at E3 in 2012. I don't think it makes a strong or clear enough point, and I'm guessing that's why I or my editor killed it. What I love about it though is how games like Shadow of Mordor and No Man's Sky are showing the power of simulation and procedural generation in making compelling AAA games. I can't say "see I told you so" because I never did, but still: see? When…
This was long overdue. There are things I think about, and now I can publish all of them on the internet. Not just, you know, the sort of thing that belongs on Engadget, The Verge, or the Karma blog. But stuff that belongs under a sort of banner like "Paul's blog" so you really know what to expect. I think I'll start out by putting up some of the not-published writing I've done. There are lots of…