Broken Cellphones Photo by Jan Antonin Kolar on Unsplash 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 by-election on stream.) Gordon responded to my post with A…
Photo by Look Studio on Unsplash NOTE : Sorry for the duplicate post. There was a glitch in the system here that posted this article twice. Introduction There is this truly great read in Noema: Why Is Everyone In Tech So Sad? by Aaron Horwath. One of the major points of this article is that Workism was used to replace religion in people’s lives. The idea that people looked for purpose in…
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 enormous companies become the gatekeepers to…
Photo by NOAA on Unsplash Introduction Michael Harley has been at it again in a follow-up post titled: What happens to our blogs when we die? . And, as usual his thoughts and ideas are really quite excellent. I highly recommend reading the original article. But, as seems to be becoming a habit with me, I have some additional thoughts that might be of interest. In fact, in this case, I might be…
Photo by Олег Мороз on Unsplash Introduction Michael Harley wrote a piece called How I make my blog posts more resilient a couple of days ago. There are a lot of good ideas and principles that he covers for maintaining a blog, or just about any website. Reading his article made me think back to a situation from nearly ten years ago where I went through a fairly major incident with one of my sites.…
Introduction Going to make a bet that you didn’t know that I was gone, and really, you don’t give a bleep . And you know what? That is perfectly fine. In fact, I’m happy if no one missed me. Want to know where I went? No? Well, okay… But I’m going to talk about it anyway. I was in the process of migrating web hosts. Oh, so now you are interested? Okay, so, I think…
The old Postville Courthouse in Lincoln, Illinois , via The Library of Congress . Abraham Lincoln practiced law there from 1847 to 1859. Well, as a surprise to me, my silly little Gravatar article was posted to Hacker News. This has called a lot of attention to the post, and made for some interesting comments. The most interesting of this is the claim that I have “cognitive dissonance”: We live in…
Green and Blue Nighttime Landscape. A couple of RSS based projects have been brought to my attention since I published The State of RSS Feed Readers a little over a week ago. So here’s a brief update. Kagi News Several people mentioned Kagi News in comments on Mastodon to the original article. Kagi News was really not what I had in mind when writing the original article. It is more of a…
Shoreline with lights. License: CC-0 So, Brennan Kenneth Brown wrote about the experience of my response to one of his posts topping the Bubbles list for most of a day. To that, I have to apologize, and hopefully provide a little context. Brennan wrote at the beginning of his post: The writing was critical, but it was also fair and written in good faith. That said, seeing a 3,500-word article…
A city full of millions of people living their lives. Photo: CC-0 Michael Lynch wrote an excellent and thought-provoking article yesterday titled Why I Stopped “Creating Content” . In this article he discusses a lot of the mentality that motivates the mainstream web these days which is worth discussing a bit more. Industry Speak I started encountering a lot of the industry speak when I found my…
You’ve probably run into some Obsidian evangelist espousing some convoluted system of organizing all their notes, and building some knowledge base. Heck, I was just involved in a conversation about Personal Knowledge Management . This isn’t that article. My personal use of Obsidian tends to be simple. I build into it the tools that I need to get things done, to make things easier.…
Bridge heading into the smokey landscape. License: CC-0 I read Brennan Kenneth Brown’s What have note-taking PKMs accomplished, really? , and found myself writing a lengthy response. But, after I wrote my response I reread Brennan’s article and found myself in a bit of a quandary. I found myself asking a simple question: was it intentional that he presented both arguments and…
The latest anti-feature from Automattic—now infecting Gravatar. Photo by: Unattributed, Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 . Happily Imperfect posted Bye bye Gravatar a short while ago, and I have to say, I’ve had a similar thought about deleting my account on there as well. My feelings towards WordPress and Automattic started changing some time ago, back…
Wolf looking directly into a camera at close proximity. There is a bit of an issue I have noticed lately: websites actively blocking Reading Mode in Firefox, and derivative web browsers. I was stunned to find out (just a minute ago) that Reading Mode doesn’t appear to be a default feature in Chromium, but instead an add-on. So, I don’t know if this is an issue for Chrome based…
Two boats docked behind a berm. Introduction Many years ago (over a decade) I wrote an article about RSS Feed reader alternatives after Google announced they were killing Reader in March 2013. That article attracted a fair amount of attention, including a request from RedHat to republish the article on their blog. On the ten-year anniversary of the death of Google Reader, the Verge published the…
Calm waters on Lake Superior. I’ve been collecting a lot of images of water lately. This is the outgrowth of a post I made on Ennui Vagaries about repurposing weather camera photos . There are a lot of weather cameras that are on the shores of lakes, rivers, or at the docks and launches. Collecting these photos has been made exceptionally easy by the Fediverse having many feeds of these…
The Harry Partch Ensemble, via Wikipedia, under a CC 0 License. Listening to Harry Partch is like going on a surreal archaeological dig through history. Only this is history reinterpreted by someone who has been taking shrooms for two decades. Yet, with the emergence of microtonality in the music of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard and Angine de Poitrine his works are more relevant today than…
Image of a checklist with circle with a slash over the top. I feel fairly certain in saying the author of the post 5 Albums meant no harm. Even the prompt: Introduce yourself with five albums that have shaped you seemed quite innocuous. And I thought: “Cool. I can write a response to this with one hand tied behind my back, and three of my fingers broken”. Part way in, I decided to throw a…
Photo of a circular pill sorter box against a pale blue background. Photo by Unattributed. License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 . Sure, I hear you saying: no one wants to get old . But it’s a fact of life, we all eventually get old. And we all eventually have to face our mortality. One of my favorite sayings about this is: One Day We’ll All Be…
The view from Lake Michigan from Michigan City East Lighthouse, 2026-07-03 . Fri, July 3rd, 2026 : All of these articles were in the Top 12 on Bubbles this morning: You Don’t Have to Blog Like Me , Stop Writing for Bubbles , Re: Your Metablogging is Lame , Your Metablogging is Lame as Hell . If you went further there are a lot of similar articles, especially articles talking about blogging…
On this day in 1976 America celebrated its Bicentennial birthday. And my family had moved to a house that was less than a year old. We had moved into the house in the late fall of 1975. Today I am living in that house after having left it for over twenty years. You might notice that I refer to this place as “a house” or “that house”. I don’t refer to it as a home. I am not certain that this…
Angine de Poitrine in May 2026 at the Great Escape by Pauil Hudson. (Via WikiMedia — License: CC BY 4.0) This morning I installed a music player that I am unfamiliar with, and decided that the first thing I should listen to is Angine de Poitrine Vol. 1 and Vol. II since I hadn’t listened to them in a while. And then I found, by coincidence that they played the Montreal Jazz Festival last…
If you look up Neo-Luddite or Neo-Luddism in Wikipedia, Chellis Glendinning, who is considered to be one of the major influencers of the movement, wrote in her paper Notes towards a Neo-Luddite manifesto that Neo-Luddites are: 20th century citizens—activists, workers, neighbors, social critics, and scholars—who question the predominant modern worldview, which preaches that unbridled technology…
I would like to supply a TLDR; for this document, but it’s too long for there to be a simple summary. The closest would be the conclusion of the article, but there is a lot of information along the way that would be lost if you jump to that. Therefor, if you clicked on this article, I would recommend reading it completely. Introduction I read Jola’s article The social contract of…
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