In an effort to make the word machine in my skull fire up, I’m trying to blog more. Some of those blog posts will be short and/or daft. Besides, why give my silly thoughts to the big companies…

untitled #1864129443 is dated on or around June 28 , 2023 and tagged orthis .

untitled #1745998579 is dated on or around June 28 , 2021 and tagged orthis .

I guess it was the heat that got to people’s brains. This week I more than ever in the just about nine years I’ve been on Mastodon I had to block and mute and filter to keep my timeline…

There are a couple of posts in today's On This Day in the marmot that I liked. (Those are links to the original posts in the archives, because On This Day changes every day. The latter (later?) one…

An analysis of free software from the perspective of Rousseau, his views on property, and the politics of societies.

My 2004 doctoral dissertation, The Reality Effect of Technoscience, is now available as a free PDF from my own site. This is the author-maintained source for the dissertation, its citation metadata,…

When someone says "write it in POSIX shell for portability," they mean well. POSIX is a specification. Not a program. The thing that actually runs your script is bash, dash, ash, ksh, yash, or one of…

I have a folder of RSS feeds called "The Crisis." It contains feeds from Talking Points Memo, Heather Cox Richardson, Empty Wheel and Timothy Snyder. I seldom read many of the posts in that folder.…

Just a quick note wishing Carl peace wherever he is now and to send my best wishes to Becky and… Continue reading “Vale Carl Wilson, Digital Preservation’s Indie…

It's a webring! And a website!

Talking open-source software, Android's future, AI, and the philosophy behind a prolific F-Droid developer

I’m happy to announce the release of Newspipe 12.1.0. This version brings a reimagined reading experience, a few features I’ve wanted for a long time, and a much smarter crawler under the…

Observation #1: LinkedIn sucks LinkedIn sucks. At this point, I doubt anyone needs to be convinced of this obvious fact. AI slop content has largely taken over the site. The one-sentence paragraphs,…

The Birth of v5, 28 June 2026 (in which a tollway's idle question — could we build our own things on this? — came back as a republic in the north with a Monday; in which we cut a door into the...

Lauren Southern has an interesting perspective on why the ‘dissident’ social media did not go the way we expected. Yet again, I am very happy I never made Samizdata anyone’s…

Populated places are probably among elements of human geography those you can most widely find represented in maps in general. I here want to discuss a bit the somewhat peculiar situation of their…

https://fs.blog/ https://fs.blog/blog/ https://fs.blog/amateurs-professionals/ https://fs.blog/open-closed-minded/ https://fs.blog/feynman-learning-technique/

I shared some thoughts earlier about building Moments . In simple terms, it’s like Bear Blog, but focused on photos. I expected a handful of people to get it. More did than I thought. Some signed up.…

My web site traffic went up by a factor of 100 in 2025. It's crazy. It would be nice if my web page were truly so popular, but no, it's just that A.I. bots have taken over the web....

“Why don’t you use WhatsApp?”

This site is a bit of a time capsule as it hasn't been updated for about 25 years. With reviews of various Gay & Lesbian books. If you are trying to find some queer media, especially order books,…

Hey all, a lot of offline stuff happened recently. None of it good news, so I didn't have the energy to create anything new. That being said, I began serializing all my audiobooks onto my podcast for…

2026/06/27: new weekly akira 2026/06/25: new illustration UP [GO] 2026/06/23: kaneda page redesigns [GO]

  by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig LitLinks are fed into the Writer’s Knowledge Base search engine (developed by writer and software engineer Mike Fleming) which has over 70,000 free…

Well, in the heights above the Haight-Ashbury, at Buena Vista park. Walk along some of its paths, look down and peer at the gutters and you will occasionally see faded letters or numbers. These…

I dislike and distrust Substack. It’s centralized, funded by people I distrust, has an unmitigated history of giving a pass (and profiting from) to some pretty hateful content, and could very…

Leafy Intro Welcome to the 286th edition of The Newsletter Leaf Journal, the official newsletter of the perennially virid online writing magazine, The New Leaf Journal ("NLJ") and its short-form…

Something happened to the internet around 2018. It didn’t happen overnight. It crept in slowly. The way a room gets messier until one day you can’t find anything. First, tweets became…

Yesterday I was thinking about my presence on ATProto and how I don't feel safe in that space at all. It's been mostly Bluesky and the small character limit is the bane of my existence. So I was…

Bookmarked Hewitt on the Neversink. Hewitt on the Neversink video

In 2022, I wrote about the damning fall of events tech company Pollen. The short of it:Pollen seemed to have pulled off the improbable feat of building a business in the notoriously low margin…

Once the 'next big thing', now largely forgotten. What happened to the service worker?

hey guess what owen? you there? Yeah yeah, I'm here. Sorry, I was busy. what could u possibly be busy with weve got nothing but time Unlike a certain someone, my parents aren't insane doomeday…

I’ve been contracting in the public sector for several years now, and seeing how time and resources (money) are sometimes spent can make me queasy. The public sector seems immune to approaching…

The other day, I saw a brilliant idea come across my Instagram feed. I only wish that I knew who posted it so I could give them credit.

Some days the sheer breadth of possibility that comes with having my own website hits hard. For the first time in the history of our species, a random schmuck like myself can have a global platform,…

Modern ad-driven technology companies like Meta, Google, YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram cannot invent genuinely novel user interfaces or interaction models. Their incentives are too misaligned with…

Hi! Design stolen from inspired by healeycodes.com/notes.

# RIP Om It was so sad to see yesterday that Om Malik — OG tech blogger, founder of GigaOm, photographer, investor, and all round nice guy — passed away at just 59. I've been reading Om's work for as…

June 2026 What the New AC Culture War Is Really About www.theatlantic.com Kids act would require age checks to get online www.eff.org · comments What Ozempic does to the gut-brain axis…

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if nobody is coming to save you

Sometimes online, I stumble upon posts of people born before music streaming was a thing and they explain how listening to new music back then was an experience. They would go to the shop, buy a CD…

I enabled Sequoia on my blog!

A feed of the music I've been listening to.Published on 2026-06-27

I've used many note-taking apps, such as Obsidian and Joplin. The best thing about those types of apps is that they are very open in terms of functionality and experience. My personal issue with them…

oysters-aint-for-me:oysters-aint-for-me:there’s a used bookstore in rural western massachusetts (the montague book mill) whose motto is “books you don’t need in a place you can’t find” and i just…

I discussed almost exactly three months ago my concerns with how physical media disappearing could lead to issues due to how we never really seem to, "Own," digital media--even if we, "Buy," it. Some…

In the past I have employed numerous solutions to capture a link to a web page into another app. I think that in every case I was focused on working in that other app and pulling in a link to the…