Hello my dear friends. I trust you are well. There are two important updates and one not so important that I wish to share regarding my blog:MereCivilian Paid members have their own private RSS feed…

TV If you enjoy the content here and want to support my broader creative work, please consider leaving a tip at my Ko-fi page . Any amount you contribute helps me continue writing, researching, and…

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Wish I could retain my data like I used to do film photography in 90s.

TBD

A small update about my Blaugust challenge. August has been a really busy month so far. We moved to a new place. Every house move involves stress. This was particularly the case for Mrs Hyde. At some…

August 19, 2026 My sites have never been hugely popular and I’ve never had a large audience except for blips and spikes here and there. But that’s not why I have a website. I make blakewatson.com for…

Added some coords, fixed some stupid css bullshit, revamped closet for like the 5th time in this websites lifetime. Rocking out to Ilsa Gold.

By next year, every major old game from the 1980-mid 1990 period will be web playable on a modern web stack.

The Jekyll Feed plug-in assumes that the name of my blog is the same as the name of my website. It assumes wrong.

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse. It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content…

Roshan: Wikipen [[File:{{#setmainimage:Screenshot_Stylometer.jpg}}|thumb|Moderators sound like moderators]] Recently there was a big hullaballoo about the fact that Claude is watermarking their…

well i didn't manage to get anything done for html day this year, so thank you to Ross A. Baker for bringing the HTML tasting menu! his bite-sized benchmarks can be used to test your css, so fork…

To start: The Phoenix Code Annoyance. I found out how to use it without having to deal with the AI bullshit. For some reason, it breaks and resets the phcode.json if you update it so that it doesn't…

How I Replaced USPS Informed Delivery With a Cleaner Email Digest So I read this article and I just thought, why not try it out myself? I like Informed Delivery because it emails on days when I…

nezahualcoyotl (nahuatl): The caverns of earth are filled with pestilential dust which once was the bones, the flesh, the bodies of great ones who sate upon thrones, deciding causes, ruling…

i was looking at one of my personal favorite wikipedia articles, " shades of pink ", and i had the impulse to share my thoughts on the shades of pink discussed in the article. after reflecting on it…

A linklog is a dated list of outbound links, maybe a tag, and a note about why it’s worthwhile. But that little note does two things at once, and together they make for a better web. See the L…

In a writing slump of sorts. It'll pass but not just yet

We’re right around the halfway point of August now (what‽ already‽) and I have not been nearly as active around this blog as I would have liked to be. I haven’t even read many blog posts! And there…

I have created a social network on top of RSS

Every product is already being graded on whether a user's agent can add to it.

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<p>Strap in, this story involves a cheese fortune teller, the department of war, and nearly every other government department in…

If you return to Twitter/X after leaving it out of principle, do you really still have those principles?

It’s been a while since I’ve written on my blog! A lot has changed in the software engineering industry in the last year with AI adoption everywhere, so there’s a lot that I could write about. But…

Even now, as you’re reading these words, hundreds of robots are poring over them, and carrying them away.

I have a lot of open source projects. Many are Swift packages, but I also have a few apps as well as a bunch of other projects in Ruby, C, and probably others too. I have realized over the last year…

Good news from the folks at Mapbox - they've revamped geojson.io using some of the bones of Placemark , which I open-sourced in 2024 . It's pretty poetic for things to come full circle like that -…

Picture by Aron Visuals Table of Contents Disappearing Software Buildings are Durable Apps and Protocols Open Source is Anti-Short-Termist Anti-Ephemeral is Antifragile Files Beat Algorithms…

What if the answer to Tech monopolies wasn't a new application, but a new way of designing the Web?

I built a new site: matbrown.dev . Drop a folder of numbered markdown files in, and it becomes a course automatically: a table of contents, runnable code examples, and a set of questions to check…

What I write is not 100% human-written anymore. I started using LLMs to help me write better and they do wonders.

I started up a little project to go to most of the taco joints in town. I say most because I’m not going to every place that has tacos on the menu, like chain restaurants. I’m targeting taquerias and…

When a venue went out of business, deleting it would have left dead Google links. The mausoleum keeps the historical specials instead.

In short: a gigantic HTML file that nearly brings your browser to its knees. And a million chunks of tofu.

SharpFM Version Two

I recently got my first library card, and the first thing I did with it was create an account on Libby. If you’re not familiar, Libby is a great service for borrowing audiobooks and ebooks from your…

Using OpaqueRange and the Custom Highlight API

What the fuck, I mumbled to myself. I sat outside a burger place, Friday 6 PM. I had just ordered and wanted to check my blog stats. Normally, I do this every other day, but once a day after posting…

EPUB is the format most e-books are distributed. (A file with the .epub extension.) EPUB is technically a zipped webpage under the hood. The EPUB 3.3 specification defines support for audio, video,…

Pain Point It’s easy for surveys to get wrong data or frustrate users by not guessing the right multiple options to offer. How many hours have you used X tool in the past month? An unskippable input…

“The British Museum is not a good thing in and of itself. It is good only to the extent that its influence in the world is for the good. The collection is a starting point, an opportunity, an…

The web is a dangerous place. While modern browser security architecture protects against many threats, security vulnerabilities are found and fixed every day. Through security exploits, malicious…

Had to chuckle quite a bit while reading this article: Dickovers, baggravation and botiquette: 18 new words to describe our tech hellscape 😂 Besides the initial Dickover, there are: AI-horning…

Read on the website: Codeberg Pages moved to a new back-end (git-pages.) This caused me some pain. But I’m now on the other side of it, and I want to share some gotchas.

Photo postcards, known as “real photos” by collectors, are premium collectibles because of the details that seem clearer than on many other postcards. They, along with other types of…

The approach I’ve always considered was some kind of archive. Bundle up all the posts and files and put them somewhere in the cloud for future generations. But even if someone stumbled across such an…

Read the full post at - US Energy Cost Explorer US Energy Cost Explorer is a classic website that takes open, publicly available data on energy costs and makes it usable, useful & interesting -…