Manuel Moreale Yesterday

AI blog question challenge

Rishabh emailed me the other day, asking me to answer the 7 questions of his new blog challenge, and who am I to say no to such a request? So here we go. I assume by AI models we mean the current crop of LLMs, and not AI models in general, because I’m old enough to remember when “Machine Learning” was a thing. What even is AI anyway at this point, since everything is lumped together into one useless definition? Anyway, I believe my first experience was trying out chagpt back when it first came out. I don’t think I spent more than 10 or 15 minutes using it at the time. It was impressive tech, but was also completely useless for me at the time, and that’s why I didn’t bother spending more time using it. This is an interesting question. Do I use AI? Well, I guess the answer is yes since it’s almost impossible to avoid using it if you use the web at this point. Pretty much all tools and services are integrating some sort of AI-powered functionalities, and it’s become harder and harder not to use them. If, instead, the question is do I use one of the various LLMs directly to do stuff, then the answer is still yes, but the amount of usage is so low that some people might consider that to be the same as not using them at all. I don’t directly pay for any of the models, but my work email has been powered by Google for more than a decade, and so I do get access to Gemini Pro. Workspace has usage data for everything, and I just looked it up: In the last 90 days, the only AI-related feature I used was the Gemini App (that’s not surprising considering I turned off everything else), and I have apparently used it 62 times. I’m now looking at the history of those chats, and pretty much all of them are single-question queries related to something web dev I was doing. Things like how to do a specific thing inside Kirby, or how to achieve something using a particular JS library. This is stuff one should be able to find inside documentation websites, but the search there is often awful and so after a google search, I try my luck with AI. And as I wrote somewhere else, I never copy-paste. I ask very narrow questions so that I can be pointed towards the correct answer. And once I have that, I do the coding and I re-implement everything myself. Am I against using AI? As a generative tool, yes. I refuse to ask AI to do something for me or to generate content from scratch. As a tech in general? I think it has some potentially useful applications in narrow contexts. As always, the answer is not cut-and-dry, and it can be yes or no depending on the framing and the scope. The only aspect I appreciate is the ability to ask questions in natural language. Because sometimes you have a problem or an answer you’re looking for that can’t be described in a more structured way. As for what I don’t like, how anthropomorphised these stupid tools are is definitely high on my list. I don’t want my computer to talk back or to make jokes or to say «I’m sorry». If I input a question, I want an answer back, and that’s it. I don’t want follow up questions, I don’t want some pointless preamble. I get why this happens, but I fucking hate it. This is software. I don't want my software to have a personality. I want it to perform a task and get out of my way. I also don’t like the lying, the gaslighting, and all the other crap, and I also don’t like what the AI industry is doing as a whole, but that’s a separate issue. Again, another question that has different answers depending on the scope. The idea of being able to generate images, in general, is neutral to me. It all comes down to what you use it for. There are some potential use cases that are totally fine, others are completely insane. As a whole, I think the ability to generate slop is bad, but that’s because humanity can’t be trusted to do anything the right way. As for their use in blog posts, I think stock images were useless, and I don’t see images generated with AI to be any different. Unless you have generated an image as part of the content to explain or visualise something. That’s fine, label it as a generated image and move on. That’s no different than including a render, or a sketch on paper, from a content perspective. My consumption of online content these days is so limited that I don’t have this issue. I read very few blogs, and I know they are not AI generated because I emailed the people behind them more than once, and I know what their stance is. I watch almost no YouTube, and I only read a few news sites. My strategy is to simply stay away from the digital world as much as possible, and I’m at the point where I’m considering dropping my digital consumption down to zero and quit the internet as a place for content. I have zero hope. And that is because I have zero hope in anything that’s in the hands of mega corporations. The incentives are totally skewed, and they’d do everything they can in order to keep the line go up. I don’t see people with strong morals in positions of power and so unless we decide to go full French Revolution, I see no reason for things to improve. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

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Manuel Moreale Yesterday

fLaMEd 🔥

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with fLaMEd 🔥, whose blog can be found at flamedfury.com . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. What's going on, Internet? Kia ora, I'm fLaMEd 🔥. I'm originally from Te Awa Kairangi (Lower Hutt), now living in Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland), Aotearoa, New Zealand with my wife and two kids. I get up every morning at 4:30 am to get to the gym before the kids get up and the day begins. I've recently picked up golf again, but find less time for that than I do for website work. You can get a better idea of what I’m into over at my website, Flamed Fury I'm not a developer, not a designer, just a guy who loves the web. Flamed Fury started in 1999. It's been through more versions than I can properly count, but the rough timeline: 5 versions before it became a personal blog, a few side quests at different domains inbetween, and finally 4 versions in the 2020 era when I landed back at flamedfury.com where I started. Started in summer 1999 on one of the free hosts, I don't remember (probably cjb.net). Moved to sweeetnet.com in 2000 through hanging out in the #sweeet IRC channel. A guy called kertiz from #sweeet took pity on my design skills and gave me a proper redesign, then stuck around contributing. Another guy fitty-two joined in. We iterated every couple of years until the dot-com bubble burst, advertising money dried up and the IRC crew drifted apart. I tried to keep it going by myself with a 2002 layout that wasn't great. But "blog" isn't really the word for any of this. The 1999–2003 version was effectively microblogging before microblogging was a thing, built around a niche (lifestyle magazine style, lol) before niche blogging was a thing either. We just didn't have the vocabulary yet. November 2003 was when Flamed Fury became a blog in the way I'd recognise the format today. Posts about polytech, nights out, whatever was going on. That lasted until 2005, then I parked it and tried being "more adult" at another domain through 2006–2008. Took a break as MySpace, Bebo, Facebook and Twitter took over. Came back in 2012 with a niche barbeque blog and carried on with it for six years before archiving the whole thing in 2018, once I realised how much I absolutely loathed niche recipe blogging. Revived the fLaMEd persona in 2019 on a new domain (Hugo + Netlify). In 2021 I settled back on flamedfury.com with Eleventy on Neocities. Two redesigns later and a move to a local VPS, here we are. Every version of this site, going back to 1999, has been the same instinct: a personal site as a place to be yourself on the web. The 1999 version was more of a microblogging website with three friends collaborating around celebrity magazine scans, that's where the era pointed. The 2026 version is the opposite. Everything and nothing, no algorithm to satisfy, no brand. Different tools, same instinct. There's a longer version of this story I'll get round to writing on the site soon. It's in draft , I promise. Hit me up if you want to see me finish it. Inspiration for what I put and write on my website comes from across the web and life experiences. A gig, a new record, a beer, a trip with the family, or any number of posts I find across the web gets me thinking. Storytelling, sharing my experiences and interests. I love monthly recaps to populate my now page, reflections of last night's gig, new (usually local) music finds, a fun time out with my friends or family. Drafts begin as a note on my phone, my notebook before I find myself with a spare opportunity at my computer. I'll begin with these rough notes and begin fleshing them out. I'll have a couple of tabs open to grab details and links of what I'm talking about to sprinkle through the post. Sometimes I'll start a draft and they'll sit there for days, weeks, and sometimes months in an untracked markdown file in Codium. Depending on what I'm writing about I won't have any proof reading. If I'm writing about something topical about the web I'll often have xandra or one of the other 32-Bit Cafe crew read over it and give me some pointers or a thumbs up. Then after sitting on it for a minute, an hour or a day, I'll publish it. Other pages on the website will get worked on and usually published in unfinished states and I'll continue to work on these over time - nothing is ever really finished is it? My ideal creative environment is in my home office, at my desk or couch in silence. I might listen to a few songs or watch a couple music videos to get me in the zone, but when it comes to focus time, all noise off and I work in silence, often talking to myself. If I'm away from home and I get a moment to myself, it's either at a table, kitchen bench or an arm chair. Hopefully with silence, but usually with the chaos of family life going on around me. Our kids are young, they're busy, noisy and need lots of attention so focus time these days is few and far between :) Do I believe the physical space influences my creativity? Heck yeah, if I'm not in the office, then a walk around the block or through the village listening to music will help me get creative - as long as I get those thoughts out of my head before they dissapear. If I'm travelling, then any beautiful location might inspire some spark. I use Eleventy for building my website. I originally started with Eleventy Excellent by Lene Saile , but it's evolved beyond that over the years. I often check in with her when she releases new versions to make sure I take in any key updates, but also find some changes I've made find their way back into the starter template :) These days flamedfury.com runs on an NZ-based VPS to keep the site close to home. I use a local domain registrar for my domains. Deployment is a simple then rsync directly to the VPS. To participate in the web, I've implemented a bunch of IndieWeb features, Webmentions, h-cards, h-entries and of course provide a number of Atom/RSS/JSON feeds which are syndicated to Mastodon through EchoFeed to meet people where they are. My Bookmarks are backed by the 32-Bit Cafe's instance of Linkding and pulled into my website at build time and shared via Atom/RSS/JSON and EchoFeed. I run an instance of Forgejo on my homeserver and commit the project there multiple times a day. I don't think so. If anything I would have tried to preserve everything rather than ditching things over the years. I've managed to recover a lot of the old stuff through old CD-Roms where I'd burnt old versions of the website or from the Wayback Machine. I would have definitely tried to keep in contact with a lot of the old crew from IRC. We drifted apart before it was easy to keep in contact with each other. I do regret losing those early relationships. I'm really happy with how I've managed to salvage a lot of the old stuff and merge it into what the website is today. It really is a labour of love. All in NZD. The domain is $39/year and my VPS is $82/year. All the other infrastructure on my home network is sunk cost over the years and I'm not sure how I'd put a $ value against that. I haven't made money from my website since 2001 along with the original internet advertising bubble burst. I did have a go with ads and affiliate marketing with the barbeque blog, but that left a sour taste in my mouth. I'm a fan of services like ko-fi and the like but haven't looked into setting it up for myself - not sure if anyone would be interested in supporting me. I throw money at the 32-Bit Cafe's ko-fi and contribute to infrastructure costs there as well as my time to help moderate and run the forums and will throw other bloggers tips here and there through their ko-fis, and will buy sticker packs wherever I see them being sold in the wider hobby web community. When I need some new graphics for the website I'm always on the look out for a commission and will happily pay for talented graphic designers services. I support a few independent journalists through their newsletters that I enjoy reading and support a local independent news/media website to help keep the lights on there as I enjoy their local content. A great way to keep up with what's going on in the country and the world without the doom-and-gloom. What's my position on people monetising personal blogs? Go for it as long as it's not intrusive or full of dark patterns. Keep it personal and creative. I love the sticker packs or graphic commissions. So many to mention! More at my blogroll and links pages. Who do I think you should be interviewing next? Hit up Chris Burnell if you have time before wrapping the project up :) If you're into making websites, or you want to start you should most definitely come and check out the 32-Bit Cafe - our small community of the web where we welcome hobby web developers of all skill levels and help each other out building our websites. We have monthly web weaving workshops, discussion forums, and other fantastic services offered free for the community and join in on the discussion at our forums . Plugging my own stuff, check out my record collection , and my ever growing list of bookmarks And for all the readers out there, keep building the web you want to be part of. There's so much great stuff going on out here. Laterz 🤙 Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed . If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 143 interviews . People and Blogs is possible because kind people support it. Chris Burnell — we've become great friends over the years. I love to bounce ideas with; dev, IndieWeb, beer, music. Xandra — xandra is my small web bestie and I've got to know her pretty well over the years through the Cafe. yequari — another of the Cafe barista team. The driving force behind our infrastructure endeavours. His new project https://webweav.ing/ recently launched a guestbook service that I'm using on Flamed Fury. jay , fyr , key , and rodrick - all my fellow 32-Bit Cafe baristas who help running and making the Cafe an awesome place to hangout. Cory Dransfeldt — another I've chatted to heaps with over the past few years. We have heaps of the same interests. His media collection and the direction he's taken his website is "beyond amazing". Robb Knight — Robb always has a new and interesting project to check out. I'm always picking up neat things to add to my website from his. america's decline - not often seen outside of the Neocities circles, but one of my favourites on Neocities. A throwback to my favourite era of the web, music, celeb, pop culture, and fantastic graphics. shellsharks - an indie web powerhouse and curator of the fantastic scrolls weekly . James - another indie web powerhouse. James's blog is full of thoughtful and insightful posts about the web and has recently launched a new podcast centered around the independent web, Wonders of Web Weaving .

JSON Writing C#

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Manuel Moreale 2 days ago

Enhanced games

The other day that stupid thing called the Enhanced Games took place. As you might have guessed by the name, this is basically the Olympics on steroids, quite literally. The event itself is not even worth commenting on. I remember hearing about this concept ages ago and forgot about it, and only skimmed through a few headlines the day after the event. But reading about it got me thinking about what I’d love to see if we were to organise an Olympics spin-off. There are two concepts I’d be genuinely excited to see, and they go in opposite directions. The first concept is to let tech and engineers go wild. A lot of modern sports are infused with technology of all kinds: from running shoes materials, to laser stitched swimsuits, to tracks that are incredibly bouncy, the list goes on and on and on. I remember, almost a decade ago, Nike trying to break the 2 hours barrier for the marathon , and thought it was an interesting experiment. I’d love to see what kind of barriers we can break by letting the best athletes and the best minds join forces, but without doing silly things, like strapping rockets to someone’s feet. The other idea is the exact opposite. Remove all tech. Like all of it. No shoes, no fancy materials, no special equipment, no stadiums, nothing. We go back to ancient times, and we see how much just human bodies alone can achieve, with as little external help as possible. I’d very much enjoy seeing both of those events. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

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Manuel Moreale 4 days ago

14 down, 30 more to go

The stars are finally aligned again, and I’m back on the road for chapter 3 of this 10-part saga. Clear sky, not too warm, I have someone who can come pick me up and drive me back to my car, the calendar is empty, so we’re going for it. Contrary to the previous two segments of this walk, this one’s quite lean on the churches department—we’ll only see 3 of them—but it’s by far the most challenging one from a physical perspective. That is, if you’re a sane person and you do these walks the way they’re intended to be walked. There’s an upcoming one that’ll likely be more challenging, but we’ll get there eventually. For now, in front of us, we have about 16 kilometers to walk and roughly 1600 meters of elevation to gain. So we better get going. Breakfast is in—coffee and bread with Nutella + peanut butter if you’re wondering—and after a short drive, we’re back at the same parking spot where we ended our walk a few weeks back. Flip flops are off, hiking shoes are on, sprayed some SPF50+ on my face and head, and we’re ready to walk. I say we, but it’s just me. Well, me and you reading this. I walked this one solo, but it is quite fun to do these hikes while keeping in mind that I’ll have to write this newsletter. I’m very much enjoying it. We cross the road, walk through another parking lot, and we immediately see sings that tell us that we’re on the correct track. Quite a few trails run through here, apparently, I counted at least 4 different ones. But we’re here to follow the yellow and white marks (for the most part), so over the bridge we go and across the fields. We’re not even 5 minutes in, and already there’s a steep stone stair in front of us. We have 1600 meters to climb after all, we better start sooner rather than later. The initial part of the trail was a bit overgrown, and I was worried it was going to continue like that for quite some time because this is not a trail that sees a lot of traffic but, thankfully, that wasn’t the case. I was also surprised by how varied the trail is at the beginning. We’re not even 15 minutes in, and we have already walked through fields, up stone stairs, and now we’re on a stone “bridge”. And shortly after that, here we are climbing another stone stair, but this time built as part of the dry stone wall. Big fan of these walls, they’re so cool. The forest itself is also quite nice here. The problem we have at the moment is that as soon as the warm season hits, the vegetation explodes, and sometimes the trails become an absolute mess. 15 minutes into the walk and we have now connected with a proper road, and we’re no longer on a trail. There are a lot of these roads around here. They’re service roads for people who have properties, but they’re closed to general traffic. Still, it’s quite rare to see cars on these and you usually only see mountain bikes. Actually, you usually see nobody on these roads. We’re now almost at the first exciting part of this journey. The yellow and white marks take us right, but that’s the normal path. We’re going left because we have one of those pesky variants to take care of and, as you know, I don’t want to walk the same road twice which means I made some changes to the original route. The problem is, I am not 100% certain the trail I saw on the map exists. It’s there on the map, sure, but a lot of times I saw lines on maps that were not there in reality. Thankfully for us, the trail is there—and it is steep—and we can continue forward since the first church is not far from here. We have already gained enough elevation to see things from above, and the view is lovely. And just like that, we’re at the site of the church of San Leonardo Abate (12/44) likely built around 1540. The church is similar to many of the others we saw in previous walks, but the interesting aspect of this one is that it has the old bell visible on the outside porch. Apparently the was a bell tower that got demolished, and I guess they decided to put the bell on display. I tried to take a picture of the inside, but it was too sunny. And in case you’re wondering, the church still has a bell outside. This church is the one that’s part of the variant, so we’re now standing at the end of that part of the trail. Which means we need to walk back to the main path, so off we go in that direction. The weather is still absolutely gorgeous. Out of the woods, across some fields, through a tiny, tiny village, and we’re now back on asphalt for a little bit, heading towards the next church, which is just right around the corner. But first, no, not a Mary, we get our first Jesus out in the wild. There’s gonna be a few more, I think we’ll see more Jesuses and Marys this time around. I should probably start counting these. 1 hour and 15 minutes in, and we have reached the church of San Zenone (13/44). Which, I’ll be honest with you, is everything but small. Consecrated in 1493, it’s probably the most luxurious one of the bunch I’ve seen so far. And it has a nice view. If you’re team Mary, it’s your time to be happy because look what we have here, just outside the church. This also doubles as a memorial for the fallen during both world wars. We’re only 20% into this walk, and we have already seen 2 of the 3 churches we’ll visit today and the next one is waiting for us roughly 3kms ahead. So we leave civilization behind us, we climb up through the forest, and we emerge on another of those service roads. I decided to try something different this time around since I was alone, and I recorded a couple of minutes of the walk. It’s unlisted on YouTube; hopefully, you don’t get bombarded by ads. The video is embedded below, or you can watch it on YouTube . Part of me was tempted to title it “You’ll not believe what happened on this trail”. On our way up, we stumble on this interesting-looking tree. I have no idea what could have caused this. If you happen to know, send me an email. I’d love to learn more about this. Also on our way up, in the middle of nowhere, stuck inside a retaining wall, another Jesus. Finally out of the woods and back into civilisation for a little bit. We’re almost halfway through our walk, and I was planning to take a quick break after 2 hours, but the remaining church was not too far, so we keep going. Like my dog, they’re also not massive fans of the hot weather. We’re less than 200 meters from the final church, where I was planning to take a quick break, but look how lovely this spot is! There’s a bench—yes, there is a bench hidden in the tall grass—two big trees that provide some much-needed shade, and a swing! We’ve found our resting spot. And since we’re stopping here, I'll use this opportunity to let my shirt dry a little bit. This place is so relaxing, I contemplated taking a nap, but we still have 8kms to walk and some 800 or so meters of elevation to gain, so the nap will have to wait. Shirt is back on, backpack is back on, we’re walking again, ready to visit the third and final church of the day, the church of San Lorenzo Martire (14/44) We’re now done with the churches, and we can set our sights on the top of Mount Matajur, our next target. The official trail would not take us up there and walk around it but, come on, if we get that close to the summit, we might as well go up to the top. And so into the forest we go again. I’m not sure who’s getting a point here between team Jesus and team Mary. I’ll let you decide. I never walked on this side of the mountain. I walked this general area many, many times, but never walked here, and I’m loving it. I also found this interesting construction. It’s currently used as a shed, but I wonder if it was used for something else in the past. It does look quite old. Time to record another short video , I think one day I should attempt to make a video of a full hike recorded in 60 seconds chunks all stitched together. Could be fun, I might do it the next time around. We’ll be out of the forest soon, but first we need to walk through a lot of flowers. There are so many colours out here at the moment, between the flowers and the butterflies. What a lovely time of the year this is. We have emerged, we’re now fully under the sun, and it is hot. I’m also starting to feel the fatigue a little bit. But we’re powering on because we’re almost there. We also have a great view on a ridge I’m dying to walk, but can’t figure out the logistic of the trip. It’s a 30+ kms walk from one end to the other, I can’t take the dog with me, and I also can’t leave him alone at home that long. So this is a walk that will have to wait for a better time. But damn if it is tempting. The summit is in sight, we’re almost there. That’s not the end of the walk, just the highest point, but once there, walking the final part is gonna be super easy since it’s all downhill. And here we are, at the top of Mount Matajur , quite literally on the border between Italy and Slovenia. I hiked this mountain more times than I can remember, at all times of the day, during all the seasons and with all sorts of weather. I walked it with snow, with rain, with winds at 100kmh, at night, at sunset, at sunrise, you name it. And on the other side, we have a view of lovely Slovenia. Way too many people up here today though, but that was expected. This is a very easy hike, and plenty of people come up here over the weekend. We’re not gonna spend much time up here, but I might come back another time and take you for a hike with me from a different route. That could be fun. Today’s hike is gonna end down there, at the parking lot next to Rifugio Pelizzo. Down the mountain we go, which feels so nice after having walked uphill for the entire hike. I could go on another 6 hours, but there’s no need to do that because we only have 1km left to walk. And just like that, we’re at the parking lot. I actually walked down some more to a secondary parking spot because there were too many people yelling and screaming at the main one. And the next chunk of this walk passes through here anyway, so next time we’ll start from this same spot. And there you have it, we have walked from Pulfero sitting at 185 meters above sea level, up to the top of mount Matajur at 1643 meters and visited 3 churches on our way up. This was fun, and less tiring than I was expecting. The data recorded by my watch during the walk is available if you’re interested in that type of stuff, and I have dumped all my photos on the shared iCloud album . The only thing left to do now is eat a proper post-hike snack. See you next time! You love the outdoors and RSS. You're one of the special ones.

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Manuel Moreale 1 weeks ago

Piri

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Piri, whose blog can be found at pketh.org . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Hey, I'm Piri. I'm a software designer, engineer, and artist of sorts. I build Kinopio , and have been blogging about the craft of making software for 12+ years (:O). I went to school in Toronto for biology and urban planning. There I learned that I liked illustration a lot more than writing boring reports and papers. After school, I got a job at a startup as an illustrator, that turned into product design, when also turned into writing code so I could build the ideas in my head. I can't remember a time when I didn't have some kind of blog. In university, I met a lot of new friends around the world by doing more angst-y cringe-y livejournal-y style writing. I started designing pketh.org while on a flight to SF, paid for by Yahoo, for a job interview at Flickr (times sure have changed). If you’re curious about the green design, I was inspired by the 1956 Jaguar D-Type, which I still think has such a unique prototype race car shape. My posts are usually long essays that take about a week or two to write and produce, so I try and make them timeless. When I have an idea for a post, I'll make a Kinopio space for it and collect thoughts, images, and URLs in it for a while. If after weeks or months it’s still on my mind, I'll start connecting and organizing everything into a rough outline. From there I'll start pasting things in and typing it up in either IA Writer or TextEdit. When the draft is done, I usually have someone proof-read it and use that feedback to make final edits. Then the final HTML formatting bits are done in my code editor of choice, SublimeText. Writing is like a muscle that atrophies when you don't use it. Mine's out of shape so the process is quite painful. When I finally a new post out to the world, I just want to lie down and never get up again. Probably related, but I end up throwing away 1/2 to 2/3 of what I write in a blog post. If I had the time to write more often I suspect it'd get easier. I think I could get pretty good at it. I prefer different places and tools depending on where I'm at in the process. I collect notes, inspiration, and connect related ideas wherever I am, usually on my phone. I like doing the early writing stage in a coffee shop or in bed. Anywhere that doesn't make me feel like I’m doing “Real Work™” yet. When I get really into it, I like to type on a desk with a good keyboard (I'm a big HHKB fan), on a screen big enough for me to keep my context windows (dictionary.app, Kinopio spaces, related web pages) next to my writing window. My blog uses Jekyll and is published on Github Pages. The domain stuff is done through Hover. It's quite basic. I might use something newer and nicer than Jekyll, but it would probably be compiled from markdown files the same way. The current design is a bit of a Ship of Theseus that I've been slowly and gently updating it over years, so it's kind of grown on me. I think the domain name is $20~/yr and I think that's it. I'm split on blogs with paid content: If writing is your job, then monetizing somehow totally makes sense. Quality independent writing and journalism is really important and should be compensated (I like Craig Mod's approach ). But for basically everyone else, blogging is a thing they do on the side for fun, and I think it sucks when people feel pressured to turn everything they do into a passive-income side-hustle potential-business-empire. Skimming the depths of my RSS feeds, I realized that I’ve subscribed to literally 1000s of blogs. But sadly most have withered away over the ages. Funkaoshi has been around for even longer than I've been writing – I consider the author my Toronto blogging senpai. I really enjoy Alexotos' in depth mechanical keyboard reviews. It's really cool and encouraging to see newer people blogging the same way we did. Lilly Ashton’s blog is worth reading If you're looking for something more personal and cozy. Since 2018, I've been building Kinopio , a spatial note-taking tool to collect and connect your thoughts, ideas, and plans. You can use it to make sense of your thorniest problems and grow your coolest new ideas into plans. I hope you enjoy it. Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed . If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 142 interviews . People and Blogs is possible because kind people support it.

Career Writing HTML

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Manuel Moreale 1 weeks ago

I feel your pain Sara

I stumbled on this piece of code recently that made me laugh, cry, sigh in despair, and think of poor Sara doing her best to make the web a better place. I guess people have forgot that is a thing that exists. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

Web Development Open Source

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Manuel Moreale 1 weeks ago

On people writing about their use of AI

I find the trend of people posting about the way they use generative AI to be fascinating at an anthropological level. I do not remember the last time a piece of technology pushed so many different people into writing about the way they use it, or not use it, or abuse it, or misuse it. To me, this is way more interesting and intriguing than the technology itself. I obviously do not know why so many people are doing so, and I suspect they must all have their own specific reasons, but I currently have three main theories but I’m sure there are more than that. The first theory is that a good percentage is trying to capitalize on the trend in an attempt to become some sort of AI thought leader. Those people are insufferable. They usually hang out on LinkedIn, but sometimes they escape containment, and they remember that they do have a blog (and that’s often a Substack, unsurprisingly) where they can post these generic-looking blog posts filled with lists and it’s-not-this-it's-that statements. The second theory is that techies are gonna tech. A lot of the people who have blogs are also into tech, and gen AI is an interesting piece of tech and so it’s natural that those people will end up writing about how they use AI. The third and final theory is that there’s a group of people who feel the need to distance themselves from what AI represents. So those posts are not really about the technology itself, but rather a statement on the state of the world around them, and they want to make it clear if and how they participate in it. This final group is to me the interesting one. Now, if you’re a techie, don’t be mad at me, I’m not saying you’re not interesting, because you are (if instead you’re an AI bro, click here . You're welcome.) I’m saying the last group is the interesting one because to me, it’s fascinating how people feel compelled to justify or explain to strangers on the Internet how they interact with a piece of technology. And it’s especially fascinating because it’s a completely pointless exercise in my opinion. Let’s pretend you just landed on my blog for the first time (hi, welcome, nice to have you here) and you have no idea who I am. For all you know, I might not even be a real person. This entire website could be a psyop run by the Italian government. With that in mind, what’s the value of a post in which I tell you how I use or not use AI from a moral perspective? Would it make a difference if I were to tell you that I don’t use it? Or that I use it maybe once a day to answer a coding-related question? What if I told you that I don’t use AI at all, but in reality, this post was entirely generated by a swarm of AI agents while I was outside walking the dog, enjoying life? Unless you have prior knowledge of me and this blog, a post like that, in a vacuum, would be meaningless. How about the opposite case, though? Let's now pretend you weren’t new here, and you had, in fact, been following this blog since 2017. If that was the case, you wouldn't even need me to write that blog post, because by this point, you’d have all the necessary information to make an informed judgment. And you’d also know that you could ping me via email or via DM and ask me directly if you had any doubt about anything related to this topic. In both cases, a post stating my use of AI would have pretty much zero value. Which genuinely makes me wonder why so many people feel compelled to write about this stuff. If you wrote one of these posts, can I ask you why? Why do you feel the need to explain how you use this technology? Is there a specific reason? I’d love to know. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

Culture Writing

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Manuel Moreale 1 weeks ago

A phone battery experiment

I’ve done all sorts of experiments over the years when it comes to my phone usage. From cutting down my screen time as low as possible, to not using the phone at all, to running it in black-and-white mode, and many others. But this morning I woke up, unplugged my phone from the charger, and I thought «I wonder if I can only charge my phone once a week» . That was a thought half-asleep me had without realizing that what I was actually thinking about was charging it twice a week, not once. So starting the week with a fully charged phone and only plugging it in once until the next Sunday night. I believe it can easily be done, and it might even be doable to use one full charge for the whole week, so not plugging my phone at all for the next seven days. Experiments are fun, and there's only one way to find out, so I’m going for it. I have a Pro Max with a healthy battery that is currently sitting at 100%, and I have put it in low power mode to give myself the best chance. We’ll see how far into the week I’ll make it before I have to charge it again. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

Mobile Electronics

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Manuel Moreale 2 weeks ago

RMF

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with RMF, whose blog can be found at baccyflap.com/prs/blog . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. My name's rmf. My legal name's not terribly hard to find, but I like to keep it lightly buried just so my 2006 blog isn't the first thing you find when you search for my name. I'm a native of the Netherlands, where I reside. I live in a small city with my partner; she's an archaeologist and I'm a botanist, though I currently teach museum anthropology classes. I went from doing science, to teaching science, to teaching culture. I've never believed in restricting a whole human life to one field of study, so I'm having a blast. My computer skills have always been self-taught. While I was in middle school I fiddled with Microsoft Paint and from there on I got to grips with ever more advanced graphic software (currently GIMP and Inkscape). In high school I liked to make videos with my friends which I edited in Windows Movie Maker, which lead to an ongoing on-and-off hobby of video editing (in Kdenlive). In 2002, I set up a WYSIWYG website which lead to me learning HTML and later CSS and, later still, PHP. Right now I do some graphics stuff for my job in education, such as making instruction sheets, posters and some other small-time stuff, but really, pretty much all my computing is done in my free time, for fun. I think that's a blessing - I don't have to work with anything I don't want to work with and do everything I do for the love of the game. Beside that I make soap which is part hobby, part side job. I enjoy tinkering with technology, so I have lots of esoteric hifi equipment, some old games consoles, old calculators... if it can be tinkered with, I like it. I enjoy writing prose and poetry and have recently been getting into fermenting and pickling, though I am subordinate to my partner in that. She's the head of pickling and fermenting, I take care of the old electronics; she draws and paints, I write; and then at the end of the day, we cook together. I started my website in 2002 and by 2003 I had a little update box to briefly communicate whatever I was doing with the site. That update box turned into a shoutbox of my random thoughts and as those got a bit longer and rantier every time, in October 2005 I turned it into a blog. Blogging was the thing to do at the time and so, at age sixteen, I figured I had enough to say to warrant a stab at the practice. It was all coded by hand: no CMS or JavaScript, just handwritten HTML with the appearance of a blog. It was all over the shop, subjectwise. A fair amount of it had to do with palaeontology and/or me being an epic atheist - ups and downs. It was simply named 'blog' and it changed over the years with the design of the site but all in all, it was very simple. No RSS, no comments, just static HTML pages updated manually. The surprising thing to me is that I had an audience - I got somewhat regular emails about my posts. I blogged until 2009. I did that classic thing of writing fewer and fewer posts and finally announcing a newer, better blog hosted at Blogger. I wrote a grand total of 4 posts for it, stopped for a year, and finally took it down. I lost interest and so, it petered out. Cut to 2026, I'm reading a few more blogs than I had been for the past several years and I start to get the blogging bug again. Or perhaps the bug was dormant and now reawakening. I'd been considering it for a while but specifically, funnily enough, after reading your article about stopping the People & Blogs series, I got inspired to pick up the pen again. Over the last decade I've written on and off for a couple of magazines and I had a regular column in a local newspaper for a while. I think my intrusive blogging thoughts started when that column went away - I like to write, it's something of a compulsive thing, and while the newspaper let me write practically whatever I wanted, it still had some constraints such as length, a certain form, and at the end of the day, some amount of harmlessness. It had to be a column - it could make the readers think, but not too much or about controversial things. So the blog suddenly popped into my head as a perfect fit. Whatever topic I want, whatever length, whatever form. And so in 2026, I picked up blogging again. I did write a CMS and some code for an RSS feed - other than that, I tried to keep the form of the blog as close to the original as possible. And again, to my surprise, there are people reading this blog. I'm clueless as to how they're finding it, buried in a subsection of my site as it is, but I'm getting emails again. A grand total of two people suggested I give the blog a name, which I did. It's now called 'bakelite & roses', a name I explain at baccyflap.com/prs/blog/2026/?m=03#1773065697 . My inspiration comes from whatever happens to me. So far I've written about umbrellas, tamagotchi, deadly accidents, CD collections and some other stuff - that's the most liberating thing to me, getting to write whatever the hell I want. I like it to be interesting, to have some novel (to me) observations in it, but other than that, it's just whatever occurs to me. It's comparable to the columns I used to write in that sense - I write them quick, maybe give them a quick read later on, and then just post. I'll often read them to my partner who will usually describe them as 'cute', which is good enough for me. I write wherever. Back when I had deadlines I'd slack off right until the final hour and then just use whatever's to hand. I've written a few on my phone but I suppose I mostly write on my laptop, just because it's faster. I'll do it at home, on the go, at work, wherever inspiration strikes. My site's hosted on a buddy's server. He runs a small IT company so he takes care of the domain too - it's an old arrangement and we're sticking with it. I pay him, he pays the bills. The blog itself is written in PHP - when I restarted in 2026 I finally wrote a backend, still pretty primitive but it makes my life a bit easier and crucially, it enabled me to provide an RSS feed. I type a post into a dirt simple little CMS and hit 'post' to add the post to a JSON file, which the RSS feed also pulls from. I may provide the source code at some point, when it's not as hokey as it is now. Well, I started it in January, which is pretty close to today, so I think I'm all good. I guess, looking back at my old posts, I do sometimes cringe at them. I added a disclaimer to those posts, just to distance myself from the bad ones. But I didn't remove them - they still reflect who I was at the time and in some weird way, who I am now. I wouldn't be honouring teen me by removing any of it and looking back I guess I could say I'd wish I'd written better stuff... but you know what, that's what I wanted to write at the time and as confident as I was of my own intellect at the time, so I am now about the public's capacity to contextualise these posts. There are wonderful, thoughtful posts in there, but also some dubious stuff, and some garbage. So short answer: I think it's perfect, wouldn't change a thing. I pay my buddy €100 a year to cover his costs and so he can write me a bill which is good for his company. It generates precisely nothing, which is how I like it. People can do whatever they want with their blogs but for me, it's just a bit of fun in my free time. No Patreons and Ko-fis for me - I know everyone wants to turn every aspect of their lives into a revenue stream these days, but for me, it's just a way to reach out. Of all blogs, the one I've been reading for the longest (22 years!) is Pharyngula . Out of all the 'new atheist' types, PZ Myers is one of the few who did not turn out to be a dirtbag. He stuck to his progressive guns and has as sharp a pen as ever. For the sheer dedication of the author it's worth a read, whether the range of topics is up your street or not. I'm currently working on a podcast, a bit of a personal project that has been taking more of my time than I thought it would. Currently in the outline stage, it'll take some time before I can finally start recording. It is driving home to me that making a podcast is, at the best of times, an effortless thing that very few people know how to do well. I honestly don't like most podcasts but one I've been enjoying, one of those podcasts that springs up on you and just keeps on giving, is Bread & Bananas , a podcast about Kampung Gelam, an old neighbourhood of Singapore, made and presented by three inhabitants of said neighbourhood. And if you're wondering why on Earth this would be a topic of interest to anyone outside that neighbourhood... well, just give it a listen. It's chill, it's thoughtful, it'll surprise you. Six episodes so far, a new one every couple of months. Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed . If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 141 interviews . People and Blogs is possible because kind people support it.

HTML Culture Writing JavaScript CSS

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Manuel Moreale 2 weeks ago

Accepting tradeoffs

I live in a very quiet place. There are 30 or so people here, only one road that sees very little traffic, and woods all around us. I wake up with birds chirping, and most of the day, that’s all I can hear around me. At the same time, public transport is pretty much non-existent, there are no shops nearby, and I have to move my car to do pretty much everything. Food delivery is not an option, and regular couriers often deliver late. And forget same-day delivery. Rent is low, but there’s also no fibre, and up until recently, the only connection available was a crappy 30-down-3-up that was often offline. Life’s all about tradeoffs, and I’m learning more and more that the path to happiness requires some ability to recognise and accept those tradeoffs. I’ve been self-employed my whole life. That means carrying all the responsibilities for my job. It means having no PTO and no ability to let someone else take care of my mistakes. But it also means being able to decide how to spend my time. It means being able to go for walks when it’s sunny outside or when I don’t feel like working. It means I don’t have to follow rules or guidelines set by my boss. Those are trade-offs I decided to accept. I don’t have money invested. I don’t own stocks, and I don’t have a retirement fund. I also don’t have debts weighing on me. I made peace with the fact that I’ll likely never become rich or own a nice house. But at the same time, I know I’m not actively participating in that aberration that is the financial economy, and that fact alone makes the tradeoff worth it for me. Tradeoffs are inevitable, and no one can tell you which one you should accept in order to live a happy life. And part of the fun is learning which ones are the ones that make your life better. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

Career

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Manuel Moreale 3 weeks ago

Nicola Losito

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Nicola Losito, whose blog can be found at nicolalosito.it . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Hi, my name is Nicola Losito. Born in the mid-70s in Bari, I lived through the first wave (in Italy) of the television invasion of Japanese cartoons—which I would later discover are called anime—and US TV series like the A-Team, Knight Rider, CHiPs, Dukes of Hazard, MacGyver, and many others. Other playmates were American comics and the first consoles (Atari, Intellivision, Commodore). Finally, I remember with immense love the long afternoons riding around on a Vespa, or in the garage with friends taking apart and putting back together our Vespas, fixing the small hiccups that cropped up or trying to make them go faster. All this led me to university studies in Mechanical Engineering until a break to give 10 months of my life to Military Service, which was mandatory in my day. Upon my return, I had missed the boat with my studies and, by then twenty-five, I finally convinced my parents that the computer was not just a toy but a multipurpose tool. I also discovered I had a bit of a knack for it, so I changed my field of study and city, graduating in Computer Science. Two years ago I received a great gift , a new heart from a 27-year-old guy that today allows me to continue living with my wife and see our son grow up. Comics, science fiction novels, motorcycles, and padel (instead of the tennis I played so much as a kid) are still part of my life. I continue to read superhero comics, along with more mature European and Japanese productions, with the recent addition of a couple of Korean authors. I ride a Ducati Monster 1200S, and my son and I are venturing into the world of minicross with an unfortunate LEM 50 DX3. Perhaps you have noticed that I have not told you about my job yet, because especially after the long period of illness and having re-evaluated the priorities of things, now for me it is just a task I have to face, something I no longer believe in and for which I can no longer get excited. Anyway, I have an anecdote to share: I found a job opportunity thanks to participating in a motorcycle mailing list for two or three years. The interactions on the list made me "interesting" or "reliable" enough that another member of the list eventually called me and invited me to participate in a selection process at the company where he had already been working for a dozen years. I started for fun, and it’s been twenty years now that I’ve been at the CNR . The lesson is: never rule out participating in something that interests you; you never know where life, passions, and the people you meet will take you. As far as I can remember, I started coming across "blogs" towards the end of 2001, and certainly by 2002 several college friends had one. Thanks to the advent of an Italian blogging platform very similar to the current Blogger (it was called Splinder), on February 28, 2003, I took the plunge and opened my first blog on that platform, starting to interact with all the other bloggers (essentially Italians) who had an account there, or on other then-nascent platforms. In September 2004, I registered my first and current domain, installed WordPress release 1.2, and imported the old content. Since then, I haven't left the platform, and I believe the current incarnation of https://koolinus.net/blog has only been re-installed once during these twenty-two years, performing updates release after release. Over time, I participated more actively in the international blogosphere, spanning various platforms: Live Journal, Jaiku, and WordPress.com practically since it was born in 2006 when I joined it to publish in English… Today my online activities are concentrated on the "historic" blog in Italian; I’ve made nicolalosito.it my personal space for English language content and I use Scribble for micro-blogging. I’ve always used Tumblr as a pinboard for images and quotes that strike me, and another instance of WordPress on a hidden subdomain to occasionally publish something more intimate that I felt like writing anyway. I essentially publish in three distinct ways: A recent and controversial post you wrote, Manuel, is exemplary of why I have this attitude. This then resulted in me sharing the following quote which somewhat summarizes the current mood: The fact is that certain things you can only say to those you know can understand them. Which is also the reason we talk so little about what really matters to us. by Enrico Galiano, Eppure Cadiamo Felici Anyway, in all these modes, I write directly in the WordPress editor (Gutenberg), publish, and then make grammatical and typographical corrections. As someone once said, the publish button is the best editor. WordPress database maintenance plugins are my great friends. Over the course of these twenty-two years, I’ve written just about everywhere: airports, hospital beds, car seats, cafe tables, desks at home or in the office. Very often with a soundtrack in the background, though in recent weeks often without music to accompany me. I’m working from home a lot—I’m "full remote"—and my neighbors are renovating. So the construction noises are more than enough as ‘ white noise ’. As I mentioned, I write directly on the computer, so I do not use notebooks or anything else. In my personal case, it is the inspiration of the moment that drives my writing, so the fact that I can immediately put my thoughts into bytes depends only on having a keyboard and an active internet connection available. In short, physical space in the strict sense has never compromised the desire or the possibility to knock out a post. My domains are all currently registered with the European provider OVH. For a few years now, I’ve been using SupportHost for hosting, after having tried almost all the big names in the industry: BlueHost, SiteGround, GreenGeeks along with a couple of national ISPs… problems arose with all of them sooner or later. Since my friend Lino Sabato told me about this company and I migrated all my content, I’ve become a happy and (above all) listened-to customer, and every time I’ve recommended this provider, those who migrated in turn have only thanked me. So to recap, I’m on a cPanel-based hosting, and I use WordPress as a CMS. I’m tempted to switch to something static, but so far I haven't found the courage or the time to approach it. Who knows if 2026 will see me make progress on this front. One thing I question a lot is the fact that I somehow gave in to splitting my nickname and my name; at many times, keeping a nickname associated with certain concepts would have allowed me to talk about them freely, without potential repercussions in real life. Having created a point of contact between these two parts is perhaps something I regret. Given how today's tech world has developed and is developing, guarding your anonymity with tooth and nail, or at least clearly separating public and private, is an effort that should be made at the expense of convenience. For me and for the vast majority of early bloggers, this is no longer possible. It serves as a warning, however, to those starting today or about to start (or for my son when he enters the web). From a practical point of view, however, I think the important thing is to choose any platform to start on and get a "feel" for your desire to tell your story, making sure you can export what you've written to another platform later on. I chose a hosting solution that allows me to have several domains (as well as sub-domains) within the same plan. I think this year we reached about €200 including taxes. I host 4 blogs for other friends, including a couple belonging to a friend who recently passed away, who contribute to the expense. Then there are the costs of the .it and .net domains, which run between €11 and €16. Could I save money? Probably yes, but currently I sleep soundly and I don't have any malfunctions (especially because for one of the domains I heavily use the email provided with the hosting plan and I have never, and I mean never, encountered a problem). On monetization, as expressed by almost all the friends already interviewed, I am indifferent to the fact that there are people who make blogging a profession. As long as this is done while respecting the reader and not treating them like a fool or a fruit to be squeezed, I can tolerate even the most aggressive ads or pop-ups. But when everything becomes self-referential and closed in an ecosystem, then I stop following. Personally, I try to support some authors by buying software, with a donation – either monetary or, occasionally, purchasing hardware or something else I read they are interested in. I support your work Manuel, and another couple of pals, with the 1 dollar a month initiative. I would have certainly pointed you to Luca , but as I mentioned, he passed away in the first days of march 2026. I would like to give visibility to Luigi Mozzillo and Nicola D'Agostino author, among other things, of the Stories of Apple project which in my opinion hasn't received the love it deserved from the public. Then there are people who don't have a blog but passionately curate newsletters. Is it okay to mention them too? In that case, I’d say the work of Anne-Laure Le Cunff is certainly noteworthy. I also really like the reflections of Tobias van Schneider both on his blog and in his newsletter. Among Italian newsletters, I’d highlight those by Gianvito Fanelli , the Polpette (meatballs) di Vanz , and everything Mafe De Baggis writes. I could probably write a whole post about the newsletters I follow. I'm not the type of person to suggest things off the cuff; what I like or inspires me is regularly described in the pages of my blogs. I would like to share these ‘life tips’ instead. Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed . If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 140 interviews . People and Blogs is possible because kind people support it. I curate a regular and periodic column called on both the Italian and English blogs, where since May 2015 I have been publishing interesting URLs that I collect (currently on Bear ) during my daily browsing; I publish how-tos on how I solve specific IT problems (which happens VERY rarely today, unlike in the past); I publish on the emotional wave that a song, a quote, a photo, or a dialog triggers in me. These days I mull things over a lot in my head, and I very rarely expose my thoughts publicly in writing. Start being honest with yourself as soon as possible. Eliminate what you don't like from your life, or confine it to a cage, and don't let it eat up what is important to you. Remember that work is a gas that expands to occupy all the space it is given. You must be consistent with the things you say, even if it's often inconvenient. I believe you have to be kind regardless. A great luxury in life is being able to afford to trust others, even when they prove they don't deserve it, and thus not be too damaged by it. Above all, don't put off until some random tomorrow the things that make you feel good or make you happy; proceed step by step but without hesitating, and allow yourself to experience every single milestone. Tomorrow morning you don't know what will become of you or the world.

Culture C#

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Manuel Moreale 4 weeks ago

A moment with a silly creature

It’s so funny how much a creature like this silly dog can change someone’s life. He certainly change mine, for better or for worse, and he also changed me in the process. But physically and spiritually. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

Entertainment

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Manuel Moreale 4 weeks ago

Hyde Stevenson

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Hyde Stevenson, whose blog can be found at lazybea.rs . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Hyde Stevenson is a nickname I've been using online for years. It's a mix from Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and its author Robert Louis Stevenson. Privacy is important to me, so I generally avoid using my real name. My parents are from Serbia, but I was born in Paris. I lived in London, and, now, I live in southern Europe. More vitamin D was needed in my life. I had two passions as a kid: sport, and computers. Sport has always been a big part of my life. When I was a kid, all my friends played football, but I was always more into basketball. I don't mind watching a good football game, but that's where it ends. But, basketball is another thing. I'm a big Nikola Jokic fan, and I haven't missed a Denver game for the last four years. When we were kids, we all dreamt about the NBA. There weren't many games available to watch. We had one guy who ordered games on tape direct from the US. Then, we shared, and copied them. Basketball was our life. We played at school, after the school, the weekends. We were chasing the best playgrounds to compete with other players. It was great. It was the end of the 80s. Bird, Magic, Jordan, the Pistons Bad Boys, and also Yugoslavian players like Vlade Divac and Dražen Petrovic. The Dream Team too, the real one. I'll always wonder what might've happened if the war in the Balkans hadn't happened and the USA and Yugoslavia had played each other in the Olympics final. That love for the game made me play at a semi-pro level. But, a bad coach put me off the courts. I was young and didn't understand why I couldn't play more when I knew I had the level. I remember one shooting training where I got 46/50 on 3pts, and the guy behind me got 36/50. Did the coach say something to me? Nope. That was enough, and I took a break from the game for a few years to pursue another passion: boxing. My love of boxing probably stems from those nights when my father would wake me up at 4am to watch Mike Tyson's fights. I've always loved boxing. My father's mate's nephew was a boxer. He invited me to train at his gym. And I got hooked. Sad story about this young man. He went pro, but after a bar fight, I heard he was murdered out for revenge by someone involved in that brawl. I also had a great group of friends, and we trained grappling, and MMA for four or five years. A good friend trained us grappling. Today, he trains fighters who fought in the UFC, and got lucky to meet many MMA fighters like Jon Jones . Another one, Guillaume Kerner trained us Thai boxing. Guillaume was one of the first western European Thai boxer who won a World Title in Thailand. You can check some highlights of his career . That was before I moved to London. When I got back in France, I was training exclusively in boxing until 2021, when I moved abroad. Since I relocated, I've really missed the camaraderie of the boxing club. I'm lucky enough to have a garage where I've hung a punching bag and can keep training. For those interested, I started last year a #50kPushUps challenge . The goal is to make 50,000 push-ups in one year. I could write many anecdotes about people I met, but I want also to share my other passion: computers. When I meet people, the first thing they say to me is that I don't look like a computer guy. Stereotypes... 🤷 My passion probably started when one night my father brought home the VCS, the Video Computer System, later renamed the Atari 2600. It's not a computer, but that's where it all started. Later, I asked if I could have a computer, and they offered me the Amstrad CPC464 with its 64Kb RAM, and cassette deck. Later, my grandmother offered me the updated version the CPC6128 with the same RAM, but with a 3-inch floppy disk. After that I had many other ones. I started to build them. I tried my first Linux distro in 1995. It was a Debian. Today, my main distribution is still Debian, even if I tried, and used many others. I've tried probably many window managers over the years. But, for the last 15 years more or less, I've been using only awesomewm , a tiling window manager, light, and customizable if you know Lua a bit. I could write a lot about Linux, but I don't think it'd be of much interest to our readers. What I can say is that my love for computers is what got me to where I am today in my career. My first blog was about Debian, the GNU/Linux distribution. It was in 2001, and it was called debianworld.org. I used to write how-tos, and articles about Linux. I used the blog to post English to French translation of the Debian Weekly News, but also the Securing Debian Manual , and some part of the Advanced Bash scripting guide . Then in 2014, after a long summer, I found out I got cyber squatted. And, just like this it was gone. Then, for five years, I didn't set up anything online until 2019. I met a colleague that asked me if I participated in any conferences, or if I had a blog. That's when I wanted to have a personal place online again. I love bears, that's why I chose that domain name. And, lazy, because I am sometimes. About the theme, it took me some time to create it, and be happy with the final result. But, then, it didn't really change. It depends. First, I need a topic, or an idea. Sometimes a blog post, a news, a new tool, or basically anything can inspire me to write directly a post. But, often, I like to go through my Zettelkasten. Every morning, I use this keybinding -0. That opens a random note. If it doesn't sparkle anything, I hit the same keys again. A "new" note appears, and, sometimes, a discussion starts. I will add more content, or argue with previous thoughts. That's how some drafts start. English not being my mother tongue, I read the different parts multiple times to be sure to make sense. My goal is to make simple sentences, but that connect with everyone. Once done, I check if some grammar hasn't been forgotten by my LSP. Then, a script will sync the content to my blog, and post it also on Mastodon. I don't. I just need my laptop, a terminal, and a coffee. That's all. Maybe the physical space could help some people. Maybe if I had a seaside view, it could impact my creativity 😅. Previously, for other projects, I used Drupal, then Wordpress. But, for this one, I wanted something easily to maintain. No database, or plugins updates. Something simple. That's why I went for a SSG, a Static Site Generator. I chose Hugo , and I've been happy with it for years. There is some JavaScript from Carl Schwan's post to add Mastodon's comment on the blog. So far it works well. Everything is hosted on a dedicated server. All post have been written in Neovim, my go-to editor, on a Tuxedo laptop. My local repository has a backup on a Synology DS1812+ NAS, which also had a remote backup. That repository is pushed on a private Codeberg repository too. Domain name was purchase at Unlimited.rs , a registar in Serbia. Originally, the name of the blog was lazybear.io, but since the announcement that it will disappear in the future, that's when I switched to a Serbian one. For other projects, I use also Porkbun that I love. I don't think so. A few of my friends suggested that I should specialize and monetize it, but that was never its goal. It's my little corner on the web where I can do whatever I want. I can tweak it as I want, try new things, post photos the way I want, without having to follow a specific format. It was always meant to be my place to experiment. I don't track visitors, I don't care about numbers. Now, and then, I get some emails, and I like the discussions I get there. Keep them coming 🙌 The domain name is around €24 per year. The dedicated server around €30 per month, but I use it for other things too. It doesn't generate any money. I could add a Ko-fi account, and maybe I will... just in case. 😇 If people want to monetize it, I don't see any issue with that. Everyone is free to do whatever they want. Ok, I have a couple of them! And, two French photographers: I also have a list of blogs I enjoy, and follow . Yeah start a blog, value your privacy, and send an email to Manuel so we can find more about you. Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed . If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 139 interviews . People and Blogs is possible because kind people support it. Rldane.space Zerokspot.com Joelchrono.xyz Benjaminhollon.com Christiantietze.de Jeremyjanin.com GregoryMignard.com

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Manuel Moreale 1 months ago

11 down, 33 more to go. Plus a cave.

We had another lovely, sunny weekend last week, and that means I walked the second of the ten segments of the 44 votive churches loop. This time around, I didn’t have to mess with the route in order to hit all the churches in one go because there were no variants. And, like last time, I was not alone. I had a friend coming with me, which is always nice. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy walking solo, but I also enjoy walking in good company. The plan was the same: meeting at the arrive, leaving my car there, driving back to the starting point and take off from there. And that’s exactly what we did. The last time we parked some 600 meters away from the actual end—because there was no parking there—so the first chunk of today’s walk is the final part of segment number 1. Clearly visible on the left, up on the hills, is the small village of Antro where we’re headed. One of the six churches we’ll visit on this walk is waiting for us right there, and it’s a good one. But first, without even realising it, we’re already at the site of the church of San Luca Evangelista (7/44). I’ll be honest with you, this is quite an uninspiring one. It’s also not in a nice location, very close to the street. I’d have completely missed it if it weren’t for my watch. And this post is sponsored by Suunto… just kidding. It is quite handy to have the whole route planned on the watch though, because it vibrates when I’m near one of the churches since are stored as POIs. No pictures of the inside since the windows were boarded and the door was locked. All of them are locked, quite annoying if you ask me. But that’s modern society for you. The church was likely first built around the year 1250, but it was for sure consecrated in 1568 by the Bishop of Cattaro, also governor of the Patriarchate of Aqui leia . We leave the first church behind us, we turn left, we cross the Natisone, and we start climbing up, heading towards Antro. The first part of this walk is not super inspiring since it’s on paved roads, but it is what it is. One day, I might attempt to make a modified version where I only walk on asphalt when absolutely necessary. Could be fun. We pass through Biacis and next to the Antro Bank Slab , an old artefact symbol of the self-government of the Friulian Slavia, developed around the end of the XI century. The path takes us behind the stone and out of the village, and we’re headed in the direction of the church of San Giacomo Apostolo (8/44) next to the “castle” of Ahrensperg. I put it in quotes because it’s more like a nice cottage with a tower than an actual castle, but the whole place is lovely, I have to say. Dual bells, like most of these churches, and I had to resist the temptation to make them ring since the ropes were dangling right there, out in the open. I can be quite the mischief, but I also don’t like to bother people, so we didn’t touch anything. Also no way to take pictures of the inside, it was way too sunny. The church dates back to the mid-12th century, and the stone we saw earlier was kept under the outside portico. Church behind us, the trail is taking us around it and the castle and up through the woods. Two unexpected sights, one after the other, are awaiting us. The first is this concrete monstrosity, which I have absolutely no clue about what it actually is. It’s a very odd-looking structure, quite tall, I’d say 15 or 20 meters tall, with three tunnels going through underneath. It’s clearly something industrial, but I have never seen something similar in my life. Plus, it’s now covered in vegetation, which makes it even harder to get a sense of what it actually is. Reminded me of Horizon Zero Dawn, if you played that game, you know what I’m talking about. The next unexpected sight was a shrine. Very neglected, it’s quite literally falling apart, with a tarp on its roof put there just to prevent water from doing even more damage. As always, it’s dedicated to Mary, which is not unusual here since the iconography of Mary is way more presente than Jesus for some reason. There are Marys everywhere in the valleys if you start paying attention to them. Up the forest we go, and we have finally reached Antro. If you suffer from OCD, don’t look at its bell tower with the off-centre clock face. It’s driving me nuts. We have some time to wait here because we have booked a tour of the caves for 11 am, and we’re way too early. So we spend some time chilling in the shade of the trees with a nice view of the village. It’s all very relaxing, and there’s a small number of people who are also waiting to go see the church and the cave. It’s now time to go, so off the path we go to reach the ticket stand. The ticket to visit the church is 8€, and there’s an app you can download that serves as a guide. But to visit the cave, you need to book a visit with a guide for 10€. On the app, you’re asked to use headphones, and yet some people were obviously blasting it on their speakers. Again, that’s society in 2026 and the main reason why I want to go live into the woods. Up the 86 steps of the old stairs we go, and we have reached the very unique church of San Giovanni Battista (9/44) nested inside the cave. The current church got rebuilt in the mid 1500 after the quakes of the beginning of the century—like many of the 44 churches—and it’s quite unique. It’s also sometimes used as a venue for events. The most fun part is that right behind the altar, you can see the cave unfolding. And it’s right behind the altar that the guided tour starts. Sadly, only the first 300 or so meters of the cave is accessible to the public, and the rest is only accessible if you’re a speleologist. The whole cave is quite big, some 4 or 5kms and there are apparently rooms that are bigger than the opening one, where the church is located. I’d love to visit it, but I think I’m too tall for this type of stuff. One fun aspect of this cave is that apparently twenty-thousands years ago it was inhabited by the ursus spelaeus , the cave bear. One less cool aspect was all the writings on the walls of the cave. Why are people so fucking obsessed with writing on everything? Also, why can’t we have nice things? Anyway, the guided visit is done, it’s now time to get back on track since we have most of the walk still in front of us. So out the cave we go and down the stair, to then take a sharp right turn and walk below the entrance of the cave. There’s a nice view of the whole area from down here. Definitely worth visiting if you’re ever in this corner of the world for some random reason. We’re almost 3 hours into this walk (even though we have spent most of the time either waiting or inside the cave), and it’s now time to gain some elevation since most of it is spread on this next chunk that will take us pretty much to the highest point of the walk and also the next church. Unsurprisingly, after some twists and turns, what do we find? Another random Virgin Mary, this time in a shell. After some more walking inside the forest, we are back on paved road for a little while. We are high enough to have a nice view of Mount Matajur, the peak that dominates the area. That is also gonna be the target of the next hike since the third chunk of this walk goes from down the valley up to that mountain. Not to the very top, but come on, there’s no way I get all the way up there, and I also don’t reach the summit. So you’ll get to see it up close soon enough. We’re now almost at the site of the church of Santo Spirito (9/44), but before we walk up the final 50 or so meters, we need to cross path with guess what? You’re right, another Virgin Mary. We’re roughly 4 hours into this walk, and the location of the church of Santo Spirito is perfect to take a break and eat something. I mean, just look how relaxing this place feels: So far, this might be my favourite location, even though the church itself is probably the ugliest one. And also the youngest. The original one was built probably before the year 1000, but then everything got destroyed during bombardments in WW2 and the current building dates back to 1949. So it’s not even a century old, and it’s in rough shape already. It’s nice to take a break and relax for a bit. It’s a lovely day, perfect weather, and there’s no rush. Plus, we have company! Ok, lunch is done, shirt is dry, it’s mostly downhill from now on, so off we go through the forest again. After a little while, we pass next to the ruins of the old Church of San Nicolò, which, if it wasn’t for my watch vibrating, I’d have completely missed because this thing is barely visible even if you are paying attention. We also stumble across whatever—or whoever—this guy is. I had to take a picture and send it to my brother since that’s his name. Through the forest, across the fields, back into the forest again, out of the forest yet again we’re now almost at the point where we can see the new location of the church of San Nicolò Vescovo (10/44). I have to say, it’s a lot easier to spot compared to the old one, which is completely covered by vegetation and in total ruin. But it’s also quite big, and I don’t know, I guess I’m more of a fan of the tiny ones hidden inside the forest. This one feels like a normal church to me. Only one church is left, and then the final descent to the end of this hike. But first, I need to stop and take a picture of something, and by now you might have an idea of what it is. And here we are, we have reached the location of the final church of today’s hike, the church of San Donato, hidden inside the forest, with its missing bell and its lovely appearance. Now, fun fact: the door has a hole in it with a cover you can swipe aside. Is this a glory hole? We’ll never know. What we do know is what’s inside it because I did peek inside that hole. What a fun experience this was! The only thing left for us to do now is to walk down the forest, take a wrong turn because the GPS messed up, do some bushwhacking, find the correct trail again, walk some more, pass next to a bunch of other Marys—there are always more Marys—cross the Natisone once again and reach our final destination. And here we are, arrived at the park where we left my car, some 7 hours and 16kms later . This was a very relaxing walk, it can easily be done in probably 3 and a half hours. But why rush when you can spend some time outside and enjoy nature? I did update the iCloud album with the new pictures, so if you want to see more from this walk, click that link. You love the outdoors and RSS. You're one of the special ones.

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Manuel Moreale 1 months ago

Nicolas Solerieu

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Nicolas Solerieu, whose blog can be found at slrncl.com/blog . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. I’m dad, designer, cyclist, designer, texture guy – currently living in San Luis Obispo, CA. My oldest kid just learned to blow his nose. The other one is in his prime baby time. These days I day dream about bikepacking and permaculture . Born and raised in France, I landed in California in 2016. An odd mix of work ethic and ego led me to define myself through the stuff I make: all sorts of combinations of rectangles and text boxes, mostly for screens, solely because I got good enough to get paid for it. While I'm filled with gratitude for my career, I spend a humorously uncomfortable amount of time torn between ascetic ideals and pragmatism. While I’m not a technologist, I’m not a monk either. I’m way too fidgety. Time outdoors, family life, movement, and occasional meditation keep me sane. I adopted this domain name in 2016 as I didn't like having my real name spelled out in the URL, it felt weird. I bought my initial domain back in 2012: nicolas-soleri.eu , I thought it was clever. SLRNCL is a concatenation of my last name and my first name without the vowels. It's hard to remember, which is great since I'm not trying to play the SEO game. I truly started to put effort into writing in 2022. The birth of my first child probably had a lot to do with it – and getting off instagram. I couldn’t fathom the idea of being a dad with an instagram account. But I’d love for my kids to one days read the blog of their silly dad. Self-awareness and allergy to grandiosity creates a tension between craft, skepticism, and my embodied experience which I love to put into words. The blog-therapy is (still) working. It’s eating up most of my creative ego and filling my feed. Nowadays I use the default iOS notes app. I write whenever. I edit little. I used to have a notes.txt file on my desktop where I was putting down all interesting nuggets, like a wine cellar, hoping for them to mature. Instead, they mostly degenerated and created a bunch of anxiety from doing nothing of it. I breed an uncomfortably large amount of thoughts daily. Most of them are unexceptional. I cultivate poor writing hygiene because I do not want to truly get into writing. Yet, there seems to be something that keeps bringing me back to words. To tame my ego and avoid creating a generational supply of passable notes I use my blog as a graveyard. Typos are my own, I’m working on it. With AI it now feels like a mark of authenticity. Sometimes I ask my wife to proof-read, but that is rare because we end up arguing, worth it. Following the flow of life is what makes my creative juice flow. I often write on the toilet or in public parks while keeping an eye on my kids. I thrive in “white-space” time - time in between things. So I jot down notes when I’m out and about. I’m not a coffee shop person and I hate my home office . My website is home cooked. It runs mostly on PHP. I still have Jquery installed but I’m slowly removing all Javascript dependencies. I'm not a great dev and prefer to stay 5 years behind trends. My website is constrained by my skills. This has kept me grounded and covered most of my needs and ambitions. I don't recommend inspecting my code, it's really not great but decently light. Building stuff is a great way to keep myself grounded in the process. I use Inter as the only font because it's nice, plain, and open source. It will default to system font if Inter isn't available. Because I don't want to import anything custom or use CDN. I'm not better than Inter (and few out there are IMO). The site is hosted by OVH in France. I’m considering self-hosting since my house produces excess solar power. I’d use bearblog if I was not a pretentious web designer and had to start over. I recommended it to my wife , she likes it. The simplicity and authenticity of the project is lovely. That said I do not regret the torturous process of having redesigned my website tirelessly over the last decade. The process taught me a lot about myself. My domain name + hosting cost under 20 euros/year. I do not run ads or track anything - I don’t plan or change this ever. That means my website has had an incredible ROI considering the career opportunities it gave me. The many people who hired me all visited my website (and told me about it). I had some rewarding connections with internet strangers. My gratitude is larger than an html file can hold, and definitely magnitude greater than what it cost me to run my website. Money is important, and I’m a lucky bastard. I don’t have anything against people monetizing their thoughts - though I’m rarely compelled by a paywall. Digital patronage and crowdfunding seems highly relevant to get out of the social media hell realm of today. It has pitfalls, the main one being requiring mass adoption which seems highly delusional. But hope and compassion are contagious while big tech fights entropy. Social media always comes back in a different form, meanwhile, html is still there. It’s the cockroach business model. There are so many goodies out there, one link away. Sharing is fun, side projects too. In my case it took me a decade to get my head out of my own butt and realize the cost of my own ventures. I believe a lot of us are similar to me, moving through life and accumulating stuff. Cleaning up, giving up, and passing along are necessary processes. So as a closing thought I’d suggest to sit, close your eyes and think of all your stuff. If you’re comfortable with it, great. Otherwise, spring is coming. Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed . If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 138 interviews . People and Blogs is possible because kind people support it. These two crack me up and make me think: Keenan and Taylor town (already seen on P&B) Some wholesome Aussie stories: Beau Miles Maggie Appleton always gets me interested The only design blog Tobias Van Shneider I've ever read I'm a fan of Faircompanies stories and mission Not a blog but worth checking out James low audio archive

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Manuel Moreale 1 months ago

Spending hard caps

I was catching up with some tech news yesterday and every time I read one of these “I woke up with a USD 18k bill in my Cloud account” articles, I am reminded about how fucking stupid—and predatory—this whole industry can be. The ability to set hard spending caps should be required by law. I think that’s another issue the EU should decide to tackle at some point. If I know I have a budget available, there should be an option for me to configure your service so that you don’t allow me to spend more than that. And if my product or site goes down as a result of that, it’s a choice I get to make. But the reason why hard caps are usually not an option is obvious: companies get to make more money this way. Hurray for capitalism! The sad part is seeing allegedly smart people arguing that no, the actual reason is that it’s a complex problem to solve, and no-one has figured out how to do it yet. An excuse so pathetic that it’s not even worth getting mad about it. There are people discussing plans to build moon bases, put servers in orbit, build digital gods, and yet setting a hard cap on billing is a complex problem to solve. Sure, I believe that. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

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Manuel Moreale 1 months ago

JTR

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with JTR, whose blog can be found at taonaw.com . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. I go by JTR these days, which is based on an earlier pseudonym I picked up long ago. Sort of an alter ego I guess. I like how it rolls off the tongue, so I stuck with it. I was a writer (and a bit of a journalist) and a teacher before I found my way into IT. Today I’m a sort of manager who still writes plenty of technical documentation and attends a lot of meetings. I had a few blogs in the past, but when I started working for the medical center which I'm still working for today, 8 years ago, I decided to record my quest to learn technology in a blog. Soon after I started there, I was looking for an app to write checklists and bullet points, and I found Orgzly . It seemed minimal, and I liked that it just writes everything to text files. I had no idea what org-mode was (or Emacs for that matter), and after a few weeks with the app I was deep down in rabbit hole. So the start of my current position, along with learning Emacs and org-mode gave me a boost to start blogging what I was learning. I think it was my boss back then or one of my co-workers who didn't understand why I couldn't just use one of the many note-taking apps that were already available to us. That question, along with my reputation of always asking many of my own whenever we had meetings, had me come up with the idea that I should just call my blog “The Art of Not Asking Why,” hinting at one of my favorite books, Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It was just organic like that. “The Art of Not Asking Why” is kind of long, so I started to abbreviate it with “TAONAW” (I pronounce it "Tao-Now"), and I liked how it sounded... so here we are.” (the name of the book should be all caps…) Today, my blog is a mix of quick thoughts and longer posts, both of which are handled well by design by Micro.blog, my blogging platform, which I’m very happy with. For short posts (300 characters or so, "tweets" and "toots" basically), I usually use my iPhone or Android. Longer posts usually start in Emacs org-mode as a draft, and then are edited by hand before I pass them through Grammarly and/or AI for typos and various checks. AI is excellent to find broken links, technical terms that I might want to expand on ( and suggest links to those), and switching back to org-mode so that my draft ends up being updated with the same post, typo and error-free (or almost free) on my blog. For screenshots, I use SnagIt , which is paid for by my job (I write plenty of technical documents). Snaggit is excellent, and I'd pay for it in a heartbeat myself if I had to. For photos, which I take with my Sony camera or iPhone, I use Apple Photos these days for light editing. I also have Darktable and Krita on my Linux desktop, both of which are free, excellent tools that are highly underrated in my opinion. They give me all the power Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom used to give me, without costing me a dime and just make me feel good to use. My posts usually come from different experiences I go through, technical or otherwise. Sometimes I look in my journal and modify an entry from there to a post, at other times I go to my old blog and import a post from there and add it to my blog with the original timeline, yet other times I got over my images and pages on my blog - there’s always something to do, beyond just writing the posts. I think that’s part of the fun. A good blog grows with you, and you learn to tell more about yourself as you progress. I used to work from coffee shops, but today I mostly blog from home. My apartment is quiet and less distracting, and the best time for me to write is in the morning (if I have enough time available), so this combination usually wins me over. I need to focus when I write, and I don’t like to get distracted, which is another reason why home is usually the best place. I absolutely love my noise-cancelling Sony WH-1000XM6 (and the WH-1000XM5 before those) headphones, which have been a life changer for me, a person who can get distracted when my neighbors from across the hall return home. My mechanical keyboard, a Kensis Freestyle Edge RGB, is about 7 years old now and I love the feel of the mechanical keys under my fingers. The ergonomic setup (it's a split keyboard) helps my wrists, and my standing desk helps my concentration further. When I write, I also listen to music: electronic or classical. Songs with lyrics usually distract me. I have two computers. A MacBook Pro M2, and a System76 thelio mira , currently running Kubuntu, which is also my gaming computer. From these two, I lean slightly toward using the Mac for my writing because I take most of my photos with my iPhone and the Micro.blog desktop app that I use is for macOS. My blog is hosted on Micro.blog, which is a hybrid of a social platform and a blogging platform in one. Micro.blog uses Hugo to build the blog and Micropub for the social network. It also syndicates to other social networks like Tumblr and Medium and plenty more that I don't use. It’s a rather unique place that follows the POSSE (Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) principles . I like the fact that I can download all of my data, which includes my posts, my media and my CSS/HTML templates, any time I wish and take them elsewhere. That’s how the web should be. When I joined Micro.blog I had to register my own domain, which I did, but these days you can also get a domain through them, and I believe you can also get a certificate through Let’s Encrypt in one go. It's a bit confusing at the start since the concepts of a social network and a blog (=website) are different aspects in our minds, but they don't have to be that separate. No. What I know today and the tools I use are the best ones for me at this point. If anything, I’d encourage myself to have learned to use Emacs much earlier and to have adhered to POSSE long ago; that would have saved me from losing work on Medium and Blogger, which are now long gone. I recommend micro.blog wholeheartedly. My plan on Micro.blog (hosting) costs $100 a year, which isn't horrible when you break it down to $8 and change per month. Micro.blog comes with many additional tools (such as hosting podcasts, encrypted notes, storing videos and more) which are worth it in my opinion. My domain costs about $30 a year. I absolutely hate how ads work on the internet today, and I will never have ads on my blog, but I believe it's OK to ask for support or, as I like to think of it, "tips." If someone likes something I wrote, they are welcome to leave a tip. I don't need it however to keep the blog going, thankfully. I don’t have a long list, and I think most of the folks I know were already covered in this series. I will highlight a few that are more active: I’d love, love to see more non-techie folks on POSE-style blogs. I’m not talking about Medium or Tumblr; these are Silos. Some exist, here and there. There used to a be a priod, back when people published on movable type and wordpress was still something new no one knew about, where I was following a diner waitress from Jersey, a fighter pilot who was a patriot in the good kind of way, and of course, there was the USS clueless (I think he’s still around, in retirement). Now, you have to be in the industry to do anything like that. I had a conversation with my partner the other day and he just shrugged. The term “silo” (he uses Tumblr) is so regular now that it’s like explaining water to a fish. And it’s a shame. Those that are different, micro.blog included, seems to require some knowledge of what, I guess, used to be common knowledge if you wanted to be online. I don’t know. Perhaps if I was still a teacher, I’d teach these internet “basics” to teens. Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed . If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 137 interviews . People and Blogs is possible because kind people support it. Annie’s blog : she often writes essays about feelings and life experiences, about once a week or so. Sal : mostly tech, here and there some other life stuff The Wandering Lensman He's professional photographer, usually an image and a short text. I like what he says about taking photos. Pluralistic from Cory Doctorow does this guy really need an intro…? I love how well-linked and resourced the daily essays are. An (the?) online privacy activist. Jack Baty Daily I lose track if this is the “real” blog or not. The guy changes blogs and platforms like we change shirts. But that’s part of the fun.

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Manuel Moreale 1 months ago

Nuances

I realised that the thing that bothered me the most about that stupid tabs discussion was the shallowness. Vertical vs horizontal tabs in a browser is not a deep philosophical topic worth of major explorations, that goes without saying, but you can still approach it with some nuances. And that’s the main issue with most of modern discourse: everything is—or tries to be—some sort of hot-take. Because being reasonable is boring. Being reasonable and working through a topic doesn’t generate strong reactions. And you don’t go viral for having a reasonable opinion. Take this piece for example , titled “Vertical browser tabs are better and you should use them”. There’s an immediate question that needs to be answered there: better based on what? In David’s case, the argument boils down to essentially this: It’s a simple matter of screen real estate. Virtually every modern computer display is widescreen, which is to say it’s wider than it is tall. Websites and web apps, meanwhile, are practically always vertical experiences. This is as reasonable as it is wrong. I am staring at a 32-inch 4k monitor at this very moment. My browser window is almost always either square-ish or vertical. Because most sites are not designed to scale above a certain width in pixels, so there’s no point in wasting horizontal screen real estate. But it does make sense to use vertical space since I can read more text at once without having to scroll. So in my case, having tabs on the side makes absolutely no sense. And mine is just one potential use case that throws the entire “vertical browser tabs are better” argument out the window. I’m sure there are plenty more. And this is not just true for this pointless “debate”. It’s true for most things. But modern discourse moves too fast to go deep into anything. Discussions tend to stay surface level with hot takes flying left and right. You see it in tech, you see it in politics—especially in politics—you see it everywhere. There’s also people who think that taking nuances into consideration is a bad thing altogether, because the only reason why someone might want to drill down into a topic is to drag a discussion into the mud and stop progress, obviously. We can ignore the fact that complexity hides in the details, while agreeing on something at a surface level is as easy as it is pointless. But maybe that’s the goal sometimes: to agree on something at a surface level, feel all good about ourselves and achieve absolutely nothing in the process. The overwhelming majority of ideas and opinions exist on a spectrum. And I am of the belief that sharing and debating where we should position ourselves, on that spectrum, is important. And if you disagree, you're wrong. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

Web Development Design

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Manuel Moreale 1 months ago

Vertical Tabs

The other day, as I was driving home, I had the bad idea of listening to the most recent Waveform podcast , where they were discussing vertical vs horizontal tabs in browsers (and many other things). The whole discussion was truly painful to listen to, you’d hope people who talk tech for a living have some more elaborate takes on this kind of stuff, and yet, the whole discussion was very, very dumb. I am not going to discuss the merits of vertical vs horizontal tabs, but I am going to say that if you are a fan of vertical tabs, you probably want to check out browser.horse , which has, in my opinion, the best take on vertical tabs I’ve seen so far. It’s obviously not for everyone, especially because it’s a browser with a subscription—for what should probably be an add-on on top of your regular browser—but still, it is a clever idea, that goes beyond simply putting tabs on the side. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

Web Development Design

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Manuel Moreale 1 months ago

Anthony Nelzin-Santos

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Anthony Nelzin-Santos, whose blog can be found at z1nz0l1n.com . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Bonjour ! I’m a militant wayfarer, budding typographer, pathological reader, slow cyclist, obsessive tinkerer, dangerous cook, amateur bookbinder, homicidal gardener, mediocre sewist, and fanatical melomaniac living in Lyon (France). I was a technology journalist and journalism teacher for sixteen years, but i now work in instructional design. In my spare time, i take photos of old storefronts to preserve a rapidly fading typographical tradition. One of these days, i’ll finally finish the typefaces i’ve been working on forever. And my novel. And the painting of the bathroom. (My wife is a saint.) I was born a few years before the web was invented and grew up at this fascinating time when everybody wanted to do something with it, but nobody knew quite what yet. We were still supposed to learn Logo and Pascal in technology class, but most of the teachers understood the importance of the web and taught us the basics of HTML and CSS. I built my first website in 2000… as a school assignment! By 2007, i was one of those insufferable tech bloggers who made enough money to feel entitled, but not enough to feel safe. (I moonlighted as a graphic designer.) When more established outlets came knocking at my door, i shut down my blog and became one of those insufferable tech journalists who make enough money to feel entitled, but not enough to feel safe. (I moonlighted as a journalism teacher.) I kept a personal blog under the “zinzolin” moniker. This shade of purple is my favourite colour, partly because it sounds a bit like my name. Over the years, it became more and more difficult to find the energy to write recreationally after having spent the day writing professionally. In 2025, feeling more than a little burnt out, i rebooted my blog and switched from French to English. Fortunately, the name is equally weird in both languages. I don’t have a process so much as a way of managing the incessant chatter in my head. I write to give myself the permission to forget, and i publish to gift myself the ability to remember. You’ll never catch me without some way to capture those little “brain itches” — a notebook, the Bloom app, a digital recorder, the back of my hand… (I wrote part of this interview as a long series of text messages to myself!) In the middle of the week, i start reviewing my notes to find a common theme or extract the strongest idea. When an incomplete thought keeps coming back, i don’t try to force it by staring at a blinking cursor. I take a long walk, and usually, i have to stop part way to write. Most of the actual blogging is done long before i sit down to properly draft my weekly note. I have this romantic notion that the more comfortable i am, the more i can edit, the worse my writing tends to get. If i could, i’d write everything longhand in a rickety train, stream-of-consciousness style, and publish the raw scans of my notebooks. You wouldn’t be able to read half of it, but i can assure you the illegible half would be Nobel-prize worthy. But then, some things only happen after a few hours of diligent editing. If i give myself enough time, i can stop transcribing my notes and start conversing with them. There’s always something worth exploring in the gap between our past and present selves – even if the past was two days ago – but that delicate work requires a conducive environment. Judging by my recent output, it looks like this environment comprises a good chair , a MacBook Air on one of those ugly lap desks, my custom international QWERTY layout , iA Writer for writing and Antidote for proofreading, cosy lighting, just the right amount of background noise, and most important of all, a pot of delicious coffee. I’ve tried pretty much every CMS and SSG under the sun, but i’ve always come back to WordPress, until Matt Mullenweg reminded us that a benevolent dictator still is a dictator . Z1NZ0L1N is now built on Ghost and hosted by Magic Pages . I used to use Tinylytics and Buttondown , but i’m now using Ghost’s integrated analytics and newsletter features. My other websites are hosted on a VPS with Infomaniak , which is also where i get my domain names, e-mail, and assorted cloud services. That’s a question i had to ask myself when i rebooted Z1NZ0L1N last year. I switched to English in a bid to better separate my professional output from my recreational output. I jettisoned most of my audience, but i found a new community around the IndieWeb Carnival and quickly rebuilt a readership on my own merits. I get excited each time i get an e-mail from someone i don’t know from a country on the other side of the globe. I wanted to find a way to publish regularly without turning Z1NZ0L1N into the umpteenth link blog. After a few experiments, i’ve settled on a weekly note that’s part “what i’m doing”, part “what the rest of the world is doing”. This is old-school blogging meets recommendation algorithms — and i love it. Some things haven’t changed, though, and will never change. I use an open-source CMS that i could host myself, not a proprietary platform that i can’t control. I designed my theme myself. I don’t play the SEO/GEO game. I pay a little less than €10/month for Magic Pages’ starter plan with the custom themes add-on. Considering that it saves me €15/month in third-party services, i’d say it’s a fair price. I pay €12/year for the domain, but i also registered a few variations, including , which was first registered in 1999! Blogging is my least expensive hobby — by far. As someone who’s worked a lot on the economics of independent publishing, i’m happily subscribed to a few news outlets and magazines. I like the idea of $1/month memberships for blogs, but in practice, i find it hard to track multiple micro-subscriptions on top of my existing (and frankly far too numerous) digital subscriptions. I wonder if we should create blogging collectives, almost like unions and coops, to collect and redistribute a single subscription in between members. In the meantime, i’ll continue not talking about my Ko-Fi page . The Forest and Ye Olde Blogroll are fantastic discovery tools. A lot of my favourite bloggers have already been featured in People and blogs : VH Belvadi, BSAG, Frank Chimero, Keenan, Piper Haywood, Nick Heer, Tom McWright, Riccardo Mori, Jim Nielsen, Kev Quirk, Arun Venkatesan, Zinzy… I’d love to see how Rob Weychert , Chris Glass , Josh Ginter or Melanie Richards would answer. Their approach to blogging couldn’t be more different, but they each informed mine in their own way. Since 2008, i’ve taken thousands of photos of old storefronts. It began as a way to inform my typographical practice, but it rapidly became an excuse to go out and pay attention – really pay attention – to the world around me. You wouldn’t believe the things i’ve discovered in side streets, the number of conversations i’ve struck after taking a picture of a once-beloved shop, and how my way of looking at the evolution of cities has entirely changed. If you’re up for a little challenge, find your own collection. It might be cool doors, weird postboxes, triangular things, every bookshop in Nova Scotia , sewer manholes, purple things, number signs… It’ll give you another perspective not only when travelling in foreign places, but also on your (not so) familiar surroundings. It doesn’t cost a penny, but it’ll pay off immensely. Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed . If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 135 interviews . People and Blogs is possible because kind people support it.

HTML Career Writing CSS Journalism

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