Latest Posts (20 found)
The Jolly Teapot 4 days ago

The dumber, the better

Zhenyi Tan, in a blog post titled Ensheinification , writes: Every time I replace something with a new thing, the new thing is worse. My mother-in-law bought a new rice cooker. It has 20 settings and none of them cook good rice. The old one had one button and made perfect rice for 10+ years. I talked to her about it. She said she tried three different rice cookers. The first one made the rice too sticky. The second one had many buttons and bad design3. And all the buttons turned out to cook the same way. The third was also full of buttons and also made sticky rice. She went back to ask the shop staff how the buttons worked. Nobody knew. They’re just salespeople. Reading this article, I could almost taste the frustration that I often experience myself when I am in the market for something. The rice cooker is actually a great example of an object that is supposed to do one thing, and do it well. It turns out that last Christmas, my wife got me something I had on my wish list for a while: you guessed it, a rice cooker. But not any rice cooker: this “analogue”, beautiful, and simple Hario rice cooker . No button. No plug. No screen. No LED indicator. Just a rice cooker that whistles when the rice is about to be ready. Is it perfect? No. The rice is very good, every time, but I would not call it perfect. But if I prepare the rice the right way, the results are repeatedly and predictably great . The object itself is well-made too. A nice glass lid, a stainless steel and aluminium body, an easy-to-clean and replaceable whistle part: I think this thing could last decades if I take care of it properly. This article by Zhenyi Tan also reminded me of Bradley Taunt’s My Coffee Maker Just Makes Coffee post that I have shared a few times already : Both digital and industrial design suffer from bloat. Far too often I witness fellow designers over-engineer customer requests. Or they add excessive bloat to new product features. It’s almost a rarity these days to find designers who tackle work as single items. Everything expands. Everything needs to do one little extra “cool” thing. Nothing is ever taken away. My new rice cooker and my dear old coffee maker are great examples of this philosophy applied to everyday objects, and the more I think about it, the more satisfying it gets. * 1 As you know, I also love to take away and remove stuff to keep things light and simple . When my soon-to-be brother-in-law first visited our new flat last year, he asked me about the kind of roller shutters we had installed, if they were electrically operated and if I could activate them remotely. I told him that the real estate developer had stuck to manual levers to keep the cost down as much as possible, but we could, if we wanted, easily add a little motor on the side. But I told him that I preferred this manual system anyway. If one day I can’t open or close the shutters, I will know where the problem comes from: a mechanical issue with the roller. If I had a smart system, and if tapping the button on my iPhone screen didn’t do anything, the problem could not only be caused by more things, but also become harder to pinpoint. Is the Wi-Fi working? Do the shutters have internet access? * 2 Should I restart the app or my phone? Does my flat have power? Do I need to reset the connection? Is it a bug? Do I have to update the app? Do I need to give the app access to my location? And finally, is there a mechanical issue with the roller? I get that these modern and more complex solutions exist: some people might prefer them over “dumb” systems, some people may actually need 20+ functions for their rice cooker. But if the price to pay for these is less reliability and simplicity, I wouldn’t count this as progress, but as regression indeed. My coffee maker is this fantastic Braun Aromaster Classic KF 47/1 , in white, and not only do I find that it looks a little Dieter-Rams-esque , but it just works. I bought it in 2020, and I plan to keep it for at least another six years. Sounds like a lot these days. ^ This sentence alone should be a warning sign urging us to keep things as dumb as possible. ^ My coffee maker is this fantastic Braun Aromaster Classic KF 47/1 , in white, and not only do I find that it looks a little Dieter-Rams-esque , but it just works. I bought it in 2020, and I plan to keep it for at least another six years. Sounds like a lot these days. ^ This sentence alone should be a warning sign urging us to keep things as dumb as possible. ^

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The Jolly Teapot 1 weeks ago

Browsing the web with JavaScript turned off

Some time ago, I tried to use my web browser with JavaScript turned off by default. The experiment didn’t last long , and my attempt at a privacy-protecting, pain-free web experience failed. Too many websites rely on JavaScript, which made this type of web browsing rather uncomfortable. I’ve kept a Safari extension like StopTheScript around, on top of a content blocker like Wipr , just in case I needed to really “trim the fat” of the occasional problematic webpage. * 1 Recently, I’ve given this setup a new chance to shine, and even described it in a post. The results are in: the experiment failed yet again. But I’m not done. Even if this exact setup isn’t the one I currently rely on, JavaScript-blocking is nevertheless still at the heart of my web browsing hygiene on the Mac today. For context, this need for fine-tuning comes from the fact that my dear old MacBook Air from early 2020, rocking an Intel chip, starts to show its age. Sure, it already felt like a 10-year-old computer the moment the M1 MacBook Air chip was released, merely six months after I bought it, but let’s just say that a lot of webpages make this laptop choke. My goal of making this computer last one more year can only be reached if I manage not to throw the laptop through the window every time I want to open more than three tabs. On my Mac, JavaScript is now blocked by default on all pages via StopTheScript. Leaving JavaScript on, meaning giving websites a chance, sort of defeated the purpose of my setup (performance and privacy). Having JS turned off effectively blocks 99% of ads and trackers (I think, don’t quote me on that) and makes browsing the web a very enjoyable experience. The fan barely activates, and everything is as snappy and junk-free as expected. For websites that require JavaScript — meaning frequently visited sites like YouTube or where I need to be logged in like LanguageTool  — I turn off StopTheScript permanently via the Websites > Extensions menu in the Safari Settings. I try to keep this list to a bare minimum, even if this means I have to accept a few annoyances like not having access to embedded video players or comments on some websites. For instance, I visit the Guardian multiple times daily, yet I won’t add it to the exception list, even if I’m a subscriber and therefore not exposed to the numerous “please subscribe” modals. I can no longer hide some categories on the home page, nor watch embedded videos: a small price to pay for a quick and responsive experience, and a minimal list of exceptions. For the few times when I actually need to watch a video on the Guardian, comment on a blog post, or for the occasional site that needs JavaScript simply to appear on my screen (more on that later), what I do is quickly open the URL in a new private window. There, StopTheScript is disabled by default (so that JavaScript is enabled: sorry, I know this is confusing). Having to reopen a page in a different browser window is an annoying process, yes. Even after a few weeks it still feels like a chore, but it seems to be the quickest way on the Mac to get a site to work without having to mess around with permissions and exceptions, which can be even more annoying on Safari. Again, a small price to pay to make this setup work. * 2 Another perk of that private browsing method is that the ephemeral session doesn’t save cookies and the main tracking IDs disappear when I close the window. I think. The problem I had at first was that these sessions tended to display the webpages as intended by the website owners: loaded with JavaScript, ads, modals, banners, trackers, &c. Most of the time, it is a terrible mess. Really, no one should ever experience the general web without any sort of blocker. To solve this weakness of my setup, I switched from Quad9 to Mullvad DNS to block a good chunk of ads and trackers (using the “All” profile ). Now, the private window only allows the functionality part of the JavaScript, a few cookie banners and Google login prompt annoyances, but at least I am not welcomed by privacy-invading and CPU-consuming ads and trackers every time my JS-free attempt fails. I know I could use a regular content blocker instead of a DNS resolver, but keeping it active all the time when JS is turned off feels a bit redundant and too much of an extension overlap. More importantly, I don’t want to be tempted to manage yet another exception list on top of the StopTheScript one (been there, done that, didn’t work). Also, with Safari I don’t think it’s possible to activate an extension in Private Mode only. John Gruber , in a follow-up reaction to The 49MB Web Page article from Shubham Bose, which highlights the disproportionate weight of webpages related to their content, wrote: One of the most controversial opinions I’ve long espoused, and believe today more than ever, is that it was a terrible mistake for web browsers to support JavaScript. Not that they should have picked a different language, but that they supported scripting at all. That decision turned web pages — which were originally intended as documents — into embedded computer programs. There would be no 49 MB web pages without scripting. There would be no surveillance tracking industrial complex. The text on a page is visible. The images and video embedded on a page are visible. You see them. JavaScript is invisible. That makes it seem OK to do things that are not OK at all. Amen to that. But if JavaScript is indeed mostly used for this “invisible” stuff, why are some websites built to use it for the most basic stuff? Video streaming services, online stores, social media platforms, I get it: JavaScript makes sense. But text-based sites? Blogs? Why? The other day I wanted to read this article , and only the website header showed up in my browser. Even Reader Mode didn’t make the article appear. When I opened the link in a private window, where StopTheScript is disabled, lo and behold, the article finally appeared. For some obscure reason, on that website (and others) JavaScript is needed to load text on a freaking web page. Even if you want your website to have a special behaviour regarding loading speeds, design subtleties, or whatever you use JavaScript for, please, use a tag, either to display the article in its most basic form, or at least to show a message saying “JavaScript needed for no apparent reason at all. Sorry.” * 3 This is what I do on my phone, as managing Safari extensions on iOS is a painful process. Quiche Browser is a neat solution and great way for me to have the “turn off JavaScript” menu handy, but without a way to sync bookmarks, history or open tabs with the Mac, I still prefer to stick to Safari, at least for now. ^ I still wish StopTheScript had a one-touch feature to quickly reload a page with JavaScript turned on until the next refresh or for an hour or so, but it doesn’t. ^ This is what I do for this site’s search engine , where PageFind requires JavaScript to operate. Speaking of search engine, DuckDuckGo works fine in HTML-only mode (the only main search engine to offer this I believe). ^ This is what I do on my phone, as managing Safari extensions on iOS is a painful process. Quiche Browser is a neat solution and great way for me to have the “turn off JavaScript” menu handy, but without a way to sync bookmarks, history or open tabs with the Mac, I still prefer to stick to Safari, at least for now. ^ I still wish StopTheScript had a one-touch feature to quickly reload a page with JavaScript turned on until the next refresh or for an hour or so, but it doesn’t. ^ This is what I do for this site’s search engine , where PageFind requires JavaScript to operate. Speaking of search engine, DuckDuckGo works fine in HTML-only mode (the only main search engine to offer this I believe). ^

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The Jolly Teapot 3 weeks ago

March 2026 blend of links

I promise you I try to avoid linking to more than two articles on the same topic in each edition — and I really want to avoid my readers to feel too depressed reading this blog — but everything seems to be about A.I. or some sort of automation these days, either directly or indirectly. I also notice that most of the topics revolve around the how and rarely on the why , as if accelerating tasks to the max, regardless of their purpose, is unquestionably a good thing. Emily Tucker’s Open Letter to Georgetown Students, In Response to Recent Announcements by the University about “Generative A.I.” – “ It’s a big win for them, in their quest to persuade you of your powerlessness, that they have gotten your university to [adopt] their marketing language for its official statements, to shape its academic programming around the presumption of their indefinite economic primacy, and to pay for you to have free access to technologies that will make it harder — the more you use them — to know yourself to be a free intellectual, creative and moral agent. ” (via Dan Gillmor ) Overthinking: A.I. wasn't the first to break my heart – This article from Ana Rodrigues read a little too close to home for my own comfort; the feelings described and words chosen are very accurate and indeed increasingly familiar to a growing number of people. We’re Training Students To Write Worse To Prove They’re Not Robots, And It’s Pushing Them To Use More A.I. – “ […] the AI detection tool flagged the essay as “18% A.I. written.” The culprit? Using the word “devoid.” When the word was swapped out for “without,” the score magically dropped to 0%. ” The Future Smells Like Paper – “ The technology should remove bureaucratic friction while preserving ceremonial weight. Make the process transparent without making it trivial. You can't automate meaning. You can only create conditions where it might emerge. ” (via iA Writer ) What I mean when I say that I hate Gen A.I. – “ I hate that I do it, and I am angry that I am forced - but I am an adult and I do what I must. I couldn't care less if I write the code I "make", but I am disenchanted with humanity. As a young boy I was full of optimism, I thought we can strive to be better. I was wrong. Money is all that matters. ” (via Brain Baking ) Backseat Software – So many quotable parts in this beauty of an article by Mike Swanson. Before writing this very sentence, I successively pasted 3 to 4 quotes, each better than the previous one. What a great read; actually very hard to get through, as you'll want to stop every other paragraph to take notes. (via The Talk Show ) TextEdit and the Relief of Simple Software – An interesting perspective from someone deeply involved in the activity of writing on a computer, but seemingly not as passionate about software as one would assume. I’ll keep an eye on Kyle Chayka’s future columns, as I wouldn’t be surprised if this one is just a first step into the inevitable quest of finding a better writing app on the Mac. I’ve been there, both as a TextEdit-only user and as a text-editing software snob. I even play with Vim in the Terminal from time to time, just so I can feel like Dana Scully typing a report . (via Michael Tsai ) SubEthaEdit – Perfect transition to a really excellent text editor, for people who love “real” Mac apps, with a neat collaboration feature. The Shape of Paris – At first, I just wanted to watch the first couple of seconds of this to see if it was worth saving for later or not, and I ended up watching it in full. Beautiful scenery that somehow made me nostalgic for the eight years of my life I lived in Paris. Also, has any other sport or hobby ever beaten skateboard in terms of style and looks? I don’t think so, it’s the epitome of cool . (via Kottke ) Shady Characters – Not as cool as a skateboard video in Paris, but this whole website looks incredible thanks to an exquisite typography. Subscribed to the RSS feed, and there is also a book, that I’ve just ordered. Previous blend of links editions

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The Jolly Teapot 1 months ago

Questions about the future of MacOS in the age of the MacBook Neo

As far as I can see, the majority of MacBook Neo reviews are overwhelmingly positive . Other reviews are simply acknowledging that this new laptop will be a huge success, while also recommending other laptops, including the refurbished MacBook Air . These reviews share the same overall message: the Neo, especially after the August-September back-to-school season, will be an immense hit, potentially becoming the best-selling Mac computer of all time, maybe outselling the previous bestseller, I want to say three to four times (just speculating here). With this upcoming increased volume of sales in the traditional computer market, i.e. not phones or tablets, and with these millions of users new to the Mac platform, what can this mean for MacOS and the ecosystem? I have a lot of questions, and very few answers, as you can see below. Will the Neo become a second chance for the Mac App Store? Will the popularity of the Neo, on the contrary, make the Mac App Store experience even worse? Will it become flooded with crappy apps, trying to take advantage of trusting users new to the platform? Will this change the average app price or business model on the Mac? Looking at the Top Free Apps list on the Mac App Store as I write this line, the 6th most popular app is called “ AI Chatbot · Ask AI Anything 5.2 ”. * 1 It sits right after Microsoft Excel and CapCut, and before Microsoft PowerPoint. No, this app — unrelated to OpenAI — is not fishy at all (!) and the Mac App Store is very safe. The 12th most popular app on the list is “ HP: Print and Support ”. Great, great stuff. I wonder what will happen with millions of extra Mac users. Will the Neo help the Mac become a proper gaming platform? The Neo may not be equipped for “serious” gaming, due to its basic screen and “modest” GPU, but all the casual games and older games like Minecraft would be perfectly fine on this machine: there is definitely an opportunity for Apple and developers here, especially with the Mac being compatible with PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch controllers out of the box. Will the popularity of the MacBook Neo be an opportunity for Apple to mobilise more third-party developers to build apps for MacOS, now that the potential user base can be significantly larger? How many of these new apps will be truly native, and how many will be built on top of frameworks like Electron, since the majority of these new users probably won’t care? Is the Neo a new opportunity for the Swift language? Will the Neo push Apple to finally update the Stickies app? I guess we will have to wait until WWDC 2026 to have parts of these answers. Will this increased popularity of the Mac, arguably the first modern Mac for the masses, bring more heat to MacOS when it comes to viruses and security flaws? This is one of the first questions I asked myself when I started to read about how the MacBook Neo could sell millions, on top of the current Mac sales. I understand that MacOS itself is pretty secure, but if MacOS becomes more appealing to apps and games developers, it will also be more appealing to virus makers. How much of the iPad market will the Neo capture? How much of an impact will it have on the Safari vs. Chrome market share: will new Mac users just use Chrome on their new Macs or stick to Safari? Will the Neo push Apple to release more frequent updates for Safari? How many Safari extensions will be available by the end of the year? How many of the new Mac users, brought to the platform via the Neo, will eventually become MacOS enthusiasts? What does it mean for the direction of MacOS? If, by the end of 2026, 80 to 90% of active Macs are MacBooks Neo (again, just speculating), what does it mean for the future of Liquid Glass? * 2 Is an increased line of revenue for the Mac a reason for Apple to mobilise more people to work on MacOS ? I am a little worried that a never-seen-before popularity for the Mac would encourage Apple to make MacOS look and behave more like iOS. Will the increased popularity of the Mac make the Mac less cool in the eyes of others, less exclusive? Is the Mac ready to become more than the cooler alternative to Windows? I have a lot of questions, as you can see. I’m sure most of these questions have been asked hundreds of times already. Answers to these questions will appear obvious to some, less so to others. We don’t even know if the Neo will be as successful as most people predict. But I’m sure the Neo’s success is the one thing that raises the fewest questions. Note: App Store rankings vary by region (I think). My observations relate to the French store. ^ Yeah, sorry in advance, I never know how to write the plural of MacBooks, so in this post I will use the “MacBooks Neo” form. ^ Note: App Store rankings vary by region (I think). My observations relate to the French store. ^ Yeah, sorry in advance, I never know how to write the plural of MacBooks, so in this post I will use the “MacBooks Neo” form. ^

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The Jolly Teapot 1 months ago

February 2026 blend of links

Some links don’t call for a full blog post, but sometimes I still want to share the good stuff I encounter on the web. World’s largest spider web – Be warned — especially if spiders make you uncomfortable — because you won’t be able to forget this video if you decide to watch it. You’ll learn something, sure, but you may end up having nightmares. LLMs and Software Development Roundup (Michael Tsai) – Fascinating collection of thoughts and reactions (as always with Michael Tsai’s blog) on how A.I. can be as useful as frustrating. Something tells me that this post, updated regularly, will age like good wine. Pure Blog – Kev has built his own CMS for his blog, and made it a brilliant tool available to everyone. If I were starting a blog today, this is the CMS I would use, as it’s just about pitch perfect as to what is needed for a proper blog. If you are reading this and don’t have a blog of your own yet, you know what to do. News Tower – “ Step into the bustling world of 1930s New York as an ambitious publisher. In News Tower, you’ll manage a growing newsroom during the Great Depression, Prohibition, and beyond. Send your reporters across the globe chasing breaking stories, hard-hitting news or scandalous gossip, it’s up to you. But beware: the mafia, the mayor, and other factions are ready to sway your headlines for their gain. ” (via Nieman Journalism Lab ) Life before social media – Precious perspective from Loren in this post, with which it’s difficult to not agree wholeheartedly. I don’t think I have lost much of my beloved online experience when I deleted my social media accounts: Facebook, then Instagram, then Twitter , and finally LinkedIn. I may miss the occasional “moment” and the ability to answer directly to posts, but I still follow most of my favourite accounts via RSS. I still catch myself doomscrolling from time to time, but nothing I can’t escape. Only using an RSS reader on my Mac also helps. Pandoc in the browser – The power of Pandoc without the hassle of having to operate it via the Terminal. Bookmarked. Shared. Praised. (via Rodrigo Ghedin ) AI Chatbot That Only Responds ‘Huh’ Valued At $200 Billion – “ … if you don’t incorporate HmmAI into your company’s workflow right now, you’re going to be left behind. ” Ferrari Luce – I’m not sure if I’m a big fan of the whole aluminium and glass finish for the inside of a car; I’d think that warmer materials like carbon fibre, leather, or even wood would feel better, but I do love the retro and functional layout of commands. This Jony Ive guy looks like an adequate designer, doesn’t he? The webpage itself is very well-made too, and not something I would have expected from a car company like Ferrari. São Paulo names new law after dog that stayed by owner’s grave for 10 years – “ Bob’s former owner died in 2011. After her burial, the brown long-haired mixed-breed dog reportedly refused to leave her side at a cemetery in Taboão da Serra […] Relatives are said to have tried several times to take the dog away, but he always returned and was eventually adopted by cemetery staff. ” Peter Falk and Lee Grant in The Prisoner of Second Avenue, 1971 – One of my grandmothers was in love with Peter Falk, and I must have inherited these genes from her. This picture must be framed somewhere in my flat. (via Daniel Benneworth-Gray ) More “Blend of links” posts

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The Jolly Teapot 2 months ago

Is the Mac having a BMW’s Neue Klasse moment?

In the last couple of months, we have seen plenty of rants , reports, analysis , and other exposés about the state of Apple software, whether it is about their bad icon design , bad icon implementation , neglect , more neglect , and plain worrisome trends . The most damning thing of all? All of these complaints are valid at the same time, and, coming from Mac enthusiasts and connoisseurs, they carry a lot of weight. This collective reaction is strong because Apple is not a brand usually associated with poor quality, odd design choices, or a lack of attention to detail. It is particularly notable on the Mac, arguably the most prominent Apple software product when it comes to enthusiasm about the brand and what they stand for. Today, some of the Apple observers and critics are almost in shock of how fast things went bad. There were warning signs before, but the core foundations of what makes the Mac a great computing platform didn’t seem threatened. The problems seemed limited to a few bugs and side apps that were quickly filed under mishaps , and the growing popularity of non-native apps that ignore Mac conventions . Now, even MacOS itself is plagued with symptoms of the “unrefined” disease. Is MacOS becoming another Windows? A couple of years ago, circa 2021, I was using a Windows computer for work. It was fine. Not great, not bad, it was just OK. Most of the tools I have to use at work live in the browser, and I managed to find peace with the few apps I was using, most of them Electron-based, like Obsidian. When I eventually got an M1 MacBook Air as a replacement, it was a breath of fresh air. Not because I’m a Mac user since 2006, but because the Mac is not fine or just OK: it’s great. Mac apps, the “real” Mac apps, are indeed very good. They feel part of the system, whereas on Windows it’s hard to distinguish between a web-wrapped app and a native app. They all feel the same. Ty Bolt said it best writing about Panic’s Nova (emphasis mine): Nova is one of the best pieces of software I’ve ever used. It’s refined and polished and there’s no equivalent on Linux and Windows. It has its own personality, but also feels like an extension of the operating system. Which is a hallmark of a great Mac app. Folks in the community call them Mac-assed Mac apps. These apps are what make MacOS really great. The best apps I have used are all Mac apps. For me, this quote is what the Mac is all about. But with all the current issues documented on MacOS Tahoe, it is not as easy to look down on Windows as it once was. For users like me, who appreciate a certain level of precision and craftsmanship in software and love Apple because of that — especially the Mac — this trend is worrisome. We know that Apple is not going away, but the Apple we love seems distracted. We worry that the Mac won’t ever feel like the Mac we love today again. We worry that our habits, our taste, and our commitments to a platform will become pointless and dépassés . We worry because there is not a proper alternative to the Mac environment. Users with a different set of tastes, values, and habits, users who may use a Mac for their best-in-class chips, but not for its software, won't understand. Some users who already use and love Linux or Windows (and easily switch between the two), for their set of tastes, values, and habits, won't understand. Users who use a Mac just to live inside a Chrome/Electron landscape of apps won't understand. This period of neglect may be over soon. It may go on for another few years. It may also be all downhill from here. We just don't know. We have to wait, we have to hope, and we have to continue pointing out what feels off about the platform we love. The most cynical will point to the obvious, saying that Mac enthusiasts are not where the money is these days for Apple. This would explain a lot, and it's very tempting to think that way. But I thought of something that may sound like wishful thinking: What if Apple is having its own BMW-Neue-Klasse moment? For BMW, Neue Klasse is the name of their brand reset, their upcoming generation of cars, from the design language to the production platform to the actual vehicle models. It was announced a few years ago, in the midst of the transition to the electric-first era. For BMW, this meant reaffirming the brand, getting back to its roots , and embracing what makes BMW a well-loved and praised car manufacturer. This kind of transition takes a lot of time, effort, and money. Between the announcement and today, brand enthusiasts and critics have perceived a regression in quality and finish , and have felt that the brand has lost touch with its premium foundations and with what makes them love it in the first place. Optimists and apologists will explain this by saying that BMW has put all their best talents and resources towards the Neue Klasse. They will tell you that the current line of models and its related perceived-quality issues are temporary while they reallocated some of their best teams , a necessary low to set things anew, with the upcoming generation of vehicles. As far as I can understand, the reasoning is that BMW knew it had enough brand capital to absorb a few awkward design cycles and perceived drops in interior quality. They surfed on their existing reputation while spending a lot of resources on a platform reset, hoping for a smooth transition. It may hurt them a little , but they considered it a small price to pay to be able to embrace this new era confidently, and regain what was lost. I want to imagine that the same thing is happening at Apple. What if the last couple of years were a transition for Apple? Unlike BMW, Apple would not share their own Neue Klasse vision: they would just unveil it when it’s ready and keep it a secret until then. Meanwhile, their best engineers, designers, and product people are reassigned and working hard on a new generation of MacOS, something that is a big step forward. Maybe Apple thinks that, for the current lineup, helped by the greatest hardware the Mac ever had, the limited resources and ongoing problems are an acceptable compromise, for now. * 1 Mark Gurman would probably have shared the scoop if that were what was really happening, but I’ll keep hoping this “Mac reset” is actually happening and good (and not a failed renaissance). After all, the Neue Klasse era could end up being a disaster, and the worrying signs we’re seeing are actually just the beginning of the end. For Apple, if we are indeed witnessing the first signs of a company that has lost its touch, if we are already at a point of no return when it comes to MacOS quality, the potential downfall won’t be nearly as consequential as it could be for BMW. Apple could lose money for decades and still be one of the richest companies in the world. Without the Mac (just 6% of revenue ), Apple would post similar financial reports for years to come. * 2 For the Mac enthusiasts like myself, there are only three upcoming scenarios in my mind right now. One, the Mac we love returns, either in its current form or as a “new class” of Mac (MacOS XX?) and all of this will just be a bad memory. Two, the Mac keeps on getting worse and worse to the point of driving long-time users away, and it ends up getting replaced with yet another version of iOS on MacBooks. Three, all operating systems end up being background tasks in the A.I. era anyway , and Apple knows this and doesn’t bother anymore. This is maybe what happened back in the butterfly keyboard era: Apple were working on the Apple-silicon Macs, and focused most of their resources towards that, hence the Mac computers of that era being underserved. I am clearly speculating, but you get my point. ^ I wonder for what part of these 6% the Mac enthusiasts are responsible for. Maybe 5%? 10%? I’m pretty sure most of the Mac revenue comes from users who won’t pay attention to all of this. ^ This is maybe what happened back in the butterfly keyboard era: Apple were working on the Apple-silicon Macs, and focused most of their resources towards that, hence the Mac computers of that era being underserved. I am clearly speculating, but you get my point. ^ I wonder for what part of these 6% the Mac enthusiasts are responsible for. Maybe 5%? 10%? I’m pretty sure most of the Mac revenue comes from users who won’t pay attention to all of this. ^

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The Jolly Teapot 2 months ago

Tempted to stick with my old Mac a bit longer

My latest post mentioned how perfect my current setup seems to be . Today, a week or two later, I must admit, this post holds up pretty well. I was expecting the post (and therefore the setup) to be updated drastically the minute I published it, as it usually goes , and yet, nothing of substance has changed since. In this post, I listed my dear old MacBook Air from early 2020, rocking an Intel chip, as the weakest part of that setup, the one thing that was the most likely to get replaced. It turns out that I’m now not so sure about that: My Mac feels fine. Sure, it’s not fast, the battery lasts around 40 minutes on a charge, and I can feel it’s struggling and getting warm when watching videos or visiting “heavy” websites. I remain cautious and very conservative with what I do with it, but for an almost six-year-old computer, it’s surprisingly usable. Somehow, I like that my Mac is old, slow, and limited. This constraint forces me to stay vigilant, to keep things as simple, native, light, minimal, and optimised as possible. When the fan activates, I know something’s wrong. I’m calling this the “whoosh notification.” When my laptop starts to make a vacuum cleaner noise, this is the signal to close the guilty Safari tab (or to turn off JavaScript ), or to get rid of the app causing the trouble, eliminating it from a potential consideration. Maybe I have to thank this very limitation for finally achieving this “perfect” setup. Without it, I’d keep experimenting, tweaking my setup further and further, and potentially even adopting apps that are not indeed that efficient or completely optimised. With a modern Mac, let’s say an M4 MacBook Air, I’m afraid I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. I wouldn’t be able to detect the inefficiencies and appreciate the efficiencies as easily. For instance, occasionally, I’m eager to try Orion Browser , as it ticks almost all the boxes for me. But every time I play with it, my computer gives me the signal. When the fan starts to blow seemingly out of nowhere, I don’t investigate further, and I become very much aware that I have to stick to Safari. Another example: every time Eleventy builds the HTML for this site, I love seeing that it sometimes takes less than one second . With an M4 MacBook Air, such a feat would be unremarkable. If I use yet another Lotus Elise analogy , my computer and setup rely on the chip equivalent of the simple four-cylinder Toyota engine , the one that was fitted in the latest generations of the car. These engines were finely tuned, decently powerful, but they couldn’t afford to deal with extra weight if they wanted to provide some sort of race car performance. Race cars from other brands — and most sports cars currently on sales — on the other hand, mounted with engines two, three, or four times more powerful, aren’t optimised or even built the same way: they can handle to be fitted into bigger cars, they can support the extra weight of ventilated seats, more speakers, and more. When these manufacturers feel their cars can be a bit more fun to drive, they simply add more power ; they don’t really bother fine-tuning every part for maximum efficiency because with such power, it’s rather unnecessary. This is why, as I write this in January 2026, I’m more tempted than ever to enjoy my Mac — and lean setup — one more year. Also, besides the much, much faster chip, the new MacBook Air is basically the same as mine. It has the same keyboard , the same screen, the same maximum brightness, the same form factor, and a slightly different design. The chip is the main star in these new models; it’s such a leap forward from mine that I’m not even sure I’d notice the other improvements, like faster memory and faster Wi-Fi. Icing on the cake, sticking to my current Mac also means being unable to upgrade to Tahoe . I use “MacOS 26” on my work computer, and Tahoe’s Safari, a prime example among many others, is surely one of the worst versions ever of the browser. * 1 I mean, look at this screenshot and try to figure out at first glance which tab is currently active. And don’t get me started on the rounded corners. * 2 In March, Apple will probably release a new generation of MacBooks Air, and, depending on what else will be new besides the M5 chip, I may change my mind. But as I said, and as I am typing these lines in a perfectly capable laptop running Sequoia, with a confident and efficient setup, I’m more tempted than ever to keep this little guy around a bit longer. Another outcome that is looking more and more likely due to the current international shit show : I may play it safe and buy a current M4 MacBook Air at a 150 euro discount on the 31st of January, the day before some potential tariffs may be added on, or not. I can also get 150 euros for trading this one in, which would make the purchase a lot more affordable than the newer model, especially if new tariffs on US products sare introduced. Very difficult to predict the future one week from now in that regard, as a lot of things have happened this week. Either way, this Intel Core i5 chip is more resilient than I expected: one just has to handle it with care. The worst ever being — quite obviously — the very first Windows version circa 2005, that would not even launch: I think Apple released the 1.0.1 update the next day or so, fixing the problem. ^ When customising the toolbar, the flexible space placeholders in particular look odd, as if the design is unfinished, unrefined. This is something I would expect on Windows, not MacOS. ^ The worst ever being — quite obviously — the very first Windows version circa 2005, that would not even launch: I think Apple released the 1.0.1 update the next day or so, fixing the problem. ^ When customising the toolbar, the flexible space placeholders in particular look odd, as if the design is unfinished, unrefined. This is something I would expect on Windows, not MacOS. ^

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The Jolly Teapot 2 months ago

January 2026 blend of links

Some links don’t call for a full blog post, but sometimes I still want to share some of the good stuff I encounter on the web. Our Algorithmic Grey-Beige World – Excellent column from Om Malik, on how algorithms, among other things, accelerated and reinforced our tendencies for conformity and blandness; so good in fact that I must have read it several times already. robinrendle.com – Speaking of conformity and blandness, you definitely will not find those in the remarkable new design of Robin Rendle’s blog: beautifully made, delightful to explore. Rendle wrote a short post about the new version. WikiFlix – A free streaming service for movies in the public domain. The video player doesn’t always seem to work, but for the collection of movies alone it is a worthy bookmark. (via Kottke ) Yoink – I’ve mentioned Yoink a few days ago , and I ended up buying a licence. This little utility makes so much sense on the Mac that I don’t understand why it hasn’t already been copied or sherlocked by Apple. What I like the most about this app is that it’s only there when you need it: this is a rare quality in software. Ricoh GR IV Monochrome – I want this. I truly want this. My Ricoh GRIIIx is great and all, but I want this, so much. […looks at the price…] Well, Actually my GRIIIx is excellent, I don’t need this at all. Still, since it costs less than a third of a monochrome Leica camera , it’s just about a bargain, isn’t it? The Case for Blogging in the Ruins – “ Social media removed the friction of publishing, and in doing so removed the selection pressure that separated signal from noise. We "democratized" the ability to publish (good?) while simultaneously destroying the conditions that made publishing meaningful (bad!) ” Venn Diagram Creator – How on Earth is this bookmark not included by default on every web browser? Thoughts and Observations Regarding Apple Creator Studio – “ Whatever you think of this new 2026 icon for Pages, you can’t seriously argue that it’s much worse — or really all that different — from the previous one. But go back in time and each previous Pages icon had more detail and looked cooler. And then you get back to the original Pages icon and that one clearly belongs in the App Icon Hall of Fame. ” I remember a time when the sole purpose I could find of the Finder “Cover flow” view option was to marvel at the Apple apps icons (I think my favourite was Contacts ). Textures, details; these icons were truly delightful, and I was amazed at how good they looked in such a zoomed-in view. Measured A.I. (Gina Trapani) – “ Every time a chatbot tells me ‘That’s a great question!’ and ‘Now you’re thinking!’ I cringe. Your AI chatbot might as well be a fawning junior intern trying desperately to impress you. ” I feel the same way with the almost systematic answer I get in the lines of: “ Ah! That’s the classic dilemma …” or “ This is a very common question …” Is this a trick to make me feel better? I know I could configure bots to never answer like that, but most of the time I use these tools logged out. How Markdown took over the world – Great look at the origins of Markdown and at the context of its success, by Anil Dash. Also, I learned the word “curmudgeonly” from this. Previous blend of links editions

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The Jolly Teapot 3 months ago

The frustration of a perfect setup

No matter how I look at the list of apps I currently use , whether first-party or third-party, I can’t find anything to change, not a program to replace, not a service to swap for another. I think I am happy with my setup. It feels strange to admit, but somehow, I can’t quite believe it; I must be missing something, something surely can be tweaked. What happens after peak setup? This frustration comes from the fact that looking at new apps, digging into settings, trying new online services, working on how each of these things operates with the others, is one of my favourite hobbies. I mean, a quick glance at the archive of this site will tell you that, not only do I love writing about apps and digital tools, but I love playing with their configurations; I’m like a kid with Lego bricks, building things, taking them apart, and building them again, with a huge smile, in a slightly different and improved way. Now that my application setup appears to be “final”, it feels as though all my toys and Lego bricks are neatly stored away in their respective drawers, sorted by colour, by type, and by size. It’s perfect, and seeing my beautiful collection all nice and tidy like that is a very satisfying sensation, except I’m looking at it seated on the empty floor of my childhood bedroom, alone and bored. What is there to do when nothing needs to be improved? I recently wrote about my HTML and CSS “explorations” with this blog. Satisfied with the results, I think this job is done. The same goes for how Eleventy works on my machine: everything has been optimised , refined, future-proofed (especially Node.js ): nothing to see here! Even the hosting is something I’m very happy with. My only gripe with xmit is that there is no possibility for me to pay for it. The other apps on my Mac — the ones that don’t live in the Terminal like Eleventy, Node.js & npm, and xmit — are also perfect at what they do, and I can’t think of anything better to explore, let alone to use. If this is not your first visit, you already know how I feel about BBEdit . Well, I feel just about the same about NetNewsWire , which is as close to perfection an app can get as far as I’m concerned. It feels part of the OS (even more so than current system apps if I’m being honest), it is stable, it is simple to use, and it runs smoothly on my soon-to-be six-year-old MacBook Air. Being happy with Safari is by far the strongest proof that my setup is final. Using StopTheScript to block JavaScript on most media sites, along with the performance and privacy benefits of using a DNS resolver like Quad9 , has proven to be an efficient way to keep Safari light and responsive, even if my web experience is getting a little more interrupted than I would like, due to all the crap websites throw at first-time visitors these days. Yesterday, I had a look at apps like Yoink , Karabiner Elements , Hazel , and also got a taste of Mullvad Browser , and News Explorer . Some of these apps were tried purely out of curiosity, to see if they would fit right in my “workflow”, others were basically reassurance that my current system and choices were the best I could have made. * 1 Among all the parties involved in this setup, the obvious candidate for a replacement is my Intel-powered MacBook Air. Yet, this old computer is currently in great shape: the recent factory-settings reset I had to do surely helped. But its best feature is not being able to run MacOS Tahoe: stuck to MacOS Sequoia, it’s protecting me from Liquid Glass on the Mac and the “icons in menus everywhere” experience. My personal laptop is a breath of fresh air after spending hours on my work computer running Tahoe. * 2 So, what will be able to make that itch go away? When nothing is broken, don’t fix it, as they say. But surely, there must be something that I’m missing, surely there is a program, somewhere, that would delight me, that would put a smile on my face. I want a new box of Lego bricks, I want to empty my drawers on the floor and see if I can do better. In case you’re wondering, all of these apps are excellent, but not enough to replace what I already use, or to justify adding a new item to my list. For example, Mullvad Browser, like Firefox, isn’t scriptable; News Explorer has more features than NetNewsWire, but is not as polished; Yoink looks incredibly useful, but I prefer my own ways for now, &c. ^ Its replacement will have to wait until the new generation comes out, probably in March; then I can decide on whether I want to stick to the Air family, keep mine a bit longer, or upgrade for a far nicer screen and go with the Pro. ^ In case you’re wondering, all of these apps are excellent, but not enough to replace what I already use, or to justify adding a new item to my list. For example, Mullvad Browser, like Firefox, isn’t scriptable; News Explorer has more features than NetNewsWire, but is not as polished; Yoink looks incredibly useful, but I prefer my own ways for now, &c. ^ Its replacement will have to wait until the new generation comes out, probably in March; then I can decide on whether I want to stick to the Air family, keep mine a bit longer, or upgrade for a far nicer screen and go with the Pro. ^

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The Jolly Teapot 3 months ago

New year, new me, new web browsing setup?

Since we’re at the start of a new year, I will stop fine-tuning everything on this blog and let it live as the receptacle it’s supposed to be. With my mind cleared of HTML and CSS concerns, I now have energy to waste on new optimisations of my digital environment, and this time with an old favourite of mine: content blockers. * 1 In 2022, I experimented with blocking JavaScript on a per-site basis , which, at the time, allowed me to feel better about my behaviour on the web. You see, I thought that I was not actively refusing adverts. I was just disabling a specific technology on my web browser; not my fault if most ads are enabled via JS after all. True, ads couldn’t reach my house, but not because I actively refused their delivery; simply because the trucks used for their delivery weren’t allowed to drive on my pedestrian-only street. Ethically, I preferred this approach to the one blocking all ads blindly on every site, even if the consequences, from the publishers’ perspective, were the same. I know it was very hypocritical of me, and I know I was still technically blocking the ads. Nevertheless, I felt less guilty blocking the technology used for ads, and not the ads directly. This setup was fine, until it wasn’t. My web experience was not great. Blocking JavaScript by default breaks too many non-media sites, and letting it on made me realise how awful browsing the web without a content blocker can be. The only way for this system to work was to have patience and discipline on the per-site settings. Eventually, I gave up and reinstalled the excellent Wipr Safari extension on all my devices a few weeks later. Last year, on top of Wipr , I also tried services like NextDNS and Mullvad DNS . With these, the browser ad blocker becomes almost superfluous, as all it has to do is remove empty boxes that were supposed to be ads before being blocked by the DNS. It was an efficient setup, but I was still blocking ads, which kept on bothering me. While I happily support financially a few publications, I can’t do the same for all the sites I visit. For the ones I am not paying, seeing ads seems like a fair deal; blocking ads was making me feel increasingly guilty. * 2 Like I wrote in the other post on the topic : Somehow, I always feel a little bit of shame and guilt when talking about content blockers, especially ad blockers. Obviously ads are too often the only way many publishers manage to make decent money on the internet: every newspaper can’t be financially successful with subscriptions, and every media company can’t survive only on contributions and grants. That’s why recently, I stopped using Mullvad as my DNS resolver, and switched to Quad9 , which focuses on privacy-protection and not ad-blocking. I also uninstalled Wipr. Today, I rely solely on StopTheScript . What’s new this time around is that I will try to be more disciplined than I was three years ago, and do the work to make this system last. What I do is set the default StopTheScript setting on “Ask”. When a site aggressively welcomes me with three or four banners masking the article I came to read, I click on the StopTheScript icon and allow it to block JavaScript on the website, and refresh the page. Two clicks, one keyboard shortcut. In most cases, these steps are easier and faster than what is the usual series of events. You know, the one where you need to reload the page with ad blockers disabled, just so you can close the modal window that was blocking scrolling on the page, and then reload the page once again, this time with ad blockers enabled. With JavaScript turned off, visiting most websites is a breeze: my computer feels like it uses an M4 chip and not an Intel Core i5, the page is clean, the article is there, it works. There are a few media sites that refuse to display anything with JS turned off, but I’d say that 95% of the time it’s fine, and I can live my life without a proper ad blocker. * 3 For websites where ads are tolerable, I don’t bother blocking JavaScript, I let it pass. In my mind, this is how my first interaction with a website goes if it were a department store: [opens page at URL] Website: “ Hi dear visitor, I see you’re looking at this product, but may I interest you in a free newsletter? Or would you like to share your Google account with us so next time you come back we’ll know? Also, could you sign this agreement real quick? Oh, and by the way, have you seen that we have a special offer currently? Would you like a cookie? ” Me: “ Hello, yes, oh wow, hum… wait a second… ” [blocks JavaScript] Me: “ Sorry, I don’t speak your language and don’t understand anything you say .” [Salesperson goes away instantly] Me: “ Ah, this is nice and quiet. ” Maybe I’m wrong, but to me, this is a more “polite” default behaviour than using an ad blocker from the get-go, which, in this analogy, would be something like this: [opens page at URL] Ad blocker: “ Alright, well done team, great job. We arrested all sales people, handcuffed them, and brought them all to in the basement. All clear. The boss can come in. ” Me: “ Ah, this is nice and quiet. ” If you have a better analogy, I’m all ears: I really struggled with this one. I’m not sure how long this JS blocking setup will last this time. I’m not sure if it feels that much better to block JS permanently on some websites rather than blocking ads. All I know is that most websites are much quicker to load without JavaScript, much easier to handle by my machine, and just for those reasons, StopTheScript may be the best content blocker for Safari. I guess this is not surprising that all the cool new web browsers include a JavaScript toggle natively. Why are they called content blockers and not ad blockers? Pretty sure it’s some sort of diplomatic lingo used to avoid hurting the feelings of ad companies. I don’t like the word content , but calling ads and trackers content is just weird. ^ I know I could use an ad blocker and disable it on some websites, or only activate it on the most annoying sites, but ad blockers tend to disappear in the background, don’t they? ^ I mention media sites because obviously ecommerce sites, video sites, and interactive sites require JavaScript. Interestingly, Mastodon doesn’t need it to display posts, whereas Bluesky does. ^ Why are they called content blockers and not ad blockers? Pretty sure it’s some sort of diplomatic lingo used to avoid hurting the feelings of ad companies. I don’t like the word content , but calling ads and trackers content is just weird. ^ I know I could use an ad blocker and disable it on some websites, or only activate it on the most annoying sites, but ad blockers tend to disappear in the background, don’t they? ^ I mention media sites because obviously ecommerce sites, video sites, and interactive sites require JavaScript. Interestingly, Mastodon doesn’t need it to display posts, whereas Bluesky does. ^

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The Jolly Teapot 3 months ago

December 2025 blend of links

I almost missed the deadline with this one, didn’t I? At least it gives me a chance to wish every one of you a happy New Year’s Eve, and new year. In 2026, I’ll write less about CSS, fonts, HTML, and text editors, and more about… well, at least I’ll try. Thank you for reading. The Future of Veritasium ▪︎ Precious testimonial on what it really means to depend on the algorithm for revenue, and on how many people actually work in the background of a successful and quality YouTube channel like Veritasium. Mouseless ▪︎ If this app is definitely not for me — I tried — it may be appealing to some of you; I found the concept very intriguing; I can see how effective it could be in some apps that require a lot of hovering and clicking. (via Pierre Carrier ) Everpen ▪︎ I’ve been intrigued by this for a while now, and 2026 may be the year when I try this. I currently love using my fountain pen at my desk, but I prefer to travel with a pencil in my bag, and this may be the perfect companion for me. Predictions for Journalism 2026, Nieman Journalism Lab ▪︎ Every year, I look forward to reading these predictions; I just wish scrolling the page didn’t make my laptop activate its “vacuum cleaner noise” mode (I had to browse the “cards” via my RSS reader: I know, it’s time for me to upgrade ). Nick Heer, People and Blogs ▪︎ “ there is no better spellchecker than the ‘publish’ button. ” If you don’t follow the People and Blogs interview series , you are missing out. Grid Paper ▪︎ An excellent bookmark to add to your collection of utilities, especially interesting if, like me, you waste many high-quality notebook pages trying to do isometric drawings, and failing miserably. The Land of Giants Transmission Towers ▪︎ I love this and I keep thinking about it since I learned about it: Why isn’t it already a thing? Truly mesmerising, and I found that the illustrations used on their website are very tasteful too. (via Kottke ) Norm Architects ▪︎ As a fanboy of Norm Architects, I don’t know whether I like more their work or the photographs of their work. For years now, I’ve had one of an older batch of press pictures as a desktop wallpaper (you’ll know it when you see it) and another as my phone wallpaper. The colours, the lights, the shades, the textures: superb. How To Spot Arial ▪︎ Sorry, I’m writing about typefaces once again , but I think this is an important skill to have. (via Gruber ) Rubio Orders State Department Braille Signage Switch To ‘Times New Roman’ ▪︎ I promise, this is the last time I’ll be sharing something about typography and fonts until the end of the year. More “Blend of links” posts

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The Jolly Teapot 3 months ago

The Club Racer Treatment

In 2022, I wrote a post called The Lotus philosophy applied to blog design , in which I was trying to explain how the Lotus philosophy of lighter cars for improved performance could apply to web design, and to my blog in particular. I wrote: For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a fan of Lotus. From the Esprit featured in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), the one in the Accolade’s Test Drive video game from 1987, to my fascination with the choices made by the engineers with the 900 kg Elise (and later the Elise CR): Lotus is more than a simple car brand, it is a way to think about product design […] The most acute observers probably noticed my mention of the Lotus Elise CR. This car is, to me at least, a fantastic example of what a company can do when driven by principles and a well laid-out order of priorities. The Elise CR, which stands for Club Racer, was basically a special edition of the regular Lotus Elise, with various modifications aimed for better handling on the track, that was lightened by about 25 kilograms compared to the base car. 1 One may think that a weight reduction of around 3% is nothing, that it doesn’t matter, and that it may not influence performance that much. And to be honest with you, I don’t really know. I just know that I was always fascinated by the engineering that went into saving those 25 kg out of a roughly 900 kg car. Compared to the regular Elise, the CR had its seats fitted with less padding, its floor mats were removed, it had no radio, no A/C, and even the Lotus badge on the back was a sticker instead of using the usual metal letters. The result was a car marginally faster, slightly better to drive, less comfortable, and less practical. If you planned to drive a Lotus Elise on regular roads, you’d be better off with a regular Elise. The Club Racer was a prize among purists, it was a demonstration of what could be done, and I loved that it existed. 2 In its essence, the Club Racer was not about the results on paper or the weight itself, it was about the effort, the craft, and the experience. It was about giving a damn. For a while now, I’ve been generally happy with this site’s design, which feels very much in line with this Lotus philosophy. But there was always an itch that I couldn’t ignore: a Lotus Elise was great, but what I really wanted was a Lotus Elise CR. This is why, in the past couple of… checks notes … weeks, I spent hours and hours giving the Club Racer treatment to this website, for very marginal changes. 3 Now that all of this tedious, frustrating, and abstract work is over, I don’t even know how much weight I saved. Probably the equivalent of the Elise CR’s 25 kg: meaningless to most, meaningful to a few. Like I said, it wasn’t really about the results, but about the effort; it was about getting my hands dirty. Today, I am quite happy with the choices I made and with what I learned in the process. To make sure my project had structure, I needed to identify which were my top 3 priorities, and in which order they needed to be. Obviously, weight saving was one of them, but did I really want to put it above all else? The Lotus Elise CR was about performance and driving experience, not weight saving. Weight saving was just a means to an end. For a blog like mine, the driving experience is obviously the readability, but I also wanted my site to pass the W3C validator, and keep its perfect score on PageSpeed Insights (that’s the performance bit). I ended up with priorities ordered like this: I decided to stick to a serif typeface, to make this website as comfortable as possible to read, just like a page of a paperback novel would be. I have been using STIX Two Text for a while now, and I really like it: it feels a lot like Times New Roman , but improved in every way possible. Not only I think it looks great, but it comes preinstalled on Apple devices, it is open-source, and if a visitor falls back on Times New Roman (via the browser default setting for ), the site maintains enough of the typography to make it just as nice to read: line length, line height, size rendering, etc. Also with readability in mind, I’ve decided to keep the automatic light/dark mode feature, along with the responsive feature for the font size, as it makes text always nicely proportioned compared to the screen size. I certainly could have removed even more than I did, but I wanted to keep the 100 score on PageSpeed Insights and pass the W3C validator . This is why I still have a meta description, for example, and why I use a base64 format for the inline SVG used as the favicon. I kept some of the “branding” elements for good measure, even if what I feel is the visual identity of this site mainly revolves around its lightness. Even a Lotus Elise CR has a coat of paint after all. I could shave even more bytes off this site if the default browser stylesheets weren’t being needlessly updated . But a Club Racer treatment is only fun when talking about weight saving, so let’s get to the good stuff. This is what I removed: Airbags: The HTML tags, as I learned that they are optional in HTML5, as are the tags: If you look at the Elements tab of the browser Web Inspector panel, both are automatically added by the browser, I think. Floor mats: The quotation marks in most of the elements in the but also on some the permanent links (I didn’t go as far as reworking the Markdown parser of Eleventy to get rid of them in all attributes, but on the homepage and other pages, each link is now 2 bytes lighter — at least before Brotli compression and other shenanigans). Power steering: The line height setting for headings. Foam: The padding left and right for mobile view. Sound isolation: A lot of unnecessary nodes in the homepage, now leaner and lighter, at the expense of extra CSS: very worth it. This includes the summaries for Blend of links posts that felt very repetitive. Air conditioning: The little tags around the “by” of the header to make it 16% smaller. I liked you guys, but you had to go. Radio: The highlight colour, used since 2020 on this site, mostly as the bottom border colour for links: it felt distracting and didn’t work well in dark mode. Metal logo: for headings. This CSS feature makes titles look great, but for most of them it wasn’t even needed on desktop. And a bunch of other little things that I mostly forgot (I should have kept a log). 4 To you dear readers, if you’re not reading this in an RSS reader, this site won’t feel any faster than before. It won’t even look better. If anything, it will look slightly worse and for that, I’m sorry. Well, not really: I’m actually very happy about what has changed, and I think it will make this site easier to maintain, and easier to be proud of. On top of the weight-saving, I also worked on improving my local Eleventy setup, reducing dependencies and the number of node modules. I’ve mentioned this on my Now page , but the site now compiles in 1.5 second on my Intel-Core-i5-powered MacBook Air, which is roughly 2–3 times faster than before. I guess this is when you have an underpowered engine that weight-saving and simplifications are the most noticeable. More noticeable than on the website that’s for sure. I hope that when I finally upgrade my computer, probably next March, I won’t get fooled by the hugely improved chips on the newer Macs, to the point of forgetting Colin Chapman: Adding power makes you faster on the straights; subtracting weight makes you faster everywhere. Happy holidays everyone. I found a great review here , in French. ↩︎ Lotus nowadays surely doesn’t look like a brand Colin Chapman would recognise. ↩︎ I thought it would only take a couple of days, but here I am, three weeks later; This was a rather enjoyable rabbit hole. ↩︎ To help me in some of the decisions, I asked a lot of questions to ChatGPT. It sometimes gave me very useful answers, but sometimes it felt like I could have just tossed a coin instead. Also, I was starting to get very annoyed at the recurring “ ah, your question is the classic dilemma between Y and Z ”. ↩︎ Driving experience / Readability Performance / W3C validation & PageSpeed Insights scores Weight saving Airbags: The HTML tags, as I learned that they are optional in HTML5, as are the tags: If you look at the Elements tab of the browser Web Inspector panel, both are automatically added by the browser, I think. Floor mats: The quotation marks in most of the elements in the but also on some the permanent links (I didn’t go as far as reworking the Markdown parser of Eleventy to get rid of them in all attributes, but on the homepage and other pages, each link is now 2 bytes lighter — at least before Brotli compression and other shenanigans). Power steering: The line height setting for headings. Foam: The padding left and right for mobile view. Sound isolation: A lot of unnecessary nodes in the homepage, now leaner and lighter, at the expense of extra CSS: very worth it. This includes the summaries for Blend of links posts that felt very repetitive. Air conditioning: The little tags around the “by” of the header to make it 16% smaller. I liked you guys, but you had to go. Radio: The highlight colour, used since 2020 on this site, mostly as the bottom border colour for links: it felt distracting and didn’t work well in dark mode. Metal logo: for headings. This CSS feature makes titles look great, but for most of them it wasn’t even needed on desktop. And a bunch of other little things that I mostly forgot (I should have kept a log). 4 I found a great review here , in French. ↩︎ Lotus nowadays surely doesn’t look like a brand Colin Chapman would recognise. ↩︎ I thought it would only take a couple of days, but here I am, three weeks later; This was a rather enjoyable rabbit hole. ↩︎ To help me in some of the decisions, I asked a lot of questions to ChatGPT. It sometimes gave me very useful answers, but sometimes it felt like I could have just tossed a coin instead. Also, I was starting to get very annoyed at the recurring “ ah, your question is the classic dilemma between Y and Z ”. ↩︎

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The Jolly Teapot 4 months ago

Typefaces as clothes

After seeing this news , I have spent an unusual amount of my week thinking and reading about Times New Roman. 1 In an ocean of opinions, mine probably won’t register, but I think the Times New Roman typeface is, by itself, fine. It looks OK. It can even look good in some contexts. The problem with it is not really how it objectively looks, but how we perceive it, due to its misplaced ubiquity. As the web browser de facto default since what feels like forever, Times New Roman has indeed been used, reused, and abused in every imaginable way, to the point where we now see these documents or pages using it and automatically think that the person behind them doesn’t care in the slightest. I thought of an analogy that works great for Times New Roman, but also for other typefaces generally in use on text-based websites like mine. Please bear with me. If typefaces were clothes, what would they be? Times New Roman could be any piece of clothes you wear, but on which you forgot to remove the price tag. People will notice it and be embarrassed for you. If it is an accident, people will tell you. But if you always show up with price tags hanging off all of your clothes, people will stop telling you, and they will not take you as seriously as you expect: It won’t matter how good or bad you think the clothes themselves look. On some minimalistic websites, Times New Roman, or rather the browser default, kind of works. You just have to own it and make it obvious it is a deliberate choice, fitting a bare-bones setup. It may work on some blogs, but used on a more complex or ambitious website, Times New Roman will look a bit odd, as if someone didn’t know there were far better options available. I love Helvetica, and I think a lot of people love it too. It is also widely used, to the point where type design nerds will try to avoid it as much as possible, even if it objectively looks great. Helvetica is a suit in the 60s. It’s iconic, seemingly everywhere, and everybody who wants to look serious and professional will wear one. Hipsters will of course refuse to wear a suit to be different and edgy, but a suit is the general standard of elegance. But there are suits, and then there are suits . If you want your suit to look great, you will need a tailor, you will need fine detailing: a quality fabric alone won’t cut it. If you wear a suit that is not adjusted to your body shape and doesn’t pair well with your shirt or your shoes, well, you might as well leave the price tag attached to it. Helvetica needs refinement to look good, it needs attention, care, and good typography; on its own it can quickly look a bit generic. When I look at typical Swiss graphic design works , what makes them look great is not Helvetica, it’s not the fonts in use, it’s how the typography is crafted, detailed, and fine-tuned, so it doesn’t just look OK, it looks fantastic. If you’re thinking that without that tailor-made design, Helvetica is just as good as Arial, you’d be right. Except that the Arial suit, unlike the Helvetica one, is made of cheap fabric, was bought at a discount on Amazon, and a good tailor would not even want to work on it in the first place. 2 Another CSS value we see a lot on blogs is . For Apple devices, it will translate to the San Francisco typeface, for Android it will be Roboto, and Segoe UI for Windows. For me, these typefaces are like clothes from the popular clothing stores. Everybody shops in them, everybody more or less follows the same fashion trends. It’s easy, affordable, comfortable, unobtrusive, inoffensive, and can even look pretty good if well-thought-out. San Francisco would be clothes from a brand like Uniqlo, and Segoe UI would be something coming from stores like Zara or H&M. Roboto would be something coming from a slightly cheaper brand like Primark, or Amazon Basics (just don’t pay attention to details). These typefaces are OK in terms of how they look, but on their own, they will look very generic, efficient, bland, and will lack on personality and identity. I’ve written about why I like fonts before . They make me think of drafts, work in progress, creativity, code, unfinished business. To me, they would be clothes like coveralls or chore jackets: functional, robust, rugged, practical, often poorly fitted. Monospaced typefaces each have different qualities, different styles, different purposes, but to the world they all look more or less the same. They will very quickly look neglected when taken out of context. It will certainly look very professional but will severely lack elegance, like that guy at the supermarket wearing a boiler suit to buy groceries. I have now realised that I’ve opened a Pandora’s box with this topic, so I may split it into two or three posts, to avoid a three-thousand-words post that I will never finish. 3 As a final entry, I wanted to list Verdana. I have always really liked Verdana, and I would use it on all my sites if it wasn’t already so popular , especially for blogs. Verdana is very easy to read, has a nice casual look; it is a practical, all-terrain typeface, that is easy to recommend since it comes installed with the most popular operating systems. So what’s not to like? Verdana is great for text, but not so great for titles. It’s good in some cases, but bad in others. That’s why I think that Verdana is like clothes made by the Levi’s brand. Obviously great for jeans and denim, but I wouldn’t wear other Levi’s clothes, and I would certainly not wear only Levi’s clothes. It may look good on you, and if you like that, go for it, but I personally won’t (and I also prefer other brands of jeans). So that was my fun and rather entertaining train of thought this week. I’ve thought about many brands that I could map to a typeface: brands like Patagonia, or COS. Please let me know if you have any similar typefaces analogies, or if you disagree with the ones I made. Full disclaimer, I’m definitely not an expert on any of this, as you can clearly see. Best take on the subject is this one , hands down. ↩︎ The CSS value is precisely hard for me to use because on Windows it defaults to Arial, while it defaults to Helvetica on Apple devices. This alone tells you a lot about what sets these two companies apart. ↩︎ There are many other typefaces I want to talk about in this manner: Georgia, Calibri, Inter, IBM Plex, Futura, Avenir, etc. Am I correct thinking about Georgia as a university professor’s brown velvet jacket? Or is it Palatino? ↩︎ Best take on the subject is this one , hands down. ↩︎ The CSS value is precisely hard for me to use because on Windows it defaults to Arial, while it defaults to Helvetica on Apple devices. This alone tells you a lot about what sets these two companies apart. ↩︎ There are many other typefaces I want to talk about in this manner: Georgia, Calibri, Inter, IBM Plex, Futura, Avenir, etc. Am I correct thinking about Georgia as a university professor’s brown velvet jacket? Or is it Palatino? ↩︎

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The Jolly Teapot 4 months ago

November 2025 blend of links

Some links don’t call for a full blog post, but sometimes I still want to share some of the good stuff I encounter on the web. Music of Wellness (From Severance: Season 1) By Theodore Shapiro ・Right next to the music from GoldenEye for Nintendo 64 as one of the best music to play while working. (via Kottke ) Random scenes from Tokyo, and some thoughts on online publishing ・Reading this post, I kept nodding along in agreement with everything Winnie Lim wrote: What is the point of most of the things we do online? This is not a cynical take, but a real question. My simple, if a little dull, answer is that we do it for ourselves first. If I were living in 1884, would I write a public journal, a diary, letters to a few friends, or books? I don’t know the answer, but a blog is what encourages me to write in 2025, just like it did twenty years ago when I published my first blog posts on Windows Live Spaces. There wasn’t really a point back then either, but an irresistible urge. Dealgorithmed ・Speaking of wondering what the point of what we do on the web is, Manu will launch a new “ newsletter about the small web, the poetic web, the quiet web, the web many say we lost years ago, yet it's still here, ready to be rediscovered by those who care ” Count me in. What A.I. is Really For, by Christopher Butler ・“ I don’t worry about the end of work so much as I worry about what comes after — when the infrastructure that powers A.I. becomes more valuable than the A.I. itself, when the people who control that infrastructure hold more sway over policy and resources than elected governments. ” Citizen Eco-Drive Cal. 0100 ・If I had the money, this is the watch I would wear and cherish. This video by Hodinkee captures very well what there is to love about this unusual quartz watch; I mean, just look at how the seconds hand moves… Marvellous. Oncle Bob ・The great mind behind my hosting service of choice, xmit , launched a new app called Oncle Bob that aims to make static site deployments a breeze. If I keep using the xmit CLI for now — especially after investing a lot of time learning how to use scripts — this finally makes things so easy for everyone. Excellent tool. The bird people of Lake Manchar: surviving in a vanishing oasis ・Reading this article has sent me into a Wikipedia spiral of links for 90 minutes or so. A very sad story that made me even more curious and fascinated by this part of the world. Random Mini Dungeons ・Dave Rupert shared a video from Odd Artworks’ Random Mini Dungeon video series , and I have to say that I love absolutely everything about these videos. If I knew how to draw isometric perspectives properly (and how to draw at all), this is probably what I would do during rainy weekends. Screw it, I’m installing Linux ・“ I do not want to talk to my computer. I do not want to use OneDrive. I’m sure as hell not going to use Recall. I am tired of Windows trying to get me to use Edge, Edge trying to get me to use Bing, and everything trying to get me to use Copilot. I paid for an Office 365 subscription so I could edit Excel files. Then Office 365 turned into Microsoft 365 Copilot, and I tried to use it to open a Word document and it didn’t know how. ” Surely you’re joking, Mr Suleyman ・V.H. Belvadi on how people in charge of A.I. are appearing surprised when learning that others are not as in awe of its potential as they would like: “ There is a sense of self-serving, faux admiration for a vision of a product intended to gaslight the public into believing in its capabilities. Anthropomorphised, such entities would be called charlatans. ” More “Blend of links” posts here

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The Jolly Teapot 4 months ago

Praise the Backup

Well, that was a fun weekend. I have spent half of my time reinstalling MacOS Sequoia , and trying to get it back the way it was, while trying to avoid losing important files. You see, on that chilly Saturday afternoon, I wanted to take care of my ageing computer, and tried an app that was supposed to clean the old files and “residue” from previously uninstalled apps. As a reader of this blog, you may know that I tend to use very few apps , but I try a lot of them . Trying a lot of apps means doing a lot of installs, and then a lot of uninstall processes. So, while experimenting with yet another app, it crashed in the middle of its cleaning work. And, because I was being dumb, I thought it would be a good idea to empty the bin at that moment. 5, 10, 15, 20, 25… These were the thousands of files being deleted permanently from the bin. Even with lots of old app files, the number still seemed rather high. I stopped the process only after losing thousands of files and realised that this cleaning app had put in the bin a lot of files and folders that it shouldn't have. A lot of files and folders. My blog files with all my Eleventy settings, all of it. Most of my system preference files. The app even deleted its own application files, which is why the app crashed, I believe. None of my other apps or extensions could be launched, error messages everywhere. I was having a lot of fun. I restarted my computer, hoping the powerful reboot spirits would once again act miraculously, but my dear old MacBook Air welcomed me as it was a brand-new Mac, almost fresh installation. Even my keyboard was set to the wrong layout (which made it truly fantastic to enter a password in such a moment of panic), my wallpaper was gone, the dock was featuring all the default apps, and I was logged off my iCloud account. Thankfully, this last part turned out to be a good thing because my personal and most important files, stored on iCloud Drive, were safe from whatever had happened on my machine. I also had a two-month-old backup on an external SSD, mirrored on JottaCloud . The cherry on top was that I couldn’t use the “Put Back” right-click action on the files left in the bin as they were not put there by the Finder, but by this third-party app. 1 There were 1200 files and folders left or so, most of them obscure preference files. Needless to say that I didn’t really bother taking hours of my weekend putting them back where they belonged, even if I knew how. I scavenged what I could, everything that seemed important — including a folder called “BBEdit Backups” (more on that later) — and used this opportunity to start anew. Since my last backup was two months old, needless to say that I had a decent amount of work to do putting everything back together, including the last four posts of the website you're reading — which had been vaporised from my computer. I had to reinstall all my apps, my preferences, my keyboard shortcuts, everything that I could, while I could still recall what they were in detail. I won’t blame the app that caused all of this, or my old computer, as much as I will blame myself. I should have been more careful about how to use it properly, I shouldn’t have decided to empty the bin at that moment, and I should have done better and more frequent backups: once every quarter is definitely not enough. The clean MacOS install experience itself was not great: It was very slow, annoying, and during all this time I worried about not being able to connect to my site again or make Eleventy work the same way it did (sorry if I get a little PTSD ). 2 Today, as I write this, my computer doesn’t really feel any faster; a clean install can only do so much on the last generation of Intel MacBook Airs. MacOS was a pain, and I was reminded of my Windows user days more than I expected. For example, I kept getting a message along the lines of “The widget blahblahblah is a different version from a previous version of that widget, do you want to open it?” and clicking “No” just brought back the pop-up window three or four more times before it eventually went away. The prompt even interrupted me while I was trying to type my complicated Wi-Fi password. Not once, not twice, but thrice. Now, everything seems fine. Eleventy works. Xmit works. BBEdit is just like it was. This whole experience made me realise three main things. Apologies if you see anything weird on this site: some little layout issues and typos that were fixed in the last two months may have returned. Please let me know if you see anything suspicious (or any of the usual typos). In the meantime, don’t be an idiot like me: take care of those backups. I won’t name the app in this post because I’m not 100% sure if the app was the sole guilty party in this affair, if guilty at all. Maybe I didn’t set it up right, maybe it’s all my fault!  ↩︎ As the song goes.  ↩︎ That BBEdit is, indeed, just too good . I’m not sure if I could have brought everything back so quickly and confidently without this app. The BBEdit automated backup folder, the one I found in the bin, really saved me. Many of the most recent versions of the Jolly Teapot text files were still there, so I didn’t have to import the text from the live website. Just when I thought I couldn’t love this app more than I already did. I’m proud of myself for thinking of creating a backup of my BBEdit preferences too. That I seriously needed to create a better backup system so that in the event of something like this happening again, whether a human error or an app shitting the bed, I would only have a week or two of files to recover, and not a whole nine weeks of them. I just created an Automator workflow to help me automate my backups and include more files. I considered using Time Machine on my external SSD, or using an app like Hazel , but for my minimal needs, this Automator workflow should do just fine. That I may have actually enjoyed all of this: the crash and this weird situation gave me an excuse to both operate a clean installation on my Mac and justify the purchase of a new one. I will probably wait until March for the next generation of MacBooks Air, but the regular M5 MacBook Pro has never looked so good. I won’t name the app in this post because I’m not 100% sure if the app was the sole guilty party in this affair, if guilty at all. Maybe I didn’t set it up right, maybe it’s all my fault!  ↩︎ As the song goes.  ↩︎

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The Jolly Teapot 4 months ago

Who are they always texting?

There is a line from a scene in Community (my favourite TV show) that seems to live rent-free in my head: And who the hell are you always texting? Everyone you know is here. I am reminded of this scene almost every day when I look at cars passing by my kitchen window and see that the majority of drivers, slowly cruising down the street, look at their phone while doing so. Who the hell are they always texting? What are they doing on their phone that couldn’t seemingly wait, or be done a few moments before, i.e. before taking the wheel? The exact same observation can be made at red lights: most drivers, once their car is stopped, will immediately grab their phone, making sure, in a way, that these few seconds waiting for the green light are not wasted. If I am proudly consistent in never looking at my phone while driving, I am definitely guilty of staring at it every time I am in a queue or in a waiting room. Only recently did I motivate myself to stop doing that at the restaurant, after realising that it was kinda gross to do while waiting to be served. I realised that I was just like the people sitting at the other tables, silent, with the screen’s white light shining on their bland faces from below, like ghosts. Just like most smokers can’t help themselves littering their cigarette butts, even though it is illegal , disgusting , and dangerous , phone users can’t seem to avoid looking at their shiny screens every chance they get. Here, I won’t focus on the dangers of looking at a screen instead of the road while operating a two-tonne machine, but instead, I will try to understand the reasons that may be driving this unconscious and obsessive behaviour. The reasons are obvious: a genuine addiction, an educated FOMO, the assumption that doing two things at once — driving and catching up on messages for instance — can save a lot of time (to have even more time to look at things on our phones). These reasons should be enough to explain this ubiquitous behaviour, but I also think that most people don’t know how to properly use their phones, despite using the same technology every day for the past fifteen years. Fine-tuned notifications, scheduled reminders, Apple CarPlay/Android Auto, send later options , hands-free commands… Some of these features are completely unknown to most users who rely on the default settings, without ever taking the time to adjust anything besides the home screen wallpaper. Default settings are great for many things, but they are simply not built with the goal of keeping us out of the shiny screen vacuum; quite the opposite, I’d say. How many times have I seen people type their passcode instead of using Face ID (and Touch ID before that)? How often do you hear the default and annoying WhatsApp notification sound? 1 How many people have you encountered listening to voice messages through the bottom speaker of their phone, while having it placed awkwardly at a ninety-degree angle against their ear? 2 It’s not just “our parents” who are completely clueless with tech. It’s not just old taxi drivers using Google Maps directly via their phone screen rather than their car’s infotainment, it’s not just European Commission politicians who would rather force Apple to change how iOS works than switch to Android, it’s also people my age and the younger generations. This poor use of technology, coupled with decade-old bad habits, ageing mobile operating systems, and a variety of addictions, I believe contributes to this behaviour. I am not immune to this either. How many times have I been distracted by new messages, emails, or even app updates when I just wanted to check the weather? Sometimes, I would not even get to the weather app : I would just forget why I unlocked my phone in the first place. I wonder how much worse this would be if I were still on social media. 3 I can only imagine the amount of noise, distraction, and temptation most people experience on every phone session. But this phone addiction is not really the main issue. Would I be so bothered by it if people were reading Marcel Proust instead of watching TikTok videos? Would people in the restaurant sadden me as much if they were using their phones to show photographs to each other, to illustrate a conversation? Of course not. The problem is not using the phone, it’s not looking at a screen all the time. It’s not that people don’t know how to master the technology; the problem is what’s displayed on those screens, what people actually do with their phones. Not all screen time is equal. When I see people using their phones while they drive by my flat, I’m not even mad about the lack of safety, I’m not even wondering why this interaction couldn’t wait or “ who the hell they are texting .” I’m just sad because it all feels rather joyless. I’m pretty sure that 90% of these moments are either wasted on low-value entertainment or triggered by message notifications and interruptions that could have been easily avoided with a slightly smarter use and understanding of all the features available. Even better than setting up your phone to avoid noise, sometimes it’s nice to simply put the phone down and look out of the window. You can look at the clouds, look at the birds, and watch cars go by. You can then see the drivers texting, wonder how these texts can be such an emergency all the time that they can’t wait, and find the inspiration for a new rant. Of course, these are the same people who don’t really know how to quickly activate their phone’s silent mode. ↩︎ This one is so weird when you know that placing your phone next to your ear “the normal way” automatically switches the audio output to the earpiece. ↩︎ I now have a handy widget on the widget side panel of the iPhone to avoid unlocking my phone — and taking the chance to get distracted — especially for that. I also don’t use an RSS reader on my phone. ↩︎ Of course, these are the same people who don’t really know how to quickly activate their phone’s silent mode. ↩︎ This one is so weird when you know that placing your phone next to your ear “the normal way” automatically switches the audio output to the earpiece. ↩︎ I now have a handy widget on the widget side panel of the iPhone to avoid unlocking my phone — and taking the chance to get distracted — especially for that. I also don’t use an RSS reader on my phone. ↩︎

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The Jolly Teapot 5 months ago

October 2025 blend of links

Some links don’t call for a full blog post, but sometimes I still want to share some of the good stuff I encounter on the web. Why it is so hard to tax the super-rich ・Very interesting and informative video, to the point that I wish it were a full series. Who knew I would one day be so fascinated by the topic of… checks notes … economics? jsfree.org ・Yes, a thousand yes to this collection of sites that work without needing any JavaScript. I don’t know if it’s the season or what, but these days I’m blocking JS every chance that I get. I even use DuckDuckGo again as a search engine because other search engines often require JavaScript to work. Elon Musk’s Grokipedia contains copied Wikipedia pages ・Just to be safe, I’ve immediately added a redirection on StopTheMadness so that the grokipedia domain is replaced by wikipedia.com (even if Wikipedia has its problems, especially in French). Also, what’s up with this shitty name? Why not Grokpedia ? I would still not care, but at least it wouldn’t sound as silly. POP Phone ・I don’t know for whom yet, but I will definitely put one of these under the Christmas tree this winter. (Via Kottke ) PolyCapture ・The app nerd in me is looking at these screenshots like a kid looks at a miniature train. (Via Daring Fireball ) Bari Weiss And The Tyranny Of False Balance ・“ You don’t need to close newspapers when you can convince editors that ‘balance’ means giving equal weight to demonstrable lies and documented facts. ” light-dark() ・Neat and elegant new CSS element that made me bring back the dark mode on this site, just to have an excuse to use it in the CSS. Eunoia: Words that Don't Translate ・Another link to add to your bookmark folder named “conversation starters.” (Via Dense Discovery ) Why Taste Matters More ・“ Taste gives you vision. It’s the lens through which you decide what matters, and just as importantly, what doesn’t. Without taste, design drifts into decoration or efficiency for efficiency’s sake. Devoid of feeling .” Tiga – Bugatti ・I recently realised that this truly fantastic song is already more than 10 years old, and I still can’t wrap my head around this fact. The video, just like the song, hasn’t aged one bit; I had forgotten how creative and fun it is. More “Blend of links” posts here Blend of links archive

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The Jolly Teapot 5 months ago

Not my kind of web browser

Yesterday, OpenAI unveiled Atlas , their new app, which is, in a nutshell, a Chromium-based browser that integrates ChatGPT and connects web pages and the A.I. in all kinds of smart ways. Atlas is not the first browser like this, as some users have had access to The Browser Company’s Dia and Perplexity’s Comet for a while now. I wouldn’t be surprised if Anthropic released their own browser in the coming weeks, just like I wouldn’t be surprised if Google made their next big version of Chrome include Gemini in the same manner as its A.I. and now browser competitors. At this point, I’d be way more surprised — and pleased — if Anthropic used anything other than Chromium for their potential browser; I’d say no chance from a company building its MacOS app on Electron , but this is a story/rant for another day. Before talking about this new browser, I want to spend a few moments on the announcement video . I’ve talked about this before , but I guess that my job, working in “brand content,” spoils a lot of these for me as I can’t help but critique. First things first: what’s up with the greyish, bland sweaters everywhere? 1 Are nice shirts or polo shirts forbidden at OpenAI? Is California chilly this time of year? Sure, this video is not meant to be fun, and I know they want to convey the image of smart nerds focusing on work and not style, but come on, make an effort for the video, show the world you earn a lot of money working for a cool company “building the future.” Also, OpenAI, this is 2025, not 1970: what about someone in the first group of four people who is not an average white male? What about not having seven men present out of seven presenters? What about a more dynamic format? What about not sitting on a shitty couch to demo an app on a computer? Is this really a video from a company worth billions? My local wine shop does better than this. So many things in this video are a head-scratcher to me. And yes, I’ve seen the “Update Now” button on top of the window and I want to scream: “ Why don’t you update your brand new browser before recording the demo video for it, you idiots? ” Second, am I the only one feeling underwhelmed by all this? I mean, besides everyone appearing in the video? I won’t get into all the potential privacy and security concerns  — which deserve your full attention — but I want to focus on potential use cases. Nothing in this video made me think: “ Oh cool, I need that .” Nothing. 2 Not even the moment when the guy types the name of a website in a text box, presses enter, and boom, that website appears. Incredible stuff. Maybe I’m not in the target demographic? Maybe I’m already too old? Maybe only people deep in A.I. can appreciate it? Maybe A.I. will indeed see the doom of my expertise and relevance? I use the ChatGPT app at work, and I actually like having a separate window for all A.I. shenanigans: I can switch apps quickly, I can close it, and I can call it with a keyboard shortcut. Sure, it’s way more limited, and I need to jump from one app to another more often, but I actually see this as a feature. This is not just about Atlas; I haven’t read about any cool use case of an A.I. browser, whether it is Dia or Comet. Maybe this new browser will change things, maybe it will reach more people and we will see good examples, but so far, it feels like even folks at OpenAI struggled to find compelling use cases. Or maybe I was too bored by the video to pay attention? Via Techmeme’s neat social media reactions compilation , I’ve seen a few comments saying that the next step for OpenAI is to build an operating system, and potentially a computer. But we already know this: they announced their own device a few months ago and “apps” a few weeks ago , so obviously they are at least considering their own OS. But, if we pretend that they will indeed build an OS, I wonder what will be more successful: a full OS built by an A.I. company, or an existing OS integrating A.I.? Since recent versions of Windows and Android are already sort of the latter kind, and if this new browser is an indicator of where things are going, I’m not sure what to expect from these companies, at least in the near future. In the meantime, as a grumpy user, I’m finding comfort in my apps that don’t force-feed me A.I. If the new cool browsers are all like Atlas, I’ve never been so happy to use Safari . We know Sam Altman wants to cultivate this looks by very often wearing these grey sweaters, maybe to emulate some sort of Steve Jobs vibe, but the other dudes? Come on. ↩︎ I know that it makes me sound like I should say: “ And it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good email machine . ” ↩︎ We know Sam Altman wants to cultivate this looks by very often wearing these grey sweaters, maybe to emulate some sort of Steve Jobs vibe, but the other dudes? Come on. ↩︎ I know that it makes me sound like I should say: “ And it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good email machine . ” ↩︎

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The Jolly Teapot 6 months ago

Uninstalling apps (part 2)

Maybe this experiment won’t last, but this week, I decided to remove Wipr from my Mac and my iPhone. I wanted to see what my web browsing experience would be like without it. Wipr is arguably the best content blocker for Safari — I’ve been using it for years — and one of the main reasons I keep using Safari , despite everything else . This is what I wrote about Wipr back in March 2023 : I wish I didn’t have to use it, but the fact is that it might be the single app […] that I can’t function without. As far as content blockers go, Wipr has proven to be the best one for me, hands down. The must-have app of the must-have list. The reason I ended up uninstalling this extension is that I recently realised that I may not need it as much as I thought I did, at least not anymore. You see, in September, I gave another shot at DNS resolvers like NextDNS . These services allow for blocking trackers and surveillance ads before they even reach your computer. My previous attempts with NextDNS were all unsuccessful, as I encountered too many connection errors for my taste, never knowing if these came from the DNS itself, my DNS settings, my browser, my internet connection, or elsewhere. This time, maybe I paid more attention to the settings, or maybe they worked on these little issues, but I ended up pretty satisfied with it. I eventually tried other options, like Quad9 and Mullvad DNS . Today, I’m using Mullvad DNS, and so far it’s been great. I like that I don’t need to manage a full dashboard of options like the one in NextDNS, and so far it’s been much more reliable than dns0.eu , which I also tried in the past. With this DNS resolver, my web browsing experience has improved considerably, if I’m being honest. Even with content blockers turned off, I barely see any ads, have never experienced slow internet speeds, and Safari has never felt so snappy and memory-efficient on my Core i5-powered MacBook Air . At some point, I realised that Wipr was only there to remove empty advert blocks from webpages, which was certainly appreciated (less empty space), but I started to feel like I was maybe underusing this great extension, like having a great player sitting on the bench. Then I started using StopTheMadness Pro again. Maybe I should write another post about why I keep coming back to this extension, but, in a nutshell, it is a bit overwhelming to manage. I somehow always end up uninstalling it before I download it again. 1 With Mullvad DNS blocking ads and trackers, and StopTheMadness blocking some banners and skipping ads on YouTube, I started to feel bad for Wipr. After a few days of this experiment, the only complaint I have is seeing all the previously hidden cookie banners. They are incredibly annoying, but I tend to see them only once per website. Other than that, barely any ads, great performance: call me impressed. Now, for situations where something remains in the way, I usually try something with Reader mode or the Hide page elements feature, either with Safari or StopTheMadness. As a last resort, when a website is getting on my nerves, I call StopTheScript to the rescue. 2 Overall, it’s a pretty satisfying set-up. Speaking of set-up, if I don’t count “apps” installed and used via the terminal, I now only have four apps installed on my Mac, and two of them are Safari extensions. 3 These are BBEdit , NetNewsWire , StopTheScript, and StopTheMadness Pro. If you are a regular reader of my “ uses ” and “ now ” pages, you may have noticed that Wipr still appears on it, along with other apps that I didn’t mention here. This is because I kept it on my work computer, with which I don’t want to use Mullvad DNS. You may also have noticed that I recently removed GoodLinks . Indeed, I really like this app, but I “replaced” it with an Apple Shortcut on my phone and an AppleScript on my Mac, triggered using BBEdit. What the Apple Shortcut does, when accessed from the share menu on Safari, is append the title and URL of the current page (as a Markdown link) to a text file living on iCloud Drive, which is always open on my Mac. Before validating the action, the shortcut asks for an optional comment that will appear next to the link in the file, which I use mostly as a way to remember how I discovered a page (usually immortalised in the “via” comments on my Blend of links posts ). On the Mac, what I do is open BBEdit, select the “saved links” file, and run an AppleScript through a keyboard shortcut that does pretty much the same thing: appending the title and URL to the bottom of that file in Markdown format. Almost as simple as adding a page to GoodLinks, without the need for another app. To open these saved links, I can simply Command-click on them in BBEdit. To me, uninstalling apps is just as fun as trying out new ones . It forces me to think about what features I really need and how I could use the already installed apps in the best possible way. As I previously explained : Once or twice a year, I get this irresistible urge to uninstall apps from my devices. Apps that I don’t use very often, apps that can be replaced by websites easily, apps that I don’t need all the time, and so on. If things go the way they usually do, this uninstalling phase will be followed by an intense “trying out new apps” or “getting some of them back” phase, so don’t be surprised if, in a few weeks, you see me using Wipr again on all my devices. Blocking autoplay on YouTube profile pages alone justifies its use. Of course, replacing the Arial and Roboto fonts with Helvetica Neue on every website is more than a nice-to-have. ↩︎ Similarly to how it handles content blockers or Reader mode, I wish Safari natively offered the option to block JavaScript on a per-site basis , like Quiche Reader or Orion Browser do. ↩︎ I used quotation marks on apps in this sentence because I’m not sure how to call an “app” like Eleventy or Brew that lives only on the terminal. ↩︎ Blocking autoplay on YouTube profile pages alone justifies its use. Of course, replacing the Arial and Roboto fonts with Helvetica Neue on every website is more than a nice-to-have. ↩︎ Similarly to how it handles content blockers or Reader mode, I wish Safari natively offered the option to block JavaScript on a per-site basis , like Quiche Reader or Orion Browser do. ↩︎ I used quotation marks on apps in this sentence because I’m not sure how to call an “app” like Eleventy or Brew that lives only on the terminal. ↩︎

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The Jolly Teapot 6 months ago

September 2025 blend of links

Some links don’t call for a full blog post, but sometimes I still want to share some of the good stuff I encounter on the web. Maria Ressa talks with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show ・A video featuring Maria Ressa and Jon Stewart is bound to be brilliant, but this one is especially quotable and bookmark-worthy. The parts on ultra-processed foods/information and “apocalypse or Armageddon” are very powerful and insightful moments that made me pause the video for a moment just to appreciate them fully. I’m a High Schooler. AI Is Demolishing My Education ・“ The trouble with chatbots is not just that they allow students to get away with cheating or that they remove a sense of urgency from academics. The technology has also led students to focus on external results at the expense of internal growth. ” Is the ability to think going to become a rare and valuable skill? ・At first, I thought this was another very interesting post on how A.I. turns people into overconfident software operators, until it became a very relatable post as the same thing happened to me this week at work: “ Indeed, ChatGPT agrees with you, so you must be right. ” Clues by Sam ・Just in case you fear that your ability to think is slipping away, this neat little daily game should keep you covered for a while. (via Kottke ) Yr Weather ・I recently realised that Apple’s weather app is not very efficient at displaying information at a glance: when I look at the forecast, let’s say to see if it will be a sunny weekend or not, Apple’s weather app just uses one symbol per day. “Rain cloud” for Saturday. There goes my plan for a barbecue on the balcony. Yet, on that Saturday, it was only raining in the morning, so the forecast was pretty much useless. Hey Apple, we don’t all live in a place which has Californian weather all year long. Yr is a Norwegian application, and the forecast doesn’t show only one symbol, but four: morning, afternoon, evening, night. Excellent so far, and the widget is exactly what I want in a weather widget. Oh my, did I just write extensively about weather apps? Merlin's Wisdom Project, or: “Everybody likes being given a glass of water.” ・I thought I had already shared this, but it turns out I didn’t. This Blend of links collection cannot pretend to call itself a worthwhile collection of links without the URL to this absolute, precious internet gem from Merlin Mann: “ It's only advice for you because it had to be advice for me. ” So many great lines in this. Moomintroll Coffee Wild Blueberry ・This coffee seems to be out of stock most of the time, but this is only proof that this is the good stuff. I first tried it years ago after a trip to Finland: it tastes great and unlike any coffee I’ve tried before. Sure, this is only “flavoured” coffee and rather expensive, but it’s a nice treat (Moomin branded products are usually very good): the perfect mid-morning coffee for October. (Sorry to readers living in the USA, South American countries, and Australia: you apparently can’t get it.) When All You Have Is a Robots.txt Hammer ・Excellent post by Nick Heer, reacting to a good post by Mike Masnick around the idea that closing your site to A.I. bots could mean the end of an open internet. This topic is more layered than I expected, and both of their perspectives are eye-opening. Reading Masnick’s I reopened my site to Google and Bing crawlers , and reading Heer’s, I reduced the list of blocked bots in my file. I know, it’s all meaningless for such a website, but I like to tune every detail in a way I’m comfortable with, even if it doesn’t affect me. Explaining, at some length, Techmeme's 20 years of consistency ・Speaking of the effects of blocking website access: “ Unfortunately for us, an array of trends has made this consistency quite challenging to maintain. Foremost among these is that crawling news sites has become much more difficult in recent years. Scanning the full text of news articles is important for us because the algorithms that alert our editors to news and organize our home page rely on analyzing that text. While it's challenging enough that a great deal of news is now paywalled, a more serious challenge is that with the rise of LLMs, many websites now simply block all bots except for a small number of search engines. ” Physics for Cats ・New Tom Gauld comic book coming very soon (and already available in French). More “Blend of links” posts here Blend of links archive

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