Author: Colin Devroe
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Switcheroo – An open source Little Arc for Safari
This post details a macOS app that recreates features from Little Arc in Safari. The post and source code were available for members only until April 3rd, 2024 and are now public. One of Arc’s best features is Little Arc — a small Quick Look like window that appears whenever you click a link in…
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Chicago snaps part 1: A few iPhone captures from last week’s trip to Chicago with the NerdPress team to sponsor the Tastemaker Conference. Hubbub had its own booth while NerdPress had a large lounge with an impressive view. A fantastic work trip.
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Diversions #1: I have no business owning this camera
This is the first edition of an all-new series of posts and future email newsletter that will be part of a new membership on my personal website. Diversions is the central hub for news about the membership, behind-the-scenes details of my personal projects, as well as a wide variety of links to people, places, and…
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Here is my profile on RsS iS dEaD LOL. Try it yourself. By @paulcuth.
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I’m trying Safari for the rest of this week in place of Arc. I’m not revolting against them, I just feel as though our values are no longer aligned. They’ve shifted from trying to build a really great web browser (which they’ve already done, imo) to chasing AI venture dollars. I don’t blame them. I’m…
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An aerial comparison of Carbondale, PA in 1948 and 2023
Sometime near 1948 Fiore Cerra took an aerial photograph of Carbondale, Pennsylvania that captured how very different a place it was just 75 years ago or so. I live near Carbondale and the moment I saw Cerra’s aerial I knew I wanted to try to recreate it. Well, in early 2023 I did and I…
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A few snaps with my phone while browsing a few local antique shops and garden center last weekend.
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The first rebuilding blocks
Korczak Ziolkowski wakes up early on a bitter cold winter’s morning – the same way he has for several decades – after breakfasting and a few mugs of the hottest coffee his palette can stand, he shoulders his tool belt and trods his way in knee-high snow to the eastern wall of the Crazy Horse…
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Introducing the Favorite Toots WordPress Plugin
One of the primary ways I find new accounts to follow on social media is by eavesdropping on other people’s favorites. Many social networks make each account’s favorites public but Mastodon does not (yet?). So I wanted a way to show my favorites publicly so that others can look through them. And I’m hoping others…
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I’m excited to finally share a portrait I made of S. Robert Powell Ph.D., the President of the Carbondale Historical Society, back in April 2023. I’m donating the prints and images to the society for their archives.
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Last year my mother-in-law gifted Eliza and I with a train ride to Jim Thorpe for our anniversary. I managed to snap a few color film photos along the way.
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My appearance on This Week in WordPress #285
My thanks to Nathan Wrigley for having me as a guest on This Week in WordPress #285. (YouTube/Apple Podcasts) Show notes There are a few links on the WP Builds website for this episode but I thought I’d share some of the links I mentioned in the episode as well. It was a lot of…
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If you’re seeing this post that means that my website is once again powered by WordPress. Yay! The site doesn’t look so nice on mobile devices, the feed is broken in a few ways, and I need to get the database load under control… you know, a typical website launch.
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The greatest productivity hack of all time
The greatest productivity hack of all time is working less. Slack recently published new research into desk worker productivity. It is a worthy read – however, it sheds light on something that most desk workers already inherently know: longer hours do not mean greater productivity. I have put a lot of personal focus on trying…
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When my blog goes quiet you know I’m very busy. I’m looking forward to announcing some personal news in early December. This morning I’ve made what is likely to be my final update to my personal website until 2024 (I added my projects to my homepage).
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I discovered a small bug with GUID in my RSS feed that likely existed for an entire year. Of course I fixed it. But that also means if you’re subscribed you very likely received all of my posts in your feed reader again. My appologies. I really do try to avoid such things.
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Yesterday, by pure chance, I met local photographer Rolfe Ross – whose work I’ve followed on Flickr for many years. It turns out his photos were being exhibited in the same venue as Eugene Lucas, whose photos I was there to see. I took some very hasty photographs of the exhibit – which I shared…
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If you’re reading this that means that Tuff, my now 1-year old static site generator that I’ve been rewriting from scratch for about a month, works. I’m going to write a detailed post about this rewrite but for now – if you see anything amiss on my site please do let me know.
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This evening I fixed a few longstanding CSS issues on my website. Many more to go. Back in April I built my own light box thingy for my portfolio images. Example. I’d like something more comprehensive, but I want to keep it light weight. Would it be terribly difficult to build something like the JPL…
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Photos from Chisholm Vineyards in Feburary 2020
For many years now Eliza and I have preferred to slow down and take our time on road trips rather than feeling rushed to get to our destination. We like to visit tucked away places. Do a little shopping. Or enjoy a drink. This usually adds about a day of traveltime to any of our…
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Colin Walker on what he gets from blogging
Colin Walker, on his personal blog (which is looking sharp as ever) about what he gets from blogging in public: “I feel compelled to write, to share, and there is an intense satisfaction in doing so. The sharing is a secondary but essential aspect; while journalling is a rewarding process it doesn’t fill the same…
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My less than typical day
In January 2021 I posted my typical day which resulted in some fun people following suit on their own blogs. Lately, my typical day is less than typical. I’ve been on a tear for about 12 months with side projects. This means that my day is jammed. But here is a glimpse… I accomplish an…
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I haven’t shared new photographic work in a while. I’ve been struggling to find the time – even though it is easily my favorite hobby. To help unclog my creative pipes, I’m slowly releasing unfinished work. Here is a new photo series, Where I – a collection of images of specific locations based on vivid…
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Talkers and writers
Mandy Brown, on two modes of thinking and how we should all try to practice both to be useful to our colleagues: “Talkers need to recognize that not everyone loves to think out loud, and that giving space for writing is part of what it means to make use of the best brains around you.…
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How to fix the web
Robin Rendle published Why are websites embarrasing? wherein he laments the state of design and accessibility on the web. But, he’s hopeful. “I do truly believe that a website can be as well designed as any book, just as thoughtful, just as brilliant.” I sympathize with Robin. The web, especially the news web, is a…
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Dear Arc
As an avid Safari fanatic, I’m reluctant to dive into a new browser backed by any company with a business model I find… elusive. I’ve been giving Arc a spin every few releases since signing up for the beta and each time it has improved a lot. Just yesterday I was chatting with our creative…
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Reducing my personal hosting complexity
Have you ever put off a task because you felt like it would take you far too long so you just procrastinate and simply never get it done? I do this all the time. And, for the most part, when I do finally get around to getting the task completed I find out that my…
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Static first
In the early days of the modern web – say, the mid-1990s through the mid-00s – my personal website was served statically. It was built with plain HTML (CSS didn’t exist at the time) that I copied and pasted when I needed to create a new entry (the word blog didn’t exist then either). But…
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Stripe Transfer continues to grow slowly. The latter half of this year I hope to grow it a bit more. As a start I’ve turned on Google Adwords and also wrote a post about migrations subscriptions from Chargebee to Stripe over on Medium.
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For the first year we’ll be in a phase with visionOS where designers will be updating their interfaces to be translucent, dynamic rounded rects. Personally, I am looking forward to when they break out of the windowed world we’ve all been living in for the last few decades and find all new ways to communicate…
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Apple Vision Pro is exactly what I hoped for
I am very happy. For many years I’ve wanted a computing experience that resembles precisely what Apple announced at WWDC just a few short weeks ago. In 2019 I wrote “I want any size screen, any time, any where.” As poorly written as that sentence may be, I think Apple is attempting to deliver just…
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Making Tuff improvements
My approach to building Tuff, my static site generator that I began working on last November, was to jump in as quickly as possible by publishing my personal website publicly very early in the development process. Doing so forced me to make rapid improvements and to focus on the most important features. By spending 5am…
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Humane Leap of faith
John Gruber on Humane’s recent demo at TED: “So far, it feels like Humane’s entire premise is founded on that same mistake: building a new device intended to replace our phones, without that new device being able to do any of the dozens of things we love to do on our phones that require a…
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How I’m using ChatGPT as an accelerator
Over the last few weeks I’ve begun using the recent crop of AI-powered services in my daily work and I’ve found them to be an enormous boost to my productivity and fun to play with. I do not know if these human-like chat services will end up causing great harm to the earth’s population or…
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Over the weekend I finished Looking At Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art by John Szarkowski. Szarkowski is, as of this moment, my favorite photographic writer and curator.
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Using Wavelength to chat with darkroom printers
Update July 1, 2024: Wavelength is shutting down July 31, 2024. For the past few days I’ve been testing out Wavelength – a group messaging app that is currently only available on Apple’s platforms. It reminds me a lot of Quill, the former messaging app that was swallowed whole by Twitter just prior to ……
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Yesterday I finished reading Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford and Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang. I’d recommend both. Chiang is great. I think I need to read more by him.
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What I saw somewhat recently #100: March 23, 2023
This is it. The final WIS link list post. This series of posts has spanned 10 years. I’m happy that I published 99 lists of links and that thousands of people have clicked on them to enjoy the interesting, creative, useful, and fun webpages I stumbled upon over the last decade. I’m saddened, however, that…
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I deleted my Twitter account today.
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Testing Tuff on macOS Ventura.
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Tuff, my static site builder, can build a simple directory for me to view my entire photo library. It creates views for each year and month and also checks various backups – both local and cloud – to make sure the files are properly backed up. It warns me if a file isn’t backed up.…
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Will my next Mac be my last Mac?
Perhaps you’ve had this experience… you walk into a place of business and see the computer and software they use to do their scheduling, billing, and ordering and you notice they are decades old. But, have you seen how productive they are? More often than not they are so fast that the computer has a…