Blog
Writing helps me think more clearly. I write about what interests me such as blogging, photography, technology, social media, and my personal creative projects.
Series: Diversions, WIS, typicalday
Topics: blogging, photography, programming
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Signboard 1.1.0 adds Trello and Obsidian import, new color schemes
This morning I released Signboard 1.1.0 which includes Trello and Obsidian import, new color schemes, the ability to archive entire lists of cards (and the list itself), and other improvements. Importing from Trello was always possible (but only partially supported). Now Signboard can import far more data from Trello board exports. The Obsidian import works
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Small detail in Signboard… as you drag a card it begins to slightly tilt in the direction that you’re dragging. Makes me happy. Signboard 1.1.0 is coming tomorrow and it will include curated color themes (so aesthetic) and importing from both Trello and Obsidian. And a few other nice new things.
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Signboard has had a hidden secret from the beginning, you can import data from Trello. Starting in 1.1.0, which will ship this Friday, that feature will no longer be hidden. Oh, and you’ll also be able to import from Obsidian and its leading community kanban plugins also.
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John O’Nolan on Ghost’s CLI
John O’Nolan added a new CLI to Ghost called ghst: We’ve spent 10+ years focusing on having a clean, well designed interface for Ghost. It’s something we care a lot about, and spend a lot of time on. But within about ~1hr of using Ghost via Claude/CLI, it was hard to imagine going back to
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Jim Neilsen on LLM instructions
Great point from Jim Neilsen re: the instructions found deep inside a model or agent’s instructions, which we may not prefer yet live with if we don’t know to override them: It’s like a Trojan Horse of craft: guidelines you might never agree to explicitly are guiding LLM outputs, which means you are agreeing to
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Simone Giertz on success
Simone Giertz in an interview with The Creative Independent: One of the things that’s most important is if I’m really proud of the thing that we’re putting out. That’s always been one of the core tenants and that goes for both the YouTube side of things and for the product side of things. If it
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Giles Turnbull on Signboard
Giles Turnbull: Colin Devroe released Signboard, a lovely little local kanban board app for your Mac. Each board is just a folder, and each card is just a text file, and when you move cards, it moves files. So deliciously simple. 😊 Thank you Giles.
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Signboard is officially released
In September 2025 I wrote about Signboard and had started scratching away at making an app that I had wanted for a long time. Since then, I’ve been using the app and I’m so happy that it exists and it is really fun to work on. At each opportunity, I’d add a feature, fix a
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Signboard running on Ubuntu and Windows 11. Bug fix release coming Friday.
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We released Hubbub Pro 2.29.0 today. We acquired this WordPress plugin just over 2 years ago and we’ve added tons of features and improvements that are helping publishers grow their websites, their mailing lists, and ultimately their revenue. Still so much more to do.
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Back in February I bought a four-wheeler and I’ve been having a lot of fun putting in some miles, adding accessories, and being outdoors. It is a 2026 Polaris Sportsman. A great way to end winter. It affords me to get to locations to do some photography that I wouldn’t be able to reach otherwise.
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In addition to Signboard 1.0.0 launching today, an all-new version of Stupid – my free daily word game – just launched as well. The UI changes based on your weather. Enjoy!
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Signboard 1.0.0 is available now. Free for personal use. One-time payment if you use it commercially. I hope people like it. I’ll write more about it soon.
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John O’Nolan on the changing landscape of software
John O’Nolan, founder of Ghost: Open source was built upon the idea that anyone should be able to study, modify, replicate and share software. Free from the grasp of corporations and copyrights to prevent it. In a strange way, I’m beginning to wonder if AI might end up fulfilling that vision more completely than open
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Gus Mueller on agentic coding
Gus Mueller, in response to the aforelinked Knauss post: […] what is going to make Acorn stand out? I’m starting to think that’s going to be personality and feel and polish, but turned up a notch. And: I’ve got feelings because anyone can put an app together now, so what’s the point of me? But
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Greg Knauss on the emotional toll of agentic coding
Greg Knauss: Is the code any good? I don’t know. Who cares? Nobody looks at it anyway. AI produces a result, and results are what matter, and if you’re waiting for quality to factor significantly into that equation, I’ve got some bad news about the last 40 years of professional software development for you. Be
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Nikunj Kothari on “Token Anxiety”
Nikunj Kothari on the anxiety created by agentic workflows: The anxiety is rational, which is why it sticks. Every week some new benchmark drops that makes last month’s workflow feel prehistoric. Codex ships overnight processing. Opus gets faster. Context windows double. None of it reduces the pressure. It multiplies it. You can do more now.
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Where Now? app makes private location history useful
Scott Boms, creator of the new Where Now? app on iOS, writing about making the app back in January: To my surprise, it didn’t take long to get an initial implementation of what I had in mind working and running on my own device. And from there it’s been fun to design the app iteratively
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Marcin Wichary on Flickr’s beautiful URLs
Marcin Wichary, writing about Flickr’s beautiful URL scheme: It was a beautiful and predictable scheme. Once you knew how it worked, you could guess other URLs. The del.icio.us and Flickr APIs and URL schemes were appropriately lauded as clean, predictable, and best-in-class. This sort of predictability isn’t seen as often these days, especially by the
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If you are excited about and enjoy using LLMs, please take time to read contrarian views. Seek out those that have solid reasons for avoiding their use and listen to them. Read the data about the privacy, rights, energy, and natural resource issues that these tools have created or exacerbated. Be open minded about these
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Selling software will still be the hard part
While reading Craig Mod’s post recalling the seventh year of his Special Projects membership (all of his yearly updates are worth reading and gleaning from) I noticed a link to Roden 102. I’m sure I read this issue (I read them all) but I maybe glazed over this bit about his use of Claude Code
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Hedley Wright on the Frames app
Hedley Wright provides a short tutorial on using the Frames app to add EXIF data to your scanned film photos for importing into apps like Adobe Lightroom: For many film photographers, this bridges the gap between analogue shooting and digital organization. In this article, we’ll explore how that information is transferred to your scanned images
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A Fence by Jasper Tandy
Jasper Tandy shares A Fence: There’s no reason to take this, or to share it. […] I’m always drawn to piles of things. I don’t know why. I’ve driven past this fence in this field all week and thought it’d make a photo that I’d like, but it was only yesterday afternoon when there was
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SpaceX buys xAI
I knew this was coming and I am still unable to fully process it. The scale of what is going on right now is too much to hold in my gelatinous human mind. I’m only writing about it on my blog because it will likely be the biggest tech news of the year? Maybe? It
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Apple should acquire Bitrig before someone else does. Still more work to be done there to make creating apps approachable for “anyone”… but Bitrig is remarkably fast at creating apps for Apple OSes. The more complex parts of the process are still on the Apple-side of things and could/should be streamlined dramatically.
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TIL The Bandcamp iOS app runs fairly OK on macOS.
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TIL You can set Finder to auto-size columns. I turned this on immediately. /via DF.
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Darice de Cuba on travel
Darice de Cuba: It’s perfectly ok to go to another country/city and just take it easy and enjoy oneself. I completely agree with Darice’s take on traveling. Go somewhere, get comfy, and explore. That is exactly what we do also. As little an agenda as possible.
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More friction, less reach
What should I post here? What should I post there? I’m struggling to find a balance that I like. My deepest self says post everything here, right on my own personal website. As broken and beautiful as it is (I’m constantly fiddling lately, sorry). But if I do that should I take the time to
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Maggie Appleton on the state of AI Agents
Maggie Appleton, in a post titled simply January 2026: You might suggest that I spend less time on X, but I’m not inclined to look away just as the train gets up to full speed. Sure it’s a distorted reality, but it points to real ground truth: even if progress on language models slows this
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Nearly a dozen of the NerdPress team recently enjoyed a beautiful week in downtown Los Angeles sponsoring Tastemaker Conference. We met with old and new customers, enjoyed good food, pet some puppies, gazed upon the cosmos at Griffith Observatory, took a tour of LA’s black history, vibe coded and were driven around in Waymos. We’ve
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I’m happy to see the younger generation of programmers joining us older folks in experiencing imposter syndrome and constantly feeling of being behind. It persists. It never goes away. You’re likely doing fine, and likely not behind. If you don’t feel these feelings you likely think too much of yourself. Work on being OK with
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Clear your calendar, pour a favorite beverage, and immerse yourself into the year in music with reports from Simon Collison and Jon Hicks. Fantastic every year.
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Comments from Mozilla’s new CEO have brought up the topic of ad blocking. With some going so far as to switch their browser. In 2023 I wrote about why I do not block ads but I do block ad tracking as best as I can.
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Chris Glass: “Alright, that’s enough of that”
Chris Glass, on his cat blog: I’ve turned off comments and other minor features to improve site performance here because I think AI bots are hogging things. The scourge of internet traffic currently are data scraping bots slurping up the web. I don’t know why there are so many, why the requests are so often,
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Every now and then YouTube will suggest a film photography related video from years and years ago. I’ll watch it and think, hey, YouTube, why didn’t you suggest this sooner?
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Diversions #10: Kona’s first snow
Pretty rich that I am extolling the virtues of boredom while at the same time reviving a recently discontinued series of posts on my site called, of all things, Diversions. But hear me out. These diversions aren’t the bad kind of diversions. I mean, my most recent post in this series talked about growing garlic
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My 2026 goal is to be bored more often
What do you do with your time? I think the modern world has afforded us all more time than we know what to do with and we’re squandering it. I know this isn’t true for everyone, and certainly not true of people everywhere, but many of us live in a time of abundance and we’re
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Taranis: “LLMs are a failure”
Anon Taranis writes that LLMs are, in large part, a failure and that all AI companies have hit a wall that they’ll never surmount. I believe it is always good to read both sides of debates. If I find myself overly positive or negative about a topic or technology, I seek out those that disagree.
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Whither Latent Co.?
Naz Hamid, writing on his personal blog, about forming a small company called Latent Co.: Driven by the creative tooling we’ve cut our teeth on and drawing on our product and imaging experience, we’re making a product for Mac. His partners are Ryan Carver and Julio Pablo Zambrano. I’ve exchanged many a message with Carver
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Elizabeth Spiers on blogging
Elizabeth Spiers, writing on her own blog again finally, about how blogging is better than social media platforms because it is harder to pick a fight. I’m generalizing off course, go read her post. I think of this now as the difference between living in a house you built that requires some effort to visit
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I don’t know if I can directly tie this to uninstalling social network apps from my phone… but I can say that I had a thoroughly enjoyable and productive offline weekend.
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Andre Franca on the small web
Andre Franca: The small web persists not because it’s winning any battle against platform dominance, but because some things are worth doing regardless of scale. These independent voices, scattered across their own domains, linked through blogrolls and RSS feeds and word of mouth, create a version of the internet that still feels human. This is
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I’ve uninstalled all social network apps from my phone; including Ivory for Mastodon. I’m really trying to force myself into boredom. To allow my mind to wander. And force-feeding myself information (even good, high quality information) is stifling my mind’s ability to wander.
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Manuel Moreale: “the web is alive”
Manuel Moreale, encouraging us all to follow all the links in his seminal series People & Blogs… This series lives on my blog but has nothing to do with me. It exists to connect you, the human who’s reading this, with all the other wonderful humans that are still out there, spending their time making
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Simon Willison on creating new programming languages with AI
Simon Willison comments on creating new programming languages with AI: My hunch is that existing LLMs make it easier to build a new programming language in a way that captures new developers. My take? Likely an unpopular one. Most modern programming languages were made to be human readable; yet, LLMs don’t need us to make
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A quick business trip to Boston with the NerdPress team. We shared some excellent meals (particularly at Sarma). I had very little free time but I did manage to saunter over to the Leica store (just before the gallery exhibition of the work of Maria Guțu) and to stop into the Cheers gift shop. This
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If you’re reading this in RSS or on my website, it means that it is being statically delivered yet again. I’m so happy about this.
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Hesitant thoughts on LLMs
I’ve wanted to write a follow-up to my April 2023 post How I’m using ChatGPT as an accelerator for several months. I want to share how I’m using AI today, what I think about it, and what I think we’ll see in the future. But I will admit I hesitated because people I respect and
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Spending time, slow time, meaningful time… looking through Paris Photo-Aperature 2025 PhotoBook Awards Shortlist. Added to Unmark (of course) so that I can spend several comfy chair, cross legged sessions doing so.