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…
Blog
Posts, notes, and things worth sharing.
Longer thoughts, quick observations, photographs, and links. All in one place, newest first.
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.
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 and interact in a spatial setting.
Weather apps can just be an actual cloud in a room. To dos can be attached to the real world object they reference. Notes can be all over the house.
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…
Will Apple’s headset enhance productivity?
I’ve written several times about mixed reality experiences over the last 6 or 7 years here on my blog. I recently went back and looked at some of those posts and so…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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.
What I saw somewhat recently #100: March 23, 2023
Wind, stirs the dust 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…
Doubling down on Mastodon
The ease of Ivory on Mastodon has me sharing a lot more than I had been over the last few years. Ivory is on my phone, tablet, and my laptop. It is…
Testing Tuff on macOS Ventura.
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.
The entire process takes 3.328 seconds and I have 153,000+ photos and videos in four locations.
Thank you modern computer.
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…
Simon Reynolds on blogging
Simon Reynolds, in December, marking the 20th anniversary of Blissblog: I honestly can't see that anyone has invented a better format than the blog, at least for what I want to do….
I’m refactoring Tuff – my static site builder – to support multiple websites so I’ve been posting more on Mastodon than here the last week or so. That should change now as Tuff is able build 3 very different websites. Lots more to do but I see the light.
Recently finished reading Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow. ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ Copious detail. Fast read if not for the length. Author a bit gushy.
I’ve published a new YouTube video. It is a review of my portrait of The Engineer.
I’m continuing to whittle away at my to do list for Tuff – my static site builder. Every few days I’m able to check off a task. Lots of small improvements add up over time.
I’m putting the finishing touches on a presentation of my portrait The Engineer that I’ll be recording for my YouTube channel.
I’m hoping to record better audio without spending too much money. Each presentation I make I want to improve.
How to help Mastodon
There have been several waves of activity on Mastodon since I signed up in 2017. Those waves have increased in frequency and intensity. Admittedly, while I did put in some effort early…
We had a possible fireball explosion tens of thousands of feet above us in Pennsylvania. Shook our house pretty good at 10:49am Eastern.
Now I’m looking for how to properly document it with NASA.
I figured this worthy of jotting down on the weblog.
What I saw somewhat recently #99: January 19, 2023
This antique store was… different This is the penultimate WIS link list. The final list, number 100, shall reprise all previous link lists and come sometime in February. I'm looking forward to…
Zero inside knowledge here; but my guess is an Apple Event in February announcing Apple VR dev kits that cost $3,000 that come with a headset + Mac mini. With the device shipping at least 6-9 months later for less than that.
Revisiting Simon Collison’s Farewell to Twitter
A very dead bird, October 2010, Plymouth, Mass. iPhone 4 Last night I revisited Simon Collison's post from early December 2022 Farewell, Twitter. I had read it shortly after he published it…
Blogging is alive and well
Oh man am I happy! People that hadn't written on their blog in a long time are blogging again. Websites that hadn't been updated in many years, some over a decade, are…
After a 3 week break from blogging and social media (more like 2 weeks completely, 1 week just reading and replying), I’m ready to jump back in. I have lots of plans for 2023 for my website and personal projects.