The nice thing about keeping a blog is that I can say at precisely 9:51am, Wednesday 5th February 2025, I discovered that macOS 15.3 had enabled a feature that was phoning home every 15 minutes with personal data. And that I said “no” and turned it off.At the time Apple were generous enough to provide a setting to disable this feature.Although they hid the second part deeper, because why should saying “no” be easy?Last week I succumbed to Apple’s harassment and upgraded macOS 15 to 27. I only…

Exploiters took advantage of a legacy approvals bug in an old payment processor called Limit Break, which the platform had stopped using in late 2024. The bug affected listings on Magic Eden's EVM marketplace, which the company had shut down earlier this year. The attackers were able to steal numerous NFTs, including 10 Meebits, 50 Otherdeeds, 10 World of Women, and 235 Desperate Apewives. Attackers also subsequently stole 660 wETH (~$1.78 million).A whitehat rescue spearheaded by blockchain…

Use Johnny Decimal, set up a Zettelkasten, implement the PARA method, buy a Bullet Journal... none of it matters if you never do the work. I often read about people setting up these elaborate systems to save time. It only took you 3 weeks to set up, but think about how much time you will save going forward! It's bollocks. You're spending hours tweaking plugins, tags, and folder trees to avoid a five-minute task you don't want to do. All it does is give you the cheap dopamine hit of feeling…

So for about fifteen years this has been my TV/movie watching sitch — I’m over here, and the computer that plays the stuff is over there *points at bookcase*. And I control this with this handy li’l keyboard. Now, when I first started this thing, I went through about half a dozen keyboards until I found this one. Most mini keyboards have a pitiful range — like a metre at most. But this one (which is not Bluetooth, but uses a USB dongle) works pretty well. That is, normally it has, like, a 98%…

I've been writing technical tutorials on my website since I started it last November, but this thread asking about static site generators for beginners on 32-bit Café made me realize I've never made a proper tutorial regarding SSGs from the ground-up basics. This post initially began as a reply to that thread, but I realized I had enough to say to fill an entire blog post. I hope this is helpful to anybody who has been interested in static-site generators but has found trying them out to be…

Roll a D6.If you rolled “1”:Read the article.Find and quote the weakest sentence. Must be tangential to the main thesis.Say “This makes me not want to read the article.”If you rolled “2”:Do not read the article.SF Bay Area humble brag: “This reminds me of the time I met Steve Jobs...”If you rolled “3”:Open with “I have a doctorate in point-set topology. This is utter nonsense.”Fail to explain the concept correctly.If you rolled “4”:“You no longer need to pay for software. I just spin up an…

Mentally I get jammed up all the time, every day I feel overwhelmed by work and tasks. Whenever I want to do a deep work, I find my mind wondering. I could not concentrate on the task and sometimes I do not even know what task that I should focus on. Step 1: Write it all down Whenever I feel stuck with work or life, I would do a brain dump onto a piece of paper. I write whatever that comes into my head. I do not care whether it is important or not important. I just write it all down. While…

Tech companies and their executives have, broadly, moved to align themselves with investors and adopted a posture of, often, disdain or outright hostility towards their users and employees. If tech companies don't value you, why provide value to them? If they back political positions hostile to your interests, why not return that hostility? I'm not arguing for boycotts, I know that people are bound to different platforms for different, compelling reasons. What I am arguing for is that, given…

Pixel Area Check out this cool project to feature independent blogs! And see if you can find this website in the grid!

Once upon a time, I ran across an experimental project called TabFS, which mounts browser tabs as a filesystem. This seemed like such a cool idea! Ever since, I have wanted a way to interact with tabs programmatically. But the main thing I’ve wanted to do is be able to grab the URLs of some or all of my open tabs, and paste them into a text file. Each time I have looked into this before, it hasn’t been possible without installing an extension. And I don’t like installing extensions. I often…

If you run a public company and someone steals your customer database, the standard public relations playbook requires you to announce two things. First, you announce that your organisation was targeted by a sophisticated, highly coordinated nation-state adversary. Second, you announce that they used an unprecedented zero-day exploit.This framing is immensely comforting to everyone involved. It suggests your engineers fought valiantly against foreign intelligence operatives before being…

Somebody took my proprietary CSS and made a website with it. I investigated. His name is Karl and he lives at: https://householderkarl.com/ It's the best-looking website on the Bear Blog platform. No old junk, posts are short and everything is arranged with an almost offensive amount of taste. It turns out the CSS works exactly as advertised. This raises serious questions about intellectual property, artistic integrity, and why nobody is paying me. Free clown again. This is how it starts. First…

Over on my ‘about me’ page, many years ago, back in the teenage years of this millennium, I wrote: My artwork has sold to collectors across the world, mainly facilitated directly through online sales rather than through galleries or agents. And this has, until very recently, been true. Not so much nowadays, though. Over the past couple of years I’ve been taking part in more exhibitions and am seeing online sales gradually being replaced by sales from exhibitions, although sales in general are…

For a year or so I have been struggling with my relationship with my phone. I am on it far too much, doing far too much of nothing. Hours have passed, and I have achieved nothing. I have learned nothing. A Slippery Slope It starts with a notification; a message, an email, a shipping alert. Then, I notice that I have other notifications that need my attention. Finally, I open Reddit, or YouTube, and I am sucked into the rapids of mindless endless scrolling. Why did I open my phone? Where did the…

As I was delightscrolling through the fediverse today, I came across this post with a close-up photo of a Palm IIIc synchronizing some email, and it made me realize how much I missed low-resolution displays. I'm thinking about how the rarity of a thing can increase its value, such as with diamonds (which are a huge racket), as they are actually not that rare, but production is tightly controled by a near-monopoly to keep the prices very high. And somehow, I think we appreciated pixels more when…

There is a particular feeling some old software has that is hard to explain without sounding sentimental. You open it, it appears almost immediately, and it does the job it was built to do. The menus are where you expect them. The file is yours. The program is not asking you to sign in, sync, subscribe, accept a new policy, dismiss a promotion, or wait while it talks to six remote services before showing a blank document. That does not mean old software was always better. Plenty of it crashed.…

For the past few years, the tech industry has kept pushing passkeys as the ultimate solution to logging in. Many Big Tech companies "helpfully" inform you every time you sign in how much easier and effortless passkeys are. The only way to make them stop is either to concede and set up a passkey or dig into the settings to find the off-switch. Google goes as far as to name the setting "Skip password when possible", and Microsoft advertises that you should make your account passwordless. Passkeys…

Over the years, I’ve had many battles about accessibility ‘modes’, and why they’re a terrible idea. That’s another article for another day, but one thing ‘mode’ advocates often come back with is that we already have modes for things like colour and motion, so why not just add more? Our users have already told their operating system how they want things to work, whether that’s darker colours, more contrast, or less movement. We should respect those preferences as they browse the web. The browser…

Welcome to my third post on Gemini and the alternative Internets and smallnets! This is going to be my most helpful and detailed article on the topic yet—and it's something I'm excited to get into. If you'd like a history and explanation of what Gemini is, read my first post, "Gemini, Gophers, and Fingers. Oh My! Alternative Internets Beyond HTTPS". My second article, "Oldnets and Altnets: A Guide to Building a Low-Spec Daily Internet Out of Gemini, Gopher, and Terminal Tools" was aimed more at…

LibreOffice 26.8, released on August 26th, became the software’s most popular update. LibreOffice is a free alternative to Microsoft Office that’s been around for nearly two decades. In one week, the installer was downloaded more than 1 million times — not counting updates via Linux distribution repositories. Someone might say the improvements to the writing system and typography are a hit among NGOs, government agencies, and offices that use LibreOffice. I’m putting my money on a…

I just ordered a Fairphone 6+, Fairbuds and Fairbuds XL. I have an iPhone 17 as my daily driver, but I couldn't help but order this phone and headsets once I became aware it was a thing. I had never heard of it until a colleague got a phone.

There was a time when installing software felt like a decision you had finished making. You bought a box, a disk, a CD-ROM, or later a downloaded installer. You entered a serial number if the program asked for one. After that, the software lived on your machine. It might have been buggy, awkward, limited, or ugly, but it was yours in the ordinary practical sense that mattered to most users. You could open it, use it, keep it, reinstall it, and often run it for years after the company had moved…

Hayden Field, reporting for The Verge: We seem to be entering into an AI agent renaissance. Meta’s new consumer-facing AI agent, Muse, topped the App Store charts soon after its release and has 600,000 daily active users in the US, by an Apptopia estimate. And AI agent platform Instinct, whose eponymous creator is fundraising at a $2.5 billion valuation, has been making the rounds in the tech industry. Under the hood, though, there are some obvious similarities to the platform that started it…

It’s common to compare the current AI takeover of software engineering to the rise of AI in chess. Chess AIs went from much weaker than serious players to much stronger than even the strongest humans. Between those points, there was a middle period dominated by “centaurs”: human-AI partnerships that were stronger than unassisted AIs or humans. Lots of people think that we’re currently in a world of software engineering centaurs. According to them, coding AIs are not yet capable enough to…

With Muse confirmed to give everyone a Virtual Machine on the cloud, we can now confidently say, 2026 is the year of desktop Linux. I’ve seen a couple of posts about this so wanted to demystify. Today, every Muse user gets a free computer in the cloud. It's a real computer, and we’ve designed the security architecture of the Muse Secure VM carefully so you and your Muse can do almost anything you could with a… pic.twitter.com/tdk4vYvF5z— David Singleton (@dps) September 24, 2026

After quite a lot of wine fuelled reading of Brennans Blog I got a little interested in the Gemini Protocol designed as a new internet protocol for "supporting an electronic library of interconnected text documents". Sounds good to me. I don't often write about tech, because everyone else on the smallweb does. But I've been a Linux obsessive since Redhat 5.2. If you search my real name, there are contributions I made to the Fedora project back when I had free time. I have made my living for 20+…

If I were to look back at the early days of me messing around with the internet - we're talking the late '90s here - it's that I didn't pursue my interest in HTML and CSS, let alone programming in general.Much like many of that era I spun up my first website on GeoCities (I was part of the SouthBeach crowd), quickly figured out how to have the requisite "Under Construction" banner, and gave everyone's ears an 8-bit blessing of Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On" on auto-play.Yup, the good ol'…

Tailwind is awesome. I like having the styling next to the markup. I can read a component and understand its layout without jumping between files. But there’s a huge gap between using Tailwind and automatically verifying that code follows a design system. This becomes especially obvious when AI agents write the UI. An agent can produce valid Tailwind while ignoring the tokens and component variants already in your project. Telling it to follow the design system gives it instructions. It also…

“Microsoft has ended 40 years of single-occupancy for Excel cells and is now allowing multiple values to inhabit the same home. For the time being, this capability is only available in Microsoft Excel for Windows and Mac Beta Channels. And it is opt-in.” Which is exactly what Microsoft was accused of doing many years ago when they brought out their OOXML standard and punted it as a global standard. Very few fell for that as ODF was already the open document standard, and not owned by any…

Last year I ran an experiment to test the ability of modern LLMs to correctly answer a relatively straightforward question. Every single one of them got it wrong. Some missed information, some made up false statements, none were right. Of course the fanbois variously claimed that I was holding it wrong, my prompts were shit, I should have chosen better defaults, and - my favourite - that it would be better next year. Well, next year is now. 365 days after the original experiment, let's see if…