Twin Cities IndieWeb - BlogFlock

Farewell Weekly Thing Forum and Ponder - Jamie Thingelstad

2025-11-18T01:34:54.000Z

In September 2023, I introduced the Weekly Thing Forum with the hope of creating a space for readers of the Weekly Thing to connect with each other and continue topics that may have started in the Weekly Thing. The Forum itself is hosted on Ponder, which aligns closely with the ethos of the IndieWeb and the Weekly Thing. Recently, Good Enough, the makers of Ponder, announced that Ponder is being shut down. With that, the Weekly Thing Forum is also going to come to an end.

In the two years of the Forum, we had 86 people join and 107 discussions. We shared some exclusive POAPs, experimented with some different things, and did many other things. I briefly considered finding a new home for the Forum, but nothing made much sense. If folks really have an itch for that, there is the (very quiet) Weekly Thing subreddit at r/WeeklyThing.

I want to thank the gang at Good Enough for taking a run at something like Ponder. I also applaud that they gave everyone the ability to download a usable HTML archive of any groups on Ponder, as well as to delete their group’s data. They kept their focus on those core values even when things weren’t going the way they wanted, and I applaud that.

I will bring back the “Reply All” section whenever it makes sense. That will bring conversations that arrive in my mailbox from issues back into the newsletter at times. As a final nod and Thank You to Ponder, I decided to create a Farewell Ponder POAP and share it with users of the service. If you would like one, send me an email and I’ll get you a claim code!

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2025-11-17T14:41:50.000Z

If you need to use a chatbot to do your job, does that make YOU the robot? – James Shelley

Whether we’re smarter or stupider than the robots doesn’t much change the possibility that their presence will make our work more robotic.

Yep. As Nicholas Bate says, the only way to win in this present future is to be human.

Gall's Law - Jamie Thingelstad

2025-11-16T23:41:56.000Z

I was listening to The Omni Show — How Jorge Arango Uses OmniFocus. It was an overall good episode and at the end Arango shared a reference to Gall’s Law. I had not heard of this before so I looked it up:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.

Arango was sharing this in reference to GTD systems — build a simple system that works and then figure out what you need from there. But I keep coming back to this because I think this happens in software and technology frequently.

I’ve been thinking about big enterprise system changes that companies have to make and the huge challenge that you face is really fighting Gall’s Law. These systems are always complex and due to the domain you cannot start simple — you have to start complex.

Gall’s Law is worth keeping in mind.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2025-11-16T20:53:54.000Z

You can still find me on the web.

Things 4 Good Five Year Impact - Jamie Thingelstad

2025-11-16T20:24:32.000Z

We’ve now done our Things 4 Good Candle Fundraiser for five years. With the amazing support of this community we have raised $31,787 for non-profits! Thank you so much. This year was an incredible jump from last year selling 321 candles! ❤️

Last year we did the first day of the sale at Mount Olivet Holiday Boutique and that resulted in a lot of new people finding our candles — and a lot of transactions. This year we returned to our at home model but still saw a lot of people participating in the fundraiser with 73 unique transactions!

I also noticed this year that I felt like the distribution of funds between the non-profits seemed much tighter than usual. I went back and did the math and sure enough it was. The “range” between the four non-profits was only 2.4%, less than any previous year.

Here is another look at this data. In a completely even distribution each non-profit would get 25%. Here we look at the percent over-achievement of the highest performing organization and the percent under-achievement of the lowest. The first year had the highest range ever.

This event has become a treasured tradition for our family and I think it has for some of the folks that come as well. Sign up to our family mailing list and check “Candle Fundraiser” to be notified of future sales.

See Four Year Impact.

Things 4 Good 2025 Candle Fundraiser Insights - Jamie Thingelstad

2025-11-16T20:13:46.000Z

We have wrapped up the 5th annual Candle Fundraiser. I’m proud to say that we raised $9,048 in donations! That is a $2,000 jump (29.1%) from last year’s results. Amazing!

Last year we made 252 candles and we sold out on Sunday. This year we sold 321 candles and only had 10 remaining after the sale. We didn’t necessarily set out to make 321 candles. It was a struggle to get the components that we needed to make all the candles. Vessels were all out of stock so I would order any vessels as soon as they came in stock but it was dribbles. Scent was also challenging. On Wednesday before the sale we had no Winter Wonderland candles and had made a bunch of True North to compensate. Then an order of 8 lbs of scent arrived a few days early and we got to making a bunch of candles!

Many people buy candles as gifts so we tend to see some larger orders. Our largest order this year was 16 candles. You can see folks tend to by in pairs — even numbers are more common than odd. We also saw a big difference this year versus last in the number of single candle sales. Last year at the Mount Olivet Holiday Boutique we had 32 sales of one candle, and this year there were only 9 sales with one candle.

This year we had eleven different scents, three more than last year. The new scent was Charcoal Rose. We also introduced two new “types” of candles — T4G Labs and Rekindled. Both of these candles were in a random scent distribution, requiring you to smell each one since they were different. The Labs candles are the result of our scent experimentation. Rekindled were all made using vessels that had been returned to us and then reused. Here is a look at rolling inventory as sales were happening.

Here is the same data but using a different visualization.

This year was also the first year we offered XL 24oz candles for a $50 donation. I had no way of knowing demand for this so we only made 12 of them to start with and thankfully the preorders allowed me to oversell them and get more made the week after the sale — totally 22 sold. This added $1,100 to the fundraiser. (Note: XL candles are not in the graphs above.)

The last new thing this year were lids. We have been asked in the past if we have lids and I decided we should just have some available. These were $10 each, are very high quality, and can be used repeatedly on different candles. We sold 40 of these. These seemed to be mostly sold when people were giving them as gifts. This added $400 to the fundraiser.

Other observations from the sale:

Having T4G Labs and Rekindled both be random scents did not make any sense. Next year the T4G Labs will be our experiments and include a list of scent lookup so folks know what each one is, using a number. Rekindled will likely become a consistent and reused scent just for that candle. We are thinking something that smells “fresh and clean”.
The XL candles were hard for us to pour because they are double wicked. I have ideas how we can set the wicks next year to make that much easier.
I’m not sharing the payment preferences as I did in previous years because we really steered people to Venmo this year which made the reconciling of payments much easier.
Adding more products completely broke our sales checkout process and I did a refactor of that for Sunday that was so much better.
For years I’ve wanted to create a handout to include with the candles for folks that have questions. I finally made this for Sunday and also have it online — Burn Instructions.

We are already busy thinking of improvements and how we will run next year’s sale! We hope to see you there! Sign up to our family mailing list and check “Candle Fundraiser” to be notified.

Also see 2025 Fundraiser Results.

Things 4 Good 2025 Candle Fundraiser Results - Jamie Thingelstad

2025-11-16T19:36:32.000Z

We completed our annual candle sale raising $9,048 for the four organizations we picked! That is a 29.1% increase from 2024, topping the growth of previous years at 21.8, 9.7, and 10.3%. A huge thank you to the 73 folks from this community who made this possible by purchasing a wooden-wick candle made with love!

As in previous years, we let people pick which organizations they would like to support. People could pick any or all of the organizations. We even had some folks request specific allocations versus dividing it proportionally.

The is the closest clustering of amounts between the various organizations that we have ever had with only a 2.4% delta between the four organizations.

A bit more about the organizations that we have sent these funds to!

Animal Welfare Institute

The Animal Welfare Institute is a non-profit committed to freeing animals suffering because of people. They do this for animals stuck in labs all the way to animals suffering on farms. Their mission is to end all human-caused suffering for animals everywhere, improving the welfare of all. I picked this non-profit because put simply, animals shouldn’t suffer due to humans, and I think it is our responsibility as a society to make sure that we do not make animals unnecessarily hurt. — Tyler

Border Angels

Centered around love, Border Angels help migrants and refugees along the entire US-Mexico border with legal issues and human rights cases. Founded in 1986 by Enrique Morones, it now runs multiple direct action programs and advocacy and humanitarian work. Their Water Drops program stations food, water, and other essential resources along dangerous sections of desert that migrants must cross before arriving in the US. Their Bond Program assists families with the financial burden of bonds and legal struggles to free loved ones being held in detention facilities. Also made possible by Border Angels, the Caravan of Love donates hygiene supplies and clothing to refugees being held in overcrowded shelters in Tijuana, Mexico, and Volviendo a Casa provides support for families suffering from loss. — Mazie

The Food Group

The Food Group is a local non-profit that supplies food shelves with low cost, local healthy foods. They also own a organic farm in Marine on St Croix where they grow veggies and give opportunities for others to learn about sustainable farming helping the next generation of farmers gain access to land, markets, educational opportunities and a network of other likeminded individuals.

In this time where so many people are food insecure, I wanted to support an organization that is working directly on this problem. I chose the Food Group because not only are they working to help get food to people who need it, they are doing it with local, healthy food and in the framework of sustainable agriculture. I also love that they operate a farm which provides organic produce to food shelves and teaches others the tools to take up sustainable farming. — Tammy

Sandy Hook Promise

I was driving up Lyndale Ave on my way to work and became alarmed at the number of police and other first responders that were racing south as I was going north. Shortly after I found out there was a school shooting at Annunciation. This was less than a mile from our home. We know many people that are connected to Annunciation. It was horrible, and should never happen. None of this should happen. Firearms are the leading cause of death for children and teens in America. Sandy Hook Promise is doing good work everyday to stop this. Join me in supporting them, and supporting our kids. — Jamie

These four organizations add to the sixteen that we have supported in previous years:

Also see 2025 Fall Fundraiser Insights for more details from this year. Additionally see results from 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2025-11-16T19:22:05.000Z

POAP 7496955 at Farewell Ponder.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2025-11-16T16:28:25.000Z

My happy place. Now add snow. ❄️🔥

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2025-11-16T15:17:52.000Z

It is cold enough again to fire up the sauna! 🔥

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2025-11-16T15:09:01.000Z

My friend David Caolo updated his site. Dave has made a lovely transition from tech pundit/blogger to artist and I could not be more proud of him. I enjoy all of his work but especially love his watercolors.

Weekly Thing 332 / Compute, Avatar, Cryptography - Weekly Thing

2025-11-16T12:00:00.000Z

Good morning! ☕️

Missed y'all last weekend. This time I feel like I had a better reason though as it was our annual Things 4 Good Candle Fundraiser. We had a great time making over 300 candles and sold nearly every single one of them to raise money for good causes. More on that next week as I wrap up all the proceeds.

I also got glasses 👓 for the first time and am doing my best to learn how to see again. Going from no glasses with off-the-shelf +1 readers to prescription glasses with progressive lenses that have 400 different adaptations in each lens has been way harder than I would have expected. I literally feel like I’m learning to see again. Each day gets better, but it has been hard to read articles and I find working on a computer to be difficult with the progressives right now. Shocker, I tend to do a lot of working on a computer. 🤪

Hope you have a great weekend! 🍂

PS: Don't miss the custom Wordle Thing at the end of this weeks email!

Currently

Playing: I've been getting my four bonus matches in every day in Clash Royale. Usually I’m playing with Tyler right over my shoulder giving me coaching. I’m starting to actually know what I’m doing and thinking more about strategy. It is a lot of fun.

Watching: We recently watched the Australian Netflix series Fisk and enjoyed it a lot. It is a tad quirky. The characters really grew on us, particularly the lead Helen. Just two seasons at six episodes each so we already have finished it!

It is a rare sight for the Northern Lights to be visible in Minneapolis.

November 11, 2025
Minneapolis, MN

Notable

Pagefind — Static low-bandwidth search at scale

One of the more annoying features for a blogger to make for their site is search, and it is one that we all want to have. If you use something like WordPress or something else with a database they all pretty much punt that to the database and use whatever the SQL server can do. This is okay, but not great. Almost no blog uses a true search index.

Static sites have it even harder. There is no database and no SQL server to ask search questions to. You have to do it in the client. Most sites figure out a way to do it but it’s clunky and often involves loading a ton of data in the client via Javascript. Pagefind has a radically better approach.

The goal of Pagefind is that websites with tens of thousands of pages should be searchable by someone in their browser, while consuming as little bandwidth as possible. Pagefind’s search index is split into chunks, so that searching in the browser only ever needs to load a small subset of the search index. Pagefind can run a full-text search on a 10,000 page site with a total network payload under 300kB, including the Pagefind library itself. For most sites, this will be closer to 100kB.

I love this and for now I’m hoping that micro.blog adds this natively or some other plug-in developer takes a go at it. It seems like a much better solution than anything else I've seen for static sites. Found this via a great writeup from Tim Bray.

Your URL Is Your State

Lovely article that dives into the richness of data that a URL can contain. Every developer should learn this structure deeply. So many times you see URLs that just contain a GUID that is obviously a pointer to some caching system in the backend. Obtuse, unsharable, difficult to deal with.

It was one of those moments where something you once knew suddenly clicks again with fresh significance. Here was a URL doing far more than just pointing to a page. It was storing state, encoding intent, and making my entire setup shareable and recoverable. No database. No cookies. No localStorage. Just a URL.

This got me thinking: how often do we, as frontend engineers, overlook the URL as a state management tool? We reach for all sorts of abstractions to manage state such as global stores, contexts, and caches while ignoring one of the web's most elegant and oldest features: the humble URL.

Good URL design is designing "with the grain" of the web.

Mr TIFF

Our digital worlds are filled with programs, algorithms, file formats, and a million other things that have all been created by people over recent decades. Some of those names folks know. The vast majority nobody does. TIFF is an image file format created years ago to help in desktop publishing and other tools. Steve Carlsen made TIFF. This article is about this bloggers search for him. I love this callout toward the end.

Out of curiosity I put Stephen's email address, now that I knew it, into a Duck Duck search and found him helping people online with TIFF queries long after Aldus had been acquired by Adobe. He also contributed to a Google Group called tiffcentral.

That is the Internet I love — where the one person that made TIFF, years later is in a discussion board answering some questions about the thing.

You Should Write An Agent · The Fly Blog

Great article walking through creating an agent using Python and then extending it with tools and capabilities. It is all a pretty simple example, but it is powerful to show how much capability you can create with these. I think it is fair to say that today every developer should know how to author their own agents with sub-agents and tools. Compared to deploying something in AWS, this is easy.

The author correctly highlights what I know to be one of the biggest challenges — managing context windows.

You're allotted a fixed number of tokens in any context window. Each input you feed in, each output you save, each tool you describe, and each tool output eats tokens (that is: takes up space in the array of strings you keep to pretend you're having a conversation with a stateless black box). Past a threshold, the whole system begins getting nondeterministically stupider. Fun!

No, really. Fun! You have so many options. Take "sub-agents". People make a huge deal out of Claude Code's sub-agents, but you can see now how trivial they are to implement: just a new context array, another call to the model. Give each calldifferent tools. Make sub-agents talk to each other, summarize each other, collate and aggregate. Build tree structures out of them. Feed them back through the LLM to summarize them as a form of on-the-fly compression, whatever you like.

Your wackiest idea will probably (1) work and (2) take 30 minutes to code.

Great stuff.

Micro.blog offers an indie alternative to YouTube with its ‘Studio’ video hosting plan - HeyDingus

I host all my blogs on micro.blog and in general think it is the best blogging solution on the market today. This new plan is a big addition for video that is really cool. The key here is to allow IndieWeb publishers to host their own video, without YouTube hosting everything that exists, and still have the performance be great. There is a lot of transcoding magic and slicing of video files needed to make that happen and micro.blog now does that with these Studio plans. While not for me, I love that this exists and is a step to publishing video that doesn't rely on Google (aka YouTube).

"Good engineering management" is a fad | Irrational Exuberance

Will Larson with a great article talking about something I've observed and adapted to, but not articulated nearly as well as him. Excuse the lengthy excerpt:

In each of these transitions, the business environment shifted, leading to a new formulation of ideal leadership. That makes a lot of sense: of course we want leaders to fit the necessary patterns of today. Where things get weird is that in each case a morality tale was subsequently superimposed on top of the transition:

In the 2010s, the morality tale was that it was all about empowering engineers as a fundamental good. Sure, I can get excited for that, but I don't really believe that narrative: it happened because hiring was competitive.

In the 2020s, the morality tale is that bureaucratic middle management have made organizations stale and inefficient. The lack of experts has crippled organizational efficiency. Once again, I can get behind that--there's truth here--but the much larger drivers aren't about morality, it's about ZIRP-ending and optimism about productivity gains from AI tooling.

The conclusion here is clear: the industry will want different things from you as it evolves, and it will tell you that each of those shifts is because of some complex moral change, but it's pretty much always about business realities changing. If you take any current morality tale as true, then you're setting yourself up to be severely out of position when the industry shifts again in a few years, because "good leadership" is just a fad.

This is amazing and I completely "feel" what he is saying. I've been leading technology teams for nearly 30 years and in the big challenges, the waves that are coming over our industry and business environment, have changed many times. As a leader you must also change and adapt. The inputs are many and properly evaluating how those inputs have changed and how that affects what you do as a leader is critical to "staying on the bus" and having impact.

I love his list of core and growth skills. This article is gold for leaders of teams, and while it is written for a technology leader I’m sure is applicable to other leadership roles and domains.

I’m a fan of taking time to refactor your own tools or capabilities. I've shared many times that I think doing an annual start and stop list is a necessary practice. In a faster growing company you may do it every 6 months or every quarter. But Larson is hitting on a bigger thing. When the fundamentals shift in technology, you need to assess differently and literally operate differently. For me this has meant leaning into AI obsessively, amongst other things.

Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line | Ken Segall

Google Maps is filled with ads and paid placements. It is one of the reasons I don't use that product, or much of anything Google makes. I wish that Apple would rid themselves of the advertising offerings they have entirely but I suspect that the advertising in the AppStore both makes a ton of money and is meaningful to app developers gaining audiences. Are Ads in Maps the same as an advertisement playing when I log into my computer? Absolutely not, but it is a slippery slope.

Book Recommendations | book.sv

Book recommendations seem to be a pretty niche thing. There is a similar use case for movie and TV shows, but I think because the time investment is lower I care less about the rigor that goes into them. I also assume they are being manipulated by some algorithmic goal that is unclear to me. This book recommendation engine though is really interesting and in my limited tests gave really good results.

Git AI is now 1.0

A lot of development teams are trying to answer this question — what code in this repo was written by an agent versus a person. There are multiple reasons you might ask this question ranging from finding problem areas in code or just attributing the productivity impact of AI agents. This project is specifically created to answer this.

Git AI Project Goals: build the standard for tracking AI code from development to production:

Multi-agent from day 0. Most teams use a combination of AI agents -- they should all work well with Git AI.

Install per-machine, not per-repo. Related: teammates without Git AI installed do not experience a degraded experience.

Work 100% offline.

No background daemon, keyloggers or filewatchers. 🤮

Avoid heuristics. Coding agents are responsible for explicitly marking code they contribute as AI generated. Git AI is responsible for tracking that code going forward.

Unnoticeable performance impact <100ms for common commands, <1s for large rebases or resets.

Git Native and compatible with any SCM (stores AI attributions in Git notes)

tl;dr - With a lot of help from the community, we figured out how to reliably track AI code through any Git workflow.

It looks super interesting and well designed.

GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT | OpenAI

This additional level of personalization for ChatGPT seems like a notable add:

Earlier this year, we added preset options to tailor the tone of how ChatGPT responds. Today, we're refining those options to better reflect the most common ways people use ChatGPT. Default, Friendly (formerly Listener), and Efficient (formerly Robot) remain (with updates), and we're adding Professional, Candid, and Quirky. These options are designed to align with what we've learned about how people naturally steer the model, making it quick and intuitive to choose a personality that feels uniquely right.

I would think they would be able to make a guess at the best tone to respond with based on how you talk to ChatGPT with your questions.

I've found success telling ChatGPT what your Insights Discovery profile is and letting it use that in how it works with you. It adapts very well based on that information.

Journal

Nov 1, 2025 at 1:46 PM

Making more candles for the Things 4 Good Candle Fundraiser for next week! I got the labels a little faster so we can put those on before pouring making it a bit more efficient. ⏱️

Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure

Nov 1, 2025 at 8:30 PM

Tammy and I were talking about movies from our youth with Tyler and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure came up. Tammy decided this needed to happen so tonight we watched this 1989 classic. I can’t say that it held up that well but there were some good laughs. Tyler thought everything about it was strange and why did they say words like “excellent” so much. We told him it is just like saying “fire” today. He disagreed. Keanu Reeves is so young in this movie. Tyler started to take the plot apart Inception-style with the time travel -- it does not stand up to the test. And just like all movies that are before everyone having a smartphone it is wild how there are no phones in the movie.

6 — 7 Mile Hike

Nov 2, 2025 at 7:16 PM

Tammy and I hopped in the car for Lebanon Hills this afternoon to get out in the woods and hike a bit. Tammy always finds it a touch annoying that I want to have a route planned out and know what trails we are taking. She would rather just start walking and see where the path takes us. Today, we did it her way and just started walking. Turn left here, right there.

About 3 miles in I wasn’t really sure which way we were going and I will admit that I tried to make extra long glances at the trail maps as we passed them. But I stayed true to the task and just followed wherever Tammy was leading us. The trails seemed familiar.

After a while we got on some trails that we both thought we had never been on. There was also long stretches with no intersecting trails which isn’t common in Lebanon Hills. After what seemed like a mile we saw a parking lot and another trail map, but it wasn’t our parking lot.

Somehow with our random turns we had navigated ourselves to the completely opposite side of the park at a different parking lot. We were 4.5 miles in and I admit to considering for a moment getting a Lyft to take us to our car, but it was a nice day and off we went to return to the other side of the park.

Nov 4, 2025 at 5:15 PM

Even the kids elementary school has gotten into this “6 -- 7” thing. 🤷‍♂️

Nov 6, 2025 at 2:32 PM

POAP 7487921 at Things 4 Good 2025 Candle Fundraiser.

Glasses 👓

Nov 7, 2025 at 5:19 PM

I picked up my new glasses today. I've had to use readers for a while but in the last few years my eyesight has gotten worse. It was time to get a better solution.

These new glasses are progressive lenses that according to the marketing have 400 specific lenses for every position you look. They told me it will take a couple weeks to get used to them and so far when I put them on it is definitely something to adapt to. Things are sharp but it all seems strange.

I'm hopeful this will result in my eyes not being so tired at the end of the day. 🤞

Nov 7, 2025 at 11:40 PM

Tyler is ready for tomorrow’s United game! ⚽️

Nov 8, 2025 at 8:45 AM

We are ready to host our fifth annual Things 4 Good Candle Fundraiser today! We are supporting Animal Welfare Institute, Border Angels, The Food Group, and Sandy Hook Promise this year.

Nov 8, 2025 at 4:30 PM

My buddy Jim and I enjoying Kramarczuk’s sausages at Allianz Field during the Minnesota United v. Seattle Sounders game. The BEST sausages in the Twin Cities.

Nov 8, 2025 at 9:00 PM

Tonight’s MN United v Seattle Sounders playoff match had everything! Without a doubt the most exciting soccer game I’ve ever been to.

United trailing 2 - 0.
Tie it up 2 - 2.
Get player ejected on RED card.
Go ahead 3 - 2.
Seattle tie it up 3 - 3.
Penalty kicks tie at 3 - 3.
Sudden death penalties go to goalies!
WIN! WIN! WIN!

An amazing game for the ages!

Nov 9, 2025 at 11:26 AM

Realized we had some big usability issues in our donation tracking sheets for day 1 of Things 4 Good Candle Fundraiser (right side). I designed a complete redo of it for today’s sale (middle) that I tested this morning and is much better. I also created a candle guide to include with the candles! 🤩

Nov 13, 2025 at 8:00 PM

I’ve had a blast learning Clash Royale with Tyler. They just announced a bunch of changes to “the economy” which meant I needed to use my Book of Cards. I decided to “pay to win” and level up my Witch and Cannon to get maximum benefit from the books. Play Clash Royale? Let’s connect.

Supporting Membership

Hey there, Weekly Thing enthusiasts! 🌟 We're on an exciting mission to support the incredible Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), champions of digital freedom and privacy. So far, we've rallied together to raise an impressive $500.85—but we need your help to keep the momentum going! With 23 amazing Supporting Members already on board, imagine the impact we could make if we doubled that number. Every single cent of your contribution goes directly to EFF, empowering them to fight for our online rights for the next 25 weeks and beyond. Join our vibrant community of changemakers today and be a vital part of this digital revolution—let's make a difference together!

$4 monthly

$40 yearly

Briefly

Time for me to come clean — I've never used virtual environments for my Python projects. Frankly it is all too complicated for me. However, looking at how uv does this I think I could make this work. → uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade - Dr. Emily L. Hunt

There are a million posts on how to get acquired — I love that Pike wrote about how to not get acquired. → How to Not Get Acquired - Allen Pike

I’m a Shortcuts power user for sure and there were some really good additions in the recent releases. The "Use Model" capability of Apple Intelligence by itself is something I’m confident you could get value from and it is right on your phone today. → What’s new in Shortcuts for iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS 26, watchOS 26, and visionOS 26 - Apple Support

This looks like a nice and simple service that could take the place of Gravatar. → unavatar, the ultimate avatar service that offers everything you need to easily retrieve user avatars

Makes total sense that this would happen. Too much upside for both companies to not. → AWS and OpenAI announce multi-year strategic partnership | OpenAI

This is a nice surprise — when linking to an app I would still prefer to link to the publishers own site, but this is a nice fallback. I would think this is also to help search engines, but even more importantly it makes the App Store accessible to LLMs. → The App Store now has a pretty sweet solution for the web – Six Colors

Love this focus on super fast simple sites. My blog will never be this small because I love including images too much. → 512KB Club | A showcase of lightweight websites.

I need to keep this site for next year — this looks like a super detailed way to track fall colors. → Fall Foliage Map 2025: Daily Updates and Forecasts!

I've been an active donor to the Internet Archive for well over a decade. I’m glad that they survived this legal fight but how we are approaching property rights in the digital space continues to be a struggle. → Internet Archive’s legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost - Ars Technica

More advanced approaches to building out ever more complicated MCP capabilities. Again focusing on managing context. → Code execution with MCP: building more efficient AI agents Anthropic

These "how I use AI" posts are always good reads to amplify your learning building on others experiences. → How I use AI (Oct 2025) - Ben Stolovitz

Deep dive using on-chain data to see how Bitcoin is changing hands. Bitcoin has really stabilized above $100,000 USD at this point. Is another crypto winter coming? Maybe? I’m starting to wonder. → Making Sense of Bitcoin’s Changing Market Rythm

Welcome to the future! 🤪 → Six coding agents at once

I love reading about the incredible variety of programming languages. This one sure reads a lot like C but has some really modern takes on the style. Almost looks Pythonic in some ways. → Why is Zig so Cool?

Interesting. I wasn't familiar with RightToCompute. Curious to read more about them. I did some preliminary AI-assisted comparisons with the EFF to get a sense of them and it is interesting territory. Proactively defending against limitations on what people are allowed to run on computers in the abstract seems like a good thing. → Montana Becomes First State to Enshrine ‘Right to Compute’ Into Law - Montana Newsroom

Incredibly powerful command-line tool that you can use to manage music files with a ton of power. The video is a great overview of the features. Impressive stuff. → beets: the music geek‘s media organizer

Date and time pickers are notoriously unhelpful. This library does a pretty good job. → Pikaday

Wild set of little tools to do odd things with type. → Space Type Generator

Little command line utility notably from Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke that helps you manage a ton of directories for little projects or experiments you want to "try". → try: fresh directories for every vibe

An incredible array of learning materials for cryptography. → Cryptography 101 with Alfred Menezes – Video lectures, notes, and exercises in all areas of applied cryptography

I was bummed to see Minnesota is not one of the states that you can import your drivers license for. However I’m excited to see I can add my passport. → Apple rolls out Digital ID in Apple Wallet for U.S. passport holders – Six Colors

The fact that Ethereum Name Service has a clear plain to work alongside, instead of in opposition to, the traditional Domain Name Service is one of the things that excited me the most about it. Web3 needs to integrate into the web. → How ENS Is Approaching ICANN's gTLD Expansion Program | ENS Blog

Something new for those that read all the way to the bottom. Do you play Wordle? Well Wordle now allows you to create your very own puzzles now. Here is a specific Wordle puzzle for this weeks Weekly Thing. The word is contained in the titles of the links that are in this issue.

Wordle Thing 332 — The clue is: "An Agents Rise or Fall"

Finally, a haiku to leave you with…

URLs mark your home,
Digital states we now roam—
Maps of our own minds. 🗺️

Would you like to discuss the topics in the Weekly Thing further? Check out the Weekly Thing on Reddit. 👋

Want to share this issue with others? The link is…

👨‍💻

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2025-11-15T15:25:27.000Z

My wife writes about Beatrix in her final high school play

The show is absolutely magical. Everyone was great, but especially to see these seniors, who I know so well, build these incredibly complex characters from vignettes, was mind-blowing. Beatrix’s friend has an amazing scene near the end that totally had me in tears, and the waterworks continued as Beatrix gave the final monologue of the show and she was So Damn Good.

The final performance is tonight at 7pm. Tickets are free. Come see it.

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2025-11-14T13:24:34.000Z

Daily MEDS: The Powerful Daily Health Strategy: Meditation, Exercise, Diet and Sleep – Kindle edition by Nicholas Bate

That is the goal of the MEDS, Meditation-Exercise-Diet-Sleep strategy, an integrated approach to health and wellness; I have encouraged its adoption on my Personal Excellence programme for over twenty years: it is simple to understand, easy to start and it works.

The latest guide from The Man Who Never Sleeps is out now.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2025-11-12T03:31:56.000Z

It is a rare sight for the Northern Lights to be visible in Minneapolis.

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2025-11-11T16:38:55.000Z

Thought: Some say they want walkable neighborhoods and 15 minute cities.

They also tend to want to work from home, DoorGrubDash meals, order from Amazon, stream all the things, and basically do anything but actually support things they should walk to.

Walkable cities start with leaving your house.

Lumière Highlights - Patrick Rhone

2025-11-11T13:52:39.000Z

Here’s the highlight reel from Circus Juventas’s show this past summer. An incredibly difficult show to rig made it a deliciously fun one for the audience to watch. If you don’t blink too much you’ll spot Beatrix throughout.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2025-11-09T17:26:01.000Z

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2025-11-08T22:05:22.000Z

Beatrix got her first college acceptance today. One of her safety choices so I’m not surprised. Just nice that a) It came so quickly and b) the first one she got was a “yes”.

I’d Like a Better Fortnite System - Barry Hess

2025-11-08T15:28:22.000Z

I like to play Fortnite. After several failed attempts, my kids finally got me into the game a couple years ago and now I’ll sit down with it a few times a week. For good or ill.

I play on a PS5 in a display environment that doesn’t have the best refresh numbers. While most of my challenges with the game are skill based, skill that is also declining due to age, I get the sneaking suspicion that some of those times where my cross hairs are on an opponent and my shots are missing that maybe my setup is getting in my way.

I suspect my results would be much better if I were playing on a computer. I wonder what the least expensive machine would be that would perform well with Fortnite and also be a place to catch up that Steam backlog? Preferably without having to watch a “How to run Fortnite on X” video to do it.

I’m curious, but I also don’t want to house and maintain another computer. So perhaps it’s best to just accept my and my current setup’s deficiencies.

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