Shellsharks Blogroll - BlogFlock

I'm off GitHub - Kev Quirk

2026-05-09T15:50:00.000Z

Ok, that's it. I'm officially off GitHub. First I moved all of my private repos to my Synology, which was extremely easy to do. I did that around a week or so ago and it's be working great.

Then I had to start sorting and moving all my public repos to Codeberg. Many were archived as I no longer maintained the projects, which left me with just 7 actual repos that I needed to move.

Pure Blog/Comments and Simple.css were the most challenging as they all had other people who relied on them, but I managed to get them moved with a little bit of messing around.

The others were super simply, I used Codeberg's migration tool to migrate the repos over, the ran a command locally to point my repos to a new target:

git remote set-url origin git@codeberg.org:kevquirk/[new-repo].git

That's it! Repo migrated.

Thoughts on Codeberg

It's fine. And I don't mean that negatively - there's a lot less going on in the UI than on GitHub, but everything is still familiar and similarly laid out. There's been almost zero learning curve moving from GitHub to Codeberg, so props to the Codeberg team for that.

I've applied for a Coderberg membership as I think it's important to support the open source projects we use, so hopefully that will be approved soon.

Overall I'm very happy with the move. All the old GitHub repos have had their README.md files updated to point to Codeberg, and they too have been archived.

So that's one less piece of big tech I need to rely on.

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Canvas is open source, but its cloud services ransomware attack really hurts - Werd I/O

2026-05-09T13:51:02.000Z

Link: 'The Biggest Student Data Privacy Disaster in History': Canvas Hack Shows the Danger of Centralized EdTech, by Jason Koebler at 404 Media

I started in edtech. When I graduated with my Computer Science degree, I returned to the university to work at the Media and Learning Technology Service. There, I discovered that all the edtech software at the time was so bad — the learners hated it, the teachers hated it, the administrators hated it, and I have to assume the people who made it also had a deep-seated contempt for it — that it actively made learning worse. Worse, these platforms were charging institutions huge amounts of money for the privilege.

Because I was an avid blogger at that time and knew that people were learning from each other on the web all the time, I built a prototype social network for learning and tried to give it to them. They told me they didn’t want it (in a way that was much ruder than that). So I quit my job and ended up releasing it under an open source license so it wouldn’t be centralized and hold institutions hostage. That act of hubris set up the entirety of the rest of my career.

Which brings me to this article:

“Thursday afternoon, millions of students at thousands of universities and K-12 schools were locked out of Canvas, a piece of catch-all education technology software that has become the de facto core of many classes. ShinyHunters, a ransomware group, hacked Canvas’s parent company and apparently stole “billions” of messages and accessed more than 275 million individuals’ data, according to the hacking group. The group also locked students out of Canvas.”

Ian Linkletter — a librarian who has been an active, and in my opinion, unceasingly correct edtech critic — is quoted as calling this “the biggest student data privacy disaster in history”. It need not have been the case; Canvas is theoretically open source. But you can’t make money with open source alone, and self-hosting is not something most institutions want to undertake. Canvas is a huge codebase with real quirks that is non-trivial to self-host, and the maintenance and infrastructure costs are real.

It’s also not clear that self-hosted infrastructure would be more resilient: a university could be subject to a ransomware attack with very little recourse. At the same time, the centralized nature of Canvas’s core offering means every institution that uses it, including over half of all US higher education institutions, were in a hard place right in the middle of final exam season. Access is coming back, but at the time of writing, it hasn’t been fully restored. It’s a hard lesson about the dangers of putting everything in the cloud.

Note published on May 9, 2026 at 1:42 PM UTC - Molly White's activity feed

2026-05-09T13:42:31.000Z

A recent CoinDesk survey found 73% disapprove of government officials having crypto business ties, yet 55% weren’t aware of Trump’s involvement, and only 17% knew he co-founded World Liberty Financial.

This underscores why my work at Citation Needed is so necessary.

https://www.citationneeded.news/signup/

Book Review: The Names by Florence Knapp ★★⯪☆☆ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-05-09T11:34:20.000Z

This has an excellent narrative structure, some beautiful prose, and I just didn't enjoy it.

The story is Sliding Doors meets Same Time Next Year mixed with a distressing amount of domestic violence.

A mother faces a difficult choice. Should she name her child after her abusive and violent husband? In one strand she does, in another she doesn't, and in the third she makes a compromise. We rejoin the story every few years to see how our protagonists are progressing.

It mostly works and pushes us to consider how much the path of our life is influenced by factors outside of our control.

I have a real difficulty with books about violence. All of the characters are unsympathetic - trapped by tyrant but also trapped by their own inaction. I also struggled with how pedestrian and limited it was. In a world where you can read anything, why would you choose to spy on your horrible neighbours? Like a tawdry soap-opera it offered nothing more than misery and heartbreak. Fine if you need that sort of substitute empathy, but it left me feeling grubby and unsatisfied.

To be fair, the characters in the book address this:

‘Why read them if they make you feel bad?’

‘Because I’m hoping one of them might feel like me,’

It isn't a bad book - although it does veer into cliché a little too often - and the structure is interesting enough. But I found its subject matter too distressing to be enjoyable,

Book Club Discussion

This isn't the sort of book I'd normally pick up - but it was chosen by the book club I attend. The majority of readers rated it higher than I did. Here are some of the things we discussed.

The central message sees to be that, no matter how hard you try, the tragedy which infects your life can never be escaped. I found that depressing and disempowering. The domestic dreariness was stifling and just left me irritated with the passivity of the characters.

The evil father is an arsehole - but a one-dimensional arsehole. I get that there's a risk to humanising an antagonist, but other than a brief mention of his back-story there's nothing about him. I didn't want a justification for his actions, but he felt like a cartoon villain.

Even when one character gains a moment of happiness, it is offset by another's misery. No matter which path is chosen, someone always ends up broken.

Are we "destined" to meet the same people, no matter what path we take?

How Many Mildliner Mix Colours Are There? - Robb Knight • Posts • Atom Feed

2026-05-09T10:58:44.000Z

A couple of weeks ago Ben was kind enough to send me a 3-pack of Mildliner Mix pens — two-colour highlighters made by Zebra. This led me down a path of looking for the second set called "Cool" but the price of shipping meant I would have been paying ~£5 a pen which I wasn't willing to do.

Then this week, as I am want to do, I went over to Stationery Pal (that website is riddled with ads just a heads up) and they had a big banner on the home page about a ten pack of Mildliner Mix so I ordered them immediately. And if my maths is correct, ten is more than six, which is how many I was aware of until that moment. This was the image they had which I downloaded so I could update the Mildliner site.

I started adding them to the site and noticed that one of the colours I already had, Red and Gold, isn't going to be in the pack I ordered. I went back to Zebra's website and there's no mention of these additional colours, just the original six. So eleven is the number.

I'm down a rabbit hole now thinking about rebuilding the reference site, working out how many of the dot and stamp marker versions there are, and if there's a secret extra one in the brush versions like there is in other ranges. Very normal stuff.

A new website, and a focus on small business - Johnny.Decimal

2026-05-09T04:02:40.000Z

For me, looking back through this website’s version history is like watching the final scenes of Interstellar. Years fly by; visuals of who we were two, three years ago. Three years feels so close but then you see this page and: no, it just can’t be! That page looks so old.

And so it is again. What started as an ID born in Japan – 41.14 New design language – became an all-consuming project. As they do. I don’t even remember when it happened. One day I wasn’t rewriting all of our websites, the next day I was, and the git history tells me that was about 10 weeks ago. Time has lost all meaning.

The major change is that there’s just one website now: johnnydecimal.com. Last year I created JDHQ as its own thing because at the time integrating it with the main site would have been impossibly difficult. But the goal was never to have two websites.

I still like the term ‘JDHQ’, and will continue to use it to refer to the interactive parts of the site: the bits where you sign in and do a thing. (You can create a free account now.) It has a bright future; more below.

A focus on small business

Before I talk more about the website, a point that I think is more important. We’ve made a decision to focus all of our efforts, as a business, on helping other small businesses.

There’s so much overhead when you run a business, and when you’re small, you have to do it all yourself. With last year’s Small Business System (SBS) we hoped to give you a space to put everything: a hundred less decisions to make. Our dream was always to expand to become your ‘operations layer’, to provide you ops manuals and guidance and support. So that’s what we’ll be doing from now.

You’ll find a calendar you can subscribe to in the sidebar of your SBS. The first events – 4× welcome Zoom sessions spread across timezones – are scheduled for next week. There’s also a WhatsApp group for our small business customers. Our job now is to support you: to make your life easier. Tell us what you need to succeed.

Information will still flow to the rest of the system. Problems solved for small business are problems we all face; tools built to help them will help you at home.

No more numbers

The previous site assigned an ID to every page. This was a cute affectation – and that sidebar table of contents was a crowd favourite – but ironically limiting.

The Johnny.Decimal system wasn’t designed to hold a preset list of pages in a specific order, but that’s what the old site did. This is in direct conflict with one of the major benefits of the web over print: you can update a website whenever you want. By giving each page a number, I inadvertently made the old site behave like a book.

As a result, it scarcely changed. There’s content that I haven’t published because I would have had to figure out how to fit it into the structure. That’s no way to run a website. So the numbers have gone.

(Technically, we do still have an ID for each page on the site. These are IDs in my own SBS and they allow us to store the artefacts for each page, e.g. the diagrams. You’ll see these IDs in the figure reference numbers. They’re meaningless and confer no order; which is how it’s meant to be.)

‘Aspirationally calm’

Our design goal was to make a place of calm. The internet is very shouty these days. There’s a lot competing for your attention. I wanted our place to be somewhere you could relax.

So there’s a lot more room. And maybe less of what gave the old site ‘character’? The ▒ shade characters at the start of headers have gone. The thick borders have gone. The line-drawing ‘brackets’ around navigation items have gone. We did try adding some of that back, but every time we decided: no. Too busy.

I’ve been using this design for a month or so and when I go back to the old sites they’re jarring. We refer to them as ‘the old clunkers’. The new place is cohesive, I hope. It’s simple. Because Johnny.Decimal’s job isn’t to get in your face and be all clever. It’s to help you get your work done and then get out of the way.

I have a lot of plans for JDHQ. This section got long, so I recorded a roadmap video. I’ll do these at the start of every month from now.

Housekeeping

Until an hour ago, there were 4 mailing lists: the ‘public’ list that anyone could sign up to, and a list for each of our products. These latter lists were intended for product updates, but I never used them.

I’ve collapsed the lists. There’s just one now and if you got an email today, you’re on it. If you don’t want to be, there's an unsubscribe link in the footer.

The site now has a version history whose entries appear in the RSS feed. The RSS feed remains the best way of keeping up to date – see RSS: a public service announcement if you don’t know how it works.

Thank you

We can only do this with your continued support. Thank you – especially to those of you who become lifetime members. It makes a massive difference.

I say it every time, and I’ll say it again: tell us what you need. You ask, we make.

Serendipity - James' Coffee Blog

2026-05-09T00:00:00.000Z

The steam of the espresso machine — of focusing in the milk to make sure it is just right, of tapping to remove the bubbles, of preparing. Soft instrumental music plays in the background, more upbeat than the music to which I was listening earlier — easing me more into the day. How the smile of a barista lights up my day. Of noticing the care and attention put into the latte art.

I have not been to a coffee shop in days, and so this morning – a morning where a drizzle of rain hung over the air, a refreshing air – I felt like I was seeing all of the rituals associated with making a cup of coffee from a new perspective. The care the barista puts into preparing a drink, the sound of the steam wand as it froths milk, the rapport between the staff members.

A hand-crafted (decaf) flat white was the best possible start to the morning on a day where the only thing I had planned was to have a coffee, read a bit of a book, and wonder “should I go see that movie I want to see?” The movie was The Devil Wears Prada 2. I had not seen the first one, but lots of actors I like appeared in the second one so I thought I would go see it.

Less than an hour before the morning screening, I booked a ticket. I usually like to prepare more, but perhaps my mind was already made up that I wanted to see the film and I was yet to realise it. It has been a year since I was last at the cinema, so I revelled in the chance to go again to see a movie that looked good. In summary, after watching the movie, I was impressed, and left excited to watch the first one too.

As I left the movie theatre, on the fourth floor of a shopping centre in the heart of the city, I heard the sound of bagpipes. The fourth floor has an open roof and so the bagpipes could have been coming from anywhere. I felt so much at home in hearing them. Where else in the world could I leave a movie screening and hear bagpipes? That sound was a portend for what was to come.

While I didn’t necessarily have a plan for the day, the more hours that passed the more I started to piece together things I was thinking about this week. I have started to get back into Magic: the Gathering, watching a few videos online of people playing games. I decided I wanted to go to a trading card shop to at least inquire about what has changed in the format since I last played seriously, nine years ago. It turns out, a lot has changed, but the worlds I could learn about are exciting.

On my way to the trading card shop, I noticed a crowd of people lining the streets on Waverley Bridge, the scene of a painting I really love. I stopped for a moment and overheard people talking about the event of the day – the tartan parade, dedicated to celebrating all things tartan. Last year, I had encountered the parade under similar circumstances: I was walking around and happened to be in the place where the parade was about to start, not knowing the event was scheduled. A lot has changed since last year, too.

Having fifteen minutes or so before the parade was scheduled to begin, I got some lunch and waited. Then, with great excitement, I watched the event from beginning to end – an hour of pipe bands, dancers, people from clans across Scotland, people who work for charities in Scotland, and people who have come from all over the world to celebrate tartan. There was a pipe band from Switzerland and contingent of people from Peru, Italy, and more. I love seeing so many people coming together — in so many outfits and from so many places., I wrote as I was surrounded by music and colour and stories and life.

Early on in the parade, a larger-than-life (paper?) unicorn was carried by several people. “A unicorn!” remarked a child nearby with great excitement. I was surprised for a split second until I remembered the unicorn is our national animal, my favourite fact to share with people I meet from other places in the world. I can think of no better animal to represent the Scottish attitude than the unicorn – welcoming, playful, and always able to bring colour to a room.

There were also people dressed as dinosaurs at the parade for a reason I can’t remember. Nonetheless the dinosaurs made me laugh the kind of laugh where you feel nothing but pure joy. The emcee for the parade had some playful banter with the dinosaurs who roared, saying something to the effect of “I’m glad I’m up here” (on the double-decker, open-top bus with tartan livery from where the emcee announced all the groups in the parade) to the dinosaurs below. I’m having a good time, I thought.

I walked for miles today, from the coffee shop to the theatre, stopping for an hour afterwords to watch the tartan parade, to the card game store and back. Serendipity was my best friend. Then, just as I was getting ready to go home, I saw someone I haven’t seen in months. Seeing them smile and wave as I did the same, my world was brightened, to an extent where despite my best efforts to describe what I was feeling it was impossible to do so. I felt so much less alone than I had the moment before.

The small things – the warm morning coffee, the smile and wave from a friend, the unicorns; the serendipity of walking without a plan and being open to what you see – really do make life special.

Published on Citation Needed: "Issue 105 – The new boogeyman" - Molly White's activity feed

2026-05-08T15:12:45.000Z

Published an issue of Citation Needed:

Issue 105 – The new boogeyman

A crypto billionaire who escaped fraud allegations after investing hundreds of millions of dollars into the Trump family’s crypto projects is now accusing them of fraud

Notable links: May 8, 2026 - Werd I/O

2026-05-08T14:31:42.000Z

Most Fridays, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.

Did I miss something important? Send me an email to let me know.

An Invitation to Build the Civic Information Economy

This feels like a vital exploration to me:

“What does it take to fund civic information? We often focus on “more money,” but we limit the field’s potential by ignoring better capital design. Today’s landscape often sees dollars concentrated in intermediary and national plays—often with good reason—but without deliberate examination, we risk stifling the imagination of a developing field.”

This is part manifesto, but also part call to action and invitation to participate. Funding for news has often been reactive, filling gaps, but what does it mean to intentionally design a genuine ecosystem with dynamics that support production of, and access to, the civic information we need that is a prerequisite for democracy to function?

I love how genuinely participative this is: rather than a bunch of people trying to be smart inside institutions, this requires that the people who struggle the most to find information are active co-designers. That feels non-negotiable to me. There’s been a pushback against inclusion and equity in news and everywhere recently, but there’s no other way to build an ecosystem that genuinely serves everybody. We’ve all got to own it. We’ve all got to take part. Everyone needs to be represented.

I have high hopes for this, and I love that the effort exists. It’s something we should all support.

Some Rationalization May Finally Be Coming for Newsroom Intermediaries

In his latest post, Dick Tofel talks about a need for consolidation in organizations that support newsrooms (and, in fact, in newsrooms themselves).

“Devoting limited resources to competing services where one offering is superior not only leads those using the inferior service to poorer results, it also subsidizes entirely unnecessary administrative costs at the inferior service. And in circumstances where competing services are roughly equivalent, mere duplication can also be inefficient—and, as noted above, may place an administrative burden on already over-stressed client newsrooms. Time is one of the scarcest resources of all.”

I’m worried.

This isn’t a criticism of Dick Tofel: he calls out the benefits of competition and the difficulty of determining winners in a market. But I do think there are two more things to consider.

The first is that I don’t believe any intermediary service designed for newsrooms is optimal. That’s not a criticism of them, either: every service has room to grow. Any time you remove competition from a market and hand it to a single privately-owned player (nationalized services are another thing entirely), the offerings stagnate because the driver to improve has gone away. Just ask anyone who remembers the web’s Internet Explorer wilderness years before Firefox disrupted them and forced widespread standardization.

The second, and probably most important, is that funders are a narrow group of people with a narrow set of perspectives. Unless they’ve done the work to be representative and inclusive in their work and culture, they may miss how one service serves a community better than another and erroneously mark them as duplicative. Or to put it another way, if there is any consolidation in any American market, I don’t trust that organizations run by women and people of color won’t be the ones to lose out.

This isn’t anyone’s intention, but reducing competition at any level — funders, intermediaries, newsrooms, distributors — has the potential to create monopolies that become gatekeepers for vulnerable communities who need more support, not less. I don’t think that’s what the moment we’re living through needs. We need more ideas, more approaches, more funding, more communities served, and more diversity. The people who want to shut down an effective, independent press want to create a monoculture. The way to combat that is not to create another one.

Report on Burnout in Open Source Software

This bleak report on burnout in open source software communities from last year has been doing the rounds. I think it’s clearly indicative of where open source is at (and its trajectory), but the solutions aren’t immediately clear — we know this because similar concerns have been anecdotally highlighted by various people for well over a decade. However, this is the first formal research report I can remember reading.

It’s pretty stark: 60% of open source maintainers work unpaid, 60% have quit or considered quitting, and 44% cite burnout specifically.

From the author:

“In my report, I draw upon a combination of academic literature and OSS community discussion to identify 6 factors that contribute OSS developer burnout: difficulty getting paid, workload and time commitment, maintenance work as unrewarding, toxic community behaviour, hyper-responsibility and pressure to prove oneself. I then make 4 broad recommendations for how to address it: pay OSS engineers, foster a culture of recognition and respect, grow the community and advocate for maintainers.“

The thing is: who is going to pay OSS engineers? Every attempt to get downstream users to pay out of the goodness of their hearts has failed at scale. There are certainly corporate sponsors of OSS maintainers already, when there’s a clear link between an open source project and a company’s bottom line. That could certainly be a broader standard, but there are also a ton of open source projects that tie less obviously into bottom lines, or are useful for communities outside large corporations.

Beyond the lack of direct compensation, it’s also a pretty thankless job. Downstream users will often make demands of maintainers that don’t take their contexts into account; people who are unpaid and overworked find themselves treated as if their users had paid them large sums of money. Open source users communities can sometimes also be wildly detached from reality; I’ve had people tell me that the solution is to move beyond a money-driven society or to have a revolution to overthrow capitalism. I mean, sure, whatever, but is that going to happen tomorrow? In the meantime there’s rent to be paid and food to buy.

The answer may be that, actually, open source doesn’t work very well except (1) in mutualistic co-operative communities (2) as a strategic move by corporations who want to change the markets that affect them in some way (3) as a self-promotional way to gain more widespread recognition for your abilities. If that’s the case, maintainers should go into it with open eyes: if they’re successful, their work will be used by people who make a bunch of money without compensating them in any way.

If new maintainers understand that they’re voluntarily signing up for extraction, I think it’s uncomplicated. If they think they’re going to “win” open source and make a living by giving their work away for free, they may be sorely disappointed.

I can never talk to an AI anonymously again

On first read, I found this a little bit sobering:

“But soon, the entire debate over internet anonymity will be as anachronistic as an iPod Touch. That’s because Claude Opus 4.7 is here, and last week, I discovered it could identify me from text I had never published, text from when I was in high school, text from genres I have never publicly written in. And if it can identify me, soon, it will be able to identify many of you.”

Kelsey Piper plugged in 125 words from an unpublished essay and asked Opus 4.7 to identify the author. It listed her as the most likely answer.

I was skeptical, so I did the same: a few paragraphs from an essay, which I plugged into an account that isn’t connected to me. Here’s what Claude said:

“Based on the style, themes, and specific concerns in this snippet, my best guess is Ben Werdmüller.

Several signals point this way: the framing of the open social web as a movement rather than a technical project, the explicit linkage between Mastodon/Bluesky, journalism, and broader liberatory politics, the critique of newsroom demographics ("very white, very coastal, wealthy"), and the historical framing of the early web as an anti-gatekeeping movement. Werdmüller writes frequently about all of these topics together — he works at ProPublica on technology, has a long history in the IndieWeb and federated social space (he co-founded Elgg and Known), and his personal blog regularly weaves these exact threads.

The voice also fits: declarative, slightly polemical, comfortable making sweeping movement-level claims, and willing to name class and racial dynamics directly rather than hedging.”

I’ll take that as a compliment! But it’s impressive that it was able to figure it out without searching.

But those are topics I write about regularly. When I gave it a snippet of my short fiction piece Sharing is Caring, it wasn’t able to find a match:

“The passage has hallmarks of contemporary speculative/dark YA or literary sci-fi short fiction — body-swapping or consciousness-transfer premise, a class-inflected ethical horror (poor family selling a daughter's body to a wealthy disabled girl's family), tight close-third POV, terse interior monologue in italics-style cut-ins ("Sure. No. Not a problem."), and the bleak ironic kicker about an eighteenth birthday. That cluster of moves shows up in writers like Ted Chiang, Ken Liu, Carmen Maria Machado, Alice Sola Kim, Karen Russell, or in anthology pieces from venues like Lightspeed, Tor.com, or various YA dystopia collections — but none of those is a confident match.”

Again, I’ll take the comparisons as a compliment, but there isn’t enough of my fiction out there to make a real suggestion. That’s going to be true of most people’s writing — unless they’re publishing really regularly on the web, and have been for a while, the models might not know about them. Kelsey had a slightly different result: a school progress report was still identified as hers. But clearly, the reliability here is shakier.

In other words, we’re a little way’s off from AI being able to identify most people quite yet. But if you’re publishing regularly, out in the open, you should expect your work to be fingerprinted. That does have implications for dissidents and people writing anonymously who have previously done so under their real names.

Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker - Joel's Log Files

2026-05-07T21:01:23.000Z

Metal Gear Solid is a very cool franchise, that is apparently a bit of a mess when it comes to its story and the connection between each game and all of that.

I am not as attached on it as I am on Resident Evil. I did not spend countless hours watching video essays about Metal Gear, or Hideo Kojima or the history of it all.

I first came in contact with the series when Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain came out back in 2015. I remember I saw the first part of a let’s play of some Spanish YouTube creator and was very intrigued by the idea of stealth, and the graphics.

It didn’t take long for me to find out about Peace Walker for the PSP. I eventually tried it out, but I gave up on it after 4 hours or so, when one of the boss fights proved too much for my teenager brain who refused to look up a guide. It was one of the first games I tried on the system based on internet recommendations, no friend of mine had talked about Metal Gear to me before!

Nowadays, the franchise seems to be back on the spotlight with the Metal Gear Solid 3 Delta remake, and with Konami more active in the gaming world overall—they are going to release a new 2D Castlevania soon!—so I thought I may as well check this game. After all, if I beat the archaic Resident Evil games, a PSP title shouldn’t be that hard, right?

I played it on original hardware, no save states or fast forwarding was used for this title, yay!

Cover of the game

Story

In this game we follow Snake, or Boss, or Big Boss (again, confusing story or something), a highly trained soldier/spy/agent who has abandoned his allegiance to any nation, and decided to form his own military organization: “Militaires Sans Frontiéres” (Army Without Borders, MSF for short) with the goal of providing aid to smaller nations and do good things overall—as much good a private army can do at least?

Anyway, the story is set somewhere in the 70s, and begins when a mysterious professor and a teenage girl called Paz (Peace in Spanish) ask him for help to uncover a military operation in Costa Rica. While Paz is oblivious to the situation and is genuine in her pursue for pacifist ideals, Snake and his friend Kaz can tell the “professor” is has some ulterior motives at play here. Alas, they agree to help out given Paz’ enthusiasm, and because there’s something fishy going, and Snake wants to seek answers.

As Snake makes his way through enemy terrain, finds new characters, and learns more about the secret military activity in the region, we will realize that there are nukes in Costa Rica, unmanned AI technology, and worst of all, a Metal Gear, a bipedal weapon able to deliver a nuclear bomb from any position in any terrain, called the Peace Walker, powered by an AI built on the image of Snake’s very own mentor. Snake’s mission is to do everything in its power to stop a nuclear launch that would send the world into disarray.

Explaining all that in just two paragrphs feels like a diservice to the game, honestly.

The story is full of twist and turns, revelations, betrayal and ethical dilemmas. I cannot stress enough how strong the writing and plot development of this game is. There are a couple of things that go on a bit of a roundabout way, but I found the conflict to be extremely interesting, and I loved the characters that we met along the way.

There are also lots of cassette tapes with extra dialogue before every mission, which contain story and information about the characters, areas, history and concepts mentioned within the game. These are fully voiced, so it never feels like you are just reading a whole encyclopedia of each character. I listened to all the tapes and it was very entertaining.

Snake’s development is great too. He has a cool demeanor, but we’ll soon see that there is a lot of regret and trauma in the things he has done in the past. Either way, he has a lot of great moments and fun interactions with the characters during cutscenes and on the cassette tapes, doing his best to inspire others and command the situation.

The rest of the cast is not far behind, Kaz is cool, Paz is inspiring, we’ll meet other characters like Amanda, who leads los Sandinistas, a resistance who want a revolution to free themselves from the americans and corruption, and are happy to join you to achieve it. There’s more characters and they have a lot to say, but no need to mention it all here.

Overall, I really loved it all, the dialogue, the discussions on nuclear deterrence, the political intrigue, plenty of conversations about AI and its military use. All of it is handled quite well and it even holds up and feels familiar with some of the things going on today, 16 years after the game’s release. Good stuff.

Snake looking very cool with a drawn comic artstyle

Gameplay

The game features two phases, which reminds me a lot of something like Fire Emblem, normal missions, and base building management.

The missions are done in a map divided by section (similar to old school Monster Hunter), each section with enemies patrolling in a certain pattern, carrying weapons and ready to alert everyone as soon as they spot you.

Snake has a variety of equipment: rations, radar, grenades, sleeping guns, assault rifles, and heavier weaponry which can be picked before each mission. One of the main items is the Fulton Recovery System, which let’s you take unconscious enemies or rescue prisoners, to recruit them to your team.

The movement set is great, you can walk or or crouch, lay down, hang from ledges. You can hide behind walls, knock to call an enemy’s attention, use close quarters combat (CQC) to incapacitate enemies, among other things.

As the adventure progresses, enemies will get tougher too, wearing better armor (which make the sleeping gun less effective) and be more resistant to CQC in general. Even then, most of the missions can be completed without ever having to fight or alert the enemy, this is the case even for some of the boss fights.

When a mission is complete, you return Mother Base, where MSF manages its operations. You can assign personnel to different teams, such as Combat, R&D, Medical, Mess Hall and Intel. The members of each team affect different parts of the gameplay. The most noticeable is the R&D team, which will let you unlock new weapons and level them up.

As you recruit more people, the base will grow, and members of the MSF can be sent to missions. The game has a CO-OP element similar to Monster Hunter, as many missions can be done in multiplayer as well, there’s also PVP modes. I didn’t engage in any of these though.

Boss battles in the game are pretty great. However, the limited controls of the PSP are a big negative. Aiming weapons is not ideal in any of the available control schemes and some of the boss fights will need some precision.

There are a few different styles of battle. Some are against military vehicles, which are accompanied by infantry. These can often be completed with pure stealth, using smoke bombs and approaching enemies from multiple angles to get rid of the infantry and make the captain come out of the vehicle, confused as to what’s going on. Of course, you can just dispatch enemies with gunfire if that’s more of your style. All the vehicles can be seized for your use in MSF, so the less you damage them the better.

Some soldiers surrounding a tank, a boss fight for Snake to defeat!

The boss battles against AI machinery are different. They unmanned weapons are much bigger in size and feature a variety of attack patterns. However, the weakspot on them is pretty clear and you can make use of different equipment to stun them and allow you to deal a lot of damage.

The game features plenty of items to aid you on your way, but they can run out as well, so being mindful is important, although requesting aid is also possible with certain equipment you unlock later in the game.

All in all, I enjoyed the constant cycle of mission -> manage base -> listen to debrief files -> repeat.

There are also lots of side quests to train marksmanship, recover files or ~~kidnap~~ recruit more members for MSF. You can also replay any mission and get more resources like that.

As you recruit more personnel, the base will grow and you will be able to send them to their own missions, which will let you level up faster and the like. You can eventually develop your own Metal Gear, but I didn’t delve deeper into that mechanic, since it requires grinding boss fight missions to acquire materials to build it, and I didn’t feel like doing so.

There is one big, HUGE bummer featured in some parts of the game though… the absolute worst quick time events ever. Many are pretty easy and normal, but some are truly horrendous stuff. For example, if you are knocked down, you’ll have to move your analog stick like a maniac to stand up again. There are also cutscenes featuring sections where you’ll have to press the same button AS FAST AS YOU CAN, and there will be some that just have a very very short time frame to perform. This is the one really big miss of the game, as there’s no accesibility option to disable these. Some people will never complete this game because of that terrible mechanic. Don’t feel bad about using the Turbo function of your emulator if that’s how you plan to try this game.

The Pupa, one of the many unmanned vehicles Snake will need to destroy

Art

The art direction is top notch. The game has incredible 3D graphics that are truly at the top of what the PSP can manage, shoulder to shoulder with the God of War games on the system. All the characters, weaponry and vehicles are modeled with incredible detail. The most impressive feat of course is the size and the scale of some of the boss fights, which rival Monster Hunter’s Ancient Dragon quests, with textures and character models similar to Portable 3rd.

Maybe the comparisons make no sense to you, but seriously, it’s mindblowing. The game is as close as it gets to PS2 quality, and with the small screen it’s just perfect. The performance is also fantastic, without any noticeable performance issues other than the loading screens which could be a bit long for a modern day gamer.

Every action of the game has animation work to match, when you walk, faster or slowly, the way enemies react and change behaviour, etc.

Huge props to the UI design as well. I found managing the base became a breeze, with a very practical UI that hasn’t dated a single day. The menus were cool and there was something to read or learn at any time.

Most of the cutscenes however, are not done with 3D animation.

Instead, this game features comic-style cutscenes, with dialogue bubbles and a scrappy-looking artstyle that looks absolutely awesome! I must admit that 16-year old me was very, very dissapointed by this for some reason, but reality is that the style holds up excellently to this day, and allows for some absolutely thrilling panelling and action shots. There are also some very emotional scenes, flashbacks and quiet moments that feature strong silouettes or changes in the color palette that are incredible to see, and realistic cutscenes wouldn’t be able to compare.

Snake looking very cool, this time in a high quality animated cutscene!

Music & Sound

The soundtrack has a very military style to it. It is actually very similar to what Into The Breach does, mostly staying in the background, but pretty present when you are managing Mother Base.

During missions, usually set in forests, swamps, jungles and military facilities, a lot of the sound will remain atmospheric, the chant of birds, the steps and hums of the enemy, the crickets singing, and trees swaying will be most of what you hear. Sound is another of the factors to take into account when making your way through each section of the enemy territory.

All the sound design is excellent too, and rather satisfying.

Music is affected by the actions you take, of course. If an enemy manages to get a glimpse of you, you’ll definitely hear the “What’s that?”, as the music becomes more suspenseful and you feel the enemy getting cautious as it walks in your direction.

If you are completely discovered, the surprise sound that made the series iconic will play, and music will start to be more stressful, alarm bells will sound and the enemy radio will request for backup, as they go into an alert status. All of this is perfectly made clear with audio queues and I honestly love it.

The sound of the AI enemies is also worth bringing up. Each of the bosses has a certain character to it, and they will also “sing” during cutscenes and during the fight against them, all of this is also a hint to get familiar with it, of course. It’s all rather excellent.

There’s nothing but praise for the voice acting as well. David Hayter is Snake, simple as that, and this was his last game before Kojima became kinda obsessed with getting a hollywood star to play the rule. Konami, for all its mistakes, brought him back for the Delta remake, so that’s fun.

The rest of the cast is equally amazing. All the extra story and details shared via cassette tapes is so fun to play through. I listened to all of it, it was really enjoyable.

Some more of the comic style artwork, the character design and contrast here is awesome

Overall

What can I say? This is a fantastic title with excellent production and passion behind it, it plays like a miracle on the PSP and is only really limited by a couple of dumb decisions, and a little bit by the hardware itself. I loved going through all of it, but here’s a list with some good stuff, bad stuff and other thoughts about it:

The good

Story, voice acting, graphics, sound effects, music, UI design, it nails it.
The writing, the intrigue, thought provoking moments and suspense.
Artwork and cutscenes with a comic book style.
Missions are rather short and self-contained, perfect for portable gaming.
The cast of characters and the interactions with Snake are interesting.
Base management and some customization to upgrade equipment.

The not so good

Quick time events that are super obnoxious.
Limited controls due to the PSP’s lack of a second stick or L2 and R2 triggers.
Annoying button mashing and stick wiggling mechanics.
Loading times can be a bit annoying, nothing unusual for a PSP game.
Way too many extra missions can be repetitive.
Base management can feel like a grind sometimes.
There’s an extra ending that requires dozens of hours of grinding.

Some tips and reminders

You need to keep the arsenal in check for every mission, some things are only useful against bosses and the like.
Just use turbo button controls if you emulate, save yourself the button mashing headache.
Get familiar with the available control schemes of the game, some are better for boss fights such as “Shooter Mode”.
Don’t forget to use the radio for extra tips! You can also get extra info from enemies under your grip.
Try to ~kidnap~ recruit everyone and there will be tools later to see which enemies are worth recruiting more later too!

There’s a couple more things I could say but I’ll leave it here for now. This game is truly awesome, I was on the edge of my seat multiple times and I really jaw-dropped at some of the moments and the fact that all of this was running on a PSP in the first place.

You can get this game on the PSP of course, but there’s a new release of it coming out in the Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol.2, which will release on August 27th 2026, so maybe waiting for it will be best!

Give it a try either way, it’s worth a shot.

This is day of 63 #100DaysToOffload

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Plugging the gaps won't save news. It's time to redesign - Werd I/O

2026-05-07T13:50:49.000Z

Link: An Invitation to Build the Civic Information Economy, by Lillian Ruiz, Simon Galperin, and Jennifer Brandel at News Futures

This feels like a vital exploration to me:

“What does it take to fund civic information? We often focus on “more money,” but we limit the field’s potential by ignoring better capital design. Today’s landscape often sees dollars concentrated in intermediary and national plays—often with good reason—but without deliberate examination, we risk stifling the imagination of a developing field.”

I have high hopes for this, and I love that the effort exists. It’s something we should all support.

I've found just the right paper for my Bottom Hole problem - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-05-07T11:34:54.000Z

A few weeks ago, I went on a mad quest to find the newspaper used in 1995's Bottom Hole TV show.

During the episode, Eddie starts reading this newspaper:

Obviously, the "Hammersmith Bugle" is not a real paper and they never ran a headline "No News Shocker". But judging from all the other shots, the prop is based on a real newspaper.

So I decided to rip off Dirty Feed's shtick and find out what was used to create the fake newspaper. The quest took me o'er hill and dale. Through the rough hinterlands of Hammersmith and into the nether regions of Wimbledon. By which I mean - I used lots of online archive sources.

And it nearly worked! I found all of the internal pages. I also found the back page:

That's from The Surrey Herald - but that's a paper with lots of regional editions. None of which had the right headline.

So I emailed my (frankly asinine ) request to Surrey Museums. They were polite, but unable to help. Their website gave a clue though - the location of the archives of the Surrey Herald:

Surrey Herald: Chertsey, Addlestone and Byfleet edition (also Walton, Weybridge and Hersham edition Feb 1979 to 1999 at Elmbridge Museum)

So I contacted the fine people at Elmbridge Museum who were happy to rummage through their microfiche for me. I expect, much like Indiana Jones, the archivists had to knock down fake walls, find a mystic box containing the treasure, and then dodge various snakes and villains to retrieve the priceless artefact. Or they may have a well designed archival system which is a pleasure to use. I don't know.

Anyway! All of which is to say that they very kindly sent me a quick scan of the front page of Surrey Herald's Walton, Weybridge and Hersham edition from November 3rd 1994.

Here it is in all its glory!

That's a perfect match for what's seen on screen:

Hurrah! Another mystery solved thanks to publicly funded museums!

What have we learned today?

Archivists are lovely, generous, and helpful people.
Museums are brilliant.
Not everything in the world has been digitised.
There was quite a lot of news that day no matter what the drunken hacks at the Hammersmith Bugle say.
We do not know if centenarian Elsie Bartlett was aware that her photo featured in this seminal part of British comedy.

The war between fast and legitimate is here - Westenberg

2026-05-07T01:18:04.000Z

The European Union spent four years drafting the AI Act, with OpenAI shipping GPT-4 to a hundred million users in two months. By the time Brussels finalised its definitions of "high-risk" systems, the systems in question had moved twice and grown various new appendages. The regulators were neither stupid, nor incompetent; they were doing what regulators are supposed to do. They consulted, they ran impact assessments, they debated wording, they translated everything into twenty-four languages, they voted in committee, and voted again, and harmonised national positions, and produced something defensible.

The process took the time it took.

This is the whole problem, and - to my mind - one of the central tensions of the decade. The institutions best able to move at the speed of the real world are the institutions we trust the least; while the institutions we trust the most are too slow, and too cumbersome to matter.

I'm not here to mount a defence of the idiotic spate of DOGE inspired initiatives; I want to argue instead for a degree of dispassionate realism about where we are, and where we're either doomed or blessed to go next.

Legitimacy is a slow technology, built of procedure, of precedent, of deliberation, and the gradual accumulation of trust across cycles of failure and correction, across generations, across years. You can't accelerate it without breaking it, because the whole point of due process is that it slows you down - it must slow you down. The whole point of peer review is that someone qualified gets to object and point out the things that should not be broken. The whole point of constitutional limits is that the people in charge can't just do whatever the hell they want, whenever the hell they feel like it.

When you strip those constraints out, you get speed - I'll grant.

It's the inevitable outcome of authority concentrating, accountability loosening, feedback loops collapsing.

The story of the twentieth century was, in part, the story of the slowest institutions racing to catch up to the fast. Markets ran ahead, regulators followed; inventors invented, courts adjudicated; technology disrupted, and culture absorbed - one way or another. The catching-up was painful and often violent, but it happened on a timescale that human institutions could survive.

I doubt this is still true // possible.

We're too far apart and drifting.

Facebook reached a billion users before any major democracy had a coherent policy position on what it was. By the time the policy machinery wound itself up, Facebook had already restructured politics in dozens of countries, undermined several elections, and pivoted into something else entirely. Whatever the regulators eventually produced was a response to a previous version of the company, but the current version had moved on.

The FDA's approval process is designed to be slow because the cost of a fast-tracked failure is, not to be ghoulish, literal bodies in a literal morgue. But the gene-editing tools available to a competent graduate student in 2026 would have required a fortified national laboratory in 1996. The technologically possible has outstripped the institutionally permissible - to the point that whole industries are migrating to jurisdictions with looser rules. The regulatory tortoise is still doing its job, but it's not the only animal in the race - not anymore.

We build legitimate institutions around legitimate problems - but the world changes. The institution remains optimised for the old problem, and gradually becomes ceremonial. Like the British monarchy. Or the United Nations. Or the academic peer review system.

The fast institutions I'm describing are rarely more competent. They're frequently, catastrophically worse. Theranos was fast. FTX was fast. WeWork outran its own ability to function. The history of speed without legitimacy is a history of fraud and human wreckage and a great many self-justifying memoirs published with the gift and grift of hindsight. Every time someone tells you that move-fast-and-break-things is a good strategy, you should ask what got broken and whose problem it's going to be to fix it.

But the answer to "fast institutions sometimes blow up" can't be that the slow ones are therefore vindicated; slow institutions blow up too. They just blow up in slow motion. The 2008 financial crisis was a slow blow-up. The opioid epidemic was a slow blow-up. The housing crisis in every major Anglophone city is a slow blow-up that's been unfolding for two decades while the relevant planning bodies follow procedure with admirable rigour. A failing institution can fail for a generation before anyone is willing to admit that the failure is structural rather than a rough patch. I've known marriages in that vein. I've known states in that vein. I've known companies, etc.

The new compact will involve some level of negotiated settlement between the two species. And I don't have a clear picture for what that settlement looks like - yet. My optimism leads me to believe (or at least, hope) that fast institutions adopt enough procedural integrity to earn the trust they lack, and slow institutions adopt enough adaptive capacity to remain relevant.

The pessimist in me (of whom I remain rather less fond) is convinced that the divergence only accelerates from here, and there's a betting chance we end up with a two-tier civilisation. The fast tier governs through algorithms, contracts, and platform policy; the slow tier governs through statute, precedent + parliamentary procedure. The two tiers nominally coexist but operate in different timeframes and address different populations. The fast tier handles anyone who is rich, technical, mobile, or willing to live within the rules of private platforms. The slow tier handles everyone else, in the residual physical world of borders, courts, parliaments, and the postal system. This is, broadly, what is already happening.

I'm wary of declensionist takes that romanticise the slow tier as "the last fortress of human dignity." There is, after all, nothing inherently dignified about waiting twelve years for a permission slip, or in the way the British NHS treats its waiting lists, or the American immigration "system" its most vulnerable applicants.

Procedure can and frequently does ossify into the basest of inhumane cruelty. Slow institutions aren't virtuous because they're slow; they're virtuous if and when their slowness produces the legitimacy it was designed to produce.

When slowness becomes a substitute for legitimacy, you have a Soviet-era clusterfuck.

But can legitimacy can be rebuilt at speed?

Can you construct an institution that is both accountable and reasonably fast?

Actual legitimacy seems to require a patience of movements and monuments that competitive markets and accelerating tech does not // will not allow. You can't do the equivalent of British common law in five years. You can't do peer review at the speed of preprint. You can't do constitutional design at the speed of a Slack thread.

What you can dov - possibly - is accept the trade-off honestly. Build fast institutions for things where speed is the binding constraint and slow institutions for things where trust is the binding constraint, and stop pretending that the same body can do both. The current confusion comes from expecting our slow institutions to keep up with the news cycle, and from expecting our fast institutions to behave with the gravitas of a constitutional court.

Neither of those expectations is ever going to be satisfied.

In the late medieval period, the Catholic Church was still the central legitimacy-conferring institution - but it had already stopped being operationally dominant. New money, new printing, new science, new political forms grew up alongside the old hierarchy and (eventually) displaced it. The displacement took two centuries and several wars, and it was far from orderly, but it happened all the same. The thing that came out the other side, the modern nation-state with a codified law and a standing armies and a civil service and a bureaucracy , eventually achieved some synthesis of speed + legitimacy that none of the contesting parties had managed alone.

We are probably at the starting point of an analogous process.

There are 2 things about that period worth flagging:

The first is that the new institutions didn't announce themselves as such. The Medici were a bank before they were a political force; and the Dutch East India Company was a trading concern before it was effectively a state. The legitimacy came afterwards, retrofitted to whatever the speed had already built.
The second is that the Church didn't vanish. It kept performing its older functions for a population that wanted older things from it, while the operational running of European civilisation passed to bodies that didn't yet have the moral authority but were already doing the governing.

How much of the actual coordination of modern life is now happening inside corporate platforms and private networks that have no constitutional standing whatsoever?

The practical advice is to know which game you're in. If you're running a startup, you're in the speed game, and pretending you're running a regulatory agency is a category error. If you're running a regulatory agency, you're in the legitimacy game, and it's something of a vapid conceit to pretend to be running a startup. Most of the dysfunction in contemporary institutions comes from this same category confusion. The legislators who tweet like influencers vs the CEOs who issue manifestos like political leaders. The universities who try to brand themselves like consumer products vs the journalists who behave like activists and then complain that no one trusts them anymore. Each of these is an institution trying to play a game for which it was neither designed nor built, and losing the legitimacy of its native game without acquiring the speed of its aspiration.

Pick a side and commit. Find a functional substitute for the legitimacy you lack, and find it before the next scandal makes your shortcomings impossible to ignore; or find a way to remain relevant despite your pace, and stop confusing the pomp of authority with its substance.

The hybrids will struggle. The pretenders - the institutions that perform speed without being fast or perform legitimacy without being legitimate - will be eaten first.

I'm not certain anyone "wins" this in any way the word "win" is usually applied. But in a war between institutions, the folks on the losing side are usually the last to figure out they're at war in the first place.

Writing a blog post without a screen - James' Coffee Blog

2026-05-07T00:00:00.000Z

This text below post is presented verbatim, as it was typed with only a keyboard: without a display or any assistive technology. Typos are left in. The "Notes after writing" and "My writing setup" sections were typed on my Mac as I prepared to publish the post.

This is my first ever blog post written without a display. I have wanted a tool like this for a while, but my motivation for finally building something was seeing Jo's excellent implementation of the idea. Jo used a Raspberry Pi 400 with a bash script that, on boot, opens a "nano" file into which you can write. Jo's implementation also automatically copied the text file in which you were working over to a flash drive. My script as-is only saves the file to disk, so it can be retrieved later.

I thought of this idea because I sometimes look away from my computer while I am writing. I do the same on my phone, too: if I am deep in thought, or capturing an idea, I want to focus on the world around me. What if a device could let me note down my ideas without having to worry about managing a display?

This blog post is written without a display. The experience so far has been fascinating. Since I cannot see what I have typed, I can only focus on the paragraph on which I am on. The only feedback I get from the keyboard is the indicator light that toggles on and off when I enable and disable caps lock, which I do every tmime I type a capital letter (yes, I do this :)).

One limit of the system is that I am unsure when I have made typos. As I write, I am focusing mainly on the keyboard in front of me, so as to ensure that I don't accidentally drift away in terms of the position of my hands. If my hands were improperly positioned every letter could be one letter off in terms of the spatial positioning of the letters on the keyboard.

I think this could be mitigated with a clever form of typo correction which lets you know when you have typed the last few words incorrectly. Furthermore, i could be interesting for automatic typo orrection to take place, although this would mean that I would be prone to lose track of exactly what my cursor position is. I can always edit the blog post after I have done, after all.

Another limitation with the system as it is presently is that there is no way for me to easily know if my blog post is still being captured. If I accidentally trigger a nano keyboard sequence, it would be impossible for me to know that I am in a mode that is not capturing my writing.

My writing modee rght now is much like when I am using a typewriter: I don't think about rearranging sentences (I can't), or about fixing mistakes that are several words back from my cursor position (side question: what is the typewriter equivalent of the "cursor" position"?).

I am not sure if I will write another blog post with this medium yet, primarily for the aforementioned reason that I don't haev a good visual ndicator that my typing is being captured. With that said, I am still fascinated by this idea of being able to capture notes without a display. ImagWith this system, I am able to capture notes without the distractions of the display. Although there is still the distraction of whether I made a typo; more research and development is needed to mature this idea further.

Thank you Jo for brining this idea to life and publishing the foundation of a bash script ath I could use to make my own screenless writing tool.

Notes after writing

The words below were written using my Mac after having copied the post back to my Mac for publishing.

Jo's post about using a computer without a screen to which I made reference in my writing above. I couldn't add a link while I was writing because I didn't have a display. In the future, I could type a reminder like TK (used as a placeholder in writing) so that I could come back and edit the post to add links.
I deliberately did not edit the post above so you could see the errors and get a better feel for how well this worked in terms of accuracy. When I knew I made a typo, I had to pause to figure out how many keystrokes I should remove. In one case, I wanted to start a sentence from scratch, so I just held down the backspace key for half a second or so. This wasn't the best strategy, which is why "ImagWith this system" appears in the blog post.
Adding a script to open nano to my ~/.profile had a significant limit: this method made it impossible to boot to desktop with startx. Thus, research is needed into how to make the script to open nano run only on boot, and not when startx is executed.

My writing setup

ALT

A Raspberry Pi 400 computer keyboard on a desk next to a notebook, a small Lego typewriter set, my computer keyboard, and my mouse.

I took this photo after I wrote the blog post, which is why the HDMI cable is plugged in.

Jo's post about using a computer without a screen

Affordances of a screenless writing interface - James' Coffee Blog

2026-05-07T00:00:00.000Z

This post was written first with my screenless writing interface, and then edited in Ghost, which I use to publish blog posts to this website. The extent of my edits were fixing typos and reworking the introduction and conclusion a little bit.

My original concern when brainstorming the idea of a keyboard with which you could type but had no other means of interaction was that the accuracy of writing would be hard to maintain. This concern is not as significant as I thought now I am using the device. Indeed, sometimes you need to try a technology out to really build an impression of how it feels.

And so I am also writing this post with my screenless writing setup, both to continue experimenting with the medium but also to capture an idea I had that I wanted to explore: the various affordances of different writing interfaces.

In discussion in a Matrix server I am in about this project, I realised that this device may be more appropriate for creating a first draft of a project. Even if the technology could automatically correct all typos, there are still inherent limitations: not being able to go back through your writing, for example. My first sentence in this blog post was so long that I forgot the first clause so I sort of had to guess how to finish the sentence With that in mind, I knew I could go back later.

Thus, this device could be used as a means do author notes, drafts for works, or streams of consciousness. I can always edit a post later. Indeed, I found myself more comfortable with the idea of editing a post afterwords precisely because I knew there were limitations that got in the way of making the post as good as it could be the first time around. This feels like a unique property of this particular mode of writing.

I also started to think about the affordances of typewriters. Typewriters don't allow corrections in the same way as computers; you can type over a word, but you can't completely erase it (unless you used Tippex or the like). It would be cool if this system had a button to read out your current paragraph so you remember your context; indeed, I think there is a lot of work that could be done to explore the idea of screenless writing interfaces of this form factor. (Update after publishing: I totally forgot how this paragraph started which is why the context jumped a bit. I wonder how if this writing form factor makes it harder to compose more complex grammatical structures, such as the sentence with a semi-colon and parentheses that I wrote before forgetting the start of the paragraph. Could a tool like this help improve one's memory?)

Anyway, I think I was talking about the affordances of typewriters. Typewriters give you a physical artefact. This means there is distance between what you have written on a typewriter and publishing it online whereas there is a very narrow distance between a text editing program on a computer and publishing one's work. For this reason, I rarely publish anything I have written on the typewriter: the typewriter is where I like to write personal essays away from my computer, without feeling any obligation to publish what I write.

I also love using my typewriter to type up letters to friends.

This all has me wondering: what are the opportunities of a system that lets you write a blog post without having a display set up? I do feel I type with less regard to editing myself as I go, because I can't easily go back and edit something while I am writing. I feel a similar way with typewriters too, where I know that because I can't easily discard a line, if I start a line I will try and finish it. In this way, the typewriter – and the screenless writing interface – pushes me a little bit outside my comfort zone: these mediums make think about how to end a sentence even if I wish I had started it with another word.

screenless writing interface

Looking for a bike - Joel's Log Files

2026-05-06T21:10:00.000Z

For a couple weeks now, I had the itch to get into cycling again. Not as a sport or a hobby, but as a tool, to commute and go to places nearby.

Around 10 years ago I used to have a pretty neat bike, it was a bit big for me but I could use it no problem. It was gifted to me by my uncle and I really liked it. However, we moved, and my dad told me he had to sell it to a friend.

I was very, very upset, but we couldn’t bring it with us, and eventually had to come to terms with it.

A couple years later, my dad gave me another bike, but I kind of neglected it for many years, I don’t know if it felt like betrayal or what but I only really used it twice and it never felt right. The bike was smaller too, with 24” wheels, and I was already (barely) an adult, so I felt too slow with it.

When I had the day off on Monday I decided I’d try and get that old bike up and running. It didn’t work out.

The tires were deflated and had some cracks, so I carried it with me and walked to a workshop to see if they could fix them—it was closed. I walked back and left the bike home, and took a bus to Walmart to buy a and get there myself—it didn’t work. The bike was in a garage/storage room, a hand-made one with an aluminum ceiling and plenty of gaps, it was easy for moisture, dust and other elements to set in, so there’s that.

Anyway, I figured it wasn’t worth it, and decided that it was too small for me, so I’d get a used bike from a workshop instead.

Yesterday I went back to work, but after my shift was over I went to a bike shop nearby and saw a few options.

Unfortunately I was feeling kinda introverted and could only ask something like “a bike with different speeds that can go uphill and through dirt roads and stuff”, which was as generic as it gets. Anyway I was still offerend a few options, some were way out of my budget (which is around 450 bucks), but some others seemed pretty decent.

I didn’t take note of the brands for this post, I could only remember a Giant which was in reparations and would cost around 290 USD once fixed. I may return today once work is over and try and make some more questions. I literally walked to four other bike workshops from there all over the city—maybe just walking is fine—but most were closed or had a very small catalog.

Once I returned home I checked online for some reviews of affordable bikes in my country. I saw a few interesting options from brands such as Alubike, Gravel and Mercurio that seem to be popular in México and with prices to match the economy here. I’ve been looking at the Gravel Everest and the Mercurio Ranger, for the most part, with the Alubike Sierra as a more expensive option which may be worth the extra.

There are some pros and cons to consider here, I made a list with some more random thoughts:

Buying online will require me to some assemble the bike, but learning how to do it might be fun.
I could still assemble it wrong and ruin some part, but I am pretty confident in myself to figure it out.
For the price of a new budget-friendly bike, I could buy a used one that’s higher quality.
I am not super sure the bikes available will be higher quality, but it may not matter that much anyway.
Buying used on a bike shop will let me try it immediately and check how it performs too.
I could also buy and assemble a new and more known brand bike online, get it serviced, and call it a day.
A bike shop will guarantee that it’s well assembled and maintained, I can get more equipment there.
Supporting a small business that brings old bikes to life sounds kinda cool.
I should still fix my older bike, maybe I could resell it after all.

Anyway, I am still on the fence on all of this, I am trying to figure out where does a bike fits in my current lifestyle. I don’t know if I’d use it to commute to work, since I need to go through a highway with a lot of trailers and trucks and it just seems super scary. By the time I get home it’s already kind of dark too.

So would I only use it during the weekends? Or I should learn how to be safe on the bigger roads? I also really enjoy just taking the bus and having an hour to spend there without worries.

Decisions must be made once again…

This is day 62 of #100DaysToOffload.

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MGK At The Spark Arena - The Weblog of fLaMEd

2026-05-06T20:29:28.000Z

What’s going on, Internet? Last night, me, my sister-n-law and our friend went into town to see the MGK gig as he brought his Lost Americana tour to Auckland for his only New Zealand show.

MGK, aka Machine Gun Kelly, aka Colson Baker is one of those artists where it’s probably good to separate the art from the artist as he seems to be a ball bag in real life.

I never paid any attention to him while he did hip hop records, but as soon as I saw the Bloody Valentine I was hooked. The album, Tickets To My Downfall was the exact type of nostalgia I needed for early 2000s pop punk in 2020.

I skimmed through Mainstream Sellout when it released and never came back to it. We got Lost Americana last year which was a step up from the second record and I listened to it a bunch. But we also got Tickets To My Downfall All Access last year, the 5th anniversary reissue. Original tracklist, the bonus tracks from the SOLD OUT Deluxe, plus 5 new unreleased tracks. Whew. It was good to hear some more tracks from that era.

We managed to grab reseller tickets, paid less for the three of us combined than a single ticket at face value, and the seats were pretty decent for where we ended up. Sweet as.

Anyway, the show was good. It kicked off on time, it was loud, there were guitars and drums, only a couple throwbacks to the rap days and one or two songs from Sellout. It didn’t take long to get right into the Tickets To My Downfall songs and that was all I needed to hear.

The stage was on theme too. A model of the Statue of Liberty’s head looming above with a cigarette hanging out her mouth, and his mic stand was a giant cigarette to match. Lost Americana indeed.

The crowd around us were all there for the same reasons. Singing along with strangers who love the same songs is one of the best bits of a gig, especially the Tickets ones. Title Track, Drunk Face, Forget Me Too, Concert For Aliens, Jawbreaker, Nothing Inside, all hit. The cover of Paramore’s Misery Business was expected, and rocked. My absolute highlight was belting out Bloody Valentine word for word with everyone around me. My Ex’s Best Friend my second favourite on the album, still can’t get that one out of my head. We had a great time, a fantastic night out.

Damn, what a show. I’ll see it again without hesitation.

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Lamy Safari 2026 Neon Pink and Neon Yellow - Robb Knight • Posts • Atom Feed

2026-05-06T20:11:34.000Z

Today my 2026 Lamy Safaris arrived even though Lamy themselves still haven't actually announced them. Thank you to the fine folks at Fontoplumo for putting these on sale early so I can get my grubby hands on them.

The yellow is striking in person and is exactly as bright as you think it will be. The pink doesn't jump out at me quite as much but the colour is still great. I think I would prefer the pink to have the black hardware because on the yellow it looks fantastic.

I'm not going to "review" these - they're glossy Safaris, you know what you're getting and if you don't, smarter people than me have reviewed them before.

Here's the new neon pink at the bottom compared to a pink Balloon, the AL Star Fiery, and the standard Safari pink. When it's next to the standard pink it's more obvious how bright it is.

Hot Cross Buns - The Weblog of fLaMEd

2026-05-06T14:58:18.000Z

What’s going on, Internet? I’ve been eating hot cross buns since January. Can you believe it? Growing up I remember that seasonal treats would come out a week or two before the associated holiday. As you might have noticed yourself, these days the bakeries, and supermarkets are pushing them out months before the event. For hot cross buns though, I’m not complaining.

I’m not a big fan of raisins, or orange spice, and whatever else they use to make hot cross buns. But when they’re combined and baked and the end result is a fresh hot cross bun, I’m right there for all of it.

While Easter is over now and my stash of hot cross buns has dried up, I’m both saddened and relieved. Since January I’ve been having at least one hot cross bun every morning with my hot chocolate (I gave up caffeine, and coffee with it, years ago). My favourite method of heating these delicious buns these days is in the air fryer. Cut in half and 170°C on the bake function for 4 minutes does the trick. Then a layer of butter. I’m not talking about a measly spread of butter. Nope. I’m talking about a slice of butter as thick as a slice of cheese. Then the goal is to eat it as quickly, but not too quickly before the butter melts and drips everywhere.

Damn they’re so good.

Daily Bread were the standout, but at the price I only sprung for them once. They use an Italian sourdough starter, multiple awards every year, you can taste why. Daily Bread also bakes a collab bun for Farro Fresh, sold right alongside the originals — slightly bigger, half the price, probably not the same starter but still super good. Bakers Delight ran a little drier than those two, though the size meant I could load them up with even more butter.

During our road trip down to Martinborough I got to try a few. The Stables in Greytown had a hot cross doughnutm the dough was good but the sugar coating wasn’t really my thing. I would have preferred a standard bun than the doughnut hybrid. The French Baker, also in Greytown, delivered the real deal. But the surprise was Jean’s, a small bakery in Upper Hutt that my wife loves to visit. Crazy delicious like all of their baked goods. Next year I’m getting a box shipped up to Auckland the moment they’re available. I was a bit gutted when I demolished the last one the other day.

I’m relieved I get a break until next year. If they were around all year I’d be in real trouble. But who am I kidding? I’m already counting down to next year’s batch. 🤙

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My Inital Thoughts On Thunderbird Pro - Kev Quirk

2026-05-06T14:01:00.000Z

Yesterday I received an email from the Thunderbird team inviting me to join a preview of their new hosted email service, Thunderbird Pro. I love email, so was very keep to sign up and test it out.

Before we get into this, I want to say that Thunderbird Pro is still under active development, please bear that in mind. Also, these are just my opinions, please don't get butthurt.

What is Thunderbird Pro?

I hate it when people explain what things are in a blog post, but I think it's warranted here since Thunderbird Pro (TB Pro) is a new product, so people may not know what it is.

With that in mind, TB Pro is a hosted email service by the Thunderbird team that includes email, contacts, calendar, secure file sending, and an appointment system that lets people book time with you.

It costs $6/month (paid yearly) and for that you get:

30 GB of mail storage
60 GB of Send storage
15 Email aliases
3 custom domains

My initial thoughts

So here's my thoughts - of which I have many, so I'll just list them out, then pick a few to talk about in more detail. Otherwise this will be a very long post.

No webmail, it's being worked on though.
Was easy to setup on the Thunderbird app - just had to login (my Zoho mail account auto-detects server settings, so not much harder though).
Doesn't configure aliases automatically in Thunderbird.
Prompts to add calendar and contacts via a single click when setting up in Thunderbird. That was a nice touch.
No way to export all DNS records as a zone file when adding a custom domain.
I think the 15 alias/3 domain limit is arbitrary and pointless.
If you setup a catch-all for a custom domain, you can send from [anything]@ which negates the 15 alias limitation.
Appointments app is weird.
Couldn't work out how to setup Send in Thunderbird.
Admin UI is clunky and has a number of UI issues.
No option to add additional mailboxes (understandable as this is a preview).
30GB is way too much storage for me. I'd like to see smaller, cheaper tiers.

I think the lack of webmail is a huge miss. Every email hosting service I can think of comes with webmail - many people access their mail on desktop via the browser, so I'd have liked to see that up front.

Having said that, maybe that's not the market Thunderbird are going for with this service. If so, maybe a lack of webmail is fine. I'd prefer to have the flexibility to check my mail from anywhere though.

I don't understand the 15 alias and 3 domain limitation. They cost nothing - they're just a line in a config file. Plus, adding a catch-all allows you to both send and receive email to/from [anything]@yourdomain.com, which renders the alias limit even more pointless.

I'd like to see these limitations removed.

Appointment service

The Appointment feature lets people book time with you directly. Think Calendly, baked into your email service. If you're a freelancer or consultant who lives and dies by booking links, that's probably a nice convenience. For everyone else, it's likely redundant.

Those who need it probably have a solution already, and those who don't will just ignore it. I'm in the latter camp, so there's no value for me.

Thundermail Appointments

Send service

Unfortunately I couldn't test the Send service. On the dashboard it says:

To use Send, you must enable it in Thunderbird Desktop. Download the app and sign in to Thunderbird Pro from the Thunderbird menu.

For the life of me I couldn't find an option for Send within Thunderbird, so I couldn't test. Shame.

I'm using the Flatpak, which is currently on v140.10.1, and I see v150 is out, so that may be why. But the Flatpak is maintained by the Thunderbird team, so I would have expected this to all be sorted before the allowed paying customers to get their hands on Pro.

There is a support card on the Send dashboard, with an option to get help. Clicking that opens the Thunderbird docs in a new tab, showing nothing but a notice box containing $ thunderbird --version=pro. So something is broken.

Speaking of broken things, there were a number of other ugly UI notices and warning elements that displayed while getting set up. It just lacks polish, which I would have expected to be ironed out by the time consumers are getting their hands on it.

Final thoughts

If I'm honest, my first impressions are underwhelming. I get that this is an early preview but for the price, services like Zoho and Fastmail are better services, and better value for money.

I don't regret signing up though - it's important to support open source services, and as Thunderbird Pro matures, it will hopefully evolve into a service that can contend with the OG's in this space.

If it does, I'll consider moving over fully. But for now, I'm considering my subscription a donation to Thunderbird, as I'm a very happy user of their email app.

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