Shellsharks Blogroll - BlogFlock

Copyright and DMCA Best Practices for Fediverse Operators - Werd I/O

2026-04-22T15:11:14.000Z

A useful guide for anyone who is running their own community space — which includes folks running Mastodon instances, Bluesky hosts, RSS services, and so on. As the author explains in the preamble, there’s the potential for “massive, unpredictable financial liability”. It’s therefore really important to find ways to limit risk.

A lot of this is common sense:

“Finally, make sure that nothing you post or advertise actively encourages copyright infringement. For example, don’t post examples of users uploading copyrighted music or video without permission, or insinuate that your server is a good place for infringing content.”

Some of it is less obvious but still important. For example, responding promptly to DMCA notices — and not ignoring them regardless of technicalities — is one place where a less-savvy operator might fall over.

It’s easy to imagine compliance as a service for these kinds of operators, baked into the platforms themselves. So if you install a Mastodon instance and you could be subject to US law (which isn’t limited to instances operating in the US), there could be an easy way to set up with a service to handle all that for you. It could sit right alongside trust and safety services that are more aligned for community safety.

[Link]

New games on hold, old games return - Joel's Log Files

2026-04-22T15:00:00.000Z

In all honesty, this is basically just another post to talk about games I haven’t finished yet but that have been very fun, so I just want to go on a quick ramble about how good they have been so far.

Some are on hold but still worth bringing up, and some I started over—after abandoning them for years—all of a sudden, and continued to play because they’re fun!

I am not sure what gets me to abandon games or put them on hiatus and just start new things instead. But it’s okay, I don’t really care that much.

New games on hold

The definition of new here is a little strange, I basically mean new to me, games that I started and played a bunch and now they’re abandoned, only temporarily, I hope.

I guess I have to talk about The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. That’s the first modern open world game that I’ve played on my Switch, for more than 60 hours by now. It still is very little compared to the playtimes other people have shared out there and I can see why.

Breath of the Wild has brought me so much joy, at the time I even purchased the DLC expansion, just to have more things to do. I must admit though, that some steam was lost. Not because the game is bad, but because ever since the Switch 2 came out I’ve been interested on playing the game with the improved performance that come with the new device. I pay for Switch Online + Expansion Pack so I wouldn’t have to pay any extra to enjoy them.

Perhaps, since I’ve decided not to buy a Switch 2 yet—unless the Ocarina of Time remake becomes a reality—I probably should give a spin to exploring Hyrule once more. There was not much story left, but alas, my procrastination is stronger.

Hollow Knight Silksong is another big game that I’ve been meaning to return to lately. The size of Pharloom is a sight to behold. More than once I’ve thought the map was completed only for new areas to keep showing up again and again. You’ve heard about this game, it’s challenging, it’s intense, it’s beautiful, it’s among the best.

By now, I only have a few side quests to complete, and after those I should be able to unlock the last part of the game, which I’m still, thankfully, very much blind on.

It has been a few months since I’ve played this one, I think I need to get used to the controls again, but I will manage somehow.

Another game worth bringing up here is Outer Wilds, which I started playing alongside the new year, catching me by complete surprise and sucking me into its universe for many days in a row, as I explored through the vastness of the solar system.

It has given me so much joy, the discoveries and mechanics were so mind-blowing that I could only stare with my jaw dropped as the game kept breaking what I thought I knew every single time. I am still not sure what got me to stop on my tracks.

I will blame my own laziness, as I got stuck in one section and couldn’t bother to find my way there again. I really should get over it though, it wasn’t a big deal. And of course, I can always just go elsewhere and keept uncovering other secrets, because it’s just that kind of game.

Old games I started over

And here, it’s old games as in “games I played a lot, a long time ago and decided to start them over because of it”, or something like that.

The first one I need to mention here is Terranigma, an old title for the Super Nintendo that I learned about maybe seven or so years ago. It was a game that caught my attention since it never made it to the Americas, and was considered to be a hidden gem of the platform.

When I first played it, I remember very well convincing a few streamers and YouTubers to give it a go, it was one of my proudest achievements at the time, but I never finished the game myself, abandoning it for now reason after13 hours or so.

This year, I returned to it when I say some people started it this year, and it has been a joy! The combat in this game is great for the time, I love how I can almost always be on the move, dashing through enemies and completing dungeons. Definitely plan to keep going with it.

Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker, however, is a title that I really didn’t expect to return, I was interested during the PSP season last year, but never bothered, I was plenty happy playing Ys, I guess.

Last time I played it, 8 years ago or so, I got stuck on a boss fight against an AI-powered vehicle after four hours or so of gameplay. I couldn’t figure it out and I have no idea why I didn’t look up a guide. The game was a joy, I actually thought I played it for at least ten hours, but nope, I gave up so quick on it, pathetic.

This time, much more accustomed to gaming as a whole, I’ve managed to surpass that battle, and even double Mr playtime by now. I am enjoying this game a lot, and I’m glad I gave it another shot, as it’s perfect for my work commutes right now.

Finally, one of the recent games I beat, Resident Evil 2 has to belong here as well, I tried it out on my PSP first, at some point in 2018. I made little progress on it, reaching the Police Station and being a bit too scared to keep playing it.

I believe that I was also rather invested on Suikoden 2 at the time, which was more appealing to me, I must say. But well that one’s on hold too,

And I also have the remake for Switch, but that’s a other story.

But now? I have completed Leon A and Claire B, and I can see myself doing so much more. The game has more modes and difficulties and all of that, I’m actually kind of looking forward to it, but, maybe I’ll need to return to RE3 first.

Finishing thoughts

As I stated when I started, I just wanted to write about some videogames, I guess, and hopefully inspire someone to play along, or check the backlog and pick something already.

What are some of the titles that you haven’t returned to in a long time? What is the game you are currently obsessed with?

Perhaps I should not ask, I already have so many games on my list, and I already endangered my playthrough of Peace Walker because I purchased Vampire Crawlers this morning, so, send help…

This is day 55 of #100DaysToOffload

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[RSS Club] How do you preserve an RSS feed? - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-04-22T11:34:46.000Z

Psssst! This top secret post is only available to RSS subscribers!

I was sent this thought-provoking blog post called "The Necessary Pain Involved in Blogging (if you want your work to be preserved beyond your lifespan)".

In it, Martin Paul Eve makes the case that trying to preserve a blog is difficult. I mostly agree with him (although think he's perhaps a little hair-shirted about it) and it made me think about what I do in terms of preservation.

This feed is captured by the Internet Archive. That's been useful on the rare occasions where my posts have been corrupted and I don't have a backup.

I got my blog an ISSN. I guess in theory this mean the British Library have a right to archive it? But I haven't looked in to whether that is the case.

I don't store my posts in a git repository. Perhaps I should?

I like the idea of WordPress's 100 year domain name but I'm not sure if I trust the current owner not to completely shit the bed. And it's hard to justify £31k on a vanity project.

I'm not a scholar, so using something like Rogue Scholar feels inappropriate. My content also isn't Creative Commons licenced (perhaps it should be?).

If you have a good solution for a long-term, stable, and relatively cheap method of preserving a blog (and its RSS feed) please drop me a comment via your favourite method.

Living the indie web life - James' Coffee Blog

2026-04-22T00:00:00.000Z

In 2018, David and Chris recorded a podcast episode about the indie web in which the topic “living the indie web life” came up. As soon as I heard the phrase, I thought to myself: what does living the indie web life mean to me?

This evening I hosted an online Homebrew Website Club, a meetup where people from around the world get together to chat about all things personal websites. We chat about writing, publishing, organising our thoughts on the web, the potentials of the web as a medium, HTML and CSS, and more. The meetup is a forum for informal chat – we don’t expect familiarity with any topic. If you are interested in personal websites, you are most welcome.

During the meeting, Ana shared a cross-stitch of the IndieWeb community logo (so amazing!), which she then posted about on Mastodon after the meetup. I responded to the Mastodon post from my own website, publishing a response and syndicating it using Brid.gy Fed so that it would show up in response to Ana’s post. Here is my original post, and here is the version on Mastodon.

I found out about Ana’s post via Artemis, the web reader I maintain; I follow Ana’s Mastodon posts from there. On Artemis today I also saw visual art from an arts publication I follow, learned that The Met museum publishes archival materials “from the vaults”, read a kind comment someone left on my guestbook, read about an idea that opened my mind, learned about how my local government is making voting spaces more accessible, and more.

The last three paragraphs summarise my day in the life on the indie web, and represent what I feel a slice of the indie web life can be like. At the heart of the indie web is people and conversation, with a bit of purposefully-designed technology that helps us stay connected. At the heart of the indie web is community, because to build a better web we need to work together.

Earlier this week, I wrote in my notes:

I don’t want to give my power away when it comes to technology. I don’t want anyone else to have to give their power away either.

Living the indie web life, to me, means resisting giving my power away when it comes to how I express myself on the web. I want to express myself in my own way, and stay connected to my friends without having to go through a third-party intermediary who doesn’t have my best interests at heart.

Because I have a website, I can share these words directly with you, and know they will show up in the way I want them to without adverts or tracking. Indeed, this website may be mine, but the words are for you.

Living the indie web life to me also means helping others to take control of their web presence, too. I host events because I want to create space for discussions – for people to think about and discuss and digest the question "how do I want to make my own spaces on the web?" I made Artemis available for others to use because I found the idea of a web reader that updates once per day useful. I thought other people might find the software useful, too.

What does living the indie web life mean to you?

This post was syndicated to IndieNews.

Artemis David and Chris recorded a podcast episode about the indie web posted about on Mastodon after the meetup here is the version on Mastodon Homebrew Website Club Here is my original post syndicated to IndieNews.

Read "Scam messages offering ships safe transit through Hormuz, security firm warns" - Molly White's activity feed

2026-04-21T13:51:46.000Z

Read:

“Scam messages offering ships safe transit through Hormuz, security firm warns”.

Reuters in Reuters. Published April 21, 2026.

Fraudulent messages promising safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for cryptocurrency have been sent to some shipping companies whose vessels are stranded west of the waterway, Greek maritime risk management ‌firm MARISKS has warned.

Better TTS on Linux - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-04-21T11:34:07.000Z

The venerable eSpeak is a mainstay of Linux distributions. It is a clever Text-To-Speech (TTS) program which will read aloud the written word using a phenomenally wide variety of languages and accents.

The only problem is that it sounds robotic. It has the same vocal fidelity as a 1980s Speak 'n' Spell toy. Monotonous, clipped, and painful to listen to. For some people, this is a feature, not a bug. I have blind friends who are so used to eSpeak that they can crank it up to hundreds of words per minute and navigate through complex documents with ease.

For the rest of us, it is a steep and unpleasant learning curve.

There are lots of modern TTS programs using all sorts of advanced AI. Many of them are paywalled or require you to post your text to a webserver - with all the privacy and latency problems that causes. Some are restricted to high-powered GPUs or other expensive equipment.

Piper is different. It is local first, runs quickly on modest hardware, and is open source.

The easiest way to install it on Linux is to use Pied - a simple GUI which allows you to select languages, listen to accents, and then install them.

It will change your speech-dispatcher to use the new Piper voice. That means it is immediately available to your Linux DE's accessibility service and to apps like Firefox.

I now have a reassuring Scottish lady speaking out everything on my computer.

Rainbow; moon - James' Coffee Blog

2026-04-21T00:00:00.000Z

The kitchen was scattered with rainbows as the sun shone through the frosted glass. Maybe the glass was put there to make rainbows; what was the architect thinking when they designed this place? I saw the shadows of my head and my hair cast onto the cabinets. Can I make a shadow puppet? I raised my hands and tried to make shapes. My favourite was the love heart, which, through the way the light was cast into the room, had another love heart in a slightly lighter shade of grey behind it. We made a double heart.

I went to look out the window as the sun set and noticed the moon at the top of the sky. The sun and the moon, together – the place where there was the light that made the rainbows will soon be of the moon: a more delicate light in the night sky. The moon will be surrounded by a sea of stars. There may be clouds – there so often are – but we can still see the stars even if they are hidden.

Last night, I even thought the clouds gave beauty to the night sky by the way that the light from the moon was dampened by, but still shone through, the grey; by how the light passed through.

Quinceañera, Metal Gear Solid, Book shopping! - W16 - Joel's Log Files

2026-04-20T21:30:00.000Z

Welcome, to my week notes! Can you believe that we are almost done with April already? There have been a lot of things going on lately, but hey, at the very least I keep reading on my XTEINK X4 and nudging other people to buy it too, because it sparks joy.

Jokes aside, here are some of the things that happened between April 14 to 20, from the year 2026!

📕 Discovered a super cool plugin for Koreader which let’s you modify the UI in a really awesome way. It basically fixes the biggest caveat with the software, as it’s now much simpler and user-friendly! I switched on the spot, not looking back now. The plugin is SimpleUI, go and get it! I decided to modify the layout on mine and it displays some stats now, very neat.
🔋 Thought for a second that my PSP was dead. It wouldn’t turn on, I tried plugging it and the charging indicator wouldn’t light up. Thankfully, I still have my original battery—I replaced it with an Ostent one a while back—and that let me turn it on to charge, then swap back to my current battery. I think simply connecting the AC adapter without a battery would have worked too, alas, it’s more than alive and well.
🎮 Messed around with my Anbernic RG35XX SP, using PortMaster to install Fallout on it! Unfortunately, the control scheme depended on analog sticks, which my handheld lacks. I also setup AM2R, which works wonderfully after messing around a bit with the screen ratio. I am looking forward to trying it that one, but I also want to continue with Fallout on my laptop at some point.
📺 My YouTube algorithm was on a roll this week, if you usually skip my video links, or don’t even scroll down that far for these posts, I encourage you to check this time, I actually learned quite a bit from these videos, and I’m sure at least one of them will be interesting to you too.
🟩 Returned to play daily word games, which I was very into not that long ago. I still prefer and play Tiled Words the most! Although I haven’t made a streak yet, I keep forgetting to play every once in a while.
🎂 There was a Quinceañera party for one of our church members! It was a fun time. There was party and a small ceremony to celebrate! I edited a video compiling memories of her life, which took me longer than I’d like to admit, the family sent me lots of photos.
📚 Purchased a few books from the Kobo store. I must say a lot of the time my purchases were through… “unofficial”… means. But not this time! Here is a list, let me know which one to start first:
- Aurora by Kim Stanley Roninson
- Dawn by Octavia E. Butler
- The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
- The Dispossesed by Ursula K. Le Guin
- Hyperion by Dan Simmons
- The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
- Welcome to Night Vale and
- Alice Isn’t Dead by Joseph Fink
- The Pearl by John Steinbeck

Reading

I continued my reading of Clarkesworld Magazine #211, and I’m halfway there with The Indomitable Captain Holli, a novella that I thought I’d hate at first, and then it kept unraveling and revealing some incredible stuff going on and well, it hooked me real good.

As for manga, Fly Me To The Moon remains fun. I’m on chapter 262 and there’s this little arc with a mock exam competition that I’ve enjoyed a bit. Also a relatively new character about to uncover a certain secret that is very intriguing to me!

Also catched up on the weekly chapter of Spy x Family and Blue Lock, as awesome as ever.

Gaming

I’m not sure what took over me, but I started Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker on my PSP! I tried this title a long time ago, around 2017 or so when I first got into PSP gaming. Unfortunately, I pretty much played the game wrong, I guess, and I got to a boss fight that I just couldn’t figure out. I decided to start over and get used to the game again. So far I’ve had a lot of fun. The game is divided in short mission segments. Between each mission you can also do some base management and from there develop new weapons and items.

Anyway, the main gameplay is stealth, and so far it’s been fun. The controls took a bit of getting used to but I stuck with the “Hunter” control type (based on the Monster Hunter games) and haven’t looked back. The latest mission I’m doing is a boss fight against an unmanned vehicle, the same one that I never completed years ago. I’ll definitely do it this time!

I continued my playthrough of Terranigma too, where I completed the last tower, which was the first serious boss fight of the game, against a giant scorpion-like creature. Before that I got a new armor given to me by my childhood friend. and after defeating the monster, I’m looking for the secret areas in the underworld. I already found one of them!

Last but not least, I actually continued with Pokémon Emerald Legacy for a bit, up to the first battle against my antagonist! In case you are wondering, I chose Torchic as my starter by the way! I am happy to have my running shoes now too, although I wish there was a way to always toggle them instead of keeping the button pressed. It’s alright though.

Around the Web

This time I mostly watched YouTube while doing a lot of chores, and I gotta say, the video selection this time was super interesting! I hope you check them out. Of course, first I gotta share some good old blogposts from some people I follow!

Blog posts

My Workspaces - This is such a good idea for a blogpost but I’m afraid that I don’t think I have more than two pictures of different things. What a trip though… perhaps I could draw from memory? Anyway read it.
Back In Space - Why do you have to tempt me to try Gemini—the web protocol, not the other ugly thing—again? I will not convert all my markdown posts into that format, nope.
I won’t save you but I’ll show you how (2026-W16) - After a long hiatus, Cassie is back to blogging, and she has some wonderful news to share. Her weeknotes were sorely missed during these trying times, all the best!
This isn’t March - Guess the theme for these weeknotes will be “websites on hiatus that suddenly returned”, so, yeah, nice to have you back Jack, not enough gaming updates.
Fits on a Floppy - Creating code is an art too, so I enjoyed this post which was inspired by some modern programs that would fit on a floppy disk from back in the day!

YouTube

What Did Ancient Humans Do at Night? - This was an incredibly interesting video, and it explains so much. I am actually kind of interested on experimenting with the information shared here.
Why Bad Art Makes Great Games - What an essay this was, and I highly agree. The title is a bit wrong though, it’s more about art direction and being willing to not just go for realism, which is where a lot of modern games default to nowadays.
When Graphics Changed Forever - This was an awesome mini-documentary detailing the technology and improvements between 1996 and 2006 in graphics on both consoles and PCs. It explains a lot in a very approachable way and with a lot of comparisons and visuals which I enjoyed. Always nice to see Resident Evil on a thumbnail.
Air Powered Segment Display: 3D Printed Microfluidic RAM? - My engineering brain was tickling while watching this vide. This is such a fun technology, and I wonder what other applications it may have.
I Solved Connect 4 - I rarely watch videos that deal with pure Math and board games, but this one was a welcome surprise, the extremely satisfying graphis and animations helped out a lot.
Making the most pickproof lock yet - Another wonderful video with a lot of engineering on it. I am no lockpicker, but I am sure Jill, the Master of Unlocking, would have no problem.
Chill Gaming for Busy Adults - A fun Tech Dweeb video that shares some tips and tricks to actually play videogames when you are a responsible adult, or something. I just play videogames idk.

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Published on Citation Needed: "Issue 104 – World Tyranny Financial" - Molly White's activity feed

2026-04-20T19:28:58.000Z

Published an issue of Citation Needed:

Issue 104 – World Tyranny Financial

As the Trump family’s crypto dealings raise more alarms, crypto enforcement is falling to new lows

My Best Sub £100 Purchase - Kev Quirk

2026-04-20T16:50:00.000Z

I was recently listening to an episode of The Idea Roastery about personal life gamechangers and toward the end of the episode, Herman asked Jason:

What is the best purchase you've ever made for less than £100?

For Jason is was an egg poacher, and for Herman it was a coffee grinder. This discussion got me thinking about what mine was, and I really wasn't sure at first. But after some thought, it hit me.

It's my dog, Tia!

She's getting old now, at nearly 14 years of age. But my wife and I got when she was 9 weeks old, after being taken from the litter at just 6 weeks old by some scumbag who ended up dumping her.

She cost us £80, and for that £80 we've had years of love, affection, and friendship from her. She's definitely my game-changer.

She's pretty cool too...

I absolutely love everything about this dog. She's my best friend in the world. She's kind. She's gentle. She's the best at spooning too. Seriously, the best.

As I look back at a life well lived and she heads into her twilight years, we know we don't have long left with her, but my goodness the years we have had have been incredible.

So yeah, Tia is by far the best sub £100 I've ever spent, and probably will ever spend.

Love you, T-bone. x

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

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Note published on April 20, 2026 at 12:40 PM UTC - Molly White's activity feed

2026-04-20T12:40:26.000Z

ghoulish

Book Review: Up - A scientist's guide to the magic above us by Dr Lucy Rogers ★★★★★ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-04-20T11:34:38.000Z

My mate Dr Lucy Rogers has written a book! This is a charming and thought provoking exploration of everything that goes on above our heads. This isn't an impersonal and imperious manuscript, it's a deeply personal and joyful book filled with science, anecdotes, and the thrill of discovery.

It's spectacularly accessible. Written in a relaxed and casual tone, it encourages domestic science. I don't mean bakery, I mean the sorts of observations you can do at home without access to a multi-million pound laboratory. The afterword of the book contains dozens of resources for people who want to get involved in science. Dr Rogers eloquently makes the case that you don't need to dedicate yourself full time - it's perfectly acceptable to engage with it on your own terms.

What I liked most about it was that she gets her hands dirty. It would have been easy to write a literature review from the comfort of a safe and dry office. Instead we get a travelogue of all the places she's been - each trek through the forest, every laboratory, and all the foreign festivals are brilliantly recounted. It's a proper adventure from America's tornado alley down to the Vatican Archives.

I find it remarkable how slow some modern science is. As she points out, "there have been only eight transits of Venus since the telescope was invented" - our knowledge rests on the shoulders of giants, but they can be slow, lumbering beasts.

If, like me, you only have a hazy memory of the science you learned at school, this book will top up your knowledge (and vocabulary). It will reignite your passion and curiosity about the world around you - and make you want to buy a round the world ticket to chase solar eclipses!

How we lost the living Now - Westenberg

2026-04-20T01:01:22.000Z

In 1840, England’s Great Western Railway started running the trains on “railway time” - a single standard, set by Greenwich, instead of the local // solar time each town had kept, independently for centuries.

Before the railway, noon in Bristol happened roughly ten minutes after noon in London, and nobody much gave a damn - they had no reason to. Time was...time. After the railway, people had to care - because a train leaving Paddington at 12 couldn’t mean one thing in London and another thing in Reading, or the passengers would miss it, or the signalmen would have no ability to coordinate, and the whole apparatus would fall apart.

That moment is, I believe, when we started losing our hold on the present.

Before the railway, time belonged to the place where you stood. Your noon was the noon of the sun over your head; a farmer in Wiltshire and a clerk in Liverpool would share a year, and a season, but they didn’t share a minute. The minute was solely the possession of your immediate surroundings, and you owned it.

But the railway needed a common minute - or it couldn’t run.

And then - once we had the common minute - we discovered that it could be commoditised. It could be bought and sold.

In 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor turned the commoditisation of the minute into a science when he published The Principles of Scientific Management - which he had assembled by standing over the shoulder of various factory workers, wielding a stopwatch, breaking their labour into fractions of a minute. He calculated how long it should take to lift a pig iron bar, and how long to carry it across a yard, and how long to drop it onto a pile. He paid workers more, if they hit his numbers, and less if they “whiffed” - and he wrote all of this down in tables which became, eventually, an entire philosophy of industrial productivity...

Taylor’s “innovation” - if we can call it that - was treating a human’s time, and by extension their very mortality, as a commodity priced by the single second; and building on that foundation the idea that time, left unoptimised, was “theft.”

After Taylor, time was something you either used, or you wasted - no third option. The present moment became a quantity.

The telegraph had started this work 70-odd years before. Samuel Morse’s first public transmission in 1844 (“What Hath God Wrought”) collapsed the time between Baltimore and Washington, from days into seconds. The phone would collapse it further, and radio would collapse it for everyone all at once...

Every technological acceleration is framed as a gift of time to all mankind, but every acceleration arrives, in practice, with increased expectations, with increased demand, with more and more pressure. The letter you could answer on your time, because the telegram you had to answer today. The phone call you could ignore in 1950 (because you simply weren’t home to take the call) became a call you had to return in 1985 because the answering machine upped the ante. Then the answering machine was replaced by your mobile phone and (insert montage of technological advances here) by 2026, a 2 hour delay replying to a Slack message became a social failure...

Hartmut Rosa, the German sociologist, wrote a book in 2005 called Beschleunigung - translated as Social Acceleration. It traces this pattern across 3 layers: tech acceleration speeds up the machines, acceleration of social change speeds up the rate at which institutions and relationships change, and and the acceleration of the pace of life speeds up how much we can (or are forced to) cram into a single day. Rosa’s argument is that these layers feed off each other; faster machines let us change faster, which means we need faster machines to keep up, and the loop tightens, and so...

Well, here we are.

The original promise of acceleration was always more free time. Washing machines would give us more leisure, email would cut our labour, automation would give us a 4 day work week, and so on. None of this really happened; a rising floor of expected output swallowed the gains, and so we signed up for more, and we ended up running faster to stay in the same damn place.

And somewhere in the early 2000’s, this crossed a cursed threshold. Before that point, tech was mostly compressing the time between events - the telegram, and the fax, and the email and the IM each shortened the gap between when you sent something and when it arrived; the gap was the thing getting smaller and smaller.

After the smartphone, the gap just...vanished. The feed became real-time, and the notifications constant. Information stopped arriving as discrete, gapped packets and started arriving as a continuous drip, and then a steady flow, and then a firehose, timed by the network’s ambient activity and no longer by anything you happened to be doing. And suddenly, you weren’t receiving mail anymore. You were drowning in a raging river of information.

Paul Virilio, the philosopher, called the condition of real-time media an accident of time itself; he argued that when everything happens at once, nothing actually happens at all, because events lose their distinguishing temporal edges, and the past // present // future collapse into a single undifferentiated smear. A 2021 RescueTime study found that the average knowledge worker checked communication tools roughly every six minutes; other studies put the average smartphone user at around 2,000-3,000 touches per day. We interrupt ourselves, or we get interrupted, enough that sustained attention has become a minority activity. It no longer happens naturally; if it happens at all, it must be scheduled.

Each notification is a tax on the present moment - pulling you into either a micro-past (what did I just see?) or a micro-future (what should I do about this?) while the here and now is skipped over like the intro to a Netflix show. And ironically - we consented to this. We signed up for it without thinking twice. The telegram was imposed on us by commerce, the factory clock by management, but we installed and embraced the push notifications ourselves, app by app, in exchange for convenience - in exchange for acceleration - in exchange for collapse.

If the Now has any place at all, it’s as “content.” We watch an event happen, and we’re already narrating it for a future audience, for a draft post, for a video - as if the event itself isn’t quite real, until it has been recorded in some way. Call it what you want; but it describers a condition in which our tools have trained us to convert the present into its sole acceptable format. It becomes raw material for a feed. You’re standing inside it and outside of it, holding a lens and prepping a caption.

The French sociologist Henri Lefebvre wrote in 1947 about the colonisation of every day life. He saw the structure of a world that would eventually (perhaps, inevitably) produce Instagram. Commerce, and then bureaucracy each laid claim to a bigger piece of the ordinary every day, until the ordinary itself became a product. A few decades later, we started calling that product “content.” Not a bad word for it, actually, considering that Content only has to be Contained - it doesn’t have to offer anything of value on its own.

We know this is happening - all of us. We talk about it constantly - I just did, and you just read it, and we both probably felt briefly quite pleased with ourselves for noticing and that’s part of the problem too...every other bestseller is about mindfulness and slow living, digital detoxes and offline retreats, sabbath practices and meditation apps that send you push notifications reminding your to experience the moment.

Silence is a malfunction. Grief is harder now, because to grieve means to sit inside a moment, and we’ve lost the practice of it. Joy is thinner, because joy needs a present it can occupy, and the present has been divided into micro-slices already claimed by the next scroll, the next ping, and the next thing we should be looking at instead...

The generational data is looking bleak.

In his 2024 book The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt argued that the cohort born after 1995 - the first to get smartphones before they were fully developed - show a sharp increase in anxiety, depression and self-harm; and the increase tracks against the rollout of social media. Haidt’s causal story might be contested, but the numbers aren’t. We’re all a little broken. We’re all breaking a little more.

My own take is that it’s not only about screen time, it’s about a generation who never had the chance to experience a present moment, without a second channel running underneath it all. The backchannel of the phone, the draft message, the group chat, the algorithm etc is all humming under whatever is supposedly happening in the room, until the hum gets so loud it takes over everything else. A childhood of partial presence creates an adulthood where you can’t watch Sabrina Carpenter and Madonna share the stage without the intermediate of an iPhone camera and screen...

The older generations lost the present slowly, and can still remember what it was like to have one. The younger are trying to reconstruct it from second principles, if at all.

I have no program to offer here. The essays that end with a neat 5-step plan to reclaim attention are almost without exception published by those who sell courses, and may my bank account forgive me, I still don’t have such a product. I do think the present can return in small pockets, and under specific conditions - when you make something with your hands, and the thing resits, when you’re looking after your friend’s dog, who is the best dog in the world, who has no opinion about the future, in the middle of a long walk and after the internal monologue has run out of fresh grievances...

It returns when the compressors and the accelerators are out of reach for long enough that your nervous system remembers it has other settings.

The railway clock runs across server farms in places you have probably never been and will probably never go. The minute is measured by atomic oscillation and shopped out, in real time, to the watch on your wrist, the phone in your pocket, the Tesla in your driveway, the smart fridge that can tweet better than it can moderate its internal temperature etc., synced to the same atomic pulse.

It’s the same common minute. But it’s only ever the minute gone by or the minute yet to come. The minute we used to have and hold is gone.

Westenberg is designed, built and funded by my solo-powered agency, Studio Self. Reach out and work with me:

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Custard creams - James' Coffee Blog

2026-04-20T00:00:00.000Z

Behind the counter in a coffee shop I visited last week there was a whiteboard which read [1]:

Sunday debate:

Custard creams or chocolate bourbons

There were dozens of tally marks on the board and counts from a social media poll. The results were:

Custard creams: 212
Bourbons: 171

I love both biscuits, so if there were a both option I would have voted as such; if I had to pick one, it would be custard creams, though. Otherwise, I might have said fig rolls, a biscuit I had for the first time in ages this week. Fig rolls may not have been an option, but they sure are tasty.

[1]: Given I saw the whiteboard on a week day, I assume the debate was going to run for a week, despite the title being "Sunday debate". In any case, any day is a good day to chat about biscuits.

The Technological Republic, in brief - Werd I/O

2026-04-19T16:35:10.000Z

[Palantir]

Palantir CEO Alex Karp wrote a book last year called the Technological Republic, but perhaps because it didn’t have the impact he hoped, the company posted a tweet thread (and LinkedIn post, etc) that summarizes its core points. Which are, to be clear, an argument for hard-right nationalism — complete with remilitarization and implied cultural hierarchy — and fusing Silicon Valley with the national security state.

In Karp’s world, Silicon Valley innovators have an obligation to build weapons through a kind of moral debt to the country. He also wants to see Germany and Japan re-militarized, escalating tensions that will see his company make more money through those arms sales — particularly as his manifesto declares that AI weapons, exactly of the kind he happens to sell, are an inevitable future of military action.

He says we should be more tolerant of billionaires and scrutinize their private lives less, while being less tolerant of other cultures. He declares that no nation has advanced progressive values more than the US (a tough sell in itself), but then recites a litany of anti-progressive ideas. He takes time to defend Elon Musk by name.

He also furthers the idea that people who further progressive ideas are some kind of “elite”, instead of what they actually are: people from all slices of life, including working class unions, who want to have a more inclusive, more peaceful society.

Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins has a great Bluesky thread that lays out the issues plainly:

“Point 21 is the giveaway, some cultures produce "wonders," others are "regressive and harmful." Once you accept that hierarchy, you've quietly been given permission to apply different standards of verification to different actors. The form of verification stays, but the democratic function doesn’t.

This is what verification looks like once national identity sits above method. Rigorous when it's pointed at adversaries, conveniently absent when it's pointed at us. Symmetric, evidence-led investigation of allied conduct, exactly what Bellingcat does, becomes the thing the worldview can't tolerate”

In short, I find this offensive, often contradictory, and terrifying in equal measure. It makes clear that Palantir, its associates, and companies like it (Anduril, for example) are a threat to a democratic, peaceful, inclusive society. There’s no point in being cautious or pulling punches; it must be opposed.

[Link]

Reprojecting Dual Fisheye Videos to Equirectangular (LG 360) - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-04-19T11:34:32.000Z

I still use my obsolete LG 360 Camera. When copying MP4 videos from its SD card, they come out in "Dual Fisheye" format - which looks like this:

VLC and YouTube will only play "Equirectangular" videos in spherical mode. So, how to convert a dual fisheye to equirectangualr?

The Simple Way

ffmpeg \
  -i original.mp4 \
  -vf "v360=input=dfisheye:output=equirect:ih_fov=189:iv_fov=189" \
  360.mp4

However, this has some "quirks".

The first part of the video filter is v360=input=dfisheye:output=equirect - that just says to use the 360 filter on an input which is dual fisheye and then output in equirectangular.

The next part is :ih_fov=189:iv_fov=189 which says that the input video has a horizontal and vertical field of view of 189°. That's a weird number, right?

You'd kind of expect each lens to be 180°, right? Here's what happens if :ih_fov=180:iv_fov=180 is used:

The lenses overlaps a little bit. So using 180° means that certain portions are duplicated.

I think the lenses technically offer 200°, but the physical casing prevents all of that from being viewed. I got to the value of 189° by trial and error. Mostly error! Using :ih_fov=189:iv_fov=189 get this image which has less overlap:

It isn't perfect - but it preserves most of the image coherence.

Cut Off Images

There's another thing worth noticing - the top, right, bottom, and left "corners" of the circle are cut off. If the image sensor captured everything, the resultant fisheye would look something like this:

I tried repaging the video to include the gaps, but it didn't make any noticeable difference.

Making Equirectangular Videos Work With VLC

Sadly, ffmpeg will not write the metadata necessary to let playback devices know the video is spherical. Instead, according to Bino3D, you have to use exiftool like so:

exiftool \
        -XMP-GSpherical:Spherical="true" \
        -XMP-GSpherical:Stitched="true" \
        -XMP-GSpherical:ProjectionType="equirectangular" \
        video.mp4

Putting It All Together

The LG 360 records audio in 5.1 surround using AAC. That's already fairly well compressed, so there's no point squashing it down to Opus.

The default video codec is h264, but the picture is going to be reprojected, so quality is always going to take a bit of a hit. Pick whichever code you like to give the best balance of quality, file size, and encoding time.

Run:

ffmpeg \
  -i original.mp4 \
  -vf "v360=input=dfisheye:output=equirect:ih_fov=189:iv_fov=189" \
  -c:v libx265 -preset fast -crf 28 -c:a copy \
  out.mp4; exiftool \
        -XMP-GSpherical:Spherical="true" \
        -XMP-GSpherical:Stitched="true" \
        -XMP-GSpherical:ProjectionType="equirectangular" \
        out.mp4

That will produce a reasonable equirectangular file suitable for viewing in VLC or in VR.

If this has been useful to you, please stick a comment in the box!

Finished reading Devil's Gun - Molly White's activity feed

2026-04-18T02:00:46.000Z

Finished reading:

Disco Space Opera series, book 2.

Devil's Gun

by Cat Rambo.

Published 2023. 288 pages.

Started April 14, 2026; completed April 17, 2026.

Note published on April 17, 2026 at 4:11 PM UTC - Molly White's activity feed

2026-04-17T16:11:15.000Z

as someone with an anxiety disorder who gets bad brain fog during very anxious periods, choosing software engineering and then writing as careers was certainly a series of decisions

Read "How Silicon Valley Humiliated the Democrats" - Molly White's activity feed

2026-04-17T13:37:40.000Z

Read:

“How Silicon Valley Humiliated the Democrats”.

Alexis Goldstein in The New Republic. Published April 16, 2026.

When will they learn? The party remains far too solicitous of an industry that’s rewarded their fealty with four years of Trump and untold damage to democracy.

Book Review: How To Kill A Witch - A Guide For The Patriarchy by Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi ★★★⯪☆ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-04-17T11:34:26.000Z

After reading The Wicked of the Earth, I wanted to understand some of the history behind the stories. Why were women⁰ accused of being witches? What really happened in those trials? What are the modern consequences of those events?

This is the story of the Scottish Witch Trials - with brief forays into England and abroad. It examines the central tension of whether witchcraft was real to the accusers, or just a convenient means to oppress troublesome women. The descriptions of the imprisonment, torture, and state-sanctioned murder is visceral and horrific.

It's also rather stark in its modern assessment of the historic context:

Nonetheless, it’s important to remember it was a proper legal trial, with evidence being put forward and the judge assessing it and carrying out legal tests. Some people think that witchcraft trials were carried out by angry peasants waving pitchforks. Perhaps this is a more acceptable way for a modern person to think about it. No one wants to think that a judicial system can get it so wrong. But it did, with catastrophic consequences for those accused.

The book is mostly good, it's a spin off from the Witches Of Scotland podcast and that's reflected in the writing. As with any parasocial¹ entertainment, it attempts to centre the authors and bring the audience along for the ride - so there's lots of descriptions of the libraries the authors visit, how things make them feel, how enamoured they are with their podcast guests. I found it a little distracting, but it's obviously right for their main audience.

Similarly, there's an attempt to bring the past to life by imagining a little monologue from various historic figures. I found that a little unconvincing; I dislike putting words in peoples' mouths. But with sparse primary documentation, that may be the best way to bring these characters to life. It's also well illustrated. Too many books eschew pictures - but this has a nice collection of woodcuts and portraits to contextualise what we're reading about.

One little nitpick, the book makes the claims:

Life was hard and life expectancy was around 35

and

Lilias was an old woman, at least 60 years old and possibly as old as 80. At a time when life expectancy was much lower than it is now, even the lower estimate was still a considerable age.

That's not quite right. Although the average life expectancy was low, that's the average at birth - with a large number of infant mortalities dragging down the average. When you look at the full data, you'll see people used to live long lives even in the distant past.

In a way, it reminds me of Invisible Women. A national tragedy hidden from view.

It builds to a rousing end. There are parts of the world where witchcraft is still taken seriously - with devastating consequences. The febrile atmosphere which led to unfounded accusations against women is still prevalent even in modern societies.

And a small number of men. But this is firmly focused on the overwhelming majority. ↩︎
As opposed to paranormal. ↩︎