Shellsharks Blogroll - BlogFlock

Notable links: May 29, 2026 - Werd I/O

2026-05-30T03:27:54.000Z

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.

Know your Point C

There’s so much packed into this idea:

“You started at Point A. Now you're at Point B. To reach your big goal, you don't just need to paint a picture of the long-term vision. You need to sell Point C: the concrete, vivid destination you will take yourself, your team, and your company to over the next twelve to twenty-four months.”

I’ve worked with so many teams where the Point C is essentially defined as: “continue existing”. And on one level, sure, it may be a good idea to find a sustainable path and keep plugging along. But how are you supposed to rally your team and community around that vision? It becomes an argument for treading water, and worse, a way to avoid making an opinionated decision about where the team should head.

Every team needs a mission (why it exists in the first place), a vision (the world it intends to create), and a strategy (the concrete steps to get there). The Point C is a well-defined, strategic, coherent lily pad on the way to that vision. Corey calls it the next fundable lily pad: what “fundable” means probably varies on your context, but it’s always a big decision milestone for your team.

Not every team finds it easy to know where it’s going. I like Corey’s point about prototyping potential futures, and particularly the way it should be undertaken as a collective activity. Implicit is that there needs to be an underlying “why”: why is this the Point C that this team needs to head to? What will you be able to do from there? Is this anchored in the needs of your community — the people you’re trying to serve? Does it hang together as a vision that improves their lives, serves the needs of your business, and inspires the team who will make it real?

And it’s worth asking: who on your team is empowered to define this? Is anyone? And if the answer is “no”, how might that change?

In his first encyclical, Pope Leo XIV says AI must serve humanity, not the powerful few

It’s perhaps a sign of how integrated technology is into society that this is a quote from the actual Pope:

“AI tends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources, expertise and access to data. Small but highly influential groups can shape information and consumption patterns, influence democratic processes and steer economic dynamics to their own advantage, undermining social justice and solidarity among peoples.”

I’m not religious, and had to look up what an ‌encyclical is. It’s a formal letter that the Pope writes to his Bishops and “people of good will”. That he chose to spend his first one talking about the adverse power dynamics and power centralization inherent to artificial intelligence is significant.

“Technology is never neutral,” the Pope wrote. I agree, of course; this is my entire career thesis. I very much appreciate the implication that decentralizing power and focusing on the humanity of individuals and communities is the ethical, moral path. If you’d asked me at any time in the past if I thought it would be something advocated for by the Pope, I would have laughed in your face, but it’s nice to be surprised.

More importantly, this is absolutely a discussion that’s worthy of focus. As technology becomes more and more ingrained in society — with people now making very consequential decisions informed by AI systems, whether they should be or not — how those systems are built, who they benefit, and what achieving equity looks like in a world where they dominate could not be more important. The Pope’s on-side; are you?

Data Centers Now Consume 6% of US Electricity—and the Backlash Has Begun

When the dotcom boom came to a crashing end, the companies behind it imploded in sometimes spectacular ways, but the infrastructure they built continued to exist. That in turn laid the groundwork for Web 2.0, the cloud revolution, and everything that came afterwards.

When we think about the AI boom, we should consider what will be left behind: the infrastructure precedents being set that will be with us for a generation. If I was a betting person (I’m not), I’d put money down on the current crop of AI tech companies imploding at some point, with their assets acquired by companies like Microsoft and Google (who already own the majority of data centers). The applications will flounder, but the data centers will remain — and the energy infrastructure that enables them.

As the linked article notes:

“Data centers have always been energy-hungry, but the AI explosion is causing computing demand to skyrocket. The biggest data centers now consume as much electricity as small cities and are proliferating at breakneck speed.”

Data centers now account for 6% of US energy use, and their water use is similarly staggering. 13% of the underlying workloads are useless: zombie processes that have been left running by inattentive owners whose priorities now lie elsewhere. Beyond the environmental impacts, which are no joke, data center consumption is pushing up people’s bills and disrupting communities. And beyond that, they push up real estate costs, with real knock-on effects for communities. It’s no surprise, then, that legislation is being written to limit their growth.

It’s not that we shouldn’t have data centers. But their footprint is enormous, and the effects are sometimes disastrous. We need to consider the effect on people’s quality of life more than the impact to GDP, not least because economic indicators like these don’t actually show if people’s lives are improving.

It’ll be an arms race: developers are considering building distributed data centers into people’s homes, making them harder to regulate. Presumably homeowners will be sold on the upside, but when the market crashes will be saddled with obsolete tech that comes at a cost to them.

My take: require them to be built with self-sufficient renewable energy that pushes excess capacity to the grid and encourage the development of new architectures that don’t require water cooling to the same degree. Outlaw the widespread practice of building data centers using shell companies that obscure their real ownership. And ensure they are taxed robustly nationwide, so that revenues can benefit local communities.

In a few years, when the hype cycle dies down and people understand the capabilities and limitations of AI with clearer eyes, we’ll have a ton of new infrastructure that can’t easily be turned down — and we will have set energy consumption precedents that will be hard to reverse. Now is the time to set the right standards, and for communities to push back against what they won’t tolerate.

The Web Is Being Made Accessible for AI, Not People

This is worth sitting with:

“The modern web, originally built for sighted humans using browsers, is now being redesigned for a new kind of user.

What these developers are offering their AI visitors is essentially an accessibility accommodation. […] But when the audience is a disabled person, it has historically been treated as an afterthought. Structured, concise text-based representations of complex content are almost exactly the kind of accommodation that blind and low-vision screen reader users have spent decades requesting from web developers, largely in vain.”

One of the oddest parts of the AI shift is that people are much more willing to do things for LLMs that they should have been doing for human beings all along. Accessibility is clearly an important one: 95% of websites have accessibility flaws, and convincing teams to allocate time for accessibility concerns can be like pulling teeth. But now that similar affordances are required for LLM use, people are leaping over themselves to implement them.

The same goes for specifications and documentation. Often, these have been afterthoughts; policies have been hand-waved rather than concretely written down in ways that people can point to. Sometimes it’s even made explicit that this is to preserve manager optionality. But now that LLMs need more concrete instructions in order to behave well, specifications, documents, plans, and policies have rocketed up the priority list.

It would be beautiful if these needs converged, but as the article notes, the affordances needed by screen readers and LLMs are different. Similarly, documentation and planning documents aimed at an LLM are coercive in nature: they’re designed to force the software to do the right thing, rather than to provide background as to why something is the case.

The simple truth is that there is clearly a perception, in some quarters, that there is a stronger productivity gain from doing this work to serve AI than doing it to serve real human people. That’s quite a dystopian idea, particularly as, even if you don’t care about people with disabilities or your own colleagues, doing those things for humans clearly actually has a real benefit. Making your site more usable allows more people to interact with your work and improves your search engine performance. Writing clear documentation and policies allows your colleagues to spend less time figuring out what to do.

But you can’t measure those things neatly. The cause and effect aren’t immediately tethered; managers don’t see a boost they can cleanly ascribe to this work. In contrast, you know pretty instantly whether the AI you’ve trained on your documentation is doing the right thing.

More importantly, whereas accessibility affordances provide new abilities for vulnerable people, an AI affordance provides new abilities for people with power. And that’s probably the heart of it.

An accessible, nuanced piece from Saskia Welch about marketing the open social web, which translates easily to being a piece about marketing any transformative technology.

“Fediverse this, Social Web that, no one cares!

Genuinely, no one cares. And, even if you get them to start caring, they do so in the complete opposite direction we've been heading with our messy, undoubtedly decentralised, marketing.”

When we’re building as part of an open source movement (or any kind of ideological movement), we run the risk of gauging our decisions based on the reactions of the movement itself. It’s easy to say that you can’t build a feature, or talk about your project in a particular way, because the community won’t like it. Fine, but are those people the ones you want to reach? Are you speaking to the converted or trying to find a bigger audience?

Talking to existing believers is fine if you want to gain approval or achieve consensus with collaborators who are already in the tent. It’s next to useless if you want to bring more people in and sell them on why what you’re building is going to make their lives better. It’s also worth saying, as Saskia does, that projects need money to reach sustainability; it’s rare that existing converts are going to be your customers.

Converts are people who want your project to exist because they believe in the cause; they are not necessarily people who want it to exist because they themselves need it. The former group is comforting, but you need to find the latter group in order to survive. And if that group doesn’t exist, your project is dead in the water.

The open social web — the fediverse, the atmosphere, any open standards movement — is not a product. Imagine selling the idea of Bluetooth instead of a great pair of wireless headphones. You set out to buy the headphones; Bluetooth is what makes them useful. Headphones can be designed and targeted for specific groups of people (people who work out, people working at their desk, frequent travelers, etc). If people get used to Bluetooth working seamlessly well, then Bluetooth becomes a feature they look for — but it’s not the thing they look for first.

Really great social media platforms are the product. The underlying standards and tooling are what makes them work. Very few people go to Bluesky for AT Protocol; if AT Protocol then gives them superpowers that genuinely make their lives better, then they might look for other products that support it. Bluesky, Mastodon, Pixelfed, et al are the products. The onus is on them to be better than other social media for people who don’t care about the underlying principles or protocols.

The Pope on Defederation

Laurens Hof provides some of the best and most important analysis of the open social web. This piece about how the Pope’s Magnifica Humanitas encyclical applies to technology movements that seek to take is beyond Big Tech is no different.

“The dominant thinking that decentralisation is built upon has lots to say about the threats of concentrated power, but has little to say about social obligations. Cyber-libertarian tradition can tell you why no one should rule the network, but it cannot really tell you why the individual pieces should be together once it does.”

Pairing subsidiarity with solidarity is smart. The former is the liberartian-esque idea we know: that a larger entity should not affect the freedom of a smaller entity. But that’s where many decentralization projects end. Here, a call for solidarity covers the social contract we all have with each other; something that pure libertarianism often pretends doesn’t or shouldn’t exist.

As Laurens notes:

“What is striking is that the two ecosystems struggle in opposite directions, where the fediverse has subsidiarity without solidarity, all autonomy and no way to govern the commons, and the atmosphere has solidarity without subsidiarity, a commons that almost no one shares responsibility for. The fediverse does not need more servers, it needs reasons for them to act like they owe each other something. The atmosphere does not need better tools, it has those, it needs the autonomy those tools enable to actually be taken up.”

His whole piece is very much worth your time.

25 years of OLDaily

If you’re not in educational technology, it’s possible you might not know who Stephen Downes is. If you are, there’s no way you don’t. For a quarter century now, his daily updates at OLDaily have been one of the main ways people learn about the space; part reporter, part advocate, he’s pushed for an open web approach to education that’s been genuinely influential. And all on one of the very first ling blogs.

My own work on Elgg, which kickstarted my career, was directly inspired by a post Stephen made about a white paper Dave Tosh and I had written about social spaces for learning, 22 years ago:

“[…] The authors' proposal is visionary. "Creation of a learning landscape where learners engage in the whole process both academically and socially should increase the opportunity to build one's learning instead of just being the recipients of information." If your view of portfolios is just something akin to a content management system, don't bother. But if it's the student's personal and continuing presence in an online community of discourse, then you are on to something.”

Twenty five years of this is an incredible achievement — clearly he touched my life, but I’m certain I’m not alone.

As Stephen says:

“Though nothing I have ever written has been as popular as that first Guide to the Logical Fallacies (I could probably have built a career off it), I think that OLDaily has been my most substantial contribution, not the least because it wasn't about me and my accomplishments, but about the wider community that made everything possible. My story really is our story, my history really is our history.”

For open educational technology, there has been no more diligent and influential chronicler.

Mitigating floods of posts in Artemis - James' Coffee Blog

2026-05-30T00:00:00.000Z

Note: The logic described in this post may be a stepping stone to a more robust system in the future. Please keep that in mind as you read and know that my solution may not be optimal, rather a start toward solving a problem.

This morning I opened Artemis and found a website I had been following for a few months had published almost a dozen posts today. The website was now, unfortunately, a zombie site. This experience left me with two questions:

What should Artemis do if a site publishes significantly more posts than usual, and;
What should Artemis do if a site becomes a zombie site?

These are two separate questions. This afternoon, I addressed the first one by adding new logic to check for if a site posts more than usual. When Artemis prepares a user’s reader with the lists of posts from sites to which they are subscribed, an additional check now happens to identify if a site is going to flood a user’s feed.

This check is as follows: Artemis counts how many posts an author has published one each day they have published a post. For each day, in ascending order by publishing date, if the author has published more than three times the maximum number of posts they have published in a day up until that date (using a 30 day rolling window ¹), and the author has published on more than two unique days in total (to prevent false positives), the author will be flagged for that day.

Importantly, the check happens on a per-day, per-author basis. This is important because posting habits may change over time, and each author has a different posting habit; a heuristic like “do something if an author publishes more than N posts” would be liable to many false positives (i.e. news sites post a lot whereas personal websites often post fewer things per day).

If an author is flagged for a day, their posts from that day will be collapsed into a roll-up. A roll-up is a list of posts by an author published in a given time frame. A link to a roll-up created as a result of the logic described above will appear as a single entry with a title like this in Artemis:

Roll-up for example.com on 2026-05-30 (Author published more than usual)

With this implementation, a user’s feed will no longer be flooded if an author suddenly posts way more than expected. Instead, the user will get a link to a dedicated page so they can review the posts. In addition, this implementation will reduce the chance that a site that has recently become a zombie and is now spamming floods your feed.

The logic above does not explicitly identify zombie sites (this could be done with a separate series of heuristics, for example checking for language changes, site generator changes, post frequency, time since last post), but it does catch the scenario that led to my feed being flooded this morning: a site I first followed several months ago came online again and published almost a dozen posts in a short space of time.

From a user experience perspective, seeing a flood of posts is overwhelming. This is the opposite feeling I want someone to have when encountering a calm reader. Indeed, if someone subscribes to an author that publishes several times per day, that is okay: the user knows to expect many posts. But in the case of an author suddenly publishing a dozen posts in a day – 12x more than usual on days they posted – the experience is not ideal.

As I mentioned in the preface to this post, I suspect my logic will need tinkering. The use of maximums may lead to false positives; there may be more optimal ways to do this. If any ideas come to mind, please let me know. But, the logic I have today is a start, and an important one at that: floods of posts in a reader are not an ideal experience. Meanwhile, I need to also think about detecting zombie sites. Perhaps the logic above could be one heuristic to take into account when determining if a site has become a zombie.

There is one notable case where this logic fails: it only works on the first day a site has flooded a user's feed (until the maximum count resets every 30 days). But, I think this is good enough to prevent cases of accidental flooding. And, for sites that have become a zombie, a roll-up with the title "(Author published more than usual)" provides a cue to the user that a feed may need to be reviewed.

Because the maximum resets every 30 days, it means that an author posting a lot on one day far in the past will not break the logic.

[↩]

zombie site collapsed into a roll-up 1 [↩]

"The protocol world has been trying to solve the problem of how to leave, and the next step is working on how we can stay together." - Werd I/O

2026-05-29T15:42:26.000Z

Link: The Pope on Defederation, by Laurens Hof in Connected Places

Laurens Hof provides some of the best and most important analysis of the open social web. This piece about the Pope’s Magnifica Humanitas encyclical is a standout.

“The dominant thinking that decentralisation is built upon has lots to say about the threats of concentrated power, but has little to say about social obligations. Cyber-libertarian tradition can tell you why no one should rule the network, but it cannot really tell you why the individual pieces should be together once it does.”

Pairing subsidiarity with solidarity is smart. The former is the liberartian-esque idea we know: that a larger entity should not affect the freedom of a smaller entity. But that’s where many projects end. Here, solidarity covers the social contract we all have with each other; something that pure libertarianism often pretends doesn’t or shouldn’t exist.

As Laurens notes:

“What is striking is that the two ecosystems struggle in opposite directions, where the fediverse has subsidiarity without solidarity, all autonomy and no way to govern the commons, and the atmosphere has solidarity without subsidiarity, a commons that almost no one shares responsibility for. The fediverse does not need more servers, it needs reasons for them to act like they owe each other something. The atmosphere does not need better tools, it has those, it needs the autonomy those tools enable to actually be taken up.”

His whole piece is very much worth your time, and his analysis on this space is unmissable.

The UK Government's Low Value Purchase System is a Waste of Time - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-05-29T11:34:54.000Z

It can be hard running a small business. If you want to sell to a large organisation like the UK Government, there are forms to fill in, checks to comply with, tenders to bid on, and a hundred other things.

Luckily, there's the RM6237 Low Value Purchase System to make everything better. If a department wants to buy something below a certain threshold, they can contact any of the registered suppliers and just buy it. No complicated paperwork, cheaper prices, win-win!

Except, there's on annoying bit of bureaucracy. Every month I have to tell the Government Commercial Agency what business I've done.

Fair enough, I guess. Let them know how many paperclips I've sold to the Ministry of Administrative Affairs.

But there's a wrinkle. What if I've sold nothing? Well, I still have to log on, wait for an MFA code to be send, click through, and report "No Business".

I think that's a waste of time. But I wondered how much time it collectively wastes for the nation's small businesses.

So I filed a Freedom of Information request to see how many people have to sign in to let them know they haven't done any business. They replied quickly - although sent the data as a PDF rather than the requested machine-readable format.

Here's how much of a waste of time it is for everyone:

Date	Total Returns	Nil Return	Percentage
Mar-25	768	729	94.9%
Apr-25	902	876	97.1%
May-25	948	923	97.4%
Jun-25	1,322	1,270	96.1%
Jul-25	1,406	1,355	96.4%
Aug-25	1,369	1,326	96.9%
Sep-25	1,416	1,362	96.2%
Oct-25	1,610	1,556	96.6%
Nov-25	1,713	1,654	96.6%
Dec-25	1,645	1,590	96.7%
Jan-26	1,536	1,487	96.8%
Feb-26	1,588	1,531	96.4%

Even if you assume that it only takes 2 minutes to fill in their form, that's over 2 days worth of time being wasted every month.

At best, 59 small businesses reported that they sold something via RM6237. Well over a thousand businesses are clicking on a button which, frankly, ought not to exist. Why isn't the onus on those buying using the system to report what they've spent and who they spent it with?

After clicking the button, I'm always asked to rate my experience using the service. I FoI'd that data as well but was told:

This information is not held. Feedback scores submitted are anonymised and only available as a service-wide view; consequently, we do not capture or hold results specific to RM6237

So the GCA are wasting everyone's time and do not track how annoying it is.

Announcing the SBS annual maintenance calendar - Johnny.Decimal

2026-05-29T05:15:53.000Z

Evolving the idea of 'TGIF' (Thank God I Filed it) from last year, we're launching the annual Small Business System 'maintenance calendar'.¹

The idea of TGIF was that if you 'touch' your system, tidying it up a smidge, but you do that regularly – on a Friday afternoon, say – then you'll be in a much better shape than if you hadn't done that. Your life will be neater and less stressful.

SBS, spread over the year

The SBS contains everything that every small business needs to operate. So if we group it up into ~25 pieces and spread those out over the year such that they get a fortnight each, and then TGIF each of them in that fortnight, after a year we'll have touched every part of the business.

And if we do that together, on the now-weekly Zoom sessions that I've scheduled, we can keep each other honest and motivated.

Get the tracker

I've set this up as a Baserow (online database) template. If you're an SBS member, email me and I'll work directly with the first handful of respondents. If this proves popular I'll build it into JDHQ.

This isn't 'doing the work'

To be clear, I'm not asking you to do any actual work – say, all of your 21 Products design – in this fortnight. Only that you check in with that part of your system, and to make sure that:

Your files are neat.
- Archive old stuff. Make sure everything's named well.
- Find stuff you know is missing and put it there.
Your JDex is in order.
- Archive old entries.
- Deal with those big notes that you've been putting off.

I imagine this might take 45 minutes? Really not long at all.

Starts on June 9th

I've scheduled Zoom sessions every Tuesday/Thursday morning/evening, alternating across weeks, from June 9th in perpetuity.

The first group – chosen to be an easy one – is due Friday June 26th. It's 15.10, 15.40+ Travel admin & records. See you on the call, where I'll explain in more detail.

Here's a 6-minute video with more details.

Working title. As always, suggestions welcome. ↩

One Million Pounds - Hey, it's Jason!

2026-05-29T00:00:00.000Z

My journey to moving 1,000,000 pounds for the sake of health!

My Home Screen (2026) - Joel's Log Files

2026-05-28T23:00:00.000Z

It’s been a while since I’ve done a post sharing what my home screen looks like, and a lot has changed since then. Last year I shared what’s on my phone, but it was more of a listicle that didn’t really go into the reasoning behind my choices. In any case, that’s what I plan to do here. at least for the homescreen I got right now!

Let’s start with the lock screen. Last time I was using a custom ROM with no way to customize it. However, since I am using a Nothing (3a) with NothingOS, I can add widgets! I have one for the weather and a global clock, both quite handy!

My wallpaper here is some official artwork from The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom—a game I have not played yet—I paid some silver points to download it from Nintendo’s rewards page because it’s just adorable and I had to have it. Not much else to comment on.

Now, the home screen itself does not have a lot going on! I am using a wallpaper featuring artwork from Into The Aether that is simply breathtaking to me. Best part? It was kind of made for me by the artist after they shared some versions where the artwork was squared or vertical with the planet at the very top. I wanted it centered and did my own version with Snapseed’s expansion tool. The artist took pity on me and gave me a proper one.

Now, the layout and mitself was made using KISS Launcher, which has been my choice for the last couple of years.

Nova Launcher is what I used back in the day, but after a whole mess that just keeps going, it’s just not worth it anymore.

KISS Launcher offers a minimal template to start building up from. I have the Minimalistic UI turned on, which let’s me add widgets to an otherwise empty screen. I just have a digital clock. I also have a row of favorite apps and the KISS search bar at the very bottom—with a three dot menu to see some settings and an app drawer button.

I set it up with a transparent theme, so it’s as simple as possible.

My row of favorites features six apps. I am starting to become a boring adult, so the first one from left to right is the phone app, I am currently using Fossify Phone, since it does what I need and not much more.

The next one is Fennec, a fork of Firefox for Android that has some extra plugins and honestly works just fine for all of my needs. I prefer to avoid Chromium browsers when I can. Fennec disables some of the telemetry of vanilla Firefox too, although I’ve heard there’s more privacy-focused alternative like IronFox, Ice Raven and iode Browser.

Next up, Signal, my favorite messaging platform. It just works and it has worked for many years now. Thanks to usernames, it has been easier than ever to make groups with the friends I’ve made online. It does everything I want it to do, and it does it very well. I have some other messaging apps but none of them I use as much as this one.

AntennaPod is simply the best podcast app for Android. It’s what got me interested into listening to podcasts in the first place. It has pretty much every feature you may need, and I like to see my stats on it every once in a while.

Besides Podcasts, there’s music! Although I grew fond of my Innioasis Y1, I still listen to music on my phone quite a bit, so I use Booming Music Player for that. I particuarly enjoy its feature to suffle albums (instead of shuffling all the songs and making a mess).

Last but not least, the Fossify Gallery app. It is the fastest and simplest of them all, loads super quick and has every feature I may ever need in a gallery.

Now, besides the minimal home screen, KISS Launcher has a History screen, which displays frequently used apps. These can be sorted in a variety of ways, but I just sort based on frequency, instead of recency, time of day, or other modes available.

Right now, my most frequent apps are the following:

Tusky - my favorite Fediverse client
Discord - to chat in the TWG Online server
Mihon - super cool manga reader I love
WhatsApp - people in Mexico won’t switch from it
Bible - I try to read daily and finish it in a year
Material Files - to access and manage my… files
Markor - markdown editor for my blogposts and quick notes
Binary Eye - scanner for barcodes and QR codes
StoryGraph - book reading app with tracking and socializing
Image Toolbox - for my weekly collages and other image things
Droid-ify - app store for all my FOSS apps
Switch Parental Controls - to track my Nintendo Switch play time.

These change every once in a while but it looks like a pretty accurate list of the sort of apps I use the most.

KISS Launcher has been around for ages. It is, in fact, featured on my very first proper blog post, and even though I have mentioned it in my uses page too, I thought it was worth sharing how my phone looks like thanks to it.

Of course, the icon pack featured here is Arcticons, the one I’ve made contributions to for a long time now, it just has everything I need, and if it doesn’t, I make the icon myself. Good stuff all around!

This is day 72 of #100DaysToOffload

Reply to this post via email | Reply on Fediverse

To reach your big goal, you need to sell where you're heading next - Werd I/O

2026-05-28T13:14:42.000Z

Link: Know Your Point C, by Corey Ford

There’s so much packed into this idea:

“You started at Point A. Now you're at Point B. To reach your big goal, you don't just need to paint a picture of the long-term vision. You need to sell Point C: the concrete, vivid destination you will take yourself, your team, and your company to over the next twelve to twenty-four months.”

And it’s worth asking: who on your team is empowered to define this? Is anyone? And if the answer is “no”, how might that change?

The Fediverse is not a product. It's time to get real about marketing - Werd I/O

2026-05-28T12:44:29.000Z

Link: The 'normal' response to the Social Web, by Saskia Welch

A smart, accessible, nuanced piece from Saskia Welch about marketing the open social web, which translates easily to being a piece about marketing any transformative technology.

“Fediverse this, Social Web that, no one cares!

Genuinely, no one cares. And, even if you get them to start caring, they do so in the complete opposite direction we've been heading with our messy, undoubtedly decentralised, marketing.”

The Costco theory of the internet - Westenberg

2026-05-28T01:29:39.000Z

At FedMart, the discount chain Sol Price built in 1950s San Diego, you could buy a can of WD-40 in one size, the big one, and that was the end of the conversation. Anyone who wanted the small can went without. Price called it the intelligent loss of sales: carry one good version of a thing, refuse the other nine, and eat the customers you lose in exchange for the trouble you save everyone else.

Jim Sinegal, his mentee, carried that habit into Costco in 1983. A Costco warehouse stocks around 4,000 items; while a supermarket runs 30,000 or more, and Amazon runs into the millions. A Costco buyer looks after fewer than 200 products and spends the extra time that buys deciding which ones earn the floor space, killing the underperformers, and doubling down on the winners. By the time you push your trolley through the door, someone has already rejected almost everything that could have been there.

Most of the internet runs on the opposite instinct. Pile the shelf higher, add the SKU, take the margin, say yes to everything. And the people using it are worn out.

I'd bet the next decade runs the other way. People don't want infinite choice anymore; they want fewer decisions inside places where someone has already thrown out the worst options.

Call it the Costco theory of the internet.

For 20 years we built the internet around abundance: more products, more creators, more opinions, more newsletters, more podcasts, more apps, more tools, more marketplaces, more feeds. The founding promise was access: anything, from anyone, anywhere, instantly. No gatekeepers, no scarcity, no permission. The shelf went infinite.

For a while that felt like freedom.

And then it turned into drudgery...

Every ordinary decision now comes with a research burden. Buying a toaster means reading reviews, scanning Reddit, distrusting half the reviews, checking YouTube comparisons, searching for "best toaster no affiliate," then wondering whether the person recommending the toaster is paid, deluded, or defending the thing they already bought. Choosing project management software turns into a 6-week intellectual collapse involving Notion, Linear, ClickUp, Basecamp, Airtable, Todoist, Things, a whiteboard, a notebook, and some founder on X insisting that the wrong task app is why your company has no momentum...

The internet gave us access to anything, and then forced us to consume everything, and then made us responsible for sorting all of it.

The modern consumer has become a part-time procurement department. We audit quality, decode incentives, compare vendors, scan reviews, avoid scams, dodge subscriptions, read refund policies, assess creators, inspect screenshots, and attempt, against all odds, to tell actual expertise apart from people who bought a microphone.

This is considered normal behaviour now.

And it's deranged.

The sane response to all this is, I think, a form of bounded trust.

Costco never promised perfect quality or the best product in every category; and it isn't doesn't claim to be a temple of taste. It sells enormous muffins, bulk socks, patio furniture, protein shakes, car tyres, petrol, hearing aids, rotisserie chickens, appliances, and tubs of dip large enough to drown any and all sorrows.

But more than that: Costco sells a higher floor.

Their promise comes down to two things:

you probably won't get ripped off, and
you don't have to inspect 900 versions of the same item.

Costco doesn't necessarily take judgement away from you. But it does absorb enough of the evaluation that shopping feels sane again, limiting the shelf, buying with discipline, backing Kirkland Signature with its own name, keeping prices legible, and standing behind the lot with a return policy that assumes you're honest. You don't wander a marketplace full of fake brands, sponsored clutter, manipulated reviews, counterfeit risk, and algorithmic sewage.

Nobody walks into Costco believing every item is elite. They walk in trusting that the floor is higher than the open market, and they'll pay for that trust.

The internet doesn't need more curation in the precious boutique sense. It needs operators who cut fraud, noise, decision fatigue, and bullshit, and who clear the garbage off the floor before you arrive.

Amazon deploys abundance logic in soul-destroying reverse. It has everything, which by now means it has too much. You can still find good things there (or so I'm told), but you do the sorting, and it's very much a case of buyer beware - seriously, buyer fucking beware: parsing the brand names, the reviews, the images, the delivery dates, the sponsored placements, the counterfeit risk, and the chance that a product with 18,000 5-star reviews still singes off your eyebrows is down to you.

A world drowning in options will pay good money for someone else's refusal. Because refusal has become a premium service.

More results stop helping once the results are polluted. Reviews that are fake, incentivised, or written by people with no standards don't improve by multiplying. Creators performing expertise for an algorithm don't add up to expertise. Tools that keep making the same bullshit claim to replace every other tool cancel each other out. And more options stop being a gift the moment you have to become an amateur fraud analyst to choose between them.

The internet's problem has moved from access to trust.

We can find anything. We can't easily tell what deserves our belief, our money, our time, our attention, or our adoption. The old internet solved scarcity; the new internet has to solve filtration, and filtration and aggregation are vastly different jobs.

Aggregation scales because it dodges responsibility. Open the gates, index the world, invite the vendors, let the users sort, take a cut. That became the dominant model because it suited the economics of software: more supply made more surface area, more surface area made more searching, more searching made more money.

Every open system becomes a target for the people gaming it. SEO gaming, review gaming, marketplace gaming, social gaming, recommendation gaming, affiliate gaming, attention gaming. The larger the platform, the stronger the pull to manipulate it. Eventually the user starts paying the tax, spending more time verifying, comparing, doubting, checking, and defending themselves against the system.

Costco-style trust starts when the operator takes - at least - some of that tax back.

A trusted operator narrows the field first, making the choices in advance and accepting the cost of everything it leaves out. Then it absorbs the complexity, doing the dull part before you get there: testing, comparing, rejecting, negotiating, standardising. Then it holds the floor. It doesn't have to make every item extraordinary, it only has to clear the obvious junk and keep a baseline you can feel the moment you walk in.

Most internet businesses miss this. You build trust by making the customer feel less exposed. Announcing your own excellence does nothing.

A marketplace makes you inspect everything. A trusted operator lets you relax, and in some categories that relaxation is the entire product.

Think about the felt difference between buying from a chaotic marketplace and buying from a retailer you trust. In the first, you're on guard the whole time, because every image might mislead you, every review might be bought, every brand might be a shell, every discount might be bait, every result might have paid its way to the top. You'll probably still get what you need. You'll get it defensively.

In the second, you still choose, but you choose inside a zone of lowered suspicion, because the retailer has put skin in the game. Sell you something bad and its reputation pays. Price something absurdly and the relationship cools. Make the returns hostile and the trust drains out. You might never put any of this into words. You feel all of it.

The internet is starved for that feeling.

And it goes well beyond retail...

A Costco-shaped media company wouldn't publish 200 takes a day. It would publish fewer pieces with a higher floor. Readers would show up because it spares them the feed, and it would earn its keep through what it refuses to run.

A Costco-shaped software company wouldn't sell a platform with 70 use cases, 11 pricing tiers, and a thousand features. It would make a clear promise to a clear user. It would end the internal debate. It would say: for this kind of team, doing this kind of work, this is the system. Use it and // or move on.

A Costco-shaped agency wouldn't offer every service that can technically be billed. It would define its shelf. It would turn down bad-fit clients, weak briefs, vanity deliverables, pointless retainers, and work that makes the operator richer while leaving the client more confused. Its standards would be part of the offer.

A Costco-shaped community wouldn't confuse growth with health. It would moderate hard, keep its standards visible, and guard the useful conversation from people who treat every room as a stage, because the health of a community depends on who it removes as much as who it lets in.

A Costco-shaped creator wouldn't post every half-formed thought chasing reach. They'd become a reliable filter. Their audience would trust their judgement because they show restraint, and in a world of constant output restraint becomes a signal.

The internet trained all of us to fear leaving something out. More pages mean more search traffic, more products mean more revenue, more posts mean more shots at virality, more features mean more markets, more services mean more deal flow.

Saying yes has become cheap. Yes to more inventory, more formats, more creators, more sponsors, more categories, more features, more partnerships, more slop, as long as it performs.

The next premium goes to whoever can say no and survive the revenue they walk away from.

Bullshit pays, at least in the short term. Low-quality suppliers pay, bad-fit clients pay, sponsored placements pay, mediocre content pulls clicks, extra features close deals, fake urgency lifts conversion, confusing pricing pulls more money out of people, dark patterns move the metrics. A growth team can always find a way to monetise confusion - and plenty of internet businesses start to rot the moment they work out that confusion is profitable.

The Costco theory says: sell relief, instead. Make people feel that someone competent is handling the market for them.

This is why the membership model works as well as it does. Costco runs as a relationship with an institution, and the annual fee puts the trust down in a contract, in black and white. You hand over money, habit, attention, and your default preference, and in return Costco has to keep the thing worth renewing every year.

It's a different game from the open web's casual opportunism. The mass internet wants traffic and optimises for clicks. The Costco internet wants repeat belief and optimises for "I'll just get it there."

"I'll just get it there" means the customer has taken you out of the comparison set. You've stopped fighting transaction by transaction. You've become infrastructure in someone's life - AKA, the default answer before the question is even formed.

Every founder says they want loyalty, but (time and time again) they build the machine that kills it. They overcomplicate the product, dilute the brand, chase adjacent customers, bolt on tiers nobody understands, publish filler, wave bad actors into the marketplace, swap human judgement for engagement metrics, and reach for pricing tricks, urgency tricks, retention tricks, interface tricks...

People commit when commitment lowers their anxiety. They pay when the payment buys them standards, accept fewer options when the survivors are safer, tolerate constraint when it comes from competence, and come back when the operator has proven that trust beats another night of searching.

A brand is a pattern of kept promises. Over time, people learn what you allow, what you reject, what you repeat, what you protect, what you punish, and on what and where you refuse to compromise.

Digital brands (and particularly the current era of influencer founded DTC companies) run this backwards, blurring their standards over time. They start with a point of view and end as a marketplace, or they start with taste and end as inventory, or they start with a community and end as a growth channel, or they start with a product and end as a bundle of loosely related monetisation experiments.

At no point do they stop to answer:

What do you let in? Who do you let near it? What do you push? What do you kill? What do you refund? What do you ignore? What earns the no?

AI means we can now produce content, software, images, video, music, analysis, pitch decks, landing pages, sales emails, reports, strategies, and whole micro-products at near-zero marginal cost - and so the shelf expands again, and the flood rises. The average unit of internet output gets cheaper, faster, and less trustworthy at the same time.

When production turns abundant, selection turns scarce. Raw output stops being the scarce thing - because the scarce thing is someone willing to tell you which output deserves your attention, which vendor is real, which product works, which argument holds, which plan makes sense, which tool is worth adopting, which document to read and which to delete before it costs you another minute.

The winners here will be operators with both A) taste and B) the power to enforce it. Taste without enforcement turns into slop. Enforcement without taste turns into bureaucracy.

The shallow version of this will be boutiques, directories, newsletters, AI wrappers, and "handpicked" marketplaces that wrap a tasteful interface around ordinary affiliate arbitrage; and of course, it won't last. People can smell fake standards. They know when a list exists to help them and when it exists to monetise their confusion. They know when the operator has actually turned down good money to protect the shelf.

The better version will be companies and people who make trust operational. They'll publish their criteria, keep the offering narrow, explain the tradeoffs in plain language, cut the items that underperform, and refuse to become a dumping ground, so that every interaction leaves the customer's life a little simpler.

The test: does dealing with you lower the load in someone's head, or add to it? If it adds, you're part of the noise.

A Costco-shaped business sells:

relief from evaluation
the feeling that someone competent has gone ahead with a machete and cleared the path
a smaller world that works better than the larger one.

The internet's current default setting is actively hostile to sustained attention. Everything asks for a decision, wants a preference, requests a subscription, a rating, a login, a notification permission, a plan, a personalised feed, an upsell, a dashboard, a profile, a follow, a like, a reaction, a review. The strongest customer experience on offer might soon come down to three words: we handled it.

It can be whole business model, if you let it, but only when it's true.

You can't fake the Costco theory with branding. You can't write your way into trust while the shelf is garbage, can't design your way out of weak standards, can't pose as a filter while the market dumps trash through your side door. It takes operational severity, the real kind.

The operator has to disappoint suppliers, partners, clients, contributors, sometimes the customers themselves. They have to pick the long-term trust account over the short-term revenue hit, and accept that every low-quality thing they wave through taxes the whole system. One bad product makes you inspect the next ten. One lazy essay makes you doubt the whole publication. One weak hire makes the team start to lower the bar. One incoherent feature makes the user wonder who's steering.

A low tolerance for bullshit has to run as an operating system, built it into how the place works.

In practice that means you remove things, you simplify, you say no earlier than feels comfortable. You define what good actually means and then make the standard explicit enough that people can test you against it. You refund when you fail, cut the features that confuse the product, stop publishing when you've nothing worth saying, turn down the clients who'd drag the standard down, and refuse any form of scale that lowers the bar.

Anyone can launch a store, start a newsletter, build a course, spin up a community, publish a directory, open a marketplace, wrap an AI model in a UI. Creation stopped being the test a while ago.

Literally, anyone.

The test now is whether people can trust you to exclude.

The Costco theory of the internet is simple. People are tired of sorting. Tired of comparison, fake reviews, infinite tabs, marketplaces that play like casinos, creators who recommend everything, software that needs a consultant to explain its pricing page, experts with hidden incentives, brands that treat their attention as something to strip-mine.

Most of the time they'd take a safer set of things over the theoretically best one. They want fewer decisions and a higher floor. They want someone with the reputation and buying power to bin the obvious garbage before they walk in. They want the kind of constraint that protects them.

None of this kills abundance. The infinite shelf stays. Some people will always want to browse, research, compare, optimise, hunt for the edge. But across a lot of categories the centre of gravity is moving.

The new edition of Permissionless is now free

I’m releasing a new edition of my book Permissionless today. I've rewritten it from the ground up: clearer, sharper, and rebuilt around the ideas I think matter most in this moment. And it’s entirely free.
You can read it here!

Everyday Obsidian 2 - Johnny.Decimal

2026-05-28T01:26:09.000Z

Published: Everyday Obsidian episode 2

Cross-Domain API Access: Beyond the "Obvious" Shortcuts - Articles by Aaron Parecki

2026-05-27T23:35:08.000Z

Cross-domain access is everywhere in today's software landscape. Whether you look at enterprise SaaS applications, AI agents interacting with user data across multiple platforms, or "integrated experiences" pulling information from a calendar, a chat tool, and a wiki—everything eventually needs to talk across boundaries.

Development teams frequently reach for the quickest path to wire these systems together. Usually, teams fall back on two "obvious" architectural shortcuts. However, as experience deploying these architectures at scale demonstrates, both models break down in production.

Let's take a closer look at why these shortcuts fail and what a resilient cross-domain pattern actually looks like.

🧶 Shortcut #1: Have the IdP issue the access token directly

The pattern: the client takes its ID Token to the IdP, exchanges it for an access token, and sends that access token straight to the resource app's API.

Why it's tempting: it reuses the IdP that everyone already trusts. It feels like a clean, one-stop shop.

Why it breaks: every API on the receiving end now has to trust a growing list of foreign token issuers — each with its own quirks around token format, claim conventions, key rotation, and revocation.

Suddenly your API team is in the federation business, doing one-off integrations per IdP. That's not a sustainable model for building APIs at scale. APIs are far better served by having a local authorization server issuing the tokens they validate — one issuer, one model, one set of rules.

🪪 Shortcut #2: Send the ID Token across domains

The pattern: skip the IdP-issued access token and present the original ID Token directly at the receiving app's authorization server, exchanging it for a locally issued access token.

Why it's tempting: ID Tokens are standardized, so it feels like it sidesteps the trust-fan-out problem from #1.

Why it breaks: ID Tokens are issued for one audience — the application the user signed into. Sending them somewhere else violates that audience binding, opens up replay and misuse risks.

🎯 What Cross-App Access does differently

Cross-App Access (XAA) uses a two-stage flow — and each stage exists specifically to fix one of the problems above.

Stage 1: The client makes a Token Exchange request to the IdP to exchange the ID Token for an ID-JAG: a purpose-built, short-lived, audience-bound grant for the resource authorization server.

No ID Token misuse, no audience confusion. The IdP also stays in the loop to govern whether this cross-app access should happen at all — exactly where enterprise IT already manages who can access what.

Stage 2: The resource app's authorization server exchanges the ID-JAG for its own access token. The API keeps its local AS, its own token format, and its own revocation story. It only has to trust the access tokens issued by its own AS — not a foreign access token.

We can push all the complexity of user login, token minting, and cross-domain policy evaluation onto the specialized identity components, keeping the resource API free to do the much simpler task of validating its own domain's access tokens and serving data.

If you're designing cross-domain access for an AI agent, an enterprise suite, or any multi-vendor ecosystem, this is the pattern to follow. The IETF draft: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-oauth-identity-assertion-authz-grant/

Cult Pens Anniversary Mystery Box Review - Robb Knight • Posts • Atom Feed

2026-05-27T19:36:55.000Z

At the start of the month Cult Pens, for their anniversary, put up a birthday mystery box for £100. No other information, just choose a nib size and they'll send out a mystery box:

We can't tell you what's inside, because it's a mystery, but we can tell you the contents are worth way more than the price, and have an RRP of at least double.

"One part of my brain knows mystery boxes are a good way for a company to move stuff that isn't selling, the other half wants to buy it anyway" was what I wrote in the Pen Addict Slack. I considered buying it at lunchtime that day but it sold out before I could decide. Then two weeks later it was a suggestion below something else I was browsing on their website, with a fine nib. I usually go for extra fine but fine is also...fine so I ordered it.

It arrived and I was very pleased to get an MP1 as the main item along with some copic paint markers which I would never usually buy (these are £27 for 6?! I'm not good enough at art for that). The full list of items:

Monteverde MP1 Piston Filling Fountain Pen Limited Edition Strawberry
Copic Acrea Paint Marker Set of 6 Deep Colours
Iwako Puzzle Eraser Set Farm Animal
Pentel GraphGear 1000 Automatic Pencil
Faber-Castell Hexo Ballpoint Pen Matt Silver
Faber-Castell Goldfaber Aqua Dual Marker Wallet of 6 Lettering
Faber-Castell Double Fibre-Tip Pen Set - Neon (Pack of 10)
Clairefontaine lined notebook
Purple pen sleeve
Midori stickers
Two ink samples: Diamine Aqua Lagoon and Jacques Herbin Rouge d'Orient

I wasn't able to find the purple pen sleeve, the midori stickers, or the Faber-Castell neon pens on the Cult Pens website but by my count, the RRP of all this lot is somewhere around £150.

I didn't realise the Copics were paint ones until I'd already smooshed it on the page like the caveman that I am so I did an art. I call it "Don't Go in the Ocean". These are fun to use and I'm definitely going to use these during this year's Inktober.

The farm eraser set is cute as fuck but I cannot use it. Look at their faces.

I didn't need another metal pencil but the graphgear is bloody lovely. The lil "clunk" when it sucks up the nib bit is delightful.

A Monteverde MP1 has been on my wishlist for quite a while but there's always been something else to buy so it was nice to have it decided for me. Even without looking, I know that a pen called "Strawberry Dreams" would the one I would get anyway. The ink looks much more purple when it's in the bottle but on paper (Tomoe River in this case) it's a stunning bright pink, I love it. The pen itself it nice to write with although my brain keeps thinking I'm picking up a TWSBI Eco and it takes a moment to adjust to the differences in feel.

I think the one dud in this box is the Faber Castell hexo has a nice twist mechanism but the pen itself is ugly and it feels cheap to hold. Not a pen for me.

Overall I'm very happy with what I got in the box. Given what Cult Pens sell I could make an educated guess about which fountain pen I was going to get from a handful so it wasn't that much of a risk. I'm not going to rush and do this every time they do one but I'll definitely consider it in the future.

When the AI boom subsides, the data centers will remain. What we do now matters - Werd I/O

2026-05-27T13:44:02.000Z

Link: Data Centers Now Consume 6% of US Electricity—and the Backlash Has Begun, by Edd Gent at SingularityHub

As the linked article notes:

“Data centers have always been energy-hungry, but the AI explosion is causing computing demand to skyrocket. The biggest data centers now consume as much electricity as small cities and are proliferating at breakneck speed.”

Gadget Review: Chuwi Minibook X N150 + Linux ★★★★☆ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-05-27T11:34:36.000Z

I needed a small and light laptop to take travelling. Something with a larger screen than my phone so I can use the Big Internet™. Nothing too expensive and something that uses the same USB-C charger as everything else.

So I settled on the Chuwi Minibook N150. It's literally small enough to fit in my cargo-shot pockets. For the price (around £300ish) it is basically fine. There are a few niggles, but none of them showstoppers for me.

I took it to OggCamp and had so many people come and ask me about it. It's a small, cute, and distinctive looking device.

The Bad

Here are the worst things about the laptop:

US Keyboard. Yup, the @ and " are in the wrong place. I can be set to UK, but then you lose the | key.
The trackpad sometimes goes a bit jittery. It usually works, but once it a while goes askew. The touchscreen can be used if it happens.
Screen rotation works, but the keyboard and trackpad don't switch off if you bend the keyboard all the way back.
No biometrics like fingerprint or camera - so you need to remember your passwords.
Support from the manufacturer is haphazard. Mostly forum links and expired downloads. The firmware seems to update fine on Linux though.

That's not too bad, I reckon.

Installing Linux

I had a brief play with Windows 11, let it update its drivers just in case there was any magic firmware, then nuked it.

Turn the device off. Turn it on and then hammer the Delete button. It'll pop you into the BIOS.

Secure Boot needs to be disabled:

Security → Secure Boot → Secure Boot → Disabled

You'll also need to set it to boot from a USB device:

Boot → Boot Option #1 → USB Device

The go to Save & Exit. I tried Linux Mint Debian Edition. It booted just fine and, after fiddling in the display settings, it automatically detected the screen rotation. Internet worked, touchscreen worked, Bluetooth worked. I tried a few distros and settled on NixOS as being the least worst option.

Everything works except the keyboard switching off when it is folded backwards.

Look and Feel

It is a solid lump of metal. There are no decals on back of the screen (so perfect for adding stickers!) and the bottom is similarly bare apart from some air-flow grilles and the usual identifying marks.

There are two USB-C ports on one side and a vestigial headphone jack on the other.

Keyboard

Despite coming from a UK warehouse and shipping with a UK plug, it has a US keyboard. The only real difference is the £ symbol is missing from the 3 button, the @ and " are swapped, and the | button is in the wrong place. None of that is disastrous and setting your OS to use a UK layout fixes things.

Because \| is mapped to #~, there's no way to type a backslash or pipe.

There are three levels of backlight. Off, dim, and not quite so dim. No fancy RBG effects here!

Trackpad

Supports multi-touch so you can use gestures. Obviously it is quite small, but you can touch the screen if you need to. Annoyingly, the trackpad is only "clicky" at the edges. You can click down in the middle, but it doesn't feel like it clicks. Not a show stopper, but a bit aggravating.

Screen

The screen has masked off rounded corners. Personally I think that's something which should be left to the Desktop Environment to decide. I can't really understand why they've done that. However, as the ratio is 16:10, you're not going to lose precious pixels when watching a movie.

The screen is bright enough for most uses and goes fairly dim for night use. It is locked at 50Hz which is a bit of a baffling decision. I guess it saves a modicum of power? For almost all uses, you won't notice the difference though.

Battery and Charging

It ships with a USB-C PD charger with a UK plug and a hard-wired connection. Unfortunately, the charger was limited to 36W - so fairly modest.

However, initially the Minibook would only charge at around 10W (20V⎓0.5A) eventually getting up to 16W (12V⎓1.3A or 20V⎓0.3A) - that didn't meaningfully change when I used a more powerful laptop charger. It never got up to the promised 36W while the unit was off.

Once I turned it on, it jumped to ~35W (11.70V⎓3A). Using the stronger charger it occasionally got to 40W (20V⎓2A) but mostly stayed around 36W.

That's not a bad speed, and the battery is relatively small, but you won't be able to take it from empty to full with a quick blast. If you do need it to charge quickly, make sure it is on.

Size, Weight, and Tablet Mode

At just under a Kg, it is light enough to slip into a jacket pocket. Similarly, although around twice as thick as a normal 10 inch tablet, it isn't massive. Holding it up for long periods means you will feel the weight more keenly - but the keyboard acts as a pretty decent stand.

It supports multi-touch and a pen, apparently, which is not supplied.

Camera

The small lens is sensibly placed in the top centre and is of surprisingly good quality. You're not going to shoot a movie on it, but fine for video calls.

Verdict

Depending on how you are blessed by The Algorithm, this is around £300 - £350. You may also have to pay tax and delivery depending on where it is shipped from.

The specifications are pretty decent. Look, it's no MacBook Neo - but it is cheap and runs Linux.

If you're happy futzing around a bit, it's a decent travel companion.

Views; between - James' Coffee Blog

2026-05-27T00:00:00.000Z

There is beauty in the moments between arriving and reaching your destination. I felt this yesterday in the moments before attending an event in Edinburgh last night. I had an hour before I needed to arrive and, the day being so warm, I decided to slow down and listen to the world around. I walked through the park with my eyes open under the evening sun for which I had been yearning for months. Every breeze through the air enlivened my senses. Every smile stuck a chord somewhere in my soul.

Nature invites us to see more, closely, in the warmer weather; we emerge from the indoors and seek the outdoors. Looking around, I saw humanity everywhere. I saw humanity in the revived bridge in the heart of the city – a bridge under construction for years that, now, brings colour where there was none for so long. We built the new on old foundations: we added colour. I heard humanity in the parting words of a young couple on an early date: with smiles on their faces, one said to the other with a laugh on the precipice “I don’t want you to see get on my bike.”

I saw humanity in the child with the red hat who climbed the lamp post, dismounting to throw a coin in the bagpipe case to the right of the foot of the piper playing in the park. The sweet sounds of life play. Amazing Grace. A woman in a perfect white dress walks past, also dropping a coin in the case. Several people stand to appreciate the music. I realised that I was among them, standing more at a distance to see not only the piper but more of the people walking past. I walked from pace to pace, seeking new views of the same place, and noticing how short the distance one must travel to see something new.

The solemnity of the pipes catch the ear of all around. The repertoire of the piper delights. I noticed that he played a song I could not recall ever hearing on the pipes. You can hear an instrument for so long and continue to discover new music. How many chords have I not heard, or heard but not known? There is always something new to appreciate.

I brought the music with me on my journey, albeit not the pipes. I hummed in the bookshop where I searched for a title I wanted to have on my bookshelf. I don’t know why I like humming in bookshops: maybe it is because there is no music playing and it feels there should be some. Or maybe it’s because books bring out the colour of human stories, but the sounds are trapped within the pages – we as viewers bring the melody. Subsequently and serendipitously I learned there is a new book in another series I have been reading that is now out. I purchased the books with joy: I held stories in my hand.

Returning to the park, I found myself philosophising – asking questions about the things that interest me. Where better to ponder? Among people living life in a million ways; around trees growing in infinitely complex ways; under the sun in a place forever my home; near people going at a pace like me: slowly, admiring the world around. I realised that the linear path ahead in the park is only linear in form – we can always choose how we walk it.

The park in which I found myself was on a hill, above which there are wonderful buildings with hundreds of years of history. A castle catches the corner of one’s eye. The topology of the garden – its steep hill, inclining into the city – invites us all to look up; to admire history and the sky and the skying and the music and the colour and the all-encompassing nature of all the stories around. The park invites us to be with ourselves, with others, and with the world around.

Departing for my destination, touching a leaf so delicate that silk could not match, and seeing the light shine through the trees in myriad different ways – through a constellation of buildings and trees (we too are constellations?) – I thought of reverie, of how on our travels some details stand out and become magnified. I thought about how reverie intersects with pace: some emotions can only be experienced when slowing down; conditions matter: the sun and the smiles and the pipes and the lovers.

First year - James' Coffee Blog

2026-05-27T00:00:00.000Z

I am half-way through my first year of university. I am studying toward an art history degree (although part of me wants to do art history and creative writing, which I would have the option to do starting next year!).

The first year of my degree is an introduction to studying humanities, and is divided into two courses: one that covers themes seen through the lenses of different disciplines (i.e. traditions as seen through history and religious studies), and the other that looks at disciplines in depth (art history, classical studies, creative writing, and English literature).

In both parts of the course, I have been exposed to so many topics I otherwise may never have encountered: the history of Cleopatra, Elizabeth I’s reign, an analysis of how Mozart built his reputation, and more. In my most recent block, English literature, we were studying Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Again, I may not have chosen to read these works myself: studying gave me a chance to encounter them. Twelfth Night left me with the delightful impression that a text written five hundred years ago can still make us laugh. Jane Eyre is now my second favourite book (following Walden).

Because I study with a distance learning school – the Open University here in the UK – most of my study is independent, leading up to assignments we do – essays on what we have studied. I have really enjoyed the essay writing part. I love applying my knowledge practically. I am especially excited for the next block on creative writing which will have many practical exercises. My initial introduction to it a few weeks ago dispelled my years-long fear of creative writing. I never knew where to begin, but the prompts in our textbook helped me a lot.

Overall, the year has been challenging but in the right way. I am learning new things, which was exactly what I wanted when I decided to study. I am able to interact with new-to-me disciplines. I am thinking about how things connect: new writing techniques I had never encountered, the meaning of a “classic”, the value of “close” study (i.e. close reading in English literature, close looking in art history), history as something that evolves as we ask new questions, and more. I feel comfortable in studying the humanities ¹, and love discussing what I am learning with other people both in my class and bringing it into my everyday life.

I just finished my essay on Jane Eyre and thought I’d write this blog post as something of a treat – reading a 400 page book and analysing and studying its themes and key points in two weeks was tricky, although very satisfying. Next up is a week on philosophy and morality for which I am especially excited, and, separately, study of the question “what does it mean for something to be a classic”?

Although I still love thinking about technology too!

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Summer Game Challenge 2026 - Joel's Log Files

2026-05-26T17:00:00.000Z

There’s a bit of an event going on in the TWG Online Discord server where everyone agreed to set a goal, to finish at least four out of ten selected games. This usually runs from Memorial Day to Labor Day—May 25 to September 7 in 2026. However, I am Mexican, so I went with Labour Day to Independence Day, which is May 1st to September 16 here. A pretty similar time frame with a few extra days that I don’t mind getting as a bonus.

The games I chose should be pretty manageable within that time frame. I selected some titles where I already have progress in the mix, since that’s not against the rules. In any case, I split them up and listed them here in no particular order.

Resumed plays

Grapple Dog - I’ve managed to complete two of the worlds in the game and I am halfway through the third one, in about 6 hours of playtime. I would like to beat this game! The grappling mechanic is pretty fun but it can also feel a bit samey. I am enjoying the challenge of collecting all the things though.
Terranigma - This is a restart of a game I had 13 hours of playtime on. I am a couple hours in and about to progress to the next chapter of the story, which will significantly change what the game’s about thus far. I think this has been long overdue for a completion from me, so I would love to finally reach credits on it.
Hades - With 30 hours of playtime, I really want to get this game’s credits rolling. It has been a joy to play so far! A true masterpiece with a lot going on for its story and gameplay. I just need to do a few more runs to get the ending. I will keep playing it every once in a while after that though, but for this challenge? credits are enough.
Outer Wilds - This one is a real gem, after 14 hours of almost continuous play, I can’t recall what got me to suddenly stop. I really need to continue the story told here, it is mindblowing and super cool, and I’m sure I’ll get a lot of fun out of it once I return. So many clues and things to figure out, some day soon.
Silksong - I reached credits on Silksong after 67 hours or so, but I really wnat to experience everything Pharloom has to offer. I want to do the 3rd Act of the game and see the new bosses and the rest of the story for myself. I want to challenge my skills and get good, suffering through whatever this game throws at me, because I know I have what it takes, or that’s what I want to believe!

First time plays

Resident Evil 3: Nemesis - After completing the first two games of the series, it only makes sense to complete the original trilogy! I did play a bit of this game years ago on my PSP, but I never got far, and I want to see I can do with all I’ve learned from the previous titles. I’m always happy to see more ofs Jill Valentine, who hasn’t been around much on later games in the series.
Metroid Prime Remastered - Since I purchased Metroid Prime 4 Beyond, it is only fair of me to try and complete the one that started Samus’ journey into the 3D world in first person view! I have heard the game holds up magnificently and performs really well on the Switch, so I am really looking forward to this one, always happy to play more Metroid.
Chants of Sennaar - This one seems like a super interesting puzzle kind of game, similar perhaps to Outer Wilds, without the physics and such, though. I have heard great things so if you have played it feel free to hype me up with a comment or email about it. I heard it’s not too long so that’s another reason why I chose it.
Emio and the Smiling Man - This one was a bit of an impulse purchase last year. I knew nothing about it other than the praise it got on Into The Aether when Brendon talked about it. It’s parrt of the Famicom Detective Club game series, so I expect some great mystery and looking around rooms and the like. Apparently it has some great thriller/horror elements too? Will check it out for sure.
Pipstrello and the Cursed YoYo - I got this because of Wouter last year and it looks incredible. It’s a bit of a Metroidvania but with gameplay akin to 2D Zelda games. I’ve heard good things so I definitely want to give it a try.

Bonus games

Although I only have to beat four of these to consider the challenge complete, and my list of ten is already pretty good, there’s some titles that may have a chance to be completed along these. Here are some of them.

Gris - I know that Amin has greatly enjoyed this game, and since I already have it on my Switch, and it’s actually rather short, I really think I should give it a go and maybe finish it before some of the main titles here!
Super Mario 3D World - This is a title I’m playing with friends during some Sundays, therefore I can’t promise I’ll complete it, because my friends would have to be in the mood and choose this over some other videogames, card games or whatever other activity there is.
Metroid Fusion - I am pretty confident I can beat this very quickly, but it is not a first time playthrough and I’ve already beaten it multiple times so it does not really count.
The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy - I don’t think I would be able to finish this game so quickly, but I would definitely get a couple of the endings. I haven’t given this one a go in a long while, I really need to return to it.
CrossCode - I am loving this game so much! but I am playing it along with some friends and I don’t want to get ahead of them. It’s a fantastic story in a great world and lovely characters, I think I would finish it if I were by myself, but I won’t betray my friends!

If you want to join me on this challenge, feel free to let me know! I would love to see your progress updates as well, you’ll see mine on my weeknotes, though I’ve been thinking about making a separate post just for my games, who knows.

This is day 71 of #100DaysToOffload

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New playlist: 'Organising our small business' - Johnny.Decimal

2026-05-26T07:55:14.000Z

We've added a new playlist to JDU: Organising our small business.

These videos show real-life examples of how we run our business with Johnny.Decimal. It's what we do every day at work. New ones will be added as we think of things that you might find useful.

Recommendation: PikaPods - Johnny.Decimal

2026-05-26T01:52:28.000Z

I've mentioned PikaPods twice before. Once in the context of my mailing list software that I host there, and again singing the praises of their support. But here's a proper mini-review, because it's a service that can save your small business a lot of time.

Let's say there's some software you want to run. This post was prompted by them mailing me to say that they now host SuiteCRM, which I've never used but sure looks like fancy CRM software and might be exactly what you need. It's open source, so you could install it yourself by simply:

Provisioning a server. You'll need PHP, Apache, and MySQL running on there. Make sure you lock down remote SSH and don't log in as root!
Downloading SuiteCRM and setting permissions with commands like sudo chown -R www-data:www-data ..
Installing then configuring the database on localhost.
Setting up a cron job using crontab -e -u www-data.

🫠

Now, I understood all that. And I'm not knocking the SuiteCRM team or their instructions: they look really clear. But I was born with a computer between my teeth and it's all I've ever known. You? Maybe not.

How's this instead.

At PikaPods, search for SuiteCRM and click run your own.
Choose whether to run it in the EU or US.
Choose a username and password.
Click Add Pod.

That's it. Your pod is now running at a URL like strong-chicken.pikapod.net. Just browse there and use it.

The leads are weak.

Sounds expensive?

It is as cheap as chips! This pod would cost US$3/month to run. And get this: they're billed by the hour, and you can turn them off! This means it's basically free to install a thing and play with it for a while to see if you like it.

I've already deleted this one. That little experiment cost me $0.00415. (Not kidding.)

Beware: this isn't quite SaaS

Software-as-a-Service (Saas) is what you're used to. Gmail is SaaS: you don't care about any of the technical details. You can't care about the details: Google won't let you.

This isn't quite that. You still have to think about your own backups, for example. That's mostly it, but that's important. Each Pod can back itself up to an S3 bucket, and if you need help with that, let me know.

If you want to 'self-host' apps in the simplest way possible for a very reasonable price, I can't recommend PikaPods highly enough.