Shellsharks Blogroll - BlogFlock

Expanding my music pipeline - Posts feed

2026-09-30T21:19:00.000Z

I've written at length about my scrobbling implementation on my site. Until now I'd managed the metadata for my music manually, editing it on macOS before adding it to Navidrome. That gave me direct control, ate time and came with quite a bit of tedium.

I'd seen beets mentioned a few times as a tool to programmatically manage and apply metadata. I've wanted to use it, but cutting over a collection with nearly 800 artists and over 5,000 albums was a lot. But, as with most bad ideas I have, this one stuck with me.

One habit I'd gotten into while managing music was to assign splits to a single artist. If I had both artists in my collection, I'd split them into two albums, one for each artist. For collaborative albums I'd have either a unique artist for the collaboration or (incorrectly) assign it to whichever artist I preferred.

Fixing this meant, for starters, a database migration. My schema supported only a 1:1 relationship between artists and albums. Now an album like When No Birds Sang can be properly associated with both Nothing and Full of Hell. So I have artists in my Navidrome library whose only release is a split for which I may or may not have included their tracks—this makes my teeth itch, but I can live with it. I can't do anything about these artists in Navidrome, but I've filled out the album data on my site with ghost tracks. I pull the full tracklist from MusicBrainz to populate these releases and highlight them as missing.

Diagram of the music pipeline between coryd.dev and my Navidrome server. 1: an album uploaded in Library's Inbox goes to an S3 inbox, which the server pulls; beets matches and tags it, or provides options if a match isn't exact. The server converts FLAC to MP3 for Navidrome and sends the originals to an archive. Then, the retag batch rewrites existing tags based on decisions and tag edits from Library's Retag tab. 2: the site syncs artists, albums and tracks from Navidrome by ID, nightly or manually. 3: Navidrome's plugin sends scrobbles, which resolve by track ID. MusicBrainz sends ghost tracks to the site.

Connecting things

My music files sit in Navidrome, my listening data and scrobbles sit in my site's database. Scrobbles are sent from the former to the latter. Previously, I'd matched listens based on name alone. I've updated my artist, album and track schema to store their respective Navidrome IDs. For about 90% of my library, Navidrome derives that ID from the release's MusicBrainz ID and the rest are built from the tags.

Aligning metadata

I've added a Library section to the music portion of my custom CMS.¹ There are Inbox, Sync and Retag tabs. New music is uploaded in the Inbox tab. It's routed to an inbox directory on my Navidrome server. A scan is run against the inbox content. Exact matches are applied automatically; otherwise I pick from a list of likely releases. Once a release is picked, the album is tagged and scanned into Navidrome.

Once Navidrome has picked up the album, I move to the Sync tab and run a check job which looks for an existing match in my site's database. If there's no existing record and no errors from the check job, I can sync the new release to my site. Plays are then tied to the album by ID.

The Retag tab is where I manage music metadata. When I initially moved my tag management to beets, I spent much of my time here. The actual music scans run on my Navidrome server and report matches and misses back. Artists that need attention are flagged here for me to review. Again, with hundreds of artists and thousands of albums, this took a while. If I want to change the match for an album, I can revert to the previously selected release or edit the metadata manually. If I edit the album record, I can choose to write the edits to the tags on the audio and, when the tags are rewritten, I sync the updates back to my site.

Edge cases

Before storing IDs with albums, I'd hit edge cases when scrobbling plays for artists who had multiple albums with the same title (looking at you American Football). This generally worked in practice, but the absence of mismatches was more luck than proper implementation. Now, if a scrobble arrives without an ID and its title matches none of the artist's albums, or more than one, the site creates a new record I can merge into the right one.

This was one of those projects with a ton of up-front work that should pay off over time. Previously, everything I added I would download, tag manually, upload to the S3 bucket where I keep my music using rclone, and then it would get backed up to an archive, scanned in and synced. Now, I upload FLAC files once, beets tags them, converts them to MP3 and imports them, then copies the originals to my archive. I tend to run metadata syncs manually when I import or retag something, but those run nightly as well. Imports are easier, tags are correct and scrobbles are more reliable.

More on this eventually. ↩︎

One Year - Kev Quirk

2026-09-30T13:25:00.000Z

Today marks a year since my little sister, Lisa, took her own life. She was 34.

It was an overdose, but we don't know if it was an accident or suicide. We’ll never get an answer, yet I lean toward believing it was by choice. As grim as it sounds, picturing her with some control over the end brings me a small measure of peace.

I still think about her every day, and I still get upset regularly. Especially when I've been to visit my nephew and I see the sadness in his eyes.

At first I was angry at the selfishness of it all, but I think that's gone now. These days I'm just sad.

Mum blames herself, and has asked me numerous times where she went wrong. I never have an answer for that. What can I say? "Well the rest of us turned out ok, Mum. So you did fine." That feels dismissive of her emotions. So I just give her a sad smile and ask her to not think those things.

I miss her. I miss her laugh and dry sense of humour. I miss how she would always call people on their bullshit. Never afraid of speaking up.

Hopefully next year it will be a little less raw...

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Are you a smartwatch "power user"? - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-09-30T11:34:26.000Z

What do you use your smartwatch for?

A few weeks ago, I overheard a conversation between someone on the Pixel Watch team and a woman I know. He was quizzing her at a party about her Pixel watch and what features she used. He'd ignored me when I said I had a non-Google watch. She thought for a moment and said, other than telling the time, all she used were pretty much the step counter and contactless payments. He looked a bit crestfallen at his impromptu user-research participant and somewhat dismissively sneered, "Well, you're not exactly a power user, are you?"

I'm trying to imagine what being a "power user" of a watch is like. Can anyone enlighten me?

I think smart-watches are much like Alexa. What the user wants to do with it is almost totally at odds with what the company is selling. Alexæ are mostly kitchen timers, song players, and light switches. No one is a "power user" constantly installing skills and using it for anything which increases the product team's engagement metrics.

The same is probably true of watches. Alerts are nifty - but cumbersome for replies. The health stuff is useful - but only for a subset of users. Seeing the time is great - but if the battery lasts less than a week, who wants to keep that screen on?

People use watches because they are moderately more convenient to carry than the giant phones we have nowadays.

Back when mobile phones were new, exciting, and made a feature of being tiny, I was working for a network operator and trying to come up with reasons for people to use our brand-new 3G network. All the research we had showed that people used their phones for exactly three things:

Voice calls
Text messages
A third thing

That "3rd thing" was varied. For some it was playing snake, for others it was a calendar, and a few took photos. But almost no-one used their phone beyond the basics. They weren't investigating the sub-menus, nor were they using most of their device's capability unless it was heavily advertised to them (ringtones, basically).

It took the industry a huge amount of effort to get people to actually use their phones for more than calls and texts. Part of that was bigger screens with enticing icons (although users will always be reluctant to click mysterious icons). Another part was that phones became genuinely useful. But perhaps the biggest change, I think, is that phones became easy to use.

Watches have tiny screens. You can only get a few words of a message on there. Icons are tiny and hard to reliably tap. Swiping away at your wrist or fiddling with a crown is a faff. Talking into your wrist makes you look like a prat. Interacting with a smartwatch is annoying. Why would anyone want to spend more time using it than is strictly necessary?

I'm sure there are some people out there browsing the web on their wrist, and sending endless voice-notes to their AI assistant, and setting up complex travel plans by tapping their nose on the screen, and installing new watch faces which always point to the nearest Dignitas clinic, and seeing what their heart-rate did during that last run, and tracking whether their menstrual cycle is synced to the phases of the moon, and hoping that tripping on the stairs didn't send an alert to the emergency services, and whatever else the team has cooked up to show that they're still innovating.

But I'll bet those "power users" are vastly outnumbered by people who are using a smartwatch for the limited set of actions which are useful to them; not to the manufacturer.

Perhaps the real power users have is the power to use a device on their own terms?

Negotiating the burden - destructured

2026-09-30T04:00:00.000Z

FOSS communities are currently undergoing a series of minor crises around the questions of what extent to accept LLM-generated contributions, and how to respond to would-be contributors who feel that a given policy (or lack thereof) unfairly impacts their ability and/or desire to contribute. As far as I can tell, the projects and orgs that institute decisive, clearcut policies against generative AI contributions rarely, if ever, receive anywhere near as much blowback or debate as those that try to stake some nuanced middle position, but projects nonetheless keep attempting to thread the needle. That predictably leads to disputes like the one that apparently flared-up around the game engine project Bevy, as chronicled here.

On that account, part of the dispute centered on the issue of how to deal with cases that appear to violate a policy limiting LLM contributions, but that aren’t demonstrably LLM-generated. Does the contributor merit the benefit of the doubt? Or should any plausible accusation trigger closer scrutiny of the contribution? Recourse was quickly made to judicial metaphor:

The burden of proof from this angle unfairly rested on an ‘accuser’, not ‘the accused’. This mirrors many justice systems, but a PR being rejected is not equivalent to imprisonment or a fine or death.

That’s true, but the accuser/accused analogy is wrong not only as a matter of degree, but also as a category error. Judicial burden of proof is a principle for mitigating the potential harms of laws that are compulsory on a population. With software contributions, though, we’re talking not about a population bound by the laws imposed on them as an accident of geography or birth, but rather about candidates for inclusion in a social group — more like PhD candidates than courtroom defendants. As with PhD candidates, it’s entirely reasonable for the candidate to bear a burden for proving the suitability of their contribution.

It’s also reasonable to expect these disputes to continue so long as projects attempt to stake out some purported “middle ground” on generative AI. The disputes are as logical as they are irresolvable. “No AI” is a clear policy signaling that the project will continue to operate as it did before. Anything else will be some variation on “AI will be accepted, subject to reasonable checks.” Those checks necessarily translate into more work for someone. The LLM-assisted contributors won’t be satisfied with such a policy because mitigating work was the point of bringing in AI tools in the first place. And non-users won’t be satisfied because now they’re responsible for making sure that work gets done.

“No” remains the most reasonably policy.

SBS Zoom sessions cancelled - Johnny.Decimal

2026-09-30T02:16:53.000Z

We've cancelled the Small Business System fortnightly Zoom sessions. Attendance was sparse, and for something that took so much mental energy they weren't earning their keep.

If you're an SBS member you can always book a 1:1 session with me. Email me for the link to my calendar.

I haven't given up on the idea of open/public Zoom sessions. We've tried a few formats over the years and nothing's quite stuck. We'll continue to experiment.

ever-changing - James' Coffee Blog

2026-09-30T00:00:00.000Z

My website is ever changing. I am

here, something - James' Coffee Blog

2026-09-30T00:00:00.000Z

In Distance there is the sight of everything; here there is the presence of something.

I was on a podcast (again) - Joel's Log Files

2026-09-29T18:20:00.000Z

Once again I am happy to share with you all the secret that I mentioned a couple weeknotes ago! I was in yet another podcast! This time I was a guest in James’ wonderful show:

Wonders of Web Weaving #21: Joel

The podcast is a fantastic show where James interviews different bloggers and writers that are active on the IndieWeb scene. There have been many wonderful people there already, such as Marisabel, Rachel, Mike, and some more.

There’s only about 20 episodes so far, so give it a listen if you care about blogging, the indie web, writing and the like!

The way this came to be is kinda fun. I was actually the one who reached out to James on Signal, to see if he’d be interested in having me on his show. It just seemed like something fun to try, and a way to challenge myself to speak some more English too, and of course ~~the free promotion muahaha~~ having a good chat with a friend. ☺️

My family would be out of town soon, and I’d be able to freely express myself without being shy about it. I also had no work that day, which was more convenient for our difference in timezones, as he would otherwise be long asleep by the time I get back home from a regular work day.

The only problem was… I took my shot with just two days of anticipation. So I wasn’t sure if he’d have the availablity. Still, I let him know.

Thankfully, James was very approachable, and told me he was free at that time, he was even happy to take the proximity of the event as a challenge for his organization skills—things lined up perfectly for both after all.

Going from being one of four people—on my previous podcast experience—to being the main guest was nerve-wracking at first, but James had my back the whole time and I felt pretty comfortable talking and rambling on. I think it also helped that neither of us are English native speakers so I didn’t feel self-conscious about my pronunciation.

The episode goes through many things, such as my start with blogging, how everything developed over time, some thoughts about hobbies like origami and gaming and why I like to share them, as well as what I want for the future of blogging and the web I’m general. I hope you check it out and find it enjoyable! And forgive my ramblings and bad pronunciation of the word “posts”.

Without further to do, feel free to check it out and share your thoughts about it in the comments!

This is day 44 of #100DaysToOffload

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2026-09-29 16:03: I think it's time... #Ubuntu - Kev Quirk

2026-09-29T15:03:00.000Z

I think it's time... #Ubuntu

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2026-09-29 11:10: Soooooo Hacker News happened. 🤣 - Kev Quirk

2026-09-29T10:10:00.000Z

Soooooo Hacker News happened. 🤣

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Pixel Art, New book started, lights out! - W39 - Joel's Log Files

2026-09-29T04:30:00.000Z

I have been participating with the #3GoodThings hashtag for quite a little while now! I’ve tried to be consistent with it and I’ve been dutiful documenting at least three interesting things that happened that way. Basically, they are a bit of a shorter version of these weeknotes! In case you wanna follow what I’m up to closer to real time.

At last, here are some notes and things of interesting that went on from September 22 to 28, 2026.

🐻 I have done a couple Pixel Bears! for many of my blogging friends. I am definitely looking forward to sharing the final results once they are completed. I only have a few more to do!
🕹 Two Nintendo Switch games were acquired… Red Read Redemption and MIO: Memories in Orbit. I don’t know how they showed up here at all… 😇
🍩 On Thursday we went to a friend’s birthday, but instead of a regular cake we had a bunch of donuts! So that was pretty funpretty fun.
🎨 Some badges have been made too, but I’m not ready to share those yet at all. Wanna do more first. These will be themed after videogames. Although you can get one already from my footer, the one that says “made by a human”!
🍔 On Friday I was invited by some friends to the movies, to watch the new Avengers Endgame Encore. Before that though, we got some great burguers for lunch! It was delicious and I was filled up.
🍕 My sister visit time is over at last, she left today and headed back to continue her studies. Yesterday some friends from church invited her (and me) to a pizza night! It was very fun.
🔌 During a visit to the supermarket, the lights went out! That was actually a bit of a crazy experience, I don’t think that’s ever happened to me. It literally went away for like a minute and some people were screaming and looking for their kids and the like. Very bizarre but actually kind of fun for me.
📚 I recently purchased The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, but I’ve actually gotten some other Kobo books that went unmentioned for a while! Let me know which one should I read next:
- Jade City by Fonda Lee
- Red Rising by Pierce Brown
- There is No Anti-Memetics Division by qntm
- Memory’s Legion by James S.A. Corey

A tasty pizza, my PSP playing FFIV, some donuts, Red Read Redemption and MIO: Memories in Orbit, and my Kobo reader

Reading

The Left Hand of Darkness - Chapters 1-5. One of the most known Sci-Fi works by Ursula K. Le Guin, this book was chosen for the TWG’s Low Key Book Club. Unfortunately, I realized too late and may be unable to complete it for the conversation about it. I’ll still read it though. The story is about a human embassador sent to a planet where genders constantly change with the time and seasons, so he is considered a perversion among them. So far, very confusing!
Centuria - Chapters 73-79. Just a few more action packed chapters. I have to say I’m starting to notice why some reviews say this has almost no substance. I can barely remember anything about it, there are no real epic or memorable moments. Only some entertaining twists and such. Revelations are nice, but no pay offs just yet, a bunch of unsolved mysteries and we are 80 chapters in. Hope something happens soon.

Gaming

Final Fantasy IV - I made even more progress on the last dungeon of the game, and I even teleported out to buy supplies and headed back inside to grind some more and get all the way to the bottom. I unlocked a new sword, the Masamune, beating another boss guardian. I continue to head downwards into the dungeon, I have not played enough to reach the end though. Definitely smelling the ending nearby.
Super Smash Bros - We had a fantastic multiplayer session, and this one was actually kind of crazy. We had the usual battles with 3 lives, but we were told that we had to leave elsewhere, and we decided to do a deathmatch. It was actually extremely competitive, and everyone ended up on red numbers. We even managed to survive someone’s Smash attack. A lucky friend grabbed the giant laser beam gun and managed to hit everyone at once. As epic as it gets.
Minecraft - Played it like 20 minutes, didn’t really feel the itch to do more though.

Watching

The Day The Earth Stood Still - A timeless classic from 1951. The writing is smart and holds up well. They somehow avoid mentioning conflicts so you can easily imagine the events happening today, though the Cold War was clearly present. The plot is simple, but ahead of its time. The terror is mostly implied rather than shown. An alien with technology beyond our understanding, along and unstoppable robot companion visit Earth, looking to share a critical message to every leader on the planet: To chill for once and stop the violence around us, or be turned into dust.
Avengers Endgame Encore - This was a very, very fun time. I hadn’t really watched Endgame since 2019, and it was honestly very interesting to see all of what happened between then and now. Anyway, the movie itself isn’t better than Infinity War, but I still had plenty of nostalgia and love for these characters, and I had a blast revisiting the closure of the Infinity Saga. Not going to lie, the extra scenes aren’t worth much.
Minority Report - A sci-fi film about a pre-crime detective who ends up framed for a pre-crime himself. He has to do everything to prove he is innocent (and will remain so). I only started the film, but I want to see the rest of it (will probably restart lol).

Around the Web

the reduction of intellectual labor by Ava, saddened by the way LLMs are taking away the joy out of a lot of jobs.
On reading books - A very nice slice of life and random thoughts about reading.
Learning scripting by scraping my own website - This was an absolutely lovely display of a human figuring things out.
Awe - A wonderful slice of life once again, this time by James!
Become worthless (to tech companies) - This was a fun one excercise. Ruining your value as a costumer for big tech.

This is day 43 of #100DaysToOffload

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An open note to the BSD community - destructured

2026-09-29T04:00:00.000Z

I recently switched out the operating system I use to serve this site, first from Ubuntu to Debian, then from Debian to FreeBSD. The first switch was motivated by Ubuntu’s roadmap for AI integration; the second, by Linus Torvald’s suggestion that people with qualms about AI should “just walk away” from the Linux kernel. Who am I to ignore sound advice? Moving to an entirely new system involved a few trade-offs, of course, but I’m happy with where I’ve landed.

And it seems I’m not the only one. Via the Fediverse, I’ve come into contact with a number of people making the jump to one Berkeley distribution or another. Many are either professional or gifted hobbyist software developers, an influx of talent that will no doubt enrich the ecosystem in time. You should be pleased to have them. (I’m decidedly less useful; for me, mere tolerance will suffice.)

Most of the arrivals I’ve spoken with have expressed similar reasons for the change. Our hope is that BSD (or, at least, the teams maintaining its distributions) will resist the pressure to embrace a technology that we see as not merely disruptive, but also destructive — destructive to the digital commons, including the practices of free software; destructive to communities both digital and physical; destructive to the processes of education and skill development; destructive to the operations of a free and participatory society; destructive to efforts to maintain a habitable environment.

In some sense, we want BSD to function as a preserve — not for the pre-AI state of computing, but for a more humane vision of what the digital commons can be. One ubiquitous refrain of AI marketing is that failure to adopt is tantamount to being left behind, but we’re not asking you to freeze half a century of development in amber. We hope to see BSD continue to grow and flourish — some are already thinking about their part in that growth — but we hope the path ahead follows a trajectory defined by interpersonal collaboration, rather than one ceded to predictive algorithms shaped by the imperatives of rent-seeking corporations.

It would be presumptuous to demand all of that, perhaps — fresh arrivals that we are. Presumptuous, maybe, to even request it. But we hope, and we’re willing to help.

The Lenfest AI Collaborative has additional funding. That's great for open source in news. - Werd I/O

2026-09-29T00:06:07.000Z

Link: OpenAI doubles support for Lenfest’s AI and local news fellowships, by Andrew Deck in Nieman Lab

I participated in this program in my former role of Senior Director of Technology at ProPublica. Because I’m no longer there, it’s no longer my place to say how it went / how it’s going, but I’ll summarize it this way: I have no regrets. The two AI fellows I got to hire are genuinely wonderful people who I hope to work with again, and I learned a ton from other newsrooms in the program.

If you’ve followed my writing for any length of time you know that I’m very far from being an AI fanboy, and there was never a sense that I needed to stray from the extremely careful approach that is appropriate for a newsroom like ProPublica. We did not need to use any particular approach or vendor, and most importantly, nobody ever asked us to do anything that would compromise the trust or safety of the newsroom or its community. (The idea isn’t to displace reporters, or any human; it’s to potentially give them new tools.) At its core, it was just an opportunity to explore a new technology in community with other mission-driven newsrooms.

It’s also a way for newsrooms to regain their confidence in sharing their technical approaches and code, collaborating with other newsrooms, and (sometimes) open-sourcing their work. That, to me, is a benefit that probably outweighs the use of any technology. Newsrooms should be sharing; they should be collaborating; they should be working together. Hopefully, even when the cohort is over and everyone has moved on to think about something else, they will retain this muscle. It’s important.

Wonders of Web Weaving, Episode 21 - James' Coffee Blog

2026-09-29T00:00:00.000Z

The twenty-first episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out:

In Episode 21, I chat with Joel, the author of joelchrono.xyz about, among other things, writing about video games, weeknotes, homepage and website design, and more.

I hope you enjoy the episode!

Wonders of Web Weaving also has an RSS feed you can use to follow along from wherever you get your podcasts.

Joel joelchrono.xyz The twenty-first episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out Wonders of Web Weaving also has an RSS feed

Autumn morning - James' Coffee Blog

2026-09-29T00:00:00.000Z

The low clouds glowed with shades of lavender as I opened the window to see the first colours of Day. A field in the distance, yellow from harvest and the drier weather, is coated in a blanket of cool fog; in front of the trees are an almost-but-not-quite transparent haze, making the trees, full of autumn life, too, feel cool. In the foreground and all around there are yellow leaves. The occasional tree carries red leaves. All around there is colour, from deep and sky blue to countryside green to vivid red.

High in the sky, I see the moon. Yesterday the whole moon was visible; today, almost the whole moon is visible; the visibility of the moon ebbs through phases just as Nature moves between phases. I can see thin clouds passing in front of the moon, so light that they are almost transparent,. The clouds are moving fast with the morning breeze.

Here, indoors, I feel the chill of the metal on my laptop and a breeze coming from the window. One edge of the window shows signs of condensation: the contrast between the relative warmth indoors and the chill outside, where the blanket of fog continues to coat the fields. Outside, the birds sing the song of Morning, the moon shows its full but fading light before disappearing until night, and blue, cloud-soaked sky, contrasts beautifully with the warm autumnal colours below.

Good morning, world. Happy Tuesday.

The Public Ledger of Credentials directory is taking flight - Werd I/O

2026-09-28T18:41:16.000Z

Link: First steps of the PLC organization, by Public Ledger of Credentials Organization

Since Bluesky’s foundation, its mission has been to work on an open social media protocol that gives users a “credible exit” from any one company’s services while allowing them to continue participating in the network.

This has two important effects. The first is that users can feel safe investing in the network knowing they’re insulated from any one company’s individual business decisions (if their social media provider makes a boneheaded decision, they can move to another one without losing their networks or content). The second, which is even more important to me, is that the network is insulated against monopoly power.

When one company owns the way everyone communicates and learns, their incentives and priorities dominate how the network works, granting them unprecedented power over democratic discourse. The most obvious example is Elon Musk, who bought Twitter to spread his values and suppress those he disagrees with. But he’s not alone: the US attempted to co-opt TikTok because they were worried the Chinese government might have undue influence over content viewed by American citizens. In an open network, that level of control is much harder to obtain; anyone can start an alternative application provider, and anyone can migrate to it. In a fully decentralized network, no-one — not a would-be oligarch, nor a nation — can have outsized control.

One criticism of Bluesky has historically been that it’s not been fully decentralized. Originally, it provided the only application and datastore that sat on the network, and it was the only organization doing identity management — so, while there was an open protocol underneath it, in practice users couldn’t pick anyone else’s services or really migrate.

There have been alternative application and datastore providers for a while: Blacksky broke the ice with an application, algorithms, and data stores that allow communities to govern their own data and fund collective needs. Eurosky, which hosts and processes inside the EU, and Gander, a Canadian alternative, are some of the providers that followed. More are showing up every day.

Which left identity resolution — the underlying address book that takes a user’s ID on the network (their Decentralized Identifier) and figures out where their data is stored. That had previously been handled by Bluesky itself, but today’s announcement heralds the first steps of transferring it into the hands of an independent Public Ledger of Credentials Organization, headquartered in Switzerland.

This is exciting to see, and is another step towards having a fully decentralized network. Bluesky did a great job of attracting journalists, authors, and other people who want to discuss culture and society; those conversations are too important to be owned by any one entity. We’re closer than ever to a social media commons that really works.

I Switched to Brave Browser - Kev Quirk

2026-09-28T11:59:00.000Z

I've been whinging about wanting to move away from Firefox for nearly a year now. It started with Mozilla's announcement about their AI strategy and my initial thoughts. Then they doubled-down and it raised my heckles even more. Then I had a long old whinge about how fucked they seem to be.

I took Vivaldi for a spin, but I couldn't get used to it. It just tries to do too much, and has way too much going on with the UI, and dark/light theme switching still doesn't work despite it apparently being fixed. So I made my peace with Firefox and stuck with it.

I kept Vivaldi on my machine as a backup, and over the last 6 months or so, I've found myself having to open it more and more due to something not working in Firefox. This was far from a daily occurrence, but it happened often enough for it to become annoying. But I still couldn't use Vivaldi full time.

It's worth stating that things not working isn't the fault of Firefox. It's developers not testing their web apps with Firefox, since it has such a small market share.

Switching to Brave

I decided to install Brave a couple months ago just to see how things went. I had some messing around to do up front, like hiding all the crypto and AI nonsense, but once that was gone, it's been fine.

Everything works how I expect, both on Ubuntu and Android. The UI is similar to Firefox, and most importantly, it doesn't try to boil the ocean. I renders webpages, then gets out of my way. I don't need it to check RSS feeds, or emails, or have toolbars on every edge of the screen. Even dark mode switching works!

I haven't felt the need to open Firefox since starting this exeperiment, so I think Brave is gonna stick.

The elephant in the room

Yes yes yes. Brave was founded by an absolute scumbag. But there's scumbags everywhere, in all walks of life. Contrary to what some people on the internet will say, my use of Brave doesn't mean I agree with, or support, Bendan Eich's world views. I consider his personal views to be separate from Brave.

You may disagree, and that's fine. But Brave is objectively a good piece of software that does what I need it to do, and does it well. So I'm gonna continue using it for the forseable future. If Firefox get their act together and become relevant again, I may jump back, but for now it will remain my secondary browser.

I do still have Vivaldi installed too. So I will continue to check in on it now and then, and if I decide they're on a par with Brave on Linux (mainly light/dark theme switching is what's missing), then I'll definitely make the switch as I feel their moral compass is far more aligned with my own.

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Book Review: Bobiverse Books 1-3 by Dennis E. Taylor ★★★☆☆ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-09-28T11:34:52.000Z

Like sticky popcorn, this is a moreish but ultimately unsatisfying set of stories. After I flamed out of Dungeon Crawler Carl, someone suggested I try this series. I can see why! It's campy sci-fi fun, with enough tropes to keep you chuckling and enough tension to keep you turning the pages.

Bob's brain is uploaded to a computer post-mortem. Awoken in a dystopian future, he has to pilot a spaceship to strange new worlds, put right what once went wrong, and hoping The Force will be with him, always. Oh, and he repeatedly clones himself. Creating a universe populated with Bobs (a "Bobiverse" if you will)

It's your standard "only I, a slightly geeky guy with lots of pop-culture knowledge, can save the world" fare which is beloved by slightly geeky guys everywhere who think they're smarter than all those normies just because they can recite the list of Hugo winners alphabetically.

Like Ready Player One it throws in as many quips and catchphrases as the plot will bear. Unlike Cline's work, it never really commits to them, so you end up with a scattering of Monty Python, Star Wars, and the X-Files without an overall theme developing.

And, in keeping with Andy Weir's The Martian, it's all just one guy sciencing the shit out of the problem. Except that lots of the science is sort of hand-waved away with "and then I 3D printed a thing".

Similar to both those books is an almost total lack of female characters. The ones that are in the first two are either plot-points or harridans. By the third there's a love interest who is slightly more rounded, and a couple of other incidentals, but offset against yet another woman who just can't appreciate the "genius" of Bob.

It's all good page turning fun other than the fact that Bob is a total cretin. He begins a slow descent into fascist dictator and barely even comments on it. He spies, carries out extra-judicial killings, and meddles in politics to his own advantage. At no point does the text ever really engage with the fact that Bob is a monster.

The character rarely reflects on whether his behaviour meets the moral standard he expects of others. He bemoans the aliens who are destroying entire ecosystems while simultaneously wiping out whole species himself. At times he is a conniving bully and reacts badly to anyone who pushes back against the ineffable will of Bob.

The jumping back-and-forth between the different Bobs is a bit frustrating, a bit like flicking between TV channels. I wish each story strand were allowed some space to develop - but instead it's one chapter of this planet, then one chapter of another, before (eventually) circling back.

Annoyingly, the books are only available on Amazon Kindle. They're not on any other platform or library. I'm grateful to the friend who lent me their copies. I binged the first three but, without any indication that Bob will mature as a character or face a reckoning for his egregious actions, that's where I stopped.

Morning moon - James' Coffee Blog

2026-09-28T00:00:00.000Z

When I opened the window this morning, I was greeted by a white and grey disk, the grey blending into the light blue of the surrounding skies. Clear as Day, and full, the morning moon made me feel a little bit of awe. Wow. When I went to bed last night, the moonlight cast beams of silver into the house. I didn’t expect to see the moon again so soon, on this cool, still autumn morning where increasingly sun-soaked branches and leaves sway delicately. In front of where I sit I see the yellowing leaves of autumn atop a tall tree. That tree, by co-incidence and the wonder of human perception and imagination, almost appears to point to the white orb that sits stoic in the sky. The moon is so still it almost looks like it will never move again. But I know that, by tonight, the moon will have travelled far – like us all – and rise to create once again its peaceful silver glow.

To the west, the intensity of the sun rising across blue skies and through light white clouds increases, marking the beginning of a new day, the moon both bringing back memories of last eve and leaving me to ponder the beauty of the sun and moon together, decorating the sky on this new day.

I look back up to the aforementioned autumn branches and notice the moon has moved relative to said branches. We are forever in movement, discernible especially with a point of reference. The leaves helped me track the movement of the moon; the colours and temperatures help me track the progression of the season.

Gig Review: Public Service Broadcasting's Race For Space at Alexandra Palace ★★★★⯪ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-09-27T11:34:08.000Z

Ahhh! PSB's RFS! A delightfully indulgent soundscape of melodic wonder, performed here on its 10th (ish) anniversary. Is it really nostalgia if an album is only a decade old? It feels like it has been in the air forever.

For something which is seemingly made up of samples, it would have been easy for them to half-arse it and basically just play the CD. Instead we got a full band, guest singers, and 360° video projection,

Oh, also a disco Sputnik flying over the crowd!

Simply magical! As were the indoor fireworks.

I might quibble a little with their song choices (no Gagarin!) but hearing the crowd repeatedly scream "GO!" was magnificent.

Ally Pally isn't a raked venue, so the video projection of the band was most welcome. An excellent gig in a splendid location.

Pre-show and Post-show

As I've written about before, the art of the Pre-Show and Post-Show is vital for getting people to pay for events outside of their homes. Right now I can stream all the music in the world for a year for about the same price as a couple of gig tickets. Why should I freeze my arse off outside, paying stupid money for mass-produced lager, when I could be at home?

PSB kept up a constant stream of emails talking about the gig. Not an overwhelming amount, just letting people peek behind the curtain of organising it, giving helpful information about logistics, and letting us know about merchandise which was available.

Crucially, they also gave us stage timings for them and their support act! How many times have you turned up on time to a gig only to spend an hour listening to some crap DJ before the crew even started setting up the stage? PSB treat their fans with respect.

Ally Pally isn't a venue I've been to before. It was well laid out with decent toilet provision - including a big block of portaloos at the back of the hall. The beer prices weren't ruinous, but I kind of resented paying £15 for a veggie hotdog and a handful of chips.

Some venues seem to think that screaming at punters to open their bags will make for an enjoyable visit. Here the security staff were polite and not overly officious. Water bottles were allowed in with a cheery wave.

Post show - although the train stations are downhill, there were several buses waiting to take punters directly back. That's a perfect way of treating guests at your venue - ensuring that they get home safe and sound.