Shellsharks Blogroll - BlogFlock

WwJD: Spend less time doing boring admin (video) - Johnny.Decimal

2026-07-18T06:22:15.000Z

A 'Working with Johnny.Decimal' video.

This video shows how my system helps me calmly complete two simple, infrequent tasks. They're far enough apart that I forget how to do them, and they've previously caused more disruption than necessary. One of the benefits of Johnny.Decimal is that it takes the edge off my computer use, turning it into a neat room where I can work efficiently and spend less time doing boring admin.

Finished reading Gideon the Ninth - Molly White's activity feed

2026-07-18T02:00:13.000Z

Finished reading:

The Locked Tomb series, book 1.

Gideon the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir.

Published 2019. 448 pages.

Started July 16, 2026; completed July 17, 2026.

Self hosting a PDS isn't hard (so far) - Posts feed

2026-07-17T21:23:00.000Z

Due to my compulsive need to self-host whatever I possibly can¹, I decided to set up a self-hosted PDS. All that's on it so far is my Bluesky profile data, but it was a surprisingly painless process.

Why bother? Well, I get to own my identity (DID) and my data. The relay and AppView remain Bluesky's, but the authoritative copy of my account is mine. I already syndicate from my site to Bluesky and controlling the PDS is the last part of this infrastructure I can reasonably control.

I've been bolting features on to my own CLI to manage my infrastructure for a bit². I use Hetzner for hosting and it wraps their hcloud CLI for my own convenience. I spun up a CX23 box with backups turned on and then ran another CLI command to bootstrap the server.

The server is running only two things: the canonical ghcr.io/bluesky-social/pds container maintained by Bluesky and Caddy. I use forwardemail.net for transactional emails.

With the server provisioned, I updated the _atproto record for my domain and added a pds A record. I use DNSControl to manage DNS records, so this only took a few minutes.

The migration

Migrating my data from Bluesky's PDS to my own was the only part of this process that made me a little nervous. I needed to preserve my DID, followers and just over 1,000 account records. I used Bluesky's goat tool to manage this process.

I generated a recovery key using goat key generate --type k256
Logged in to my old (Bluesky) account: goat account login -u <username> -p <app-password> --auth-factor-token <email-code>
Created a PDS invite for myself using my CLI (or SSH into the box and run pdsadmin create-invite-code).
Ran the migration — it pauses and emails a PLC confirmation code that you paste into the prompt:

goat account migrate \
    --pds-host <host> \
    --new-handle <username> \
    --new-password "<password>" \
    --invite-code "<pds-invite-code>"

Added my recovery key to the identity so it's my highest-priority rotation key (this also emails a confirmation token): goat account plc add-rotation-key <recovery-pubkey> --first

It ran faster than I expected and worked without any issues (shocking, I know). I syndicated a post, opened my profile in an incognito window and it loaded without issue. I also verified that DID doc #atproto_pds pointed at my new host and threw my private recovery key in my password manager.

Cleanup

The last step was to add support for a custom PDS URL to my site and the PWA I built myself to browse Mastodon and Bluesky simultaneously. This consisted of a migration to update the database schema to save the URL and the corresponding field in the UI. The app passwords I use for both also needed to be recreated on the new PDS which I did from the aforementioned CLI.

I have yet another server running which, at this point, I'm starting to collect like trading cards. My ATProto data sits on its own server, free to be used with any apps that support it (for my purposes that's only Bluesky — for now). It was a surprisingly straightforward process and I'm thankful for that.

I'm still getting my head around ATProto, but I appreciate that you can own your own data, if not all of the application infrastructure. I was used to the Mastodon mental model where, while you can migrate between instances, not all data comes with you. You own the identity but, perhaps, not all of the content. You can't own everything in either case, for now, but it feels like we're heading in the right direction.

Except email. ↩︎
More on that in a future post, probably. ↩︎

One of those webinars - Joel's Log Files

2026-07-17T14:15:00.000Z

Don’t worry, it was fully optional.

I assisted to a webinar about “the potential of AI” in the workplace, and you can already guess what sort of conference I had to go through yesterday. I shared a livestream of my thoughts on my Polymaths’ profile in case you want to see my reactons to what was said there, it’s hilarious stuff.

Something I didn’t mention on that thread was a little quizz at the start, where people filled out polls and the like, and one of the pages was actually a word cloud, they asked “what words come to mind when you think about AI?”.

Of course, I typed a few: “Wasteful”, “lazy”, “slop”, “unethical”… there was no limit I found to how many I could add, but I stopped with those. They didn’t even show up in the word cloud.

“Useful”, “automation”, “future”, “tool”, “assistant”.

Each word got bigger as more and more people typed them in real time.

This wasn’t a multiple choice question, they were chosen and submitted by many.

It is unfortunate, and undeniable, how many people today are perfectly okay with all this, even when they are aware of the bad they caused and continue to cause—they simply look the other way.

“It’s a necessary evil now, there’s nothing we can do about it.”

“We need to catch up with the times, it’s the same as the calculator or the personal computer”

One of the common themes during the presentation was how “you should learn how to use it, don’t stay behind”, because “you will not be replaced by it, but by those who know how to use it”.

Honestly though, as grim as it sounds, I couldn’t help but cringe at every example and slide showed through the whole thing. The generated graphics, the generated prompts, pretty much all the information there was not made by the presentator, none of the examples or problems solved were real.

It’s such a big charade, and the fact everything started with how much running these things can cost and how “it’s not that the AI is inneficient, it’s just that you don’t prompt it properly” let me know it’s all just a joke.

At some point the host shared their screen and started to copy-paste example prompts, while the sidebar featuring a chat history was in full display. “Answer this email”, “summarise this email”, and almost out of frame… “I’m doing a webinar about[…]”.

Check the thread if you want, it’s a good laugh. Watching the bubble pop will be fun.

This is day 98 of #100DaysToOffload.

Reply to this post via email | Reply on Fediverse

Notable links: July 17, 2026 - Werd I/O

2026-07-17T13:28:46.000Z

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

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Mamdani invests in tech capacity to “solve real problems”

There’s a lot that newsrooms can learn from Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral administration in New York City. His latest announcement is the Public Interest Technology (PIT) Crew, a set of dynamic, cross-disciplinary digital teams that will solve problems across the city using a rapid, human-centered approach.

As Pamela Herd notes here, this is a shift from contracting out to building internal capacity:

“Traditionally, the conventional wisdom since the 1990s and before was that governments could buy tech products like an off-the-shelf product. This led to a massive turn to contracting out, which was great for consultants but bad for government capacity. The outsourced approach often cost too much, delivering too little and too late.

[…] What people who know tech and government have been screaming for years is that building good tech needs in-house capacity, even when you are using contractors. It requires the government owning the design, development and delivery of technology, relying on rapid iteration to fix problems in a way that is impossible when contractors are running things.”

This dynamic is also highly prevalent in newsrooms, resulting in the same problems. If you rely too heavily on buying existing technology or working with outside contractors, you are building operational, functional, and intellectual dependencies on those organizations. You import their values and ways of working, which in the case of some vendors may be catastrophic in itself, but you also put yourself on their timelines and make yourself subject to their feature priorities and interests. And that’s before you consider security and trust profiles, which may radically differ between newsrooms and the vendors that serve them.

New York City isn’t alone; other governments are beginning to shift from outsourcing back to internally owned technology. The article links to a report explaining Colorado’s move back to internally-run IT, which states the issue plainly:

“There is an alignment problem: the issue is not effort, but that we have organized around internal structures rather than outcomes, and that misalignment has made excellent work harder.”

Mamdani’s PIT Crew sounds a lot like how a product team should work: directed groups of experts rapidly prototyping solutions to concretely defined problems anchored in real people’s needs. By doing it internally, he can make sure these solutions are built exactly the way the city needs, build institutional capacity and knowledge, and, theoretically at least, do it far more cheaply in the long run.

As these sorts of civic measures succeed, I think (or, perhaps, I hope) we’ll see more newsrooms translate those outcomes to their own businesses and begin to understand that they need to prioritize technical capacity too. All the same reasons apply here.

Of course, most newsrooms don’t have the budget of the New York City Mayor’s office. I think the solution to that is third entities: non-profit organizations that exist to provide shared technical capacity across newsrooms, based on newsroom needs, that behave as if they were part of newsroom teams. Think of it as a kind of PIT Crew for news, operated independently but in deep collaboration with newsrooms. By using a radically open source approach, newsrooms can pool resources together and solve shared technical problems more easily, on their terms and according to their values.

While there are always places for startups and tech platforms, the idea that the tech industry can always serve needs better than building institutional capacity is fundamentally broken; it’s also fundamentally right-wing. I’m delighted to see the New York City Mayor’s office move in a more productive direction. I hope it becomes an example for everyone.

We are not alone

I was delighted to be included in this roundup by Adiel Kaplan, the Program Director at the Tow-Knight Center for Journalism Futures at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.

As Adiel says:

“Having a say in what the future of news looks like will likely require not just that collaboration across newsrooms, but also outside them, with other institutions that want to shape a future with informed communities at its center — which is, after all, the mission. Right?

[…] It will also require a different way of thinking about our role in this ecosystem, beyond creating content and distributing it. It might mean getting more involved in building technology, or joining forces in new ways with government-funded institutions.”

This is exciting to me: I’ve been saying for a while now that news needs to get more involved in building technology. My flippant line is that news treats technology as something that happens to it, like an asteroid — but it’s actually a creative work, like an article. Although many newsrooms are too small to build a strong capacity in themselves, it’s perfectly possible for news as an industry to build capacity and create the technology that is unique to its use cases on its terms. So I think it’s a very good thing that news institutions are talking about this need.

The people listed in the article are exceptional. I’m just happy to be on the list in such fine company. Don’t sleep on any of them; I feel most connected to Ivan Sigal’s ambitious and vital work at the Modal Foundation and what Trei Brundrett is building (in collaboration with Blaine Cook and others) at New_ Public. But these are all worthy endeavors: the Library Newsroom Project is a genius on-the-ground effort to create local newsrooms based in every public library in the US, and Sannuta Raghu’s news atoms embed meaning and provenance in natural language articles. All are promising.

We need to move forward. There are certainly more people who could have been added to such a list; my hope is that if one were written a year from now, it would be exponentially longer. Let’s innovate.

White House Directed Patel to Oversee Investigation Involving Times Reporting

The White House personally directed FBI Director Kash Patel to issue subpoenas to journalists reporting on the President’s new Qatari-gifted Air Force One.

“The White House’s deep involvement in the case came after officials said that President Trump was enraged about the coverage of the Qatari-donated plane, which The Times reported Thursday lacks the same defensive countermeasures of the previous Air Force One.”

These subpoenas were delivered by hand to some of the reporters at home, echoing the FBI’s raid of a Washington Post engagement reporter’s home earlier this year. In both cases, it’s highly likely that these were attempts to discover who leaked information to their respective newsrooms.

There’s lots to say about first amendment issues here, and commentators like Dan Kennedy at Media Nation have pertinent thoughts. It’s clear that journalism is under attack by the administration, and they rescinded rules that protected journalists in leak investigations last year. The US Press Freedom Tracker is a sobering read. But it’s also important to take a moment to talk about the technology side of this story.

When the administration wants to issue a subpoena to a newsroom, it has a few avenues available to it. The first is to issue it directly to the newsroom or to its reporters, as they did here. In some ways, this is the best outcome: then the newsroom knows about the subpoena and can actively fight it in court.

The other avenue is to subpoena the newsroom’s service providers. If source information is stored unencrypted on a service like Google Workspace, the administration could subpoena Google. If a gag order is added — which might well happen if it’s a criminal subpoena or labeled a matter of national security — then the newsroom would never find out and have the chance to fight it. This is true even if the service provider nominally promises to notify the newsrooms about subpoenas: a gag order is a gag order.

Larger newsrooms have strong data security practices for this reason: they know to create policies and architectures which force subpoenas to come through them. But not every newsroom has the capacity to build a strong security strategy. Which means for every story we hear about that involves these newsrooms, there may be many more that took place in secret.

The Freedom of the Press Foundation maintains digital security resources and runs training for newsrooms and specific advice about source protection. The EFF also has some great resources. More resources are out there. But there is more of a need than ever for every newsroom to make sure they have access to someone who can advise them on digital security both holistically and on a case-by-case basis. Not every newsroom can afford a permanent member of staff, but finding access to some kind of resource is vital.

Likewise, journalism funders should focus on providing access to experts, understanding that these issues are existential for the organizations they fund. Not only is this an attack on press freedoms, but it’s also an attack on trust. Every newsroom can do its reporting because sources feel safe to reach out to it; if their safety is in question, they may be less likely to leak, and we may be less likely to read the stories that help us make good democratic decisions. That’s what the administration seems to be banking on.

Trump dismantled a federal climate website. These women rebuilt it.

This shouldn’t have been necessary, but is still wonderful to see. Climate.gov had been the go-to resource for climate data, but it went offline when the Trump Administration radically cut NOAA’s funding. At that point:

“[Rebecca] Lindsey joined forces with former NOAA employees Anna Eshelman, and Mary Lindsey, her older sister, to become the core team behind the deactivated site’s successor, Climate.us, preserving over 15 years of key climate data and resources. The trove features key maps, educational materials and climate indicator reports, including the now-deleted Fifth National Climate Assessment, the government’s most comprehensive analysis of climate change that was at risk of being lost to the public.”

This is possible because US government data is public domain by law. Had it not been available under a permissive license, the administration’s act of vandalism would have meant the data was gone for good. But because it was, the datasets can find a new home.

It’s a joy to use. Check out the climate dashboard, which tracks numbers like the total area of the Arctic Ocean that was at least 15% ice-covered each September. It also hosts a set of resources for teaching climate and energy. The dataset gallery includes crucial information like the NOAA’s archive of oral histories from people whose lives were affected by climate change.

But it’s also precarious. The whole thing relies on donations to keep it afloat, which is really what tax dollars are for. Still, for the moment it’s wonderful to see people pick up the slack when government is no longer doing its job. In the absence of government support, archives like this are works of journalism in themselves: ways to help us make stronger decisions. They deserve stronger support, and ultimately, we all deserve the restoration of such important government infrastructure.

A Leak of San Francisco Police Drone Footage Exposes the New Reality of Urban Surveillance

I’m not sure I agree with this article’s implication that the problem with SFPD’s drone policing was that it accidentally leaked the data.

““There’s a certain trust given to the police to use these things correctly,” says Curry. “When you're watching a drone feed live, you can look into dozens of different apartments, you can see police zooming in on people, you can see arrests. The fact that all of this was exposed feels like a really big issue from a privacy perspective.””

I’d humbly submit that the privacy problem exists regardless of whether the footage was leaked or not: this is ubiquitous surveillance of a city’s citizens from above. That footage can be analyzed, both by humans and software, to track people and target them for any reason. There is very little oversight, and because the police department is using a private company to run it, the teams there presumably have access to an enormous amount of private footage.

The thing is, none of this actually makes us safer. As the ACLU of Northern California points out in its Seeing Through Surveillance report:

“The evidence is clear that while surveillance has increased exponentially, public safety has not. On the contrary, surveillance systems often make people less safe, especially for groups that have historically been in the government’s crosshairs. Modern surveillance technology makes it possible for the government to track who we are, where we go, what we do, and who we know. It fuels high-tech profiling and perpetuates systems of biased policing. It facilitates deportations, chills speech, and imperils the rights of activists, religious minorities, and people who need reproductive and gender-affirming care.”

Most importantly, it doesn’t actually help. As the report points out, the city of San Francisco itself learned that adding cameras to its highest-crime neighborhoods had no impact on crime. Regardless, it added more funding to the program and voted to remove oversight in 2023. The result is more money spent, less privacy, with no impact on public safety. And now we know that the footage is being accidentally leaked, the privacy footprint is obviously even worse.

In a world that is becoming markedly more authoritarian, it’s unconscionable that supposedly permissive cities would add more surveillance. It doesn’t work, it misuses funds that could be spent helping the vulnerable, and it’s data that could be used for undemocratic purposes. It needs to stop — and to do that, we need to apply pressure to our elected representatives and raise awareness of how backwards it is.

To innovate, news needs allies - Werd I/O

2026-07-17T13:26:50.000Z

Link: We are not alone, by Adiel Kaplan at the Tow-Knight Center

I was delighted to be included in this roundup by Adiel Kaplan, the Program Director at the Tow-Knight Center for Journalism Futures at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.

As Adiel says:

“Having a say in what the future of news looks like will likely require not just that collaboration across newsrooms, but also outside them, with other institutions that want to shape a future with informed communities at its center — which is, after all, the mission. Right?

[…] It will also require a different way of thinking about our role in this ecosystem, beyond creating content and distributing it. It might mean getting more involved in building technology, or joining forces in new ways with government-funded institutions.”

WwJD: This is what Johnny.Decimal was designed for (video) - Johnny.Decimal

2026-07-17T04:58:04.000Z

A 'Working with Johnny.Decimal' video.

Managing complex tasks is not just possible, it's easy with Johnny.Decimal. Everything has a home, and you keep a simple index that lets you find it again, and everything looks the same no matter what app you're using.

Multi-line links on my home page - James' Coffee Blog

2026-07-17T00:00:00.000Z

Every so often, I publish a blog post with a longer title. When this happens, sometimes the post title wraps onto a second line in my list of blog posts on my site home page. This was a tiny detail, but one that I would often notice.

Last night, I brought the design to Front End Study Hall, and asked what I could do to make the text better aligned. For context, the following screenshot shows the grid of links on my home page, with one post, the post about an IndieWeb event in the Southeast Asia / Pacific time zone, wrapping ¹:

ALT

A grid with two columns: one with the heading "Explore", the other with the heading "Recent essays". All links except for one, the third link down in the "Recent essays" column, span one line.

When a link overflowed to a new line, the text was subtly grouped together, so there was a visual indication that both lines were part of the same text. But, when this happened, the rest of the list would be misaligned with the first list to the left. This was the problem I wanted to solve in FrESH, but I came out with another idea.

We spoke about the grid alignment issue, but the bigger reservation I had became clearer: I was unhappy with how titles that spanned multiple lines appeared.

During the call, gRegor shared an idea related to distinguishing if a link had spanned multiple lines: what if I used text-indent to indent the text on a multi-line link? The results looked great. The rule we came up with was:

nav ul li {
  text-indent: -1rem;
  padding-left: 1rem;
}

This would add left padding to all of the li elements, and indent the text by -1rem. The text indent rule only applies to the first line by default, so this rule would mean that all text except for the first line in each link would be pushed left.

After the call, I learned I can accomplish this in a single line:

nav ul li {
  text-indent: 1rem hanging
}

Per the MDN documentation on text-hanging:

hanging

Inverts which lines are indented. All lines except the first line will be indented.

Now, my site home page grid looks like this:

ALT

My home page grid with two columns. This time, the second line in the link that spans two lines is indented, creating a cleaner, clearer visual indication that there is a relationship between the first and second lines.

The second line in the long link is now indented. I really like this design. I didn’t consider the idea of indenting until gRegor mentioned it and we saw it on the page.

I also used this as an opportunity to clean the markup on my home page, moving several inline styles to the main CSS, removing unused styles, and simplifying the markup (which let me remove a few div tags – yay!). I added some more spacing between each link so that the lists breathe a bit more.

We had several ideas on how to keep both lists aligned, but this is something I might explore another day. For now, I am happy with the greater visual cue that the second line of a link is part of the first line afforded by indenting the second line (and subsequent lines) above the first line.

Thank you to everyone who attended Front End Study Hall and shared feedback and ideas related to this design problem.

Note: The screenshot was taken from an archival copy of my site, so may not be exactly what it looked like on the page, but is close enough.

[↩]

Per the MDN documentation on text-hanging: gRegor Front End Study Hall 1 [↩]

Mango Nectar Mead Recipe - Cool As Heck

2026-07-16T19:25:00.000Z

Mango Nectar Mead

Created: 2026-07-14
Batch Size: 1 gallon
Style: Melomel (mango)
Target ABV: ~12–14%
Original Gravity: ~1.105 (estimate — confirm with hydrometer)
Final Gravity: ~1.010–1.018 (71B will finish semi-sweet at this OG)

Ingredients

Base Must

Langers Organic Mango Nectar: 1 gallon jug (minus ~2 cups reserved for topping up)
- 20% juice (Alphonso mango puree concentrate + mango puree), filtered water, organic cane sugar
- 528g total sugars per gallon (1.16 lbs fermentable sugar equivalent)
- Contains citric acid and ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) — no preservative issues for fermentation
Honey: 2 lbs (orange blossom or wildflower — light varietal that won't compete with mango)
Pectic enzyme: ½ tsp (optional but recommended for clarity)

Yeast & Nutrients

Yeast: Lalvin 71B-1122
- Tolerance: ~14% ABV
- Partially metabolizes malic acid, softening the citric acid in the nectar
- Produces fruity esters that amplify tropical mango character
- Ferment at 64–68°F for clean fruit expression
Fermaid O: 6 tsp total (TOSNA 2.0 scaled for ~1.105 OG — 1.5 tsp per addition × 4)
Go-Ferm: 6.25g (for yeast rehydration)

Optional Secondary Additions

Frozen mango chunks: 2 lbs in a mesh bag for 2 weeks — the 20% juice nectar won't deliver intense mango on its own; this pushes the fruit character
- Pull at 14 days max to avoid off-flavors
Vanilla bean: 1 split bean in secondary for 7–10 days for a mango-vanilla creamsicle vibe
Allspice: ¼ tsp whole allspice in secondary for 7 days (tropical spice accent, go light)

Estimated OG Breakdown

Ingredient	Amount	Gravity Contribution
Mango nectar sugars	1.16 lbs equivalent	~53 pts
Honey	2 lbs	~70 pts
Total (1 gal)		~1.123

Estimate may run high — the nectar is mostly water with dissolved sugars, so actual OG depends on mixing. Expect 1.100–1.123 range. Confirm with hydrometer on brew day and adjust honey if needed.

Process

Day 0 — Must Preparation

Reserve nectar: Pour ~2 cups of nectar into a sanitized container and set aside.
Mix must: Pour remaining nectar into fermentation vessel. Warm honey slightly (hot water bath, not boiling) to pour easily, add to vessel. Shake/stir vigorously for 2–3 minutes to dissolve and aerate.
Top up: Add reserved nectar to reach 1 gallon total volume. Take OG reading.
Rehydrate yeast: 6.25g Go-Ferm in 125mL water at 104°F. Let cool to ~100°F, pitch yeast. Wait 15–20 minutes, then temper with small amounts of must (5-minute intervals) until within 10°F of must temp before pitching.
Pectic enzyme: Add ½ tsp at pitch (or 12 hours before if you want to be thorough).
Pitch yeast and aerate again briefly.

Fermentation Schedule (TOSNA — Day 0 = pitch day)

Day	Action
0	Pitch yeast, aerate vigorously
1	Add 1.5 tsp Fermaid O, stir gently to degas
2	Add 1.5 tsp Fermaid O, stir gently to degas
3	Add 1.5 tsp Fermaid O, stir gently to degas
4	Add 1.5 tsp Fermaid O, stir gently to degas (or at 1/3 sugar break — whichever comes first)

Primary Fermentation (Days 0–14)

Temperature: 64–68°F — cooler end preserves mango aromatics; above 72°F risks fusels
Airlock should show active bubbling within 24–48 hours
Stir gently during nutrient additions to degas CO₂
71B is a steady, moderate fermenter — expect a controlled fermentation, not explosive
If adding frozen mango in primary: Place in mesh bag, remove by Day 10 or when gravity hits ~1.040

Secondary Fermentation (Weeks 3–12)

Rack off lees when gravity stabilizes (~2–3 weeks)
Optional mango: Add 2 lbs frozen mango chunks in mesh bag for 10–14 days. Taste at Day 10.
Optional vanilla: Add 1 split bean after pulling mango. Taste at 7 days.
Top up with reserved mead or similar wine to minimize headspace
Bulk age 2–3 months minimum — mango flavor fades during primary but returns during aging

Packaging (Week 12+)

FG target: ~1.010–1.018 (semi-sweet — residual sugar supports the mango character)
Taste and adjust: The nectar already has citric acid; taste before adding any acid blend
Bottle: Still is traditional, but a light sparkle (¾ tsp corn sugar per bottle) works with tropical meads
Aging: Drinkable at 3 months, peaks at 6–9 months

Yeast Considerations

Yeast	Why / Why Not
71B-1122 ✅	Metabolizes malic acid → softens citric tang from the nectar. Fruity esters amplify mango. 14% tolerance → finishes semi-sweet, which suits mango.
QA23	Tropical ester bomb with passion fruit/mango notes. 16% tolerance → would finish drier. Solid backup if you want a crisper mead.
D47	Temp-sensitive (needs <68°F). Good mouthfeel but no tropical ester production. Fine for traditionals, wrong for mango.
EC-1118	18% tolerance → bone-dry finish, strips mango character. Would need heavy backsweetening.
K1-V1116	Neutral workhorse, 18% tolerance. Won't contribute fruit-forward esters.
Voss Kveik	Citrusy/earthy ale esters clash with mango. Needs 80°F+. Wrong profile.

Notes

Low juice content (20%): This nectar is mostly sweetened water with mango concentrate. The mango character won't be as intense as fermenting on real fruit. The optional 2 lbs frozen mango in secondary is strongly recommended for authentic mango flavor.

The "organic flavor" ingredient: Unknown composition. 99% it's fine for fermentation, but if the must stalls unexpectedly, this would be the first suspect. The ascorbic acid and citric acid are non-issues — they're common mead additives.

No water added: This recipe uses the nectar as the complete liquid base (no dilution). The nectar is already mostly water (80%), so it functions as the must liquid. If you want a lighter session mead, dilute 50/50 with water and use 1 lb honey instead — OG ~1.085, ~11% ABV.

Sugar from nectar: 528g total sugars (368g added cane sugar + ~160g natural mango sugars). This is roughly equivalent to 1.16 lbs of fermentable sugar already dissolved in 1 gallon of liquid — treat it as built-in gravity points, not as a separate honey addition.

Weeknote #2009 - Robb Knight • Posts • Atom Feed

2026-07-16T18:41:50.000Z

I backed this pen Kickstarter despite breaking my rule of no hardware Kickstarters - the company, Antou, seem to know what they're doing but we'll see. They have a lot of nice stuff on their site including this pen rest. The pen should be arriving in August some time.

Pica is a new font management app that looks great and it's free. I need to get a handle on all the fonts I have.

I'm not a font designer but if I was I might need to make proofs and Hellbox is the one.

Two fascinating fonts I came across: Datatype is a "variable font that turns text into charts" and then this person built a chess rendering engine into a font which is wild.

Matt did a handwriting font, something I've done a couple of times to varying levels of success.

The last font and writing link is this post about backtrack-free cursive. I don't write cursive (or in lowercase for that matter) but this is really interesting.

What intrigued me about files.md is that it uses an API I wasn't aware of to access local folders and files. I'm not dropping Obsidian any time soon but this is an API I want to try out more.

Friend of the blog made equinox to test light and dark mode at the same time which is handy.

I'd come across but not heard of the XY problem before: "asking about your attempted solution rather than your actual problem". Nice to have a name for this scenario.

P4LETTE is another colour palette generator. Can't have too many.

Daily games is a thing now and I've been enjoying 4x3. I also found Gerrymandle which is interesting but doesn't spark joy for me.

Signalbox, a live train map, does spark joy though.

Finally this is a fun article about using public domain image archive for art ideas.

Finished reading Wasteland Warlords 6 - Molly White's activity feed

2026-07-16T17:33:50.000Z

Finished reading:

Wasteland Warlords series, book 6.

Wasteland Warlords 6

by James A. Hunter and Eden Hudson.

Published 2024. 158 pages.

Started July 12, 2026; completed July 15, 2026.

📝 2026-07-16 17:05: Anyone using Pop!OS with Cosmic? I tried it when it was first released, but I... - Kev Quirk

2026-07-16T16:05:00.000Z

Anyone using Pop!_OS with Cosmic? I tried it when it was first released, but I looks like they've done a lot of dev work to it and it's improving all the time.

Considering installing it again...

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Gadget Review: Thermal Master DV2 - Infrared Birdwatching Scope ★★★★⯪ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-07-16T11:34:50.000Z

The good folks at Thermal Master have sent me their DV2 camera to review. As their name suggests, this is a thermal / infrared camera - they've specifically designed this for bird watching and animal spotting. Let's put it through its paces and see how it compares to the competition!

Straight away you can see it is different from normal IR cameras - they tend to have a small fixed screen and a rubber button interface. This has a lush touchscreen which displays the thermal image and is used to control the camera. The screen can go bright enough to be easily visible in full daylight, and you can dim it down to something more appropriate for night-time viewing.

OK, enough waffle, time to get snapping!

Photos

Here are some shots from the camera of various bits of wildlife near me. I haven't edited these images, they're exactly what you get from the camera.

The resolution is 512x384. There's no EXIF metadata - so no location information.

There's also no in-picture thermal gradient so you can't see the exact temperature of an object. This is designed for spotting animals, not working out how hot your electronics are. The datetime is burned in to the image but can be turned off.

It has the ability to almost totally remove the background "noise" of the sky - making it excellent for spotting things on the wing.

Filesize is about 20KB per photo. So you can fit will over a million images on the ~32GB internal storage. Digital zoom goes up to 8X.

Videos

The static images don't really do it justice. It's also possible to shoot video. This gives you a reasonable idea of what you'll see on the touchscreen.

Video resolution is the same as the photos - 512x384 - and runs at 30fps. File size is around 40MB per minute. So about 12 hours of footage can be stored. I've re-encoded these videos to be smaller while keeping the same quality.

Here's a friendly fox I found - I've cycled through the various settings so you can see how they work.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Fox1.mp4

Again, as with the photos, there's no metadata and the datetime is burned in. Here are a couple of cats playing around in the park.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Cat1.mp4

Twisting the lens allows you to adjust the focus - it is really impressive the amount of detail it can pick up.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Cat2-Focus.mp4

There's no video stabilisation (use the tripod mount if you need it) and there's no audio.

RTSP

You can also stream the video to a computer, VLC, or anything else which will take an RTSP stream.

The URl will be rtsp://[IP Address]:8554/ch0 - that will get you a 20fps stream of exactly what the camera is seeing.

Range and Detection

It reckons it'll detect a human's heat signature from around 900 metres away.

There are several modes which will let you see more or less detail. That's particularly important if you're just interested in the hottest part of the image, or if you need to photograph something against a relatively warm background.

The App

This'll pair with your Android phone using the Thermal Masters app. It's a bit of a beast - around 200MB. That's because it's the same app for all their cameras and contains PDFs for several different models. Despite the relatively high download numbers, it has zero reviews.

Like lots of software from hardware manufacturers, the app is basic but serviceable. It connects to your DV2 via WiFi. You can either be on the same network or connect the camera to your phone's hotspot.

Looking through the app's code, it appears to use OpenCV, ffmpeg, and some other popular Open Source libraries. Sadly, the required attribution is missing.

The app is great for monitoring the camera, you can zoom in on the image and fiddle with some of the settings. But you can't actually trigger a photo or video recording! That's a bit annoying.

Linux

For our penguin powered friends, this shows up as 1f3a:1000 "Allwinner Technology Prestigio PER3464B ebook reader (Mass storage mode)". It's a basic drive which lets you copy the media back to your computer via USB-C. Easy as.

Comparison

So how does it compare to the Topdon TS004 Thermal Camera? The Topdon is also marketed at the bird-spotting crowd and, on the surface, has fairly similar features.

The most obvious difference is the user interface. The TS004 is a Monocular - so you need to shove your eye into the end to see anything.

With the DV2, you've got a big screen to look at - which is generally much more pleasant. That display of the DV2 is a touchscreen which makes it pretty easy to interact with - whereas with the TS004 you have to repeatedly mash buttons to change any settings.

In terms of resolution, both have a standard 256×192 sensor. The upscaling on the DV2 is good - but doesn't fundamentally change how much thermal information there is.

But it is the thoughtful little extras which make the DV2 useful. There's a built-in laser pointer which is useful for working out exactly what you're aiming at. At the bottom is a standard tripod mount, so you can rig it up somewhere to monitor an area.

Slightly bizarrely, it comes with an optional Picatinny Rail adaptor. That screws into the side of your DV2 and allows you to add firearm accessories! So if you ever wanted to add a sniper scope to your thermal camera…

Alright, a regular range-finder will also attach to it 😆

The battery is a bit of an odd one. You can physically remove the battery and place it in its own USB charger. The battery is a 1INR22/71 which is a chunky beast. The charger comes with two slots (although only one battery is included) so you can quick-swap to a full battery if you need to. There is a USB-C port on the bottom, if you want to charge it the normal way.

With the TS004, the only way to stream video was via the app. The DV2 will connect to any WiFi network and present an RTSP stream. The built in WiFi is useful for grabbing firmware updates.

The DV2 also suffers a little from the lack of a trigger button for taking photos. When held in the hand, it feels natural to click the button under the thumb finger - instead, that toggles the laser. Taking a photo means tapping away on the screen to get to a sub-menu. Annoyingly, your phone can't be used as a remote control.

One thing in the TS004's advantage - it's lens cap is attached to the body of the unit. The DV2's is a separate rubber cap which comes off completely. Best remember to stick it in the supplied carrying case, eh?

The TS004 also has built-in animal recognition. It can detect heat signatures and tell you if they're a bird or a human. However, it always misidentified English foxes as Wild Boars! So was of limited use.

The DV2 uses AI to upscale the quality of the images rather than trying to detect what it is actually looking at.

In general, the DV2 is easier to use and produces seemingly better quality media. But having to tap the screen multiple times to take a photo or video is slightly annoying.

Price

All the infrared cameras I've reviewed have been expensive. This one is no different. At the moment it is in stock for £459.

You can use the code THERMBIRD10 for 10% off at the official store or from Amazon.com.

That's a chunk of change - but you do get a lot of tech for the price. This isn't designed for finding hotspots in your home, it's excels at picking out wildlife - and the screen is big enough for several people to gather round to see what you've spotted.

Final Thoughts

This is one of the better thermal imaging devices that I've reviewed. The large touchscreen makes it so much easier to control than anything else on the market - all the others have squishy rubber buttons. It is mostly a delight to use, if you can put up with the slightly strange process of taking a photo.

Thermal cameras are still very expensive - the sensors are low resolution and sometimes flaky. The DV2 does a great job of producing a usable images and videos.

The app is no worse than the competition. It really ought to inform users about the use of Open Source code though.

The addition of the laser pointer isn't as gimmicky as I'd thought. I've no use for the Picatinny attachment, but I can see how it could be useful.

If you want to go wildlife spotting, this is probably the device to get. It captures an incredible amount of detail and is excellent at picking up the faintest heat signatures.

📝 2026-07-16 11:47: A few of us were talking to one of the summer interns at work about... - Kev Quirk

2026-07-16T10:47:00.000Z

A few of us were talking to one of the summer interns at work about age:

Someone: How old do you think Kev is?

Intern: [with all the confidence in the world] 50?

I turn 42 in August. FML. 🤣

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Re: An IndieWeb Event for Southeast Asia / Pacific Time Zones - James' Coffee Blog

2026-07-16T00:00:00.000Z

Naty is hosting a new Homebrew Website Club event on Wednesday, August 5, 2026, at 5:30pm to 7:00pm Hong Kong Time (UTC+8). If there is interest, the event may turn become regular!

If the time works for you and you love chatting about websites, I recommend checking out the event. Homebrew Website Clubs are always fun, providing a place to chat about what people are building on their websites, the culture of the web, HTML/CSS, writing on the web, and more.

This event adds to several other online events, geared toward:

European timezones (HWC London/Europe) (which I host!)
The US East Coast (HWC Eastern)
The US West Coast (HWC Pacific)

Furthermore, there are in-person events that happen in several cities listed on the IndieWeb Events community page, and the IndieWebClub Bangalore website, all of which are run to provide a place to chat for people passionate about websites.

IndieWebClub Bangalore website Naty is hosting a new Homebrew Website Club IndieWeb Events community page European timezones (HWC London/Europe) The US East Coast (HWC Eastern) The US West Coast (HWC Pacific)

RE: We Need A Physical-Digital Music Experience - The Weblog of fLaMEd

2026-07-15T10:44:08.000Z

What’s going on, Internet? Olly wants a physical-digital music experience: browse the racks at your local record store, chat to the staff, listen to stuff, but instead of bagging the vinyl, pay them for a FLAC download and have the store clip the ticket. I think I’m into it…

While I still buy records physically, I often don’t have the time to get into the local record store weekly to dig through the crates. I purchase my records through a few stores online, often lining up with sales as vinyl is expensive.

When I’m buying a digital album, it’s usually through the artist or band’s website directly, Bandcamp, or Qobuz as a last resort. That way the sale goes through to the artist or band as directly as possible. But it does nothing for a local record store.

Sadly, my favourite local record store recently closed down. See: RIP to my favourite record store, Flying Out.

The book world already has this figured out. Libro.fm lets me link a local book shop, The Village Bookshop in my case, and whenever I purchase an audiobook through Libro.fm they get a slice of the purchase. I get the audiobook I was buying anyway, and a local shop gets supported for existing.

I’m torn though. Buying digital through a record store means the artist gets less, and that’s the whole reason I buy direct. Books are different: very few authors can sell DRM-free copies from their own website unless they’re independent, so something like Libro.fm filling that gap makes sense.

It would be cool to have the physical space where you can still dig through the crates, or flip through the shelves, scan a QR code and go direct to the artist website or Bandcamp. Could the record shop take a cut through the referring QR code? However, that’s just another dollar taken from the band. Physical stores are just so damn expensive these days.

I guess it’s more a case of a service like Bandcamp setting something up like the Libro.fm model: I link my local record store, and every digital album I buy sends a slice their way. The artist still gets their cut, and the store stays in the picture.

Yeah, I don’t know?

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BLAOW! BLAOW! LET'S GET ROWDY! - The Weblog of fLaMEd

2026-07-15T09:53:00.000Z

BLAOW! BLAOW! What’s going on, Internet? This banger of a track, Rowdy (BLAOW!), was introduced to me as part of Les Mills SPRINT release 43. We’re only up to release 44 but have been enjoying this track every other SPRINT class.

I’ve been playing it a bit for the kids, and I love it in the mornings when we get ready for a ROWDY drop off.

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Dinosaur Discovery Returns - The Weblog of fLaMEd

2026-07-15T08:00:00.000Z

What’s going on, Internet? Last year we discovered the dinosaurs at Auckland Zoo, and this year we went back for round two. They’ve added some new dinosaurs to the track this year, so it was well worth the revisit.

We made the trip with my brother and his kids again, and this year my parents were up for the week so it was a great family night out. The kids are all a year older, we stayed out later and they had a great time. My youngest who is two years old now was a bit scared, but was able to put on a brave face walking around with daddy.

I expect many more visits to the dinosaurs during the day as we visit the zoo during the upcoming weekends. I might never ever get to the NZ birds section (I have been trying with each zoo visit, lol).

Enjoy the photos.

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How I keep track of my gaming - Joel's Log Files

2026-07-15T04:01:12.000Z

Every weeknote and monthly summary, I list all the videogames I played. There are a few things that I do to help myself keep track of it all. Some tools I’ve mentioned here and there, but never all in a single post.

I won’t really be making any specific tutorials, but leads in the right direction, in case you are interested on tracking your gaming like me.

I’ll be honest, while a lot of these tools are pretty easy to set-up, there’s still a lot of manual work required to have it all nice and tidy, there’s an argument to be made that I shouldn’t really be obsessed by how much I play videogames and keeping track of everything. However, having a full history of everything gaming brings me joy, where as trying to remember what happened in the past and being unable to, does not.

After all, it is a bit sad that I have no idea when I realized Parasive Eve was a game I was interested in playing. I don’t really remember the exact date I tried Chrono Trigger for the first time. I have no memory of when I completed Ocarina of Time. Yes I have rough estimates, but that’s it, and I also lack the context of it all, which is kind of important sometimes.

I just wish I had kept some sort of journal entry that helped me figure out things, like where my headspace was at the time, and at least how long I have played certain games.

Newer consoles have finally started to include some tools to know how much I play videogames. Platforms like Steam have a built-in playtime counters, and well, thanks to all the tools I mentioned here, I can bring it all to a single place.

Playtime per console

First, I wanted to write about how I keep track of the gaming I do on each of my gaming devices, as all of them have different setup, be it using custom firmware or a separate app. Only one of them has a feature complete built-in tool, but we’ll get to that later.

Nintendo Switch

While the Switch features a pretty basic Profile Activity screen, showing how much you have played the twenty most recent games. This is an approximate and it won’t even start counting the time reliably until you play from 5 to 10 hours of a game.

Have no fear though, the Switch Parental Controls app features a great inteface to display my gaming per day, with a monthly view as well! However, this app does not have the full playtime of each game, and it doesn’t provide a full history either, as data vanishes after a few months.

A great option to see the full playtime is Exophase, a website I connected to my Nintendo account, displaying the playtime of each game I play. You need to launch a game you want to track at least once after connecting your account so it gets synced with the website, it will not automatically scan every game in your library.

It is unfortunate that the Switch has never had a proper Activity Tracker, especially because their previous handheld console has one of the best implementations I’ve ever seen, we’ll talk about that later.

Emulator handhelds

A few months ago, there was no good way to keep track of the games in my handhelds. The only one that worked okay was my Miyoo Mini Plus running OnionOS, although sometimes I ended up with duplicated data and other issues when renaming ROMs. Nothing to worry about, I wrote a post on how to fix those issues!

Nowadays I use the Anbernic RG35XX SP, and I prefer to use the muOS software. They have finally added a built-in Activity Tracker screen, which is awesome, although not as feature complete as the upcoming trackers.

You can access a particular game’s data by simply using the select button while it’s highlighted on the screen. For some reason, this only works when viewing the game list from the Library, it doesn’t work on the History or Favorites screen.

Of course, the full Activity Tracker can be accessed from the Info screen where you can see the full list displaying playtimes and times opened of every game in the handheld. Pretty useful, if rather simple.

Nintendo 3DS

In case you did not know this, the Nintendo 3DS has literally the best activity tracker implementation I have ever seen, and it’s completely native to their OS: The Activity Log. There’s no hacking necessary to have access to it, it just works.

Not only does it track the total playtime and the times a game is opened. It also has a full timeline of every single day, divided by the hour in both a graphic and a list view. It also displays the steps you take while carrying the 3DS in sleep mode.

There’s little for me to add here, it’s genuinely impressive stuff and I wish the Nintendo Switch had implemented something half as good as what this is. Absolute top tier functionality and features.

The surprise: PSP!

However, the PSP is the real reason I wanted to write this post in the first place.

For years now I have been wondering why the PSP did not have a built-in activity tracker. The interface already let’s you access information about a game by pressing the triangle button, but it doesn’t really have anything regarding playtime, which always seemed like a missed opportunity for me.

Since I mostly play JRPGs, I usually knew my playtime based on the in-game info, which was good enough for me, but it was still not a given on every single game, and I had to take some extra steps in some videogames just to know how much I’ve played it. For example, on Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, I had to exit a mission, go back to the main menu, load a save, and only then I would know how much I had played it, taking into account the loading times, it was a bit painful.

Thankfully, a couple months ago developer OniMock released a homebrew application and plugin that that can track PS1 and PSP games running on the device. It’s called GameDiary, and it’s incredible. To get it to work you need to have a modded PSP of course. I recommend this guide as of mid-2026. It seems like version 5 of that custom firmware is being worked on, but it’s not as stable as ARK-4 yet.

Anyway, if you’ve installed a PSP plugin before it should be quite simple, but the instructions are found in the link I already shared.

For me the plugin worked great from the start, it didn’t affect performance in any noticeable way. The new application looks amazing as well, featuring playtime for a current session, as well as the total playtime and other stats, featuring the videogame artwork and a really pretty interface.

This is a feature I always wanted, and it truly competes with the 3DS’s built-in tracker! I highly recommend giving it a go.

Keeping track of everything with Backloggd

All of the tools I mentioned often work by themselves, with different interfaces and functionality to each, some are built-in, some required some setup, but at the end of the day, all the information on them ends up in different places, be it locally, on an app, or a certain website.

For better or worse, I consolidate everything by hand using Backloggd.

I have been using this website for a few years now, and I don’t see myself ever leaving it! It’s full of incredible features and an amazing stats page that I absolutely love.

I personally don’t care at all about putting in the work. Every single day I play something, I log it to to the game’s journal, write a short text of what happened and the amount of time I played. You can sort in all manner of ways, but my favorite is sorting by Most Recent Session, since it removes all duplicates and displays full playtime of each game logged in order.

You can also create lists and other useful things, but well, you should really give it a try if you are willing to put some work into it. I guess you can simply put start and end dates like a normal person instead of being like me, you do you!

Personally, I’m super proud of my journal, so please give it a look and let me know what you think of it! Of course, if you decide to make an account there, give me a follow!

This is day of #100DaysToOffload

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Note published on July 15, 2026 at 1:40 AM UTC - Molly White's activity feed

2026-07-15T01:40:12.000Z

fascinating economic discovery from Fidelity: houses actually are cheaper now than in 2020!*

* if you denominate them in an arbitrary asset that has appreciated over that time frame

next up from Fidelity: groceries aren't getting more expensive**

** if you denominate their price in World of Warcraft gold