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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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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

This week at JDHQ – 2026-07-13 - Johnny.Decimal

2026-07-14T22:53:06.000Z

Originally sent to the mailing list on Monday 2026-07-13.

I've been finding it difficult, after taking a month off circumnavigating Taiwan by rail – counter-clockwise, starting from and returning to Kaohsiung City, great trip, recommended – to get back into the flow of things. Feeling distracted and without focus, I went back to an old friend: Cal Newport's Deep Work.

It holds up to perhaps its third reading, and was exactly what I needed. Because its advice is so simple, really, and so obviously true. In order to do good work – work that you're proud of, work that will be noticed – you have to be deliberate. You have to recognise the many distractions of the world and do something about them.

Cal gives the sort of advice that's easy to implement badly: plan your day; don't browse crap online; disconnect at night. But – as I discovered the last few weeks – none of this works as a half measure. A day half planned wasn't planned. Only browsing some crap still leaves your brain a mess. So I'm going all-in: here's my calendar.

The specific problem that I'm trying to solve is the one where you work all day, get to the end, look back, and think … well I was busy, but what did I actually achieve? When you allow yourself to bounce from task to task all day, it's easy to fall into the trap of busywork. There are only two of us in this little business: there's no time for busywork.

Practically, this schedule stops me from drifting away from a task. Those large chunks of pink are labelled either 'Product' (the making or improving of) or 'Marketing' (like sending this email). Figuring out either of those things is hard, and the natural tendency is to start something, do it for half an hour, and drift away from it. And when I say 'natural tendency', it really is: in Willpower, Baumeister and Tierney explain how our willpower is a finite resource, consumed throughout the day. But there are things you can do to help strengthen it, and this is one of them.

I've done spells of 'hyper-scheduling' in the past. It only works when you get to set your own schedule, which rules out a lot of jobs. But if you can, it's worth a try. I'll report my progress.

'The Work System'

Work has started on 'The Work System', aka a 'coping mechanism' for those of you stuck in some corporate situation. We know you probably can't reconfigure the SharePoint, but we should be able to give you something that helps.

Lucy has spent the week in discovery (ref. Workshop area 20-29) and we just reviewed what she has so far. It's nowhere near ready to share, but here's a teaser at how much we're working with.

We'd love to know what help people need 'at work'. Here's a short survey, every question optional: tell us as much or as little as you like.

This survey link will expire around 13th August 2026.

Typeform survey: Johnny.Decimal 'at work'

Giving structure to ideas

On the topic of structure, we're still trying to figure out how best to give structure to our many, many ideas.

(Image made with tldraw which I've just started using and am enjoying a lot.)

Ideas occur, and are saved mostly as simple lists of text in notes that we label 'P5 Ideas'. This extends the task and project management course's P1-P4 system of prioritisation. A 'P5 idea' is just that: a very low priority thing; not even a task. We have a lot of these ideas through our JDex. Let me see if I can … okay, that explains it! A quick grep across my 29 notes named 'P5 ideas' reveals 894 bullet points. That's a lot to try to make sense of (which is why we mostly can't).

We've got a bunch more stuff saved in the still-needs-a-proper-name 'imaginarium aka megablog'. I try to keep ideas out of Things; they might start life there, captured in my inbox, but at morning review I move them out to a P5 note. An idea isn't a task; don't dilute your task system with them.

I just started reading Bob Doto's A System for Writing – the first time I've really learned about Zettelkasten. (Loving the book so far.) ZK's similarities with our 'imaginarium' are striking: the tracking of many granular ideas, loosely connected, in service of surfacing broader ideas, such that content ideas (writing, for Bob – any content, for us) are revealed and can be planned and produced.

I've yet to find the right tool for this job. It's obviously not 894 bullet points spread across 29 text files. In the imaginarium video you'll see me using Airtable. It's too slow, and not visual enough. I need a database crossed with a whiteboard, and I think it needs to be local to be fast enough. I want to feel like Tom Cruise (eww).

I'll take a look at Notion later, but don't think it'll give me the moving shapes around on a canvas I'm looking for. I don't think Obsidian's Canvas will be enough, and this thing needs an actual relational database. Airtable has proven that much. If you've got any other app ideas, I'm all ears.

When we've figured this one out I'll write it up. I can see it becoming a mini-course: how to have, track, and make use of all your ideas, in the specific context of running a creative business.

Recording the 'projects' update to T&PM this week

As noted in the past, the 'projects' half of the 'task and project management' course needs an update. This is the result of 6+ months of thinking since releasing the course, and reflects how we run our own projects. There was a preview video the other week.

These lessons are mostly planned and I'll be recording them this week and next.

SBS Zoom sessions

The Small Business System Zoom sessions continue, one a week, alternating Tuesday/Thursday across timezones. They're 'intimate', shall we say, with just a handful of regulars so far. But the discussion is interesting, and we always learn something. It'd be good to see you there – and don't worry, if you want to lurk with your camera off, that's okay.

That's all for now. As always, we're here to help. Let us know what you need – just reply to this email.

📝 2026-07-14 23:24: I went for an 8km (5 mile) run this evening. I'm working my way up... - Kev Quirk

2026-07-14T22:24:00.000Z

I went for an 8km (5 mile) run this evening. I'm working my way up to 10km, but I think this was a little too much, too soon. We'll see how my middle-aged joints are in the morning...

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The SFPD leaked its drone footage. It shouldn't be surveilling to begin with. - Werd I/O

2026-07-14T12:31:32.000Z

Link: A Leak of San Francisco Police Drone Footage Exposes the New Reality of Urban Surveillance, by Andy Greenberg and Dhruv Mehrotra in WIRED

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.

We need a PIT Crew for news - Werd I/O

2026-07-14T12:07:18.000Z

Link: Mamdani invests in tech capacity to “solve real problems”, by Pamela Herd in Can We Still Govern?

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.

I'm a USB-C Maximalist - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-07-14T11:34:26.000Z

My wife and I recently went on a 7 week holiday around Europe. Although we each took a massive backpack, we wanted to travel fairly lightly. I took a single universal power brick. This little unit was all I needed to charge my various gadgets.

It has a hefty USB-C PD (Power Delivery) port for rapid charging of my phone and laptop. Two other USB-C ports for my other gadgets. And a couple of legacy USB-A ports which were redundant. The pass through was useful for using the same socket as the hotel's TV / lamp / coffee maker.

Wherever we were in the world, I was 100% confident that I would be able to buy a replacement charger if I needed it. USB-C cables are everywhere too. What are the chances that I could find the exact charger needed for a GameBoy Colour? Or the puck for last year's Pixel watch? Or the weird barrel jack for an HP laptop?

No. One charger. One cable. One standard.

Here's everything I took which needed to be recharged.

Phone
- A Pixel 8 Pro (running GrapheneOS). It also has the ability to act as a power source and recharge other devices.
Laptop
- A Chuwi MiniBook. Small, light, decent battery.
eReader
- A no-name eInk device. I read a lot on holiday.
Watch
- A cheap but capable smartwatch. No magnetic charging dongle - just shove the cable into the body.
Toothbrush
- Again, a cheap and unbranded device. And, again, no charging dock - the bottom has a protected USB socket.
Tracker
- What if someone steals my bag? Hopefully the PebbleBee "Find My" device will help me recover it.
Battery
- Most trains, trams, and buses have USB power supplies. But sometimes you want your own hefty store of electrons. This one accepts PD charging and also outputs PD.
Headphones
- Some cute ear-cuff headphones. I feel a bit guilty about including these, because it is their case which has the USB-C port rather than the cans themselves.
Bug Bite Zapper
- This is a bit of a cheat. It uses my phone's USB port to heat up.

I probably could have gotten away with a single-port charger. The phone needs recharging every night, but most of the other devices can go days or weeks without being topped up.

As we were travelling light(ish) I didn't bother bringing the Nintendo Switch. We were in a major cities, so no need for our USB-C powered walkie-talkies. We were out sightseeing most days, so I didn't take the USB-C to HDMI adaptor which would have let us connect the laptop and phones to a hotel TV. Perhaps in the hotter countries I could have done with the USB-C neck cooler - instead I purchased a cheap USB-C rechargeable fan. Rather than bring a beard trimmer, I went to local barbers. If anything needed AA batteries, well, I could have used these rechargeable batteries.

I know there are some problems with USB-C. But the benefits far outweigh the glitches. Using my USB-C cable tester, I can be sure all the cables I have can deliver the amount of power my devices need.

There's simply no point buying any electrical gadget which uses a proprietary charging port.

You can read all my USB-C posts and all my gadget reviews.

What electrical items do you travel with which don't use the one-true-connector?

Commute to the gym & a gifted album - W28 - Joel's Log Files

2026-07-14T02:00:00.000Z

And well, here is another weeknote for y’all to update you on what I’m up to. I’m still following the World Cup, I have done a return to the gym and even went on a Saturday.

⚽ Norway lost against England, so now the stakes are clear. No Latinos want Argentina to win again for some reason, and same goes for me, if England took Mexico out, they better get to the finals and snatch that cup. You got this Bellingham.
🎨 Continued making a few more themes for the Nintendo 3DS, I made a theme for Terranigma—another SNES game I love—and another one based on TechDweeb’s iconic themes for retro handhelds!
🛡️Purchased some stuff from AliExpress which arrived today, including a case for my 3DS styled after Monster Hunter, a glass panel replacement for the upper screen, a screen protector and an analog stick cap replacement, in case the rubber of mine dies like it often happens.
🚲 Went to the gym on Saturday, and I did so riding my bike! Which means is the first time I left it locked without direct line of sight. I also had the bright idea of doing leg day. Riding back home was alright, but my legs and lower back have been achy for a while, send help.
📱 Wrote a blogpost already, but yeah, I lost my phone for a whole day, and it was quite the stressful time. It’s all in the past by now, almost as if nothing had ever happened, time sure is weird.
🛍️ Because of Summer vacation time, all of my family is now together yet again—so all the siblings are back here to annoy me!—that basically means we went window shopping to the mall again (and also buying some things too). My wallet is very light.
💿 Acquired a new album for my Bandcamp collection! Time Once Lost (Remastered) by Rozen. This was actually a gift from Bojidar because of my birthday—it took a while because Bandcamp screwed up—and it’s actually kind of crazy. It’s a bunch of remixes based on The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask and IT RULES. Listening to it as I type this post.
🎧 Besides that album I returned to a Welcome to Night Vale and some really interesting episodes of 99% Invisible

Gaming

This was a varied week when it comes to the devices I played. Playtime on my Nintendo 3DS, PSP, Nintendo Switch and my phone too!

Started

Black Rock Shooter is a PSP exclusive I saw mentioned for the first time on the TWG Discord, since its graphical artstyle is one of the best in the system. We play as a cute/edgy black-haired anime girl with amnesia who is Humanity’s last hope in an apocalyptic future where machines are taking over. The game is a sort of rail shooter RPG where I move across stages and get close to the enemies to enter combat, which consists of shooting at them with a huge gun that the protagonist effortlessly carries somehow. It seems to follow the rule of cool pretty well, I’m interested in the story too, as the stakes are rather high! only completed like 5 missions so far.

Ongoing

Fire Emblem Awakening has become much more complicated now that I realized how pairing up characters together to make them get married affects the events in the game! The story has become very interesting now with some revelations I kind of saw coming but with implications far bigger than I thought. For now, I’m having fun! But definitely needed a little break, which is why I started BRS.

Finished

Monument Valley: Forgotten Shores was another DLC of the original Monument Valley and I really love how different the theme of each level was. The artistic style of this title is unmatched and timeless. Beautiful isometric themes with super creative levels that really broke my brain even more than the original levels and Ida’s Dream. That final eight level was truly something else, I had to find help for a part of it, but other than that, basically a sequel in an on itself—I’ll definitely play the other two games too!
Transistor is over, and it was very, very good. This game came before Hades and you can tell how it inspired it. The gameplay was very good in my opinion, a weird mix of action and turn based combat that kind of felt like Into the Breach

Reading

Kingdom - Up to chapter 873. After finishing Shikimori’s Not Just a Cutie I was missing something more focused on action stuff and decided to return here. As always, it does not dissapoint, the Hi Shin Unit is going on the offensive now, as well as some other armies, but the great general and enemy of Qin, Riboku, seems to have a plan to make everyone understand his true might as a strategist.
Blue Lock - Up to chapter 353. Blue Lock’s next opponent is England, and they continue to discuss how to face off against them. There’s a bit of an unexpected visit that shakes the team a bit, but fun stuff is happening!
Spy x Family - Up to chapter 137. After Loid manages to escape the hilarious scenario of the previous arc, he’s way too exhausted and ends up in the hospital, where her fellow spy coworker—who has a huge crush on him—ends up trying to fulfill some super dangerous mission to earn his attention, but Anya doesn’t want any of it, other than candy.

Watching

I wanted to watch the sheep detectives movie but my siblings watched it without me first and I haven’t had a chance to see it on my own. However, I saw another masterpiece.

Megamind - I already watched this film this year, but this is one of those films that you just can’t help but love. What a fantastic film this is, both hilarious and actually epic. The best animated superhero film after The Incredibles. Way better than Despicable Me.

Around the Web

Blog posts

i went to the world cup and all i got was my umbrella taken away - a thoughtful slice of life from tiramisu reflecting on the world cup, football and the experience of it all!
Holiday reading, mostly from Standard eBooks - Neil shares some rather curious reads he chose from the public domain, I just like seeing people mention Standard Ebooks in the wild.
Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze? - An piece from Brennan that shares some wisdom I hadn’t seen worded in such a way, it definitely got me thinking and I think you should check it out as well.
I Know Everything About You - Lou shares some life experiences related to his skill—one I’m jealous of—to actually remember details about people and their life.
My Nintendo 3DS XL - Syl wrote a wonderful piece inspired by my own post on the 3DS. I loved the pictures and especially the pendants she shared, lots of personality in a single photo. I should get some charms for my handhelds too…

YouTube

I Made My LEGO Gameboy Actually Playable! - I am aware of Natalie’s design using real Game Boy parts, but this alternative isn’t bad either! Good stuff.
Designing My Dream Retro Handheld - Ross has made this epic video where he shares a wishlist of features for the ultimate 4:3 handheld. I agree with pretty much every single point. It will probably never happen.
Ammo Counters - Oh man, this challenge is always a joy, and this retrospective on videogame ammo counters was incredible. The whole evolution of the mechanic until the modern day.
Nintendo Was Right - After Sony announcing that physical media will die, it seems like, as bad as Nintendo is, they are the least bad of them all, which I guess deserves some respect nowadays.

This is day 96 of #100DaysToOffload

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Finished reading Wasteland Warlords 5 - Molly White's activity feed

2026-07-14T01:51:43.000Z

Finished reading:

Wasteland Warlords series, book 5.

Wasteland Warlords 5

by James A. Hunter and Eden Hudson.

Published 2024. 131 pages.

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

Finished reading Wasteland Warlords 4 - Molly White's activity feed

2026-07-14T01:50:50.000Z

Finished reading:

Wasteland Warlords series, book 4.

Wasteland Warlords 4

by James A. Hunter and Eden Hudson.

Published 2024. 141 pages.

Started July 10, 2026; completed July 11, 2026.

Wonders of Web Weaving, Episode 10 - James' Coffee Blog

2026-07-14T00:00:00.000Z

The tenth episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out:

In Episode 10, I chat with Kristoffer and Elliott, the creators of the Internet Phone Book. We talk about, among other things, the history of the Internet Phone Book, the affordances of physical books for a community project, 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.

Kristoffer Elliott Internet Phone Book The tenth episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out Wonders of Web Weaving also has an RSS feed

Somewhere, I'm online and listening to music - Posts feed

2026-07-13T22:24:00.000Z

I've had the song I'm currently listening to and, if idle, the last song played displayed on my home page for a while now. Initially, it was powered by last.fm. As I've built my own scrobbler, I populated the element from my own data. The static implementation is straightforward: I store each listen as a record, when a listen is inserted, the cache is cleared and warmed and an update is displayed.

What I've been kicking around as an idea has been to have a live progress display to complement this. I implemented something like this briefly while using Jellyfin to listen to music, but Jellyfin's webhooks weren't made for a live update like this.

I've been using a Navidrome plugin to scrobble to my own API and this was a good opportunity to try and expand on it. Luckily, Navidrome added a playback_report method in v0.62 with exactly the data I needed: state, position_ms, playback_rate, and the track duration. When I'd attempted this with Jellyfin, I'd done so by advancing every single tick using a webhook payload. In this case, I'm pushing an anchor — position, playback rate, duration — and the bar's motion is a CSS animation with a negative delay, so the browser interpolates. A new fragment only lands when the live state diverges from the predicted state: pause, seek or track change. Paused playback differs in display, but it's simply an anchor with a frozen rate.

The other challenge here is that I wanted this to work without JavaScript. JavaScript can enhance the implementation, but it should be enhanced from a state where progress is already updated live on the page. This is also what I first shipped: the now playing display on its own document, the connection to which is held open while being loaded in an iframe.

The iframe works and it works without Javascript, but there's a cost: if the response never completes, the page never stops loading. Everything works. It's cosmetic. JavaScript lets us paper over that as an enhancement.

The enhancement here took the form of server-sent events. The same fragments the iframe gets — byte for byte, same markup, same CSS — but sent to an EventSource. A background fetch written into a mount point on the page. No loading spinner and the JavaScript-free implementation acts as the noscript fallback.

Four failures

Caddy's encode zstd gzip compressed the now playing event stream and compressing a never-ending response buffers it. Setting flush_interval -1 didn't prevent compression buffering. Excluding the route from encode fixed the buffering behavior.
The iframe hid a layout bug: long titles could run past the widget layout. A grid item's default min-inline-size: auto sets the floor at its own min-content and a nowrap line of text will grow unbounded. Setting min-inline-size: 0 on a flex child does not mitigate this. Moving the enhanced version of the widget out of the iframe exposed this bug.
View transition clashes: I animate album cover images when navigating from a page with one to the dedicated album page. I'm displaying the album cover in the now playing widget and may display it elsewhere on my home and music index pages. These transition names are derived using the album URL but the browser aborts transitions when there's a duplicate name. So, if there's a copy of the same album cover outside of the widget, I remove the widget's transition and fallback to the default page level transition.
The outstanding one: if I quit my music app, I'll end up displaying the wrong track until I transition tracks. This is an edge case, but it's one I'd like to solve. If I pause a track, quit, open and resume, Navidrome stops emitting reports. Resuming the track doesn't resolve the issue either.

The last bug may be self-inflicted too, I'm not sure. I had a bug fix release queued for Cadence and dropped in an update to report now-playing status and progress reporting. I'm pretty confident in that implementation, but I'm no fan of absolutes.

An edge case aside, this has been working well and by well I mean that if I visit my site while I'm listening to music the metadata and progress all lines up.

I've also been thinking about why I built this and the answer to that has been simple: it's fun. Remember going to a friend's MySpace page and seeing what tracks they had pinned? What autoplayed through your speakers in a blast, to the dismay of everyone else in earshot? I miss that. That was fun.

I guess this is a tribute to a more personalized, less standardized and sterile web. On its face, it's a widget, but the motivation is to recreate things that I enjoyed and still do. It's an indicator of presence — somewhere I'm online and listening to music. Not unlike an AIM status message, perhaps?

📝 2026-07-13 23:22: Every time I look at Sven's blog I get jealous. I loved his previous design... - Kev Quirk

2026-07-13T22:22:00.000Z

Every time I look at Sven's blog I get jealous. I loved his previous design so much I copied it (with his permission). His new design is so fun and it's making me want to make mine more fun (no copying this time though).

I'm just not sure I have the time at the moment. 🤔

https://svbck.blog/

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Climate.gov was destroyed. Open data saved it. - Werd I/O

2026-07-13T19:01:12.000Z

Link: Trump dismantled a federal climate website. These women rebuilt it., by Jenae Barnes at The 19th

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.

[RSS Club] Half a million steps is about 10 marathons - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-07-13T11:34:09.000Z

Shhh! RSS Club posts are only available to feed subscribers. Keep the secret!

I'm not a big fan of the "Quantified Self" movement, but since buying a ridiculously cheap smartwatch, I've been interested to see just how many steps I take per day.

During our recent Interrail holiday, we travelled about 6,400 Km by train over 49 days. But how much did we cover by foot?

My watch pairs with the Open Source app Gadgetbridge rather than the crappy app made by the manufacturer. Sadly, Gadgetbridge doesn't have a simple way to export data in a usable format. Instead, it spews out a database dump and asks you to run SQL commands to get information out.

After a bit of swearing at the command-line, I got my daily step count. I didn't always wear my watch, but this is accurate enough for my purposes.

In seven weeks, I took 545,453 steps.

The average stride length for someone my height is around 80 cm.

So that's a total of about 436,362 metres

A marathon is about 42 Km.

No wonder I feel knackered. I think I need a holiday to recover!

Rust-proof your code with our new Testing Handbook chapter - Trail of Bits Blog

2026-07-13T11:00:00.000Z

We’ve added a new chapter to our <a href="https://appsec.guide/">Testing Handbook</a>: a comprehensive guide to security testing Rust programs. This chapter covers the tools and techniques we use at Trail of Bits to validate the security of Rust programs and systems. <div id="rust-banner-code"> <div class="highlight"><pre tabindex="0" style="background-color:#f0f0f0;-moz-tab-size:4;-o-tab-size:4;tab-size:4;"><code class="language-rust" data-lang="rust">fn main() {(|f:&dyn Fn(u128)->Box< dyn Iterator<Item= char>+'static>|f(*[&( 0x7B736D70683F73u128<<64| 0x7A6A6D7C3F7A667D),&(0x7B736Du128 <<64|0x70683F7073737A77)][((std::hint:: black_box(0.0f64)/0.0).to_bits()>>63)as usize]) .for_each(|c|print!("{c}")))(Box::leak(Box::new(|n: u128|Box::new(std::iter::successors(Some(n),|&n|Some(n>>8) ).take_while(|&n|n>0).map(|n|((n as u8)^0x1F)as char))as _)))}</code></pre></div> </div> <h2 id="whats-in-the-chapter">What’s in the chapter</h2> The chapter starts with a security overview of what Rust’s guarantees do and don’t cover, including underappreciated issues like unwind safety, nondeterminism, and arithmetic errors. This leads into an overview of dynamic analysis, which covers a range of boosters for unit tests, how to use Miri to detect undefined behavior, property testing with <code>proptest</code>, coverage measurement, and mutation testing. The static analysis section then covers Clippy in depth, including a list of our favorite lints. Beyond tooling, the chapter also covers what we’ve learned from auditing Rust codebases directly. Our gotchas and footguns checklist is a great reference for manual code reviews, and will help you find subtle issues like <code>a & b == c</code> having different operator precedence than in C. The memory zeroization section offers three solutions to the tricky problem of guaranteeing that secrets are erased from memory. Finally, the specialized testing sections cover tools like Kani (a model checker), and the supply chain section covers the full toolchain for vetting dependencies. <h2 id="still-oxidizing">Still oxidizing</h2> We’ve also <a href="https://github.com/trailofbits/skills/tree/main/plugins/rust-review">released rust-review</a>, a Claude Code plugin for automated Rust security reviews. Co-built with Aptos Labs, it targets over a dozen bug classes, from memory safety and concurrency hazards to FFI pitfalls and async cancellation issues. It’s a fast way to catch security issues in a Rust codebase before they make it to audit. Our goal is to keep the handbook current as the Rust ecosystem evolves. If your favorite tool or gotcha isn’t covered, <a href="https://github.com/trailofbits/testing-handbook">submit a PR</a>. And if you need help securing your Rust systems, <a href="https://www.trailofbits.com/contact/">contact us</a>.

There And Back Again - The Weblog of fLaMEd

2026-07-13T08:00:00.000Z

What’s going on, Internet? This was meant to be the April wrap-up. It’s now the middle of July, so let’s call it the autumn-into-winter wrap-up and pretend that was the plan all along, lol.

Autumn kicked off with Easter down in Martinborough and a batch of hot cross buns. I managed to get to three gigs in three months: MGK at Spark Arena, Split Enz at Spark Arena, and a solo night out for Home Brew performing Last Week at the Auckland Town Hall. I’m so happy I got to see Home Brew perform live, finally after all these years. Auckland has been really good for me being able to get out to gigs more frequently.

More recently, this month we escaped a rainy afternoon at Kelly Tarlton’s. The following weekend we headed south to Butterfly Creek and spent the afternoon there. My first time visiting and really enjoyed it. It’s part butterfly sanctuary, part farm, part zoo, part adventure playground, and part dinosaur kingdom, lol. There’s a lot going on. We spent around 30 minutes in the butterfly house while my son stood super still in an attempt to have a butterfly land on him. So cute, but didn’t work out for him this time.

Then finally the weekend just been we spent a long weekend on Waiheke for Matariki. We spent Friday on the beach, hot chocolate and fluffies at the beach cafe, late lunch at The HEKE, and a bus trip to Oneroa for ice cream. Saturday we spent the morning at the Ostend Markets, back to the beach, then back to the beach cafe for an early dinner and to watch the All Blacks Italy game.

When I last wrote about books, it was all about reading eBooks again. Since then I’ve got through nine books, with only A Darkness Returns being an eBook. Highlights of these books were The New Girl and Leave Before You Go by Emily Perkins, Platform Decay by Martha Wells and the return to James S. A. Corey’s new universe The Faith of Beasts.

I also read The Lean Startup, Blood Ties, Famesick, Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today but mostly didn’t finish these.

The record shelf did some damage this quarter, 20 new arrivals. June was basically an Olivia Rodrigo situation, and each gig sent me home with its record: MGK’s Lost Americana, True Colours after Split Enz, and Last Week on pink vinyl after the Home Brew show.

I guess the other thing with three months to cover is that I got through a lot of media. Highlights being Outer Banks. I wrote up seasons one and two and have since torn through season three and halfway through season four as I write this. Such a fun show. I realised as I started season three that this reminds me of the recent Tomb Raider games or the older Uncharted games which I loved playing.

The other big binge was Hacks, all five seasons, 47 episodes. I had an absolute blast with this show. It was sitting there waiting to be watched for literal years and I finally sat down and blasted through it.

Another standout was Tulsa King, got through the last two seasons quickly. I wasn’t expecting to enjoy this show so much!

The Boys wrapped up with season five. I think I was satisfied with how it ended? Yeah, I think so. I also got through Fallout season two quickly, can’t wait for the next. And also wrapping up was Euphoria which messily wrapped up with season three. This season was kinda bat shit, not sure whether I enjoyed it or not, but happy I don’t have to think about it any more.

Keeping up with the weeklies and new seasons: House of the Dragon season three, X-Men '97 season two, and Power Book III: Raising Kanan season five. This season we’re really seeing Kanan turning into how we saw him in Ghost.

I’m also slowly working through Only Murders in the Building season five with my wife and in-laws when we are able to sit down together and watch an episode.

Eighteen movies since March. The highlights though. I caught Project Hail Mary at the theatre with my brother-in-law before it stopped showing. Finally caught up with The Fantastic 4: First Steps to make sure I’m up to speed with the road to Avengers: Doomsday. I was excited to see The Devil Wears Prada 2 as the first always had a special nostalgic place in my heart.

Anniversary was an unexpected sleeper, I was not expecting what this movie ended up being after watching the trailer.

Don’t Ever Stop, a fantastic documentary on Tony De Vit. This was especially good as a hardhouse fan and hearing legends of the scene talk about their interactions with Tony and memories of the origins of what became the hardhouse scene in the UK.

The Drama was an interesting one, and to be honest I thought the other woman’s secret she shared was way worse than Zendaya’s. Locking a kid in a fridge in the forest and not telling anyone is wild. Get out of here.

And the rest… Office Romance, Mile End Kicks, A Real Pain, Eenie Meanie, Carolina Caroline, Stone Cold Fox. I don’t think I watched any I didn’t like.

The bookmarks kept flowing while the blog was quiet. The best of them are already rounded up in the May and June link dumps, so I won’t repeat them here. Check out the bookmarks page for even more.

Around the web? I can’t remember if I shared this already, but I participated with issue 24 of the Ctrl-ZINE. Go give that a read! I also finally sat down with Manu to answer his People And Blogs questions. Manu has also hung up his hat since founding and running the series for the last few years and Zachary Kai has picked up the reins. You can find the archive here.

James has recently started a new podcast, Wonders of Web Weaving which is 9 episodes deep as of writing. Catch up on all of them if you haven’t already, and if you keep listening you might hear yours truely in a week or two 😉

Website wise, there’s plenty going on under the hood while I prepare for the 2027 redesign. Really looking forward to sharing this with you all soon. There’ve been a few improvements around the site, but you’ll see most of the changes when I roll out the new design.

I did sit down and refresh my 11ty and Neocities guide. I’m really pleased with all the great feedback I’ve received from this one, especially with all the people who have successfully managed to build a website using 11ty with it.

Sweeet, laters 🤙

Hey, thanks for reading this post in your feed reader! Want to chat? Reply by email or add me on XMPP, or send a webmention. Check out the posts archive on the website.

📝 2026-07-13 08:12: Haven't worn this watch for months, but it's such a fun one to wear in... - Kev Quirk

2026-07-13T07:12:00.000Z

Haven't worn this watch for months, but it's such a fun one to wear in summer. Beautiful dial and a Seiko movement that will probably outlive me.

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

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

‘Repeat that, repeat’ (Collaborative writing) - James' Coffee Blog

2026-07-13T00:00:00.000Z

Ruben and I are doing a collaborative writing challenge where we both write our thoughts on the poem “Repeat that, repeat” by Gerard Manley Hopkins. We’re not trying to do an academic formal analysis, rather share our own thoughts. You can read Ruben's post on his website.

If you are interested in writing your thoughts on the poem on your website, you are most welcome! Email me if you write your own reflections, and I’ll add a link to your post if you write one at the bottom of this article.

The poem

Repeat that, repeat,
Cuckoo, bird, and open ear wells, heart-springs, delightfully sweet,
With a ballad, with a ballad, a rebound
Off trundled timber and scoops of the hillside ground, hollow hollow hollow ground:
The whole landscape flushes on a sudden at a sound.

Source: WikiSource.

My thoughts

I have heard people talk about the musicality of poetry – how the poetry sounds when read – but I have never explicitly thought about how a poem can encourage you to think of sounds. I am not sure if that was the intention with this poem, but the words “Repeat that, repeat” make me think of sound.

When I started to think about the phrase “Repeat that, repeat”, I thought of the ephemerality of sound: how sound exists and then fades away. To what extent is the call of a cuckoo the same the next time it calls? Does it sound the same to me but would be fundamentally different with a trained ear? I wonder.

The poem contains several examples of repetition: the use of “ballad” twice, the use of “hollow” thrice. Reading the last two lines, I had to look up the word “trundled”. It means rolled. Rolling is cyclical. Ballads have repeated lines; there is some degree of cyclicality in there, too. The more I read, the more I see repetition at all levels.

Then, the final line uses the word “sudden,” which evokes a moment rather than a cycle. It feels like I am being invited to stop for a moment to think about the sound, rather than to get caught up in the flow of Nature.

I see musical words in the second two lines: “hollow” can evoke sound, “flushes” is like the flood of water. Earlier in the poem, “ear wells” is used. “Ear” evokes listening; “wells” reminds me of water. “heart-springs” – a term I have never read before – contains “springs”, which also evokes water and flowing. This poem seems to flow on and on: when I get to the end, I want to go back to the beginning. Almost like a ballad.

The use of “whole landscape” toward the end makes me think of the all-encompassing nature of sound: a sound can take the centre stage in our view of the world, to the extent that the view of the landscape changes as we hear a new sound. Now that I think about it, the landscape changes with sound, too: the call of a cuckoo may encourage another to move, the sound of water flowing indicates that water is moving; the sound radiates through the air.

WikiSource Email me Ruben You can read Ruben's post on his website

The Trump administration is subpoenaing journalists to reveal sources. Their data security is more important than ever. - Werd I/O

2026-07-12T14:59:17.000Z

Link: White House Directed Patel to Oversee Investigation Involving Times Reporting, by Devlin Barrett, Glenn Thrush, and Maggie Haberman at the New York Times

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.