Posts in series "Recently I found..."

It's the best part of two years now since I dropped Pinboard in favour of Raindrop. It's also seven years now since I first created a Pinboard account and started collecting possibly-useful bookmarks¹. I've found this process useful, and it continues to be a great way to find and remember things. The way it works these days is:

• Spend most of the week scrolling social networks, Reddit, the Orange Site, etc.
• See something I find interesting.
• Add it to the unsorted collection in Raindrop (mostly via the iOS app)
• Normally once a week fire up Braindrop and filter, edit, describe, and tag the links.

This approach gets used for a few different reasons:

• It lets me collect links I want to refer to in the future.
• It lets me collect links I want to review as a reminder to look at a thing.
• It lets me collect links to posts and articles I want to make a point of reading.

As such, I use it as both a long-term bookmark/information store as well as a read-it-later queue. It works well.

When going through this routine over the weekend, I got to thinking: while I do publish a public list of my bookmarks (complete with RSS feed), it might be interesting to make an occasional post where I list out the links I discovered, which I found interesting and worth hanging on to, and explain what caught my interest. It might also be a worthwhile process to look further through the past seven years of bookmarks and write about some of the older links (or at least use that occasional review to weed out the history).

So, that's the plan. I'm not sure quite how long it will last, but I think it would make for a good occasional series. I was going to call it "This week I found...", but then I realised that that puts pressure on me to make it a weekly thing. Perhaps it should be more like "Recently I found..."; that way it can either be multiple posts in a week, or once every few weeks.

Introduction¶

An occasional collection of things I've recently found on the Internet and added to my bookmarks.

Tutti Space Program¶

Described as "A playful 2D space sandbox with flowing materials, heat, and gravity", it's exactly that. One of those things to mess with in the browser when you're either waiting for a boring meeting, or in a boring meeting, or just have time to kill. Or just because.

The Jqwik Anti-AI Affair¶

The Jqwik author's perspective on their Markdown-based "malware".

Finalist¶

Saw this go past in my Mastodon feed, although I lost track of who mentioned it. This app falls under the heading of "apps I really want to like because it seems to solve a problem I want solved but I don't like how it solves it". Mostly I do like how it solves it, but something is off about it; also it's laggy as hell on my iPhone 16 Pro, for some reason.

As such, I didn't stick with it for long, but I might revisit it at some point to see if the performance improves; hence saving it.

Modus Themes¶

In the past few days I've been toying with changing the look of my Emacs. This is where I landed. The documentation is excellent. I don't know why it took me so long to discover it.

LisaOS Emulator¶

An Apple Lisa. In the browser! I've never used a Lisa. I've never seen one in person. It's sort of wild to me that I now live at a moment in time where we can emulate, right in the browser, machines that date from my younger days.

Vintage Macworld Magazine Library¶

Never read it myself; I'm a late arrival to the world of the Mac (I've been a user just over a decade now). Should be fun reading some of the older copies.

Project Gemini¶

This is a new one on me; I just stumbled on it over the weekend. It is a now well-established protocol for a simple web of documents. I'm very tempted to have a play with this. I'm ever so slightly tempted to see if I can do something with BlogMore, such that I could target this approach in some way too.

Gemcities¶

Free hosting for Gemini-protocol sites.

flounder¶

Free hosting for Gemini-protocol sites.

Introduction¶

An occasional collection of things I've recently found on the Internet and added to my bookmarks.

Gemini hypertext format specification¶

The specification for the hypertext format used by the Gemini protocol, also known as "gemtext". Currently I'm developing my own terminal-based Gemini client so this comes in very handy.

UK government's under-16s social-media ban¶

The press release from the UK government, covering the intended ban on social media for under-16s. Even if we were to assume this is a good thing (and I'm far from convinced it is), the proposal as it looks right now is hilariously bad and appears to be as ill-informed as any attempt to control the Internet that has gone before.

How to be mean to IIS-based servers¶

A funny, and kind of informative, post about how you can be mean to IIS servers. Not that I'd ever do that (no, really, I wouldn't, that's not my sort of thing), but it's fun to know that some folk actually do that.

NetNewsWire Status¶

I was very late coming to NetNewsWire, only discovering it in the last year; it's been one of my go-to RSS tools (along with OldNews, of course) on macOS and iOS ever since. Here the author talks about the progress made in the last year.

The LLMentalist Effect¶

An article in which the author talks about the con played by psychics, and how large language models pretty much do exactly the same thing.

Dialog attendance list¶

Does what it says on the tin: shows the list of people who were "leaked" on the Dialog website.

The Community is the Achievement; the Achievement is the Community¶

An article on how community is one of the important properties of where tech has taken us, and the threat that AI poses to this. As of the time of writing, this is still on my to-read list, but I strongly suspect it's going to be a good and useful read.

Introduction¶

An occasional collection of things I've recently found on the Internet and added to my bookmarks.

JSON-LD Explained for Personal Websites¶

Handy guide to how JSON-LD can be useful for personal websites.

TownSquare¶

On the one hand, this looks like a fun idea: sort of a Second Life for websites. On the other hand, it's the worst of the Internet, which is no surprise.

The AI Resist List¶

Does what it says in the title, pretty much.

Rest of the World¶

A good reminder that tech stories come from places other than the "western" world.

smolweb¶

A handy guide to all things relating to the small web, and related concepts.

Gemtext Is Not Accessible¶

A good reminder that, as fun and neat as Gemtext is, it's not terribly accessible.

Honesty gets Emacs patch rejected¶

The FSF, in effect, does what the FSF is there to do: defend the copyright of GNU Emacs (among other projects). Meanwhile someone attempts to contribute a patch written by a large language model, and seemingly gets offended that it's rejected. I think the worst part about it is they seem to think that being honest about using an LLM should let their contribution in.

The UnOfficial History of Second Life!¶

A pretty fun Reddit post that contains a potted history of the evolution of Second Life. I've had an account for a good chunk of that time, and it all reads about right to me.

Radial¶

I've long been a fan of pie menus. I wish macOS had adopted and used pie menus. This looks like something I need to try out at some point.

The AI Compass¶

It's one of those "compass" type quizzes that works out where you stand on the whole issue of AI. I landed on "The Skeptic".