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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I say "started collecting"; I was a del.icio.us user back in the day. ↩
It's now well over a year since I released Braindrop and it's in constant use by me. I continue to find raindrop.io a really useful resource, and more often than not manage, edit, tag, and review what I save there with Braindrop, including which become public, and which don't.
So with the release of v1.1.0 I've added three new commands to the application:
JumpToNavigation - Jump to the navigation panel; bound to 1 by default
JumpToRaindrops - Jump to the main raindrops list panel; bound to 2 by default
JumpToDetails - Jump to the details panel for the selected raindrop, if the panel is visible; bound to 3 by default
Now it's just a little easier and quicker to get around the UI.
If raindrop.io is your thing, and you want to work with your saved bookmarks in the terminal: Braindrop is licensed GPL-3.0 and available via GitHub and also via PyPI. It can also be installed using uv:
uvtoolinstallbraindrop
If you don't have uv installed you can use uvx.sh to perform the installation. For GNU/Linux or macOS or similar:
A touch over a year ago I did the initial work on an application called Tinboard, a terminal-based client for the Pinboard bookmarking service. I had a lot of fun building it and it was an application that I used on a near-daily basis. However, around August last year I realised it was time for me to move on from Pinboard and try something new; based on various recommendations I settled on Raindrop.
As mentioned in the other blog post, Raindrop offered more or less everything I had with Pinboard and so the move was fairly straightforward. The one thing that was missing though was an application similar to Tinboard.
So, late on last year, with my winter break approaching, I decided to start from scratch and build a "Tinboard for Raindrop", which I'm calling Braindrop.
This was going to be a bit of an adventure too. Since being laid off from Textualize earlier in 2024 I'd not been following its development quite as closely as I used to, and had also run into some issues and bugs with it since that time; moreover, as well as various bugs appearing, some breaking changes had also been made. As such this was going to be a process where I'd wrap my head around what's happened with the framework over the prior six months or so.
Given all this, over the past couple of weeks I've been spending a few hours a day doing some for-pleasure coding and v0.1.0 of Braindrop is the result.
As much as possible I've tried to keep the look and feel similar to that of Tinboard, while also doing my best to avoid some of the "ah, I wish I hadn't done it this way" design decisions I'd made. As of the time of writing I'm very pleased with the result.
One thing I did want to do is ensure that the application was as keyboard-friendly as possible, while also still allowing use of the mouse. Textual can sometimes get that wrong and I ran into an example of this while trying to ensure that there's good in-application help. Somewhat recently Textual added a built-in help system which, sadly, can't easily be used by and navigated by someone using the keyboard. So instead I've recreated the help system I built into Tinboard, while adopting the documentation standard that Textual had settled on (which, coincidentally, was kind of similar to what I did in Tinboard to start with).
As with Tinboard, I've also made sure to make full use of the command palette, with every action that makes sense having a keyboard hotkey as well as a command in the palette. I also took things a little further and made sure that the hotkeys are shown in the command palette for easier discovery.
I've also made sure that Textual's new theme system is available for easy use; so out goes dark/light mode toggling and in comes a collection of different themes. Here's a wee selection as an example:
That's a small selection of the themes, with more to explore.
There's a few more things I want to do before I consider the application v1.0-ready, but it's already in use by me and working well. As I decide what else I want to add to it I'm building up a list of TODO items.
Given that my day job these days is quite varied, isn't quite so coding-intensive, and isn't always related to all things Python, it's actually been fun to sit down and hack up a pure Python application from scratch again. It's also helped me discover a couple or so fresh bugs in Textual (which I've reported, of course) and given me the opportunity to PR some trivial fixes as I've noticed typos and stuff as I go.
Anyway; that's v0.1.0 out in the wild. I'm pleased with how it's turned out and there's more to come. It's licensed GPL-3.0 and available via GitHub and also via PyPI. If you have an environment that has pipx installed you should be able to get up and going with:
pipxinstallbraindrop
It can also be installed with Homebrew by tapping davep/homebrew and then installing braindrop:
I was quite late discovering Pinboard; by the looks of things I created my account and paid my first subscription for it in early 2019. Since then I've been a pretty avid user and found it really useful. I've even written a couple of clients for it (one for Emacs and one for the terminal).
During that time it's had its fair share of hiccups and outages, but on the whole I've found it a stable and useful service.
The service does have its detractors, and concerns over its long-term stability and how well it's maintained are fairly common. I half paid attention to these, and had started to think about where I might go if there was an issue.
While maintaining and syncing bookmarks isn't exactly a difficult or unsolved problem, and while it's also true that it could be fun to roll my own solution, there are a couple of things I need that would make building my own approach a bit of a chore.
Things important to me are:
An extension for any random browser I might find myself using
A good mobile client for at least iOS and iPadOS
A good API so I can write my own tools if I need to
A clean and focused backend website
I kept these things in mind and kept an eye out but I'd never really felt the need to actively start looking around.
That... yeah, that was the final push I needed to start to think seriously about where to move and how.
A couple of people suggested Raindrop, and from what I could tell it was coming up as a pretty popular service that some Pinboard users were migrating to. I had a look and it wasn't quite what I was after; but close.
You see, there's two things I really like about Pinboard that Raindop didn't seem to cover:
Simple support for "this shit is unread". I see things, I share to whatever Pinboard app I have on my phone or tablet, etc, and then I review some time later (normally in Tinboard).
I looked around at some blogs that talked about Pinboard vs Raindrop and didn't see any that really dived into this particular aspect of migrating; I also asked a couple of folk who'd made the move about this and they didn't really have any insight (mainly because they didn't care about those particular uses).
One thing I did notice though was that Raindrop does support making individual collections public. So, if I was willing to sacrifice any other uses for collections (a bookmark in Raindrop can only be in one collection), I could simply have a Public and a Private collection and import pins into the appropriate one. Also, unread pins could be left out of the collections and I could use that to signify unread status.
This seemed fine as I'm heavy on the tags anyway.
Now... Raindrop has a pretty comprehensive import facility built in. I gave it a try with Pinboard's backup file and it worked really well. That is... really well except it just threw away the public/private/unread aspect of the pins. There was only one thing for it then: I had to write my own importer!
Which brings me to Paindrop. It's a quick hack but it does the job, and it does the import just how I wanted. The result of the first test was pretty much spot on (in this image I'm comparing what Raindrop says vs what Tinboard says I have in Pinboard):
Usage is pretty straightforward. You create Public and Private collections in Raindrop, you create an app in Raindrop and get the access token, you grab your Pinboard access token and then:
where the first parameter is the Pinboard access token and the second the Raindrop access token.
If all goes well, after a few moments, the importer should finish and you should find that all of your pins have migrated to Raindrop, all public pins are in the Public collection and all private pins are in the Private collection. Any pins that were marked as unread will be Unsorted.
Note that if you used different names for your public and private collections you can pass those names to paindrop with the --public and --private switches.
If you're looking to move your bookmarking history out of Pinboard and want to keep the same sort of structure I had I hope Paindrop will be useful to you too.
Paindrop can be installed with pip or (ideally) pipxfrom PyPI. It can also be installed with Homebrew by tapping davep/homebrew and then installing paindrop:
