Kev QuirkModify

2026-10-07 20:42:00

I've had lots of hobbies over the years. To name a few off the top of my head, there's been fish keeping, guitar, harmonica, fountain pens, watches, motorbikes, this blog, web development, 3D printing, tattoos, digital minimalism, table tennis, and many more.

Some of my hobbies have stuck, but I've never gotten so enthralled into a hobby that I become obsessed. Instead, there's generally 4 steps in the process:

1. I decide I want to take up a hobby.
2. I read, watch videos, and obsessively learn about the topic.
3. Invest lots of time and/or money into the hobby.
4. Decide I've learned enough and move on.

I don't always get to step 4. For some hobbies, like watch collecting and motorbikes, I continue to invest some time and money into them, and they continue to bring me joy. But I'm not obsessed. I see someone wearing an interesting watch; it piques my interest and we can have a conversation about it. But I'm not the type of person who can tell a watch brand from across a room (unless it's a Casio).

Similarly, I love riding and working on my motorbikes - both bring me genuine joy. But I'm not the kind of biker who has to get out on their bike as much as possible, where driving the car is some kind of punishment. I enjoy driving too.

While walking the dogs this morning I was idly thinking about all the random possessions I have scattered around the house that are the culmination of many abandoned hobbies. I started to think about why that is, and it dawned on me…

It's not guitars, or harmonicas, or fish, or motorbikes, or watches, or anything else. It's learning about those thing that I find so enjoyable. It's the nitrogen cycle of an aquarium. It's learning to place your fingers at the right part of the fretboard on a guitar. It's learning to ride a motorbike safely and smoothly through some technical twisty roads, or learning how a clutch works and how to strip it down.

It's learning. Learning is my hobby.

And once I've decided I've learned enough about a topic, I'm good. I don't want to be the next Eric Clapton, Valentino Rossi, King of DIY, or Teddy Baldassarre. I want to be good enough at those hobbies, then move on to the next thing I can learn about.

I think that's why computers have always interested me, because there's always something new to learn with them.

So in future, instead of going neck deep and spending money on the next frivolous hobby, maybe I'll just spend some time learning about the thing to see if that satisfies my learning hobby. It probably won't though, as I'm something of a magpie when it comes to shiny things.

But hey, at least I'm having fun and I'm not hurting anyone, right?

2026-10-06 16:47:00

Been trying a new email client, Hylki, after reading about it on OMG! Ubuntu! Really enjoying it. It's modern and has a tonne of features.

https://hylki.app/

2026-10-04 23:17:00

I really enjoy writing. Not typing - writing. With a fountain pen on good quality paper. I find the whole process cathartic; putting pen to paper demands far more use of my grey matter than hammering away at a keyboard.

I mentioned in a recent post that when I finished an English course many years ago, I was hunting for creative reasons to type. Similarly, over the last 6 months or so I've gotten into fountain pens, and now I'm looking for ways to write creatively.

I thought about handwriting some text then scanning/photographing it to publish it here, but that feels too convoluted. Plus, I feel like writing with a pen is more of a personal endeavour.

Then it struck me - why not get a few pen pals!

So I'm throwing this out into the wild - does anyone fancy exchanging letters with me?

The only real requirement is that you can read and write in English (sadly, it's the only language I speak). I'm looking for perhaps 3–5 people to swap letters with. Naturally, we'll need to share postal addresses so we can send our prose back and forth.

There’s zero pressure when it comes to frequency, either. Just write back whenever life allows. If a month or so passes without hearing from you, no hard feelings. I'll just assume our correspondence has naturally run its course.

If you're interested, please fill out the short form linked below. Since I can only manage 3–5 pen pals, submitting the form doesn't guarantee we'll write, but if we seem like a good match and share common ground, I'll reach out by email to swap details and get things going.

I won't be publishing these letters online - these are purely offline, private conversations. I'd ask that you keep them private, too.

If you prefer not to use Google Forms, feel free to email me with the following:

• Your name
• Preferred email address
• Which country/city you live in
• A little bit about yourself and why you want to write to me
• Some topics you'd like to discuss

Sign up to become a Pen Pal

2026-10-03 21:46:00

Following my recent post about not checking Mastodon, a reader raised an interesting privacy concern regarding Webmentions. They explained that they had stopped using Webmentions altogether because Fediverse users often don't realise - or explicitly consent to - their replies being republished on an external blog.

This surprised me, as I'd never considered that Webmentions could be a privacy concern.

To my mind, a public post on an open platform like Mastodon is precisely that: public. The Fediverse is decentralised by design. When you reply to someone, your message doesn't remain isolated on your home instance; it federates across countless independent servers. Pulling a public reply onto kevquirk.com via a Webmention bridge is conceptually no different from fosstodon.org relaying a reply originally posted on mastodon.social.

Unless the concern is about deletion persistence (e.g. cached mentions remaining if a post is deleted), I struggle to see where the privacy violation lies when republishing content that was broadcast publicly to the open web in the first place.

Am I missing a subtlety here? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

2026-10-03 16:04:00

Took the dogs out on the field this morning. All the dewey spider webs were beautiful in the morning sun.

I'm no Jack Baty, but they're good enough.

2026-10-01 19:11:00

My relationship with Mastodon has been somewhat tumultuous over the years, until I eventually stepped down from Fosstodon around 18 months ago. I have to say, it was the right decision. I don't miss running Fosstodon one bit.

But since then, I've found myself less and less engaged in the Fediverse. Mainly because there's so much outrage over there. It's so tiring.

The majority of my timeline is fun, but the outraged minority have ruined for me. To the point where I don't want to be there, and I'm much happier having not checked the timeline for the last month or so.

I'm not off the Fedi, however. What I've done is build features into this site that allow me to automatically cross-post to the Fedi. I even have a custom page that only I can access, which allows me to create a note as simply as posting to Mastodon:

As well as this, I've implemented Webmentions in Pure Comments as of earlier this month. So I can reply to any comments from afar too.

It's nice. I can see still engage with people on the Fedi, all while not having to put up with the checking the timelines.

What Now?

I have around 12,000 followers on my Mastodon account. Because Mastodon really doesn't scale well, those 12k followers take a fair amount of Fosstodon's resources. Which I don't think is fair if I'm not really using the service (I do donate every month).

So I'm thinking about spinning up a single user GoToSocial instance that I can live on. That way I'm not using any of Fosstodon's resources and I can do my own thing, on my own server.

I own thefedi.uk and thefediverse.uk so something like @[email protected] would be quite cool, I think. I could even provide accounts to friends in the future then too. On the other hand, I'm not sure I want the headache of managing a federated server again.

Maybe I should stop overthinking it and just stay on Fosstodon. What would you do in my position?