2025-09-17 01:30:00
As you probably know by now, thanks to the infinite supply of news on the subject, today new OS versions came out for Apple gadgets. Yes, it’s the one with that idiot Liquid Glass. Yes, I hate it. No, I don’t hate it because it’s different from what I was used to before. And you know why? Because I was hating the previous one as well. «Why are you still using it then?» I hear you say. Because I have no good alternatives. Most of the tools I use are developed exclusively for this ecosystem, and those are tools I love to use. Plus, Windows is not any better, and I don’t have time to deal with anything Linux. So yeah, it is what it is. I’ll get used to all this nonsense on MacOS, from the insanely big rounded corners to the awful design choices.
Something I won’t get used to, though, is the home screen on my phone. For the past couple of years, I was running with a setup that looked like this:
This empty screen was achieved with a workaround, using a combination of a purposely designed wallpaper and a few accessibility settings. And I loved it. The fact that my home screen was empty was making me so happy. The only way I was interacting with my phone was by swiping down and using Spotlight.
But now, in their infinite wisdom, the fine folks at Apple have decided that everything on this stupid device needs to show fake reflections, which means the empty dock is now back because fuck me for using the phone in a weird way, I guess.
Thank you, Tim Apple.
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2025-09-12 23:25:00
Sometimes I post not because I have something to get out of my system, but because I have something I want to share. This is one of those occasions.
First, Cody has a new pop-up newsletter going called “Trespassing Through Montana”. I’m a big fan of what he does, and I also enjoy helping people connect with each other online, so I’m not gonna pass on this opportunity to suggest you to sign up for his newsletter.
The second is that the Internet Phone Book is back in stock. I mentioned this lovely object in an old post of mine, and I’m so glad I managed to grab my copy when it came out. I’m also happy to be in it and very pleased to have Luke as my neighbour.
That’s it, that’s all I have to say. Buy the book, sign up for the newsletter, and enjoy the weekend.
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2025-09-12 19:00:00
This is the 107th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Jack Baty and his blog, baty.net
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Hello, I'm Jack. I was born, raised, and live in west Michigan, US. I live in a quiet (aka "boring") suburb with my lovely wife, our dog, a few tropical fish, and a sea urchin named Lurch.
I was a paperboy, fast food worker, and ditch digger long before I started creating software for a living. My first programming project was a Laboratory Information Management System (L.I.M.S.) for a local environmental testing lab. This was in 1992. I was learning as I went, using a Macintosh RDBMS environment called 4th Dimension. I continued as a solo software developer for a couple of years.
In 1995, I cofounded the web design firm "Fusionary Media" with my two partners. Fusionary grew to a team of around 15 people. We built some very nice websites, software, and mobile apps for companies like MLB, GM, Steelcase, etc. This went on for 25 years, until we sold the company in 2020. I've been "retired" since then, but I miss working on things with people, so we'll see.
These days I spend most of my time with photography, blogging, and reading.
I enjoy tinkering with tech of all kinds and exploring what different software tools can do. This often means completely upending my workflow in order to shoehorn some cool new toy into it. I call this a "hobby".
Which one? 😂
In the late 1990s, when the internet was still new and exciting, I wanted to tell everyone about everything. I was learning to create websites, so starting a blog was a great opportunity to do both. I created a couple of proto-blogs in 1998 and 1999, but those have been lost to time. My current blog at baty.net began in August 2000, 25 years ago this month. Everything before 2021 is archived at archive.baty.net. I don't delete old posts, although I probably should.
My early posts were mostly Gruber-style link posts. It's sad that so many of those original links are dead now. Eventually I started sharing more details about what I was doing and thinking about, rather than just linking to other things. This continues today.
I sporadically maintain several other sites/blogs. Other than Baty.net, there's also a "Daily Notes" blog at daily.baty.net, but lately I've just been rolling that into baty.net. I recently started a photo blog using Ghost at baty.photo. Ghost makes posting images easy, but I haven't decided if I'll continue.
I keep a wiki using TiddlyWiki (since 2018) (rudimentarylathe.org). I don't even know what it's for, honestly, but I keep putting stuff there when I don't know where else it should go.
My dream is to have only One True Blog, but that's been elusive.
Honestly, I don't really have a creative process. Nothing deliberate, anyway. My posts are mostly journal entries about whatever's on my mind. What usually happens is that I'll read someone's blog post or I'll try some new tool, and share my thoughts on it.
I used to write (bad) poetry and would love to compose longer, thoughtful essays, but that never happens.
More often than not I publish things long before they're ready. It's as if I'd never heard of proofreading. I just fix things later. If I had to make everything perfect first, I'd never post anything.
I write my posts in whatever text editor I'm infatuated with at the moment. 90% of the time, that means Emacs, the nerdiest possible option.
I prefer a tidy, pleasant environment. Usually, though, I sit at my desktop computer (an M4 MacBook Air and Studio Display) in my messy basement office. I just start writing whenever I have something to say. My wife thinks I have some form of auditory processing disorder, so I rarely listen to music while writing. It only muddles my thoughts (even more than they already are).
I do find that things come easier for me when I'm surrounded by books. They inspire me.
Once in a while, I'll draft posts longhand with a nice fountain pen or on a manual typewriter, but I'm lazy, so that's pretty rare.
If I had my way, there'd be a giant window in my home office, maybe overlooking water. Currently I stare at a bare wall, which is probably not ideal for creative inspiration.
I change platforms so often that it'll probably be different by the time anyone reads this, but I'm currently using Hugo to render a static website.
My static sites are hosted on a small VPS running FreeBSD with Caddy as the web server. I use Porkbun for domain registration and management.
For creating new posts in Hugo, I have Emacs configured to create properly formatted Markdown files in the correct location. I write the posts in Emacs. When finished, I run a little shell script that builds the site and uploads it to the server. I don't use any fancy Github deployment actions or anything. I just render the site locally and use rsync to push changes.
I've used nearly every blogging platform ever created. I've even written several of my own. Each platform has something I love about it, and when I start to miss whatever that thing is, I'll switch back to it. And so on. Sometimes moving to a new blogging platform gets the writing juices flowing. Sometimes it's just something to do when I'm bored and don't have anything to say.
I would love to be the type of person who started a WordPress (or whatever) blog in the noughts and never changed anything. So many of my posts have bad links or missing images due to moving from platform to platform. It's frustrating for both me and my readers.
I suppose what I'd do differently is pick a process and stick with it. Maybe focus on writing instead of tinkering with themes and platforms and such. Blogs are simple things, really, and overthinking everything has caused me nothing but trouble.
I'm running my static sites on a small, $5/month (plus $1 for backups) VPS at Vultr, so it costs very little. I pay another $5/month for Tinylytics to watch traffic/views. So I'm in for around $11/month.
The Ghost blog costs $15/month at MagicPages.
One other cost is domain registrations, which adds up to maybe $50/year.
I have no interested in trying to make money from blogging, even if it were feasible.
I hesitate to recommend specific blogs, since that means leaving out so many others. I'll just pick a few at random from my RSS reader. Most of the blogs I follow are by people writing about their lives and interests. I'm less inclined to follow Capital-B Bloggers or industry-specific blogs these days. I'm interested in people, not companies.
May I just suggest to anyone reading this, if you're even remotely interested in starting a blog, do it! 😁
This was the 107th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Jack. Make sure to follow his blog (RSS) and get in touch with him if you have any questions.
You can support this series on Ko-Fi and all supporters will be listed here as well as on the official site of the newsletter.
Jamie Thingelstad (RSS) — Piet Terheyden — Eleonora — Carl Barenbrug (RSS) — Steve Ledlow (RSS) — Paolo Ruggeri (RSS) — Nicolas Magand (RSS) — Rob Hope — Chris Hannah (RSS) — Pedro Corá (RSS) — Sixian Lim (RSS) — Matt Stein (RSS) — Winnie Lim (RSS) — Flamed (RSS) — C Jackdaw (RSS) — Kevin Humdrum (RSS) — Fabricio Teixeira (RSS) — Rosalind Croad — Mike Walsh (RSS) — Markus Heurung (RSS) — Michael Warren (RSS) — Chuck Grimmett (RSS) — Bryan Maniotakis (RSS) — Barry Hess (RSS) — Ivan Moreale — Ben Werdmuller (RSS) — Cory Gibbons — Luke Harris (RSS) — Lars-Christian Simonsen (RSS) — Cody Schultz — Brad Barrish (RSS) — Nikita Galaiko — Erik Blankvoort — Jaga Santagostino — Andrew Zuckerman — Mattia Compagnucci (RSS) — Thord D. Hedengren (RSS) — Fabien Sauser (RSS) — Maxwell Omdal — Numeric Citizen (RSS) — Jarrod Blundy (RSS) — Andrea Contino (RSS) — Sebastian De Deyne (RSS) — Nicola Losito (RSS) — Lou Plummer (RSS) — Leon Mika (RSS) — Neil Gorman (RSS) — Reaper (RSS) — Matt Rutherford (RSS) — Aleem Ali (RSS) — Nikkin (RSS) — Hans (RSS) — Matt Katz (RSS) — Ilja Panić — Emmanuel Odongo — Peter Rukavina (RSS) — James (RSS) — Adam Keys (RSS) — Alexey Staroselets (RSS) — John L — Minsuk Kang (RSS) — Naz Hamid (RSS) — Ken Zinser (RSS) — Jan — Grey Vugrin (RSS) — Luigi Mozzillo (RSS) — Alex Hyett (RSS) — Andy Piper — Hrvoje Šimić (RSS) — Travis Schmeisser — Doug Jones — Vincent Ritter (RSS) — Shen — Fabian Holzer (RSS) — Courtney (RSS) — Dan Ritz (RSS) — Jeremy Bassetti (RSS) — Luke Dorny (RSS) — Thomas Erickson — Herman Martinus (RSS) — Benny (RSS) — Annie Mueller (RSS) — SekhmetDesign — Gui (RSS) — Jamie (RSS) — Juha Liikala (RSS) — Ray (RSS) — Chad Moore (RSS) — Benjamin Wittorf (RSS) — Radek Kozieł (RSS) — Marcus Richardson — Emily Moran Barwick (RSS) — Gosha (RSS) — Manton Reece (RSS) — Silvano Stralla (RSS) — Benjamin Chait (RSS) — Cai Wingfield — Pete (RSS) — Pete Millspaugh (RSS) — Martin Matanovic (RSS) — Coinciding Narratives (RSS) — Arun Venkatesan (RSS) — fourohfour.net (RSS) — Jonathan Kemper — Bookofjoe (RSS) — Marius Masalar (RSS) — Jim Mitchell (RSS) — Simon Howard (RSS) — Frederick Vanbrabant (RSS) — Thibault Malfoy (RSS) — Beradadisini (RSS) — x-way (RSS) — Vincent Geoffray — TAONAW (RSS) — Sebastián Monía (RSS) — grubz (RSS) — Sal (RSS) — Bomburache — Eric Gregorich (RSS) — Noahie Valk (RSS)
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2025-09-11 00:35:00
Stumbled on this post a moment ago—on a lovely colourful blog, I might add—and I have thoughts on the subject:
I'm low-key mad about this! So we just can't use em dashes anymore? We let the machines take them from us?? And we didn't even put up a fight or anything???
Although I'm frustrated, I promise from now on to no longer use em dashes and keep my heavy italics usage to a minimum as well. I don't want anyone to think I use AI. (I mean, I do use AI to research stuff, but not to write.) It just sucks because I feel like from now on there will always be this bubbling paranoia over writing that no writer will ever be able to avoid. I'm genuinely a pro-technology, "embrace the future but let's make it better"-type of person, but I'm wary of the "new normal" this precedent sends.
But whatever. You win, AI. You can have your stupid em dashes.
No you can't have them. Yes, we can still use em dashes. And no, I’m not going to stop using them because fucking chatgpt is abusing them. What if they tweak the instructions next week and tell it to use more full stops or commas? What are we gonna do then? Stop using those as well? Hell no. I’ll keep writing however I want, and if someone decides to stop reading what I write because they suspect it’s AI-generated because I use too many em dashes, or parentheses, or any other punctuation or word or whatever, well, good riddance. I’m not gonna miss you.
Looks like I’m not the only one feeling this way.
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2025-09-06 14:35:00
While clicking through my RSS feeds, I found my way to Jay’s post titled “Do blogs need to be so lonely?”. It’s an interesting post, especially interesting for me since I love blogs. Betteridge's law of headlines tells us that the answer to the question Jay is posing is “no”, but I think it’s worth expanding on why I think that’s not the case.
Do blogs, like this one I’m writing in now, need to be so lonely? Not always, but sometimes, I feel like I’m shouting into the void. I’m picturing something relatively simple. Something like a group blog, or a blog co-op. A group of internet friends posting together, without too much oversight or coordination between them.
So, I don’t have anything against the idea of group blogging or a blog co-op, but I don’t think that will address the initial problem Jay’s flagging, that sensation of shouting into a void. I guess shouting into a void with a few friends is better than doing it by yourself, but the end result is still the same. And unless by group blog he means writing posts together and not just posting them on the same site, then I don’t think the situation would change much.
The second part of that quote is the one I find the most interesting and the one I can’t stop smiling at every time I think about it.
A group of internet friends posting together, without too much oversight or coordination between them.
I can’t stop smiling because we already have this. It’s what people used to call the blogosphere. There are already potentially millions of people out there, posting together, without much oversight or coordination between them. I have interviewed one hundred and six of them for People and Blogs (which, btw, is a collaborative blogging project) and there are almost a thousand collected on the blogroll.
A lot of them I consider internet friends. I follow what they’re up to thanks to their blogs, and I occasionally send them emails, precisely to address the “shouting into the void” nature of blogging. And it’s working wonderfully.
I think we have all the tools we need to address the issue Jay’s flagging in his post. Now we just need to actually do it. I think it comes down to linking more to what other people are writing, posting more replies to other people’s posts, and putting some effort into connecting directly with the author when we stumble on a piece of writing that resonates with us.
So why not collaborative blogging? Why not groups of people coming together to create personal blogs? Something less formal than a journalist collective, but more communal than a personal blog. Blogging collectively opens us up to a new kind of content, one in which members of the blog are in conversation with one another in a way that’s comfortable and unique.
This is already happening; it doesn’t need to be invented. In his piece, Jay quoted Leon’s post. I have now mentioned and linked to both of them in mine. They’ll be free to respond on their blogs if they want to keep the conversation going, and anybody else is welcome to join.
Your blog doesn’t have to be lonely. But at the same time, you can’t expect it not to be that way without effort. So if you care, then put some effort into this. Trust me, it’s worth it.
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2025-09-05 22:50:00
Back in March 2024, The Browser Company—a name I still find hilarious, all these years later—published a website called “We Might Not Make It”. They described it as:
A limited series that breaks down the top 5 reasons our company might not make it to next year. (And why we think we can.)
The plan was to release a 5-part video series. Quite ironically, considering the name, they stopped at video number two and the whole project was quickly abandoned. The three remaining videos that were planned were:
The first one is not even worth talking about. This was a company that was so small to the point of being insignificant in the context of the whole web, so there was no risk of them ruining anything. The other two points, though, those are quite funny to look at in retrospect. Many people loved Arc, but it was quickly abandoned when everyone and their moms pivoted to AI. A move that surprised literally nobody. And it was also not surprising to read the news that The Browser Company got acquired because they couldn’t, in fact, make money, and so the only two options were either shut everything down or get acquired. This is a story we’ve all seen a million times in the tech world: someone makes a nice product using VC money, a product that has zero chance of being commercially viable because it has no business model. They promise the moon, only to then turn their back on their user base and sell everything as soon as someone makes a decent offer.
And, like literally every other company that gets acquired, they promised that they “will operate independently”. If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you. I honestly doubt the whole team will still exist in 12 months. I guess we’ll see.
I was never an Arc user, and you won’t be surprised to know I couldn’t give less of a fuck about Dia because the last thing I want is to spend time chatting with my browser. But, if you were an Arc user, maybe give Zen Browser a try? I heard it’s quite good.
And, since we’re talking browsers here, I won’t miss the chance to mention the Ladybird project since they’re actually making a new browser, which is so awesome to see in 2025.
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