2026-05-31 21:35:00
Here we go again. Afternoon walk this time around. It’s almost 2pm, and I’m standing in the same parking spot where I got picked up last week. No breakfast in me, but I did have lunch before heading out. Compared to last week’s hike, this one’s gonna be way easier. We have a bit more than 20kms to walk, with roughly 650 meters of ascent and 1300 of descent. Gonna be fun.
Before we begin, I’ll have to apologise for the terrible photos I took, especially of the churches. Been a weird walk, and there was also non-ideal lighting most of the day and, I don’t know, I guess I was not very inspired today? I’ll hopefully do better next time around. Ok, down the mountain we go.
Compared to last week, today’s a lot cooler, and there’s a gentle breeze. Perfect conditions to walk down a mountain and into the forest.
The first part is a lot steeper than I thought. I did consider walking the whole loop in reverse, and this part would not be fun. I’m having a hard time going down, I can’t imagine going up from here, especially after a long walk.
Thankfully, the trail becomes a lot easier to walk after that initial steep part, and I’m now enjoying my time in the woods. There’s gonna be a lot of going in and out of the woods on this hike.
Down a few steps and I’m about to emerge next to Montemaggiore, the last town you encounter on your way up to Mount Matajur. I saw these concrete stairs many times before, while driving up this road. Always wanted to walk this trail, and I’m glad I’m finally doing it.
The trail goes through the buildings, neat! So many old and abandoned buildings. Makes me kinda sad. But I get it, life up here ain’t exactly easy, or practical.
And on the other side? A big, and frankly quite ugly, Jesus. This is relatively modern, and I’ll be honest, I’m not a fan.
The trail continues in and around the town, down a few sets of stairs, and through some overgrown grass. So far, this one’s the worst-maintained trail I have walked. But I can imagine that doing maintenance is not exactly easy over here. So kudos to everyone who does it.
I’m now back on one of those service roads, and it’s a very enjoyable walk. We’re slowly going down, the weather is lovely, and I’m very much enjoying my time outside. It’s not an incredibly varied walk so far, the scenery is mostly the same, but still, this is not a bad way to spend a Saturday afternoon.
This small football field made me smile. I have no idea who comes up here to use it, but it’s fun to see it’s still there. I’d have loved to have something like this available to me as a kid. But now there’s nobody around, these valleys are slowly getting abandoned, which is sad but also understandable.
Time to take a left turn, leave the service road behind me and go up into the woods again. I’m not too distant from the first of the three churches I’ll visit today.
Was not expecting to find myself in this open area with a view of the valley underneath. This is a lovely spot, and there’s also a cabin nearby. Probably used by the hunters, like most of the cabins scattered around the valleys.
Into the woods again, and I now need to leave the trail behind me because the first church is some 100 or so meters off the path. So down I go and to reach the church of Sant’Ulderico in Monte (15/44).
The area around the church is quite neglected, and the overall scenery is really not the best. The only good thing about this one is that one of the windows was open, and I finally managed to take a decent picture of the inside of one of the churches. It’s very barebones, but the altar is nice. I still think it’s sad that these are all locked; they could become awesome shelters for the night. I should probably learn lock picking…
Time to hike back up to where I left the trail earlier and keep moving on through the woods. Next stop is gonna be where the trail splits and the variant starts. I hate these variants. They make no sense, and this one in particular is almost as long as the main path, only to touch one more church, one that is not even all that nice or unique. But I guess there’s no point in complaining; nobody is forcing me to walk these trails after all.
After another hour of uneventful walking into the woods, we have finally reached the location of the church of Santi Primo e Feliciano
(16/44), which I didn’t even bother visit closely and only took this photo of it.
The only nice thing about this church is the location, since it has a great view, but the building itself is incredibly uninspiring, especially because it has probably been restructured in modern times. There are a couple of pictures on the link above if you want to see more of it. That said, though, there are a couple of way more interesting things to see around here. Starting from this throwback sign.
What a blast from the past. Do you even remember the time when not everyone had a phone, and you could use phones in public places to make phone calls? What a time!
The other unusual sight is a Thai temple?!? That was very unexpected. I was aware that there’s a Buddhist one in the area (that I might actually see during a future walk), but knew nothing about this one. Neat!
And right in front of it? A small chapel to remember the people who have died during the two World Wars. I told you these things are everywhere and that it’s impossible to forget what happened during those times if you live here.
I’m about to start going back up, and my watch vibrates to alert me that there’s a “severe weather storm alert” which is always great to see when you’re half way through a long walk, and you’re in the middle of nowhere, a couple of hours from your car. I was contemplating stopping for a quick break, but the opposite happened: I started going! As a result, I took very few pictures of the next chunk of the walk but was mostly the same, going in and out of the woods.
An hour later, I connected back with the main path and was close to the third and final church of this walk, the church of San Michele Arcangelo (17/44), which is by far the best one of the three I visited today.
Very small and in an elevated position with a nice view of the valley. Like many others, it was reconstructed after the quakes of the sixteenth century, and you can clearly see that there are parts missing in the front. Still, I much prefer to see churches in this condition; at least they feel like they have a history behind them.
Almost 4 hours in, still 7 kms left to walk, which means there’s no time to waste. I leave the church behind me, go through the small village, into the woods, and some 20 or so minutes later, I’m back on a paved road.
My legs would love to go right and downhill, but I need to go left and uphill, the direction our grandparents used to take to go to school back in the day. But I’m quite happy for this because I get the chance to see a church I've always wanted to visit.
That’s the church of Sant'Andrea Apostolo and every time I drive up to Mount Matajur, I can see it from my car. Has this very characteristic twisty road going up to it from the small village underneath and I always wanted to drive there.
And I have to say, the location is very nice. Living up here must be a nightmare because there’s only one way down, and the road is very narrow. Plus, the closest anything must be 30 to 40 minutes away by car. But if you’re looking for peace and quiet, this is the place for you.
Another point scored by team Mary on my way out of the town.
There’s less than 5kms left now, I’m starting to feel a bit tired, my feet hurt, I need better shoes, I want to take a quick break, but I also don’t want to stop because I know I’m only an hour or so from my car. And stopping at this point makes no sense. So into the forest I go again for the final stretch of this walk.
Found a bunch of sheep chilling in the forest right at the end of the walk. These animals are so fun. If I had the space, I’d totally get a few, just to see them play with the crazy dog I have. I wonder what he would do. Maybe one day I’ll find out.
Final descent into the forest, couple of turns, and here we are, back at the parking spot where I left my car some 5 hours ago. Thankfully, it’s still there because walking home from here would not be fun. Doable, sure. But not fun.
So far, my least favourite walk and the churches were mostly uninspiring, but hey, that’s part of the fun. Next up, we have another long descent, but I very much look forward to doing the walk after that, number 6, since that has the potential to be the most tiring yet fun and interesting walk of the entire series. I’ll definitely need to buy a better pair of shoes by then. There's a new folder on the shared Drive folder with all the pictures I took on the walk. And yes, I have moved from iCloud to Drive because apparently iCloud doesn't like huge albums. And there's also the link to the data recorded by my watch, if you want to get more info on the hike itself.
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2026-05-30 15:10:00
Rishabh emailed me the other day, asking me to answer the 7 questions of his new blog challenge, and who am I to say no to such a request? So here we go.
I assume by AI models we mean the current crop of LLMs, and not AI models in general, because I’m old enough to remember when “Machine Learning” was a thing. What even is AI anyway at this point, since everything is lumped together into one useless definition? Anyway, I believe my first experience was trying out chagpt back when it first came out. I don’t think I spent more than 10 or 15 minutes using it at the time. It was impressive tech, but was also completely useless for me at the time, and that’s why I didn’t bother spending more time using it.
This is an interesting question. Do I use AI? Well, I guess the answer is yes since it’s almost impossible to avoid using it if you use the web at this point. Pretty much all tools and services are integrating some sort of AI-powered functionalities, and it’s become harder and harder not to use them. If, instead, the question is do I use one of the various LLMs directly to do stuff, then the answer is still yes, but the amount of usage is so low that some people might consider that to be the same as not using them at all.
I don’t directly pay for any of the models, but my work email has been powered by Google for more than a decade, and so I do get access to Gemini Pro. Workspace has usage data for everything, and I just looked it up: In the last 90 days, the only AI-related feature I used was the Gemini App (that’s not surprising considering I turned off everything else), and I have apparently used it 62 times.
I’m now looking at the history of those chats, and pretty much all of them are single-question queries related to something web dev I was doing. Things like how to do a specific thing inside Kirby, or how to achieve something using a particular JS library. This is stuff one should be able to find inside documentation websites, but the search there is often awful and so after a google search, I try my luck with AI.
And as I wrote somewhere else, I never copy-paste. I ask very narrow questions so that I can be pointed towards the correct answer. And once I have that, I do the coding and I re-implement everything myself.
Am I against using AI? As a generative tool, yes. I refuse to ask AI to do something for me or to generate content from scratch. As a tech in general? I think it has some potentially useful applications in narrow contexts. As always, the answer is not cut-and-dry, and it can be yes or no depending on the framing and the scope.
Nope.
The only aspect I appreciate is the ability to ask questions in natural language. Because sometimes you have a problem or an answer you’re looking for that can’t be described in a more structured way.
As for what I don’t like, how anthropomorphised these stupid tools are is definitely high on my list. I don’t want my computer to talk back or to make jokes or to say «I’m sorry». If I input a question, I want an answer back, and that’s it. I don’t want follow up questions, I don’t want some pointless preamble. I get why this happens, but I fucking hate it. This is software. I don't want my software to have a personality. I want it to perform a task and get out of my way.
I also don’t like the lying, the gaslighting, and all the other crap, and I also don’t like what the AI industry is doing as a whole, but that’s a separate issue.
Again, another question that has different answers depending on the scope. The idea of being able to generate images, in general, is neutral to me. It all comes down to what you use it for. There are some potential use cases that are totally fine, others are completely insane. As a whole, I think the ability to generate slop is bad, but that’s because humanity can’t be trusted to do anything the right way.
As for their use in blog posts, I think stock images were useless, and I don’t see images generated with AI to be any different. Unless you have generated an image as part of the content to explain or visualise something. That’s fine, label it as a generated image and move on. That’s no different than including a render, or a sketch on paper, from a content perspective.
My consumption of online content these days is so limited that I don’t have this issue. I read very few blogs, and I know they are not AI generated because I emailed the people behind them more than once, and I know what their stance is. I watch almost no YouTube, and I only read a few news sites. My strategy is to simply stay away from the digital world as much as possible, and I’m at the point where I’m considering dropping my digital consumption down to zero and quit the internet as a place for content.
I have zero hope. And that is because I have zero hope in anything that’s in the hands of mega corporations. The incentives are totally skewed, and they’d do everything they can in order to keep the line go up. I don’t see people with strong morals in positions of power and so unless we decide to go full French Revolution, I see no reason for things to improve.
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2026-05-29 19:00:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with fLaMEd 🔥, whose blog can be found at flamedfury.com.
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What's going on, Internet? Kia ora, I'm fLaMEd 🔥. I'm originally from Te Awa Kairangi (Lower Hutt), now living in Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland), Aotearoa, New Zealand with my wife and two kids.
I get up every morning at 4:30 am to get to the gym before the kids get up and the day begins. I've recently picked up golf again, but find less time for that than I do for website work.
You can get a better idea of what I’m into over at my website, Flamed Fury
I'm not a developer, not a designer, just a guy who loves the web.
Flamed Fury started in 1999. It's been through more versions than I can properly count, but the rough timeline: 5 versions before it became a personal blog, a few side quests at different domains inbetween, and finally 4 versions in the 2020 era when I landed back at flamedfury.com where I started.
Started in summer 1999 on one of the free hosts, I don't remember (probably cjb.net). Moved to sweeetnet.com in 2000 through hanging out in the #sweeet IRC channel. A guy called kertiz from #sweeet took pity on my design skills and gave me a proper redesign, then stuck around contributing. Another guy fitty-two joined in. We iterated every couple of years until the dot-com bubble burst, advertising money dried up and the IRC crew drifted apart. I tried to keep it going by myself with a 2002 layout that wasn't great. But "blog" isn't really the word for any of this. The 1999–2003 version was effectively microblogging before microblogging was a thing, built around a niche (lifestyle magazine style, lol) before niche blogging was a thing either. We just didn't have the vocabulary yet.
November 2003 was when Flamed Fury became a blog in the way I'd recognise the format today. Posts about polytech, nights out, whatever was going on. That lasted until 2005, then I parked it and tried being "more adult" at another domain through 2006–2008. Took a break as MySpace, Bebo, Facebook and Twitter took over. Came back in 2012 with a niche barbeque blog and carried on with it for six years before archiving the whole thing in 2018, once I realised how much I absolutely loathed niche recipe blogging.
Revived the fLaMEd persona in 2019 on a new domain (Hugo + Netlify). In 2021 I settled back on flamedfury.com with Eleventy on Neocities. Two redesigns later and a move to a local VPS, here we are.
Every version of this site, going back to 1999, has been the same instinct: a personal site as a place to be yourself on the web. The 1999 version was more of a microblogging website with three friends collaborating around celebrity magazine scans, that's where the era pointed. The 2026 version is the opposite. Everything and nothing, no algorithm to satisfy, no brand. Different tools, same instinct.
There's a longer version of this story I'll get round to writing on the site soon. It's in draft, I promise. Hit me up if you want to see me finish it.
Inspiration for what I put and write on my website comes from across the web and life experiences. A gig, a new record, a beer, a trip with the family, or any number of posts I find across the web gets me thinking. Storytelling, sharing my experiences and interests.
I love monthly recaps to populate my now page, reflections of last night's gig, new (usually local) music finds, a fun time out with my friends or family.
Drafts begin as a note on my phone, my notebook before I find myself with a spare opportunity at my computer.
I'll begin with these rough notes and begin fleshing them out. I'll have a couple of tabs open to grab details and links of what I'm talking about to sprinkle through the post.
Sometimes I'll start a draft and they'll sit there for days, weeks, and sometimes months in an untracked markdown file in Codium.
Depending on what I'm writing about I won't have any proof reading. If I'm writing about something topical about the web I'll often have xandra or one of the other 32-Bit Cafe crew read over it and give me some pointers or a thumbs up.
Then after sitting on it for a minute, an hour or a day, I'll publish it.
Other pages on the website will get worked on and usually published in unfinished states and I'll continue to work on these over time - nothing is ever really finished is it?
My ideal creative environment is in my home office, at my desk or couch in silence. I might listen to a few songs or watch a couple music videos to get me in the zone, but when it comes to focus time, all noise off and I work in silence, often talking to myself.
If I'm away from home and I get a moment to myself, it's either at a table, kitchen bench or an arm chair. Hopefully with silence, but usually with the chaos of family life going on around me.
Our kids are young, they're busy, noisy and need lots of attention so focus time these days is few and far between :)
Do I believe the physical space influences my creativity? Heck yeah, if I'm not in the office, then a walk around the block or through the village listening to music will help me get creative - as long as I get those thoughts out of my head before they dissapear. If I'm travelling, then any beautiful location might inspire some spark.
I use Eleventy for building my website. I originally started with Eleventy Excellent by Lene Saile, but it's evolved beyond that over the years. I often check in with her when she releases new versions to make sure I take in any key updates, but also find some changes I've made find their way back into the starter template :)
These days flamedfury.com runs on an NZ-based VPS to keep the site close to home. I use a local domain registrar for my domains.
Deployment is a simple npm run build then rsync directly to the VPS.
To participate in the web, I've implemented a bunch of IndieWeb features, Webmentions, h-cards, h-entries and of course provide a number of Atom/RSS/JSON feeds which are syndicated to Mastodon through EchoFeed to meet people where they are.
My Bookmarks are backed by the 32-Bit Cafe's instance of Linkding and pulled into my website at build time and shared via Atom/RSS/JSON and EchoFeed.
I run an instance of Forgejo on my homeserver and commit the project there multiple times a day.
I don't think so. If anything I would have tried to preserve everything rather than ditching things over the years. I've managed to recover a lot of the old stuff through old CD-Roms where I'd burnt old versions of the website or from the Wayback Machine.
I would have definitely tried to keep in contact with a lot of the old crew from IRC. We drifted apart before it was easy to keep in contact with each other. I do regret losing those early relationships.
I'm really happy with how I've managed to salvage a lot of the old stuff and merge it into what the website is today. It really is a labour of love.
All in NZD. The domain is $39/year and my VPS is $82/year. All the other infrastructure on my home network is sunk cost over the years and I'm not sure how I'd put a $ value against that.
I haven't made money from my website since 2001 along with the original internet advertising bubble burst. I did have a go with ads and affiliate marketing with the barbeque blog, but that left a sour taste in my mouth. I'm a fan of services like ko-fi and the like but haven't looked into setting it up for myself - not sure if anyone would be interested in supporting me.
I throw money at the 32-Bit Cafe's ko-fi and contribute to infrastructure costs there as well as my time to help moderate and run the forums and will throw other bloggers tips here and there through their ko-fis, and will buy sticker packs wherever I see them being sold in the wider hobby web community.
When I need some new graphics for the website I'm always on the look out for a commission and will happily pay for talented graphic designers services.
I support a few independent journalists through their newsletters that I enjoy reading and support a local independent news/media website to help keep the lights on there as I enjoy their local content. A great way to keep up with what's going on in the country and the world without the doom-and-gloom.
What's my position on people monetising personal blogs? Go for it as long as it's not intrusive or full of dark patterns. Keep it personal and creative. I love the sticker packs or graphic commissions.
So many to mention!
More at my blogroll and links pages.
Who do I think you should be interviewing next? Hit up Chris Burnell if you have time before wrapping the project up :)
If you're into making websites, or you want to start you should most definitely come and check out the 32-Bit Cafe - our small community of the web where we welcome hobby web developers of all skill levels and help each other out building our websites. We have monthly web weaving workshops, discussion forums, and other fantastic services offered free for the community and join in on the discussion at our forums.
Plugging my own stuff, check out my record collection, and my ever growing list of bookmarks
And for all the readers out there, keep building the web you want to be part of. There's so much great stuff going on out here. Laterz 🤙
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2026-05-29 00:10:00
The other day that stupid thing called the Enhanced Games took place. As you might have guessed by the name, this is basically the Olympics on steroids, quite literally. The event itself is not even worth commenting on. I remember hearing about this concept ages ago and forgot about it, and only skimmed through a few headlines the day after the event. But reading about it got me thinking about what I’d love to see if we were to organise an Olympics spin-off.
There are two concepts I’d be genuinely excited to see, and they go in opposite directions. The first concept is to let tech and engineers go wild. A lot of modern sports are infused with technology of all kinds: from running shoes materials, to laser stitched swimsuits, to tracks that are incredibly bouncy, the list goes on and on and on. I remember, almost a decade ago, Nike trying to break the 2 hours barrier for the marathon, and thought it was an interesting experiment. I’d love to see what kind of barriers we can break by letting the best athletes and the best minds join forces, but without doing silly things, like strapping rockets to someone’s feet.
The other idea is the exact opposite. Remove all tech. Like all of it. No shoes, no fancy materials, no special equipment, no stadiums, nothing. We go back to ancient times, and we see how much just human bodies alone can achieve, with as little external help as possible. I’d very much enjoy seeing both of those events.
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2026-05-26 16:05:00
The stars are finally aligned again, and I’m back on the road for chapter 3 of this 10-part saga. Clear sky, not too warm, I have someone who can come pick me up and drive me back to my car, the calendar is empty, so we’re going for it.
Contrary to the previous two segments of this walk, this one’s quite lean on the churches department—we’ll only see 3 of them—but it’s by far the most challenging one from a physical perspective. That is, if you’re a sane person and you do these walks the way they’re intended to be walked. There’s an upcoming one that’ll likely be more challenging, but we’ll get there eventually.
For now, in front of us, we have about 16 kilometers to walk and roughly 1600 meters of elevation to gain. So we better get going. Breakfast is in—coffee and bread with Nutella + peanut butter if you’re wondering—and after a short drive, we’re back at the same parking spot where we ended our walk a few weeks back. Flip flops are off, hiking shoes are on, sprayed some SPF50+ on my face and head, and we’re ready to walk.
I say we, but it’s just me. Well, me and you reading this. I walked this one solo, but it is quite fun to do these hikes while keeping in mind that I’ll have to write this newsletter. I’m very much enjoying it.
We cross the road, walk through another parking lot, and we immediately see sings that tell us that we’re on the correct track. Quite a few trails run through here, apparently, I counted at least 4 different ones. But we’re here to follow the yellow and white marks (for the most part), so over the bridge we go and across the fields.
We’re not even 5 minutes in, and already there’s a steep stone stair in front of us. We have 1600 meters to climb after all, we better start sooner rather than later.
The initial part of the trail was a bit overgrown, and I was worried it was going to continue like that for quite some time because this is not a trail that sees a lot of traffic but, thankfully, that wasn’t the case.
I was also surprised by how varied the trail is at the beginning. We’re not even 15 minutes in, and we have already walked through fields, up stone stairs, and now we’re on a stone “bridge”.
And shortly after that, here we are climbing another stone stair, but this time built as part of the dry stone wall. Big fan of these walls, they’re so cool.
The forest itself is also quite nice here. The problem we have at the moment is that as soon as the warm season hits, the vegetation explodes, and sometimes the trails become an absolute mess.
15 minutes into the walk and we have now connected with a proper road, and we’re no longer on a trail. There are a lot of these roads around here. They’re service roads for people who have properties, but they’re closed to general traffic. Still, it’s quite rare to see cars on these and you usually only see mountain bikes. Actually, you usually see nobody on these roads.
We’re now almost at the first exciting part of this journey. The yellow and white marks take us right, but that’s the normal path. We’re going left because we have one of those pesky variants to take care of and, as you know, I don’t want to walk the same road twice which means I made some changes to the original route. The problem is, I am not 100% certain the trail I saw on the map exists. It’s there on the map, sure, but a lot of times I saw lines on maps that were not there in reality.
Thankfully for us, the trail is there—and it is steep—and we can continue forward since the first church is not far from here.
We have already gained enough elevation to see things from above, and the view is lovely.
And just like that, we’re at the site of the church of San Leonardo Abate (12/44) likely built around 1540.
The church is similar to many of the others we saw in previous walks, but the interesting aspect of this one is that it has the old bell visible on the outside porch. Apparently the was a bell tower that got demolished, and I guess they decided to put the bell on display.
I tried to take a picture of the inside, but it was too sunny. And in case you’re wondering, the church still has a bell outside.
This church is the one that’s part of the variant, so we’re now standing at the end of that part of the trail. Which means we need to walk back to the main path, so off we go in that direction. The weather is still absolutely gorgeous.
Out of the woods, across some fields, through a tiny, tiny village, and we’re now back on asphalt for a little bit, heading towards the next church, which is just right around the corner.
But first, no, not a Mary, we get our first Jesus out in the wild. There’s gonna be a few more, I think we’ll see more Jesuses and Marys this time around. I should probably start counting these.
1 hour and 15 minutes in, and we have reached the church of San Zenone (13/44). Which, I’ll be honest with you, is everything but small. Consecrated in 1493, it’s probably the most luxurious one of the bunch I’ve seen so far.
And it has a nice view.
If you’re team Mary, it’s your time to be happy because look what we have here, just outside the church. This also doubles as a memorial for the fallen during both world wars.
We’re only 20% into this walk, and we have already seen 2 of the 3 churches we’ll visit today and the next one is waiting for us roughly 3kms ahead. So we leave civilization behind us, we climb up through the forest, and we emerge on another of those service roads.
I decided to try something different this time around since I was alone, and I recorded a couple of minutes of the walk. It’s unlisted on YouTube; hopefully, you don’t get bombarded by ads. The video is embedded below, or you can watch it on YouTube. Part of me was tempted to title it “You’ll not believe what happened on this trail”.
On our way up, we stumble on this interesting-looking tree. I have no idea what could have caused this. If you happen to know, send me an email. I’d love to learn more about this.
Also on our way up, in the middle of nowhere, stuck inside a retaining wall, another Jesus.
Finally out of the woods and back into civilisation for a little bit. We’re almost halfway through our walk, and I was planning to take a quick break after 2 hours, but the remaining church was not too far, so we keep going.
Like my dog, they’re also not massive fans of the hot weather.
We’re less than 200 meters from the final church, where I was planning to take a quick break, but look how lovely this spot is! There’s a bench—yes, there is a bench hidden in the tall grass—two big trees that provide some much-needed shade, and a swing! We’ve found our resting spot.
And since we’re stopping here, I'll use this opportunity to let my shirt dry a little bit.
This place is so relaxing, I contemplated taking a nap, but we still have 8kms to walk and some 800 or so meters of elevation to gain, so the nap will have to wait. Shirt is back on, backpack is back on, we’re walking again, ready to visit the third and final church of the day, the church of San Lorenzo Martire
(14/44)
We’re now done with the churches, and we can set our sights on the top of Mount Matajur, our next target. The official trail would not take us up there and walk around it but, come on, if we get that close to the summit, we might as well go up to the top. And so into the forest we go again.
I’m not sure who’s getting a point here between team Jesus and team Mary. I’ll let you decide.
I never walked on this side of the mountain. I walked this general area many, many times, but never walked here, and I’m loving it. I also found this interesting construction. It’s currently used as a shed, but I wonder if it was used for something else in the past. It does look quite old.
Time to record another short video, I think one day I should attempt to make a video of a full hike recorded in 60 seconds chunks all stitched together. Could be fun, I might do it the next time around.
We’ll be out of the forest soon, but first we need to walk through a lot of flowers. There are so many colours out here at the moment, between the flowers and the butterflies. What a lovely time of the year this is.
We have emerged, we’re now fully under the sun, and it is hot. I’m also starting to feel the fatigue a little bit. But we’re powering on because we’re almost there.
We also have a great view on a ridge I’m dying to walk, but can’t figure out the logistic of the trip. It’s a 30+ kms walk from one end to the other, I can’t take the dog with me, and I also can’t leave him alone at home that long. So this is a walk that will have to wait for a better time. But damn if it is tempting.
The summit is in sight, we’re almost there. That’s not the end of the walk, just the highest point, but once there, walking the final part is gonna be super easy since it’s all downhill.
And here we are, at the top of Mount Matajur, quite literally on the border between Italy and Slovenia. I hiked this mountain more times than I can remember, at all times of the day, during all the seasons and with all sorts of weather. I walked it with snow, with rain, with winds at 100kmh, at night, at sunset, at sunrise, you name it.
And on the other side, we have a view of lovely Slovenia. Way too many people up here today though, but that was expected. This is a very easy hike, and plenty of people come up here over the weekend.
We’re not gonna spend much time up here, but I might come back another time and take you for a hike with me from a different route. That could be fun. Today’s hike is gonna end down there, at the parking lot next to Rifugio Pelizzo.
Down the mountain we go, which feels so nice after having walked uphill for the entire hike. I could go on another 6 hours, but there’s no need to do that because we only have 1km left to walk. And just like that, we’re at the parking lot. I actually walked down some more to a secondary parking spot because there were too many people yelling and screaming at the main one. And the next chunk of this walk passes through here anyway, so next time we’ll start from this same spot.
And there you have it, we have walked from Pulfero sitting at 185 meters above sea level, up to the top of mount Matajur at 1643 meters and visited 3 churches on our way up. This was fun, and less tiring than I was expecting.
The data recorded by my watch during the walk is available if you’re interested in that type of stuff, and I have dumped all my photos on the shared Drive folder.
The only thing left to do now is eat a proper post-hike snack. See you next time!
You love the outdoors and RSS. You're one of the special ones.
2026-05-22 19:00:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Piri, whose blog can be found at pketh.org.
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Hey, I'm Piri. I'm a software designer, engineer, and artist of sorts. I build Kinopio, and have been blogging about the craft of making software for 12+ years (:O).
I went to school in Toronto for biology and urban planning. There I learned that I liked illustration a lot more than writing boring reports and papers.
After school, I got a job at a startup as an illustrator, that turned into product design, when also turned into writing code so I could build the ideas in my head.
I can't remember a time when I didn't have some kind of blog. In university, I met a lot of new friends around the world by doing more angst-y cringe-y livejournal-y style writing.
I started designing pketh.org while on a flight to SF, paid for by Yahoo, for a job interview at Flickr (times sure have changed).
If you’re curious about the green design, I was inspired by the 1956 Jaguar D-Type, which I still think has such a unique prototype race car shape.
My posts are usually long essays that take about a week or two to write and produce, so I try and make them timeless.
When I have an idea for a post, I'll make a Kinopio space for it and collect thoughts, images, and URLs in it for a while. If after weeks or months it’s still on my mind, I'll start connecting and organizing everything into a rough outline.
From there I'll start pasting things in and typing it up in either IA Writer or TextEdit. When the draft is done, I usually have someone proof-read it and use that feedback to make final edits. Then the final HTML formatting bits are done in my code editor of choice, SublimeText.
Writing is like a muscle that atrophies when you don't use it. Mine's out of shape so the process is quite painful. When I finally git push a new post out to the world, I just want to lie down and never get up again. Probably related, but I end up throwing away 1/2 to 2/3 of what I write in a blog post.
If I had the time to write more often I suspect it'd get easier. I think I could get pretty good at it.
I prefer different places and tools depending on where I'm at in the process. I collect notes, inspiration, and connect related ideas wherever I am, usually on my phone.
I like doing the early writing stage in a coffee shop or in bed. Anywhere that doesn't make me feel like I’m doing “Real Work™” yet.
When I get really into it, I like to type on a desk with a good keyboard (I'm a big HHKB fan), on a screen big enough for me to keep my context windows (dictionary.app, Kinopio spaces, related web pages) next to my writing window.
My blog uses Jekyll and is published on Github Pages. The domain stuff is done through Hover. It's quite basic.
I might use something newer and nicer than Jekyll, but it would probably be compiled from markdown files the same way.
The current design is a bit of a Ship of Theseus that I've been slowly and gently updating it over years, so it's kind of grown on me.
I think the domain name is $20~/yr and I think that's it.
I'm split on blogs with paid content:
If writing is your job, then monetizing somehow totally makes sense. Quality independent writing and journalism is really important and should be compensated (I like Craig Mod's approach).
But for basically everyone else, blogging is a thing they do on the side for fun, and I think it sucks when people feel pressured to turn everything they do into a passive-income side-hustle potential-business-empire.
Skimming the depths of my RSS feeds, I realized that I’ve subscribed to literally 1000s of blogs. But sadly most have withered away over the ages.
Funkaoshi has been around for even longer than I've been writing – I consider the author my Toronto blogging senpai.
I really enjoy Alexotos' in depth mechanical keyboard reviews.
It's really cool and encouraging to see newer people blogging the same way we did. Lilly Ashton’s blog is worth reading If you're looking for something more personal and cozy.
Since 2018, I've been building Kinopio, a spatial note-taking tool to collect and connect your thoughts, ideas, and plans. You can use it to make sense of your thorniest problems and grow your coolest new ideas into plans. I hope you enjoy it.
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