✍️ New post: Best Free Synthesizer Plugins in 2025
Not your usual web design or development-related post. But that's what personal websites are for, right? 😉🎶🎹
https://matthiasott.com/notes/best-free-synthesizer-vst-plugins-in-2025
Feeds from people participating at the IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf, May 2025.
Tumblr-ing
I now have a website on Tumblr.
When I write, I usually have a direction in mind: a point I want to make. Today, however, I find that I instead have the feeling of discovery without yet having the exact words to describe what I want to say. Perhaps if I write a few words I w...
It sparkles on my machine. 😁🪄✨
🎧 All We Love We Leave Behind – Converge
More Converge, more betterer! Certainly one of my favourite discoveries in recent years. While I enjoy everyone here, it’s again Ben Koller’s drumming and Nate Newton’s bass playing that fascinate me most. Just listen to that groovy drum rhythm, together with the rather calm bass in “All we love we leave behind”, or this insane drum fill in “Veins and Veils” (again, with a great bass riff). Putting a ride symbol in there like this makes me absolutely addicted, and makes me happy for days.
CC @flogehring 😉
It’s alive! 🧟♂️🎉😍 (kinda)
[photo] Edinburgh
https://jamesg.blog/assets/images/2025/07/edi.jpeg ALTIn the foreground there is an old street lamp. In the middle ground, there are Gothic buildings in the city of Edinburgh with several turrets and towers, including a University of Edinburgh building. In the background, a tall church spire peeks through the dense fog.
The link router pattern
There are several websites that are devoted to helping you find the right link for a given task. song.link lets you create a link with an album cover, title, artist, and buttons to stream a given song or album on all of the major music streaming services. They have a companio...
Communicating the indie web
As a technical writer, I ask myself a lot of questions as I prepare material. Who is the audience for the document I am writing? What can I reasonably assume they already know? Given that, what background do I need to include? What do I need to explain? What words can I use t...
Reading
I would like to read a book today! I said to myself with enthusiasm this morning. I used to read every Saturday morning, but as I started visiting more museums I stopped reading as much. I had the same feeling that I felt last week when I was inspired to write: I really want ...
Futures for the web
Xandra asked a terrific question on Mastodon:
what does the indie web need the most right now? if that’s kinda hard to answer, to phrase it in another way: if you could snap your fingers and add one of these to the #indieweb, which do you think would have the biggest positiv...
It's a Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not day over here … 🎶🥁🎸
I can’t wait to bring this thing to life! 😁✨
Any ideas for what else I should add? (I already know this will get out of hand quickly … 😂)
Walking
I want to make the most of the sunshine, I thought to myself as I contemplated going on a second walk. I went for a walk earlier today to get groceries. All walks bring my mind space, but meandering on a favourite path feels more conducive to letting my mind wander. I venture...
Mashups
I have had the question “what is the blog equivalent of a mashup?” in the back of my head for a while. Joe’s most recent blog post, “Return to Mashups”, further has me thinking about this question. What does it mean for a blog post – or an entire blog – to be a mashup? My thi...
Brainstorming a tool to follow new album releases with Wikipedia
I feel a bit overwhelmed when looking at the home pages of music applications like Apple Music. There are so many visuals to look at, playlists to view – curated by theme, by artist, by mood – and recommendations of songs I have not yet heard. I have seen that Apple Music sho...
I’m writing again… it’s been a while.
My favourite sentence of the post so far:
“And naturally, you also want to avoid FART.” ☺️
🎬 Natural Born Killers
Greatly enjoyed this one. The two are just so sweet. So, I loved Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis here. Tommy Lee Jones was great, too. Greatly reminded me of Wild At Heart. Story and proposition is great two. Reminded me partly of Nightcrawler. And it is just overall funny and weird with wild camera work, which reminded me of Climax. But I would’ve enjoyed one more action scene like the one at the diner at the beginning.
🎬 L.A. Confidential
I liked this overall. It’s a wild chase with ever more intrigues and entanglements coming to light. I especially liked Guy Pearce’s character and performance. But I couldn’t fully enjoy this on a first watch, as this was so fast paced and has this rather complex plot (watching in to me non-native English didn’t quite help, either), that I had the constant feeling of having missed something. Luckily they actually explain more and more towards the end, and I could more and more shake that feeling. Still, maybe a candidate for a second watch.
Summer rain
I woke up to the sound of the summer rains; of water falling on the gutters, of the collective sound of raindrops falling on the leaves of trees. Listening closely, the phrase that comes to mind to describe the sound is “white noise,” except this does not capture the essence ...