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The Onion: Historians Confirm Lewis And Clark Set Out On Expedition To Justify Purchase Of Expensive Camping Equipment:

You can imagine how, if you had just blown the equivalent of $80,000 in today’s money on a keelboat you didn’t need, you too might feel stupid not taking it out on the river.

🤣

This special edition of Tigana looks beautiful. I can’t justify the price, but I would like to get a hardcover version one day, to go with my old paperback. It’s a favorite I haven’t read in forever.

I’ve been pulled in different directions lately and have a lot to catch up. But I did write some code today. Also working on something that uses ID.me, which I’ll hopefully announce tomorrow if they approve my OAuth access. Argh, gatekeepers!

Designing a values-centered life from first principles.

I listened to an Evan Osnos podcast interview with Katie Drummond. Osnos is a reporter at the New Yorker, Drummond is the top editor at Wired.

Summary: AI is not just hype — it’s a transformative breakthrough on the scale of past revolutions like the web and personal computing. But journalism risks missing the story by filtering it only through billionaires or old frameworks. What’s needed is realism, openness, and listening to a wider range of voices.

PS: Sorry for the abbreviated show notes. Technical difficulties prevented me from iterating over it last night.

I grew up in the 20th Century. Because of that, I suspect my first experience of the word “totem” was probably in a piece of fictional media (television, probably) where the word “totem pole” was used. That usage was likely not respectful to the Native Americans depicted in the fiction. see Reel Injun That doesn’t...

Kevin Kelly writes: "When a customer of yours complains, always apologize first and ask, 'What can we do to resolve this?' even if it is not your fault. Acting as if the customer is right is a small tax to pay to grow a business." Amen. Google sent an email saying my Google ...

Maybe it’s been too long since I’ve seen Downton Abbey, but I like The Gilded Age even more. Great balance between the different characters' stories and also the train business, which I love.

Tuesday afternoon session in Belfast

Last year: "There could be a developer community writing apps that all join up in the middle in WordPress's database. Pretty powerful idea!"

But what about Substack and Ghost? A lot of people do their writing there too? What about those people. Here's the cool part for all people who write on the web. The API we use in WordLand to hook up to WordPress is open and documented. They don't break their APIs in WordPressLand. At least so far. You could say that API is a standard. And I bet it would be a lot easier for Ghost, for example, to support a limited subset of that API than it has been to get ActivityPub support implemented. Because the WordPress API is what I would call "really simple," and that's the thing I value most about a good API.

Now here's the real reason I need WordLand and if you write for WordPress sites, I think you'll want it too. It's because WordPress is like the Microsoft Word of web writing. If you ask someone how they do their site, in 2025, it's probably going to be WordPress. So if someone invites you to write a guest post on their blog, chances are pretty good I can write it in WordLand, and it'll be archived in my collection of writing, and easy for me to find, because that's what WordLand does for writers. So I was able to create the new post on the WordCamp site in less than a minute, and it was completely painless. And that's the point. Here's the screen shot:

I needed a "featured image" for my WordCamp post, so I gave ChatGPT a simple assignment. "Imagine a place called WordLand." Last year this was a miracle, now it's so-what, but I still think it's a freaking miracle.

Lots of embarrassing typos in a post yesterday on why I need WordLand. I did something unusual, I fixed the post this morning, and cleared up some of the ideas. It was an important post and equally important to get it right. I also cross-posted it on the WordCamp Canada site.

I’d purchased this in 2024 as a late Christmas present for myself, but it took several weeks to be delivered due to our neighborhood being closed off by the National Guard for the Eaton Fire. It finally arrived on January 23 in true “barn” condition. The carriage took a hit and is off about 1/2″ … Continue reading

Back on March 7, 2025, I picked up my second Royal KMG for the pittance of $21. The first was in pica, but this one has my preferred elite/12 pitch size. Today I pulled it out of the office closet where it’s been waiting patiently since the Eaton Fire for some restoration attention. I acquired … Continue reading

Listened to a segment on today's Brian Lehrer podcast about how to keep the good feelings from a vacation when you get back home. Here's my idea. Before you leave make a list of the things you like about being on vacation. Take it home, put it somewhere you can find it when you're feeling down and want that feeling back. Pick one of the things on the list and do it. Your subconscious will tune into it as an act of self-love and give you some of the body chemistry that you felt when you were hanging out at the beach or hiking the Applachian Trail. A similar idea in a Bruce Sterling talk in 2009.

I’ll start with this quote from Mike Rockwell’s blog: I’ve been a happy Linode customer for years, but they experienced an outage Sunday morning that took my Cloudron server offline, impacting my Mastodon and Pixelfed instances. As of this writing they’re still offline and ...

Monday afternoon session in Belfast