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...
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...
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 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 ...
The Victoria and Albert Museum published a YouTube video highlighting an art project inspired by the question “What would your dream museum look like?” The video — featuring ideas ranging from a museum of soil to a museum of kitchen tables — is well worth a watch.
This got m...
When did I feel the change from the countryside to the town? This question came to mind while I was walking earlier this evening. While walking, I noticed that there was a point at which I felt I was coming back from the countryside into town, but I didn’t know when that mome...
I want to write something! This thought has come to mind a lot lately. I have the energy to go and start writing. But before I do, I ask myself: what do I want to write? Inspiration is hard to find, although I recently realised that the voice saying that I want to write somet...
Should I go for a walk? There is always that moment of hesitation. I could stay in, do chores, watch television, and relax. Or I could go outside and walk, maybe even explore. I put on my shoes and headed out without a particular path in mind. I think I was a bit excited to g...
Zachary and I are exchanging blog post titles with each other (inspired by kami). I chose the title “What making this by hand means to me” for Zachary; he chose the topic “The way I think about a song” for me. Thank you Zachary for the excellent topic choice.
Is there a lyri...
At Homebrew Website Club yesterday evening, I had an idea: what if there was a piano that, when you pressed a key, it typed a HTML opening tag? While this may be somewhat impractical for authoring HTML documents, on reflection I think this idea gets at a deeper interest: how we author HTML documents. This made me think: how do people write HTML? What tools are used?
Tantek demo’ed the text expansion feature in macOS that lets you type letters and expand them into larger sequences. This could be used, for example, to turn
One feature I am working on is being able to follow Mastodon feeds via ActivityPub in Artemis 1. I am working on this because there are a few low-volume accounts whose content I would like to see in my reader.
In doing so, I have been asking myself the question: how do I wan...
This week my edition of the good internet magazine arrived, a fantastic web-focused print publication. I am delighted to hold stories of the web in my hands; this web we weave is real. The edition has been sitting on my coffee table since it arrived, enticing me with stories ...
Looking around in thought, I notice one of the trees outside is swaying from the wind. It has been a bit cooler in the latter half of the week — most welcome after the warm weather of late. There are a few raindrops on the window from when the rain was falling earlier, but ar...
Jo and I are doing a poetry exchange collaboration. We have each selected a poem for each other that we have never read, about which we will share our impressions. Below are my impressions from reading the poem Jo selected for me to read and write about You can read Jo’s entr...
When I started visiting art galleries, I would take pictures of the placards of pieces of work I liked. I would take pictures of the art, too; just enough so that I could map the placard to the painting. I wanted to document the art I really liked; to be able to go back and r...
My wrists have been a bit tense lately so I have decided to try to use my desk more. I had grown comfortable sitting in my armchair using my computer but, if I am to be using my computer several hours per day, perhaps I need a more ergonomic setup.
This week I have changed t...
When I am out and about, I like to take notes when something makes me wonder, smile, or otherwise makes me think.
Here are a few notes I have taken over the last few weeks.
“How did you find out about us?”; “the internet,” I say. The clerk responds, playfully, “sometimes it...
Artemis, the calm web reader I maintain, has a few new features. Below is a summary.
You can now use break mode, holiday mode, and night mode to pause your feed. Catch-up mode lets you review posts published in a specified number of days grouped by author. You can show up to...
I refer to Artemis as a “calm web reader”. I have designed the software to avoid common triggers that cause people to periodically check a piece of software. There are no notifications. All post titles are on one page; there are no folders. There is a “read” state, but this s...
I have watched Tomorrowland several times. In the movie, it is revealed that a society of geniuses made another world: a place where they could go to invent and explore and wonder without distraction. But the other world – Tomorrowland – invented something they shouldn’t have...
I saw Monet’s Ice Floes for the first time in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It stood out among all of the Impressionist paintings in the room, in large part because of its brightness but relative lack of colour. The painting depicts ice on the river Seine, one of Monet’s ma...
Last weekend I visited The Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, an art collection that showcases mainly Impressionist and Medieval art, with some other genres too. The gallery was unlike any other I have visited. The outside of the building was modern: constructed with grey lim...
At Homebrew Website Club last night we got onto the topic of chaos and websites. I asked What is the most chaotic page on your website? To my surprise, everyone had a slightly different answer: from pages with an “earthquake mode” to a web page whose background colour changes...
When I design web pages, I usually start with an idea or concept I want to explore. Here are a few examples of things I have wanted to play with:
A two-column layout that uses black, white, and grey A site that only uses two colours A web page that uses text with unusual spa...
When I woke up this morning, I thought that I wanted to try something new. Instead of my usual routine of reading, I spent some time trying on different outfits, seeing which one felt like the best for the day. I had washed and dried my hair well last night so this felt like ...
The default experience for opening an RSS or Atom file in Chrome and Firefox is for the browser to show raw XML. Sometimes, feed files download when you open the link instead of showing XML. In both cases, the user experience is less than ideal. A raw feed file is unintuitive...
I love having long hair. But having long hair means you need to dry long hair. Without any plans this evening, I decided I would wash my hair and follow the routine I learned earlier this year. It does take more time, but when you have an evening without any plans what better...
I was trying to find my way. I was thinking my mind was made. goes the refrain in Big Red Machine, Fleet Foxes, and Anäis Mitchell’s Phoenix, a song that I have been listening to a lot this week. Listening to the song makes me both want to sing along with the same passion as ...
