FeedCity

What MOOC completion rates and the edtech Matthew effect reveal about who online learning actually serves, and who it leaves behind.

My weekly blog post. Links this week include slime mold macrophotography, a font based on gerrymandering and the ins and outs (mostly outs, to be honest) of poop. I'm sad about the loss of internet history with Lycos letting Angelfire and Tripod die. I saved a little on my own but so much is just gone. Link Lagniappe is going strong! Plus, as usual, I listened to, read and watched things.

Writing web applications in 2026 I've been creating web pages for a long time. I started with Microsoft Frontpage, graduated to plain HTML (think table layouts, font color, limited css) and then when PHP v3 dropped I started building web applications. These applications were...

When you are a CLI warrior but you need to work with CSS

https://github.com/sharkdp/pastel

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เมื่อมนุษย์ ops ต้องมาจับ css แต่ชีวิตเกาะกับ terminal ก็ต้องใช้สิ่งนี้ มันดีมาก เลือกสีมาแล้วปรับค่าต่อได้เลย pipe ไปเรื่อยๆ https://github.com/sharkdp/pastel

In the beginning I was complaining about Apple Watch's battery life (it requires a daily charging session), so a friend recommended Garmin to me. And I'm hooked. My Garmin model lasts two weeks on a single charge, which is great because a nightly charging regimen can use on...

Homebridge 2.0 Launch We’re launching Homebridge 2.0 on May the 4th and yes, we absolutely planned it that way. Beyond improvements to the core HAP-NodeJS code and the removal of long deprecated code, the headline addition in 2.0 is the initial groundwork for Matter...

Random thoughts on the passing week. After 2 weeks of hiatus I was finally in the atelier again to work on my sculpture. I think the bust is coming to an end. I feel the resistance to continue working on it. One part of me says “I’m bored of this, I want to work on somethin...

I love all the new discourse about WordPress. It was so quiet until this week, now I'm getting a much better view of the landscape. I started developing seriously around WordPress almost three years ago. I've been developing this kind of software since the late 80s if you c...

Sometimes I put test posts on my blog. This is one of those times. Still diggin, amazingly -- in 2026. What makes this post different is that 1. It's a singular item, ie there is no title, and just one paragraph. It's a collection of sentences not paragraphs. 2. It has a right margin image. I have to test this specific case. It has to go on a certain length so that the image that appears in the right margin doesn't leak over to the next item, and the image should be small so it doesn't require so much text to keep it out of the next post. And now I believe I have entered enough text.

Natasha "Perfect for Easter, EGGO is a two piece construction toy"

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Tech Stuff

PopTask As a concept I find this super interesting — a task list that lives in the menu bar and understands human inputs like "evry tue thu 7 30 n sat mrng". Supports

Excellent podcast discussion with John Stewart and Heather Cox Richardson. I desperately wanted to get in the conversation. I think they missed something important and came soooo close to saying it. Trump isn't only a TV star, he's a blogger. Comes naturally to him. Why wasn...

This must be due to the unique way the Beeb is funded. I stopped subscribing to all BBC feeds because of this very reason, many, many moons ago. I love RSS and more so given my accessibility needs so to see and be reminded of how it is abused this way is frustrating Du...

Nice idea, I don’t think I have the energy for this year. Reminder set for 2027. April 9 is CSS Naked Day! Join us for the yearly festivities on April 9 of going nude on the Web! The idea behind CSS Naked Day is to promote web standards. Plain and simple. This incl...

Oddly the BBC match report suggested McCabe picked up a yellow card for the hair pull, She did not. It was not even a free kick. They implied a “should it have been a card” as if it was debatable. Whilst previously they reported about a hair pull in the men’s game and explai...

Some experimental Bitcoin sites I made back in 2012-13

Previously, I'd written about how I was trying to connect my home network and VPSs. Turns out life is too short to worry about things like that. At th...

This problem with Freeplane’s canvas performance was annoying to figure out! First, I had some really simple mind maps that were way too jerky to pan around in. Then, every method I tried in the “Preferences” menu, like toggling Anti-Aliasing (AA) or changing rendering hi...

WordPress could have an active developer community creating writing tools for WordPress users. I also want WordPress to form the foundation of a new social network, one that supports all the writing features of the web. With really nice user interfaces for people to choose from. That's a new ecosystem. It may form around ChatGPT and Claude etc. Or it could start with WordPress. I think I can get this bootstrapped, but I need people to work with. That's the summary of what I'm about at this point in 2026.

Feature request for WordPress. If an item doesn't have a title, you can do better than (no title) in the Posts list. Grab the first N chars of the body, or add a tool tip with the same text. I write a lot of "singular" posts, ie posts without titles. This is what I see on the Posts page.

Does EmDash have a feed reader built in??