Glenn Fleishman, Six Colors: ElevationLab has released an AirTag product I find appalling, and I strongly urge they immediately withdraw it from sale and recall all inventory. The AirTag Silencer is a simple device: remove the back panel and battery from an AirTag, position the Silencer’s highly engineered pin over the speaker, tap the pin with a hammer, and the AirTag’s speaker is destroyed. This prevents it from emitting an alert in three circumstances, only one of which is triggered by an…

A cartoon coded in CSS from comiCSS.

This blog has moved from WordPress.com to self-hosting. If you were following it via WordPress, you should use an RSS reader pointed at nolanlawson.com/feed instead. WordPress has served me faithfully for 15 years, but I think it’s time to move on. A few things have nudged me in that direction: The recent drama surrounding WordPress has left a bad taste in my mouth and eroded my confidence that it’s a good long-term bet. The WordPress interface keeps nudging me away from the old-school…

Today marks a year since my little sister, Lisa, took her own life. She was 34. It was an overdose, but we don't know if it was an accident or suicide. We’ll never get an answer, yet I lean toward believing it was by choice. As grim as it sounds, picturing her with some control over the end brings me a small measure of peace. I still think about her every day, and I still get upset regularly. Especially when I've been to visit my nephew and I see the sadness in his eyes. At first I was angry at…

Only a few weeks ago I was singing the praises of vertical tabs and specifically threw praise at Firefox's implementation, when coupled with Tab Groups (for combining tabs into a collection that can be moved together, folded-away and restored later) and Multi-Account Containers (which allows tabs to have isolated browsing contexts, which is great for privacy and also helps a lot with logging into multiple accounts simultaneously). At the time, my tabs looked a bit like this: But this week…

I have been noticing a couple of disturbing trends this year outside of the AI/LLM bubble. Has anyone else noticed them? First, domain registrars seem to be raising domain name prices like never before. Every couple of months, I get an email from Porkbun or Cloudflare saying that the registry controlling a domain's TLD is raising prices on such-and-such a date. I can't remember the last time I saw domain name prices decrease. They only seem to go up. That is why I try to renew domains for more…

I’m a Wikipedia editor, and have been since 2004. It’s fun! I don’t do it often enough. My niche is jazz and transit articles, though I spend as much time fixing templates, formatting, categories, and page formatting. Recently I’ve been getting email and DMs from a few people asking if I can help them or their clients “fix” Wikipedia articles. These invariably involve scrubbing references to contentious topics, actions, and/or positions. It’s telling how nobody ever pings me asking for…

Dear podcasts and apps, Stop telling me your subscription only cost one cup of coffee per month. Because my daily cup of coffee cost me about SGD 0.25 (about USD 0.20) per cup. And your subscription is much more expensive than that. Thank you. Sincerely, Not a picky coffee drinker.

[Birds are so weird, and it’s great.] Apparently, Brazil is full of very loud birds, and UMass biologist Jeff Podos has been studying them. The white bellbird is one of a trio of very loud birds, and it’s currently considered the “World’s Loudest” by no less an authority than Guinness World Records. Here’s how the bird is described. …sounds like a smoke detector that needs a new battery and attracts mates by screaming in their faces… Gosh, that’s sexy.Link:…

My relationship with Mastodon has been somewhat tumultuous over the years, until I eventually stepped down from Fosstodon around 18 months ago. I have to say, it was the right decision. I don't miss running Fosstodon one bit. But since then, I've found myself less and less engaged in the Fediverse. Mainly because there's so much outrage over there. It's so tiring. The majority of my timeline is fun, but the outraged minority have ruined for me. To the point where I don't want to be there, and…

There's something wonderfully comforting about a good sausage casserole - the kind that fills the kitchen with cozy aromas and brings everyone to the table with a smile. This recipe is one of those simple, homestyle dishes that feels just like a warm hug.Tender meaty sausages, a rich savoury gravy, and familiar flavours come together in a way that's simple and deeply satisfying. It's easy to make, uses everyday ingredients, and delivers the kind of hearty, feel-good meal we all crave when the…

It's Inktober again which means I'm drawing one thing a day, in ink, from the official[1] prompt list. I'm tagging my posts with #Inktober and #Inktober2026 — these tag pages are flagged to render the images in a gallery instead of the usual notes pages. My first drawing is up as of this morning. As much as I love Jeff the dinosaur from last year[2] it's too easy to fall back on "Jeff does/interacts with whatever the prompt is" so this year will be mostly Jeff-free. Last year my drawings were…

Hacker News (aka HN) is a link aggregator where “hackers”1 gather to discuss technology, politics, and anything which “good hackers would find interesting”. HN is a means by which its host, prominent startup incubator Y Combinator, projects soft power, promotes startups it funds, and feeds people with ideas into its incubation program. Hacker News is one of the most popular forums for discussing technology online today – perhaps the biggest.HN also has a pronounced political bias, which is…

Why this photo? Because the accordionist pictured above, who could easily be a stunt double for my father-in-law, is none other than Krist Novoselic, the former bassist for Nirvana, performing two years ago. Here he is in 2023 with Geddy Lee (I would love to hang out and jam with Geddy — and hey, Krist too!): Another pic of Krist: By the way, it pleases me to no end that a member of Nirvana has embraced the accordion. I’m glad to be in good company. I haven’t seen a photo of him in several…

28 Sep 2026 Tangled earphones were a feature, not a bug. My parents gifted me a Sony MP3 player in 10th standard, in boarding school. A bright red Walkman. Actually I got it because my elder brother had been demanding one for a while. So we both got one at the same time. But everyone from my generation will tell you the same thing about that era. We hated the earphones. Not the music. The wires. They had a superhuman ability to tangle. Throw them in your bag, tangled. Pocket, tangled. Leave…

Pheasant shooting beings Got up at 9.20. A rotten day. Rained the whole day. John brought my wages. Not fit to go out all day. Did some reading and sorted out some books.

This morning, I killed my Gumroad stores. I hadn’t been watching Gumroad. I kept them around to support VAT, and a handful of you used them. This morning I learned that gum road has gone fully AI. I can’t trust them with my intellectual property. Their support is also managed by AI, so I can’t trust them with money. This is disappointing, but mostly it’s a reminder that I need to keep a better eye on my retailers. European folks, I’m considering other retailers that will support VAT.…

I might have forgiven the shitstorm that was Apple’s Tahoe macOS release. I never upgraded my laptop from Sequoia after seeing the accessibility disaster that was Liquid Glass. I was able to survive iOS 26 by enabling ‘Reduce Motion’ and ‘Increase Contrast’ in the system settings. I searched for something to change the offensive design so I could use my phone normally without distraction. These modes emphatically help my brain, and I can’t really explain why. It’s like seeing the difference…

Tech companies and their executives have, broadly, moved to align themselves with investors and adopted a posture of, often, disdain or outright hostility towards their users and employees. If tech companies don't value you, why provide value to them? If they back political positions hostile to your interests, why not return that hostility? I'm not arguing for boycotts, I know that people are bound to different platforms for different, compelling reasons. What I am arguing for is that, given…

This blog is an expression of the things I love—I love community, religion, science, good web technologies, and history, just to name a few topics off the top of my head. Of course, I also love writing. Focusing on what I love and what brings me joy is how I've been able to sustain my publishing cadence over the past year without it ever becoming a slog, or burning me out. I'm incredibly lucky and privileged to be able to truly do what I love, but I've also cultivated the wisdom to stay firm on…

This is my first time hosting the IndieWeb Fiction Carnival, and I am also hosting the IndieWeb Blog Carnival. It was an impulse, inspired by the itch for creative writing, while noticing no one had claimed the October spot. So why not? I noticed participation in the Fiction Carnival is less intense than in the Blog Carnival, so I hope to be able to manage both. Here we go! sunflower in the sky, why do you wish to fly? is earth not enough, the sun worth the fright? Prompt: Sunflowers in the Sky…

I think it should be clear to actual readers of this site that I do not want any games sent to me that use generative AI, including code, but since it keeps happening: Please stop sending this crap to me. I think it’s morally wrong to use these products, it’s an obscene waste of energy, they’re built by stealing the work of others, and all of these companies have rancid ethics. I don’t care if you just used it for code. It fucking sucks and I hope your next game will be better. Thank you.

In June 2008 Apple announced Mac OS X Snow Leopard, proudly boasting that it would have "no new features". Instead of piling on new things, Snow Leopard aimed to build on the success of its predecessor, Leopard, opting to focus on under-the-hood performance and stability improvements throughout the system. 18 years later, Apple is taking a similar approach with macOS 27. Golden Gate aims to fix the missteps of last year's Tahoe, promising an expansive set of improvements and "a more responsive…

I appear to have misplaced my mojo. I’ve not lost it completely. I mean I know roughly what it looks like, and it can’t be far cos I had it up until recently. I just can’t be bothered looking for it. I know I know, it’ll be the last place I left it. Thing is, it isn’t. I checked. I looked back a few weeks in my journal and there it is, right where I expected it to be. Except now, it isn’t. I can’t think of why it’s disappeared — I’d make a rubbish detective — and don’t think there is anything…

Cue dramatic opening music, sweeping camera shots, a host appears… I don’t watch much “live” TV. The Great British Bake Off if the exception. Becca has said she is going to watch the upcoming Celebrity Traitors (largely for the ‘water cooler’ chat at her work). I will not be watching. Don’t get me wrong I like the idea behind the show, and there will be some people I’ve actually heard of as well —when is a celebrity, not a celebrity?— it’s just the format of these shows I don’t enjoy. Now, I…

If your life were a movie, what would its theme song be? I use the word melancholy fairly often when describing my moods. I don’t see it as a negative thing at all, it’s just how I’ve always been. I’m not overly pessimistic, but definitely not the most optimistic person. The moment I saw this prompt, this is the song that popped into my head. I know it was used at the beginning of the weirdly wonderful movie Vanilla Sky, but surely there was more to my subconscious thinking? Indeed there was. I…

As a kid playing RPGs, I learned a lot of new words — some invented for a particular game’s fictional setting but others drawn from the real world. In a sense, the seeds for this blog were planted during the process of finding out if a given word existed outside the realm of video games. If it did, I always wanted to share — like, “Look, mom, a non-educational video game taught me something!” Indeed, this post began years ago with a trip to the dictionary that ultimately led me to Paracelsus,…

Worthy Read is an ongoing series here at the blog where I link out to a piece I think is worth your valuable time. Katie Baker / The Ringer: The internet lasts forever, the internet never forgets. And yet it is also a place in which I feel confronted with an almost unbearable volume of daily reminders of its decay: broken links, abandoned blogs, apps gone by, deleted tweets (miss you always, ah-well-nevertheless!), too-cutesy 404 messages, vanished Vines, videos whose copyright holders have…

According to the American Kennel Club's website, "the official term for dog shows is conformation — as in, the act of conforming or producing conformity"1. Already this reads like something that Jonathan Swift would write to satirize eugenics. "To conform" is the language of early-2010's young-adult dystopia, of a poster viewed through the They Live glasses. Nevertheless, the paragraph gets up, dusts itself off, attempts to justify its thesis: The official term for dog shows is conformation —…

The nice thing about keeping a blog is that I can say at precisely 9:51am, Wednesday 5th February 2025, I discovered that macOS 15.3 had enabled a feature that was phoning home every 15 minutes with personal data. And that I said “no” and turned it off.At the time Apple were generous enough to provide a setting to disable this feature.Although they hid the second part deeper, because why should saying “no” be easy?Last week I succumbed to Apple’s harassment and upgraded macOS 15 to 27. I only…