If you’ve been paying attention to the behavior of similar companies over the last decade, I think the answer is about as self-evident as an answer could ever be. Unfortunately, we continue to not learn the particular lesson about trusting these companies with our best interests, but I applaud We Will Not Be Divided for the effort.

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I was feeling wiped out. Exhausted. Not really in the mood to go out on a Friday night, even to a show that I had purchased tickets for months prior and had been very much looking forward to.

But I did go — and after a fairly quick but delicious dinner nearby at Brenda's French Soul Food, Emily and I darted over to the Great American Music Hall to see Kathleen Edwards (and her top-notch band) light up the room — and I was glad I went.

A little live music performed by real flesh-and-blood humans is good for the soul. And her songs in particular seem to reaffirm my own faith in humanity — a thing, like a garden, that needs constant attention and care to sustain, especially in times like these.

I’ve probably said it before, but I’ll say it again: Kathleen Edwards writes some of the most genuine, smart, heartfelt, and even cheeky songs. It’s not country, it’s not folk, and it’s not really rock in a conventional sense but I know they’re something special and unique because they hit me right in the feels. And if you hear the story behind the title track to her latest album, I think you’ll understand.

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I didn’t come into 2026 thinking that I’d make an app. In fact, I hadn’t considered such a thing in any serious way before, and yet, I managed to do it.

While I also don’t really consider this something with widespread appeal, it came into being as an attempt to automate one small thing for myself in the personal data I capture. Then, after showing it to Luke, he suggested a couple changes that could make it more widely useful — and now, 70+ builds later, it’s available on the App Store for iOS 18 and 26 devices.

The App Store review process turned out to be somewhat arduous or at least persnickety. I was missing a couple of flags in the app’s plist file related to features initially so the app was initially rejected. An easy fix later and I resubmitted — only to have it rejected again though for somewhat unclear reasons. After providing additional background info and feature clarifications along with a video showing the app’s features in use, it was approved.

During that time, I also continued building quality-of-life features and other improvements like data Import (export to JSON was already built in), Shortcuts and Home Screen Quick Actions alongside some smaller visual adjustments.

This latest build is available via Test Flight, and I plan on submitting it for review this week before moving on to new features¹ that I’ve lined up in the queue.

I guess this means I’m an engineer now too? 😂

Footnotes

1. Including: the ability to add names, categories, and brief notes to saved locations. I have some early ideas for simplifying the map and log views but I think that’ll be come afterwards to avoid trying to do too much at once when I already have some refactoring to do. ↩

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The solution to yesterday’s near-disastrous Riso breakdown (meltdown?): a black Sharpie.

For context — aka how I did I end up in this situation? Each Risograph ink drum has a strip of black light-aborbing material on the rear side of the master clamp. The Riso bounces light off this black strip to detect whether a master (stencil) is present on a drum or not. What I’ve since learned is that aftermarket parts use a material that’s not quite as good as official parts from Riso¹.

In my case, this meant that during the set up of up a newly clean drum, the machine got confused and thought there was a master on the drum when in fact there was not. This in turn led to a mess of ink on the pressure rollers inside the machine as well as on the internal transfer belts — all of which I needed to thoroughly clean.

The fix — or to at least improve the light-absorption of the aftermarket strips is to draw over them using a simple black Sharpie. Dumb, but sufficiently effective, at least until I can attempt to get official replacement parts — or source a better material.

Footnotes

1. If you’re thinking gee Scott, why didn’t you just use official Riso parts? I would say that’s a fair question, but unfortunately official parts are tough to come by if you’re not an authorized retailer or service tech. And so for most of us, it’s after-market parts all the way down.

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Earlier this week, I finally finished fully disassembling, cleaning, and rebuilding the six ink drums for the new to me (sort of¹) Risograph ME9450 duplicator that joined my little print lab recently.

Of course that turned out to just be the first step in getting the machine operational again as I’m now scouring the insides of the machine to resolve a sensor error with the master making unit. This means there’s something — probably something very small — stuck somewhere inside the machine — and that if I want to finish getting the machine operational again, I need to find it.

Because it’s not all that easy to see inside the machine I started taking photos to check the places that are hard to reach or see — and think I might have spotted the culprit. I hope. It would sure be nice to spend more time printing than mucking about in the innards of the machine²…

Footnotes

1. There’s a story there — for another time. ↩
2. There’s some light cleaning needed inside the machine too, but that’s not urgent.

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If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.

Ursula K. LeGuin

On one hand, we’re living through some kind of technology renaissance in which we’ve created technologies that aren’t unlike magic to many, yet, at the same time, the tragedy is both in how misused most of this technology has become — and how we continue to just shrug our shoulders at the obvious and easily predictable harms that it’s unleashed.

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Art & Design

• Make it Yourself is a lovely free digital book that collections 1000 useful DIY projects that pretty much anyone can build on their own. This is important — and nothing beats the feeling of finishing projects like this.
• It’s not clear what life is really for at all, if it isn’t for doing more of whatever makes you feel most alive. The secret to being happy in 2026 is currently… not an easy thing, but a worthwhile pursuit.
• Even Adobe is getting in on the maybe there’s something to this analog thing game. Some of us figured this out a long time ago and know it’s also not going anywhere anytime soon, probably ever.
• I’m still shocked and disappointed to hear about the nearly 120-year-old CCA shuttering. The loss of arts institutions in the Bay Area continues and the area will be much poorer for it. I can confirm: SF's Tech Billionaires Don't Care About Your Art School.
• Lithub’s recent collection of the Best Book Covers of the Last Decade is full of greats, and some that are new to me. A lot of Peter Mendelsund covers, not surprisingly.
• Monodraw is a drawing and diagraming app for macOS entirely built around ASCII artwork. This is highly relevant to my interests.
• Mike Monteiro has a new book out called How to Die (and Other Stories). It’s sure to not pull any punches.

Type of Note

• Times New Resistance impersonates Times New Roman to autocorrec the autocrats. Simply perfect.
• Modulator feels like something of an experimental return-to-form for Zuzzana Licko in how it builds off two of her earlier fonts — Modula Round and LoRes Monospace.
• I was sold on Cast Type’s revival of Aosta from the initial hero image alone which puts its architectural monolinear forms to good use. I will admit I’m not crazy about is the ball terminal on the lowercase ‘y’ glyph.
• Also from Cast Type, Flume almost resembles licorice with its tube-like all-caps forms and unusual outward and inward terminals. It’s different, and that’s increasingly hard to come by whether it’s useful or not.
• Kilotype’s Lofi Forest is highly unusual in the world of pixel fonts. I mean kind of. It takes stochastic texture to a new place in the world of fonts to great effect.
• Molfetta is an Italian-inspired sans-serif family that mixes angles, arches and sturdy strokes. It’s perfect for menus, packaging, and editorial.
• The exaggerated curves of Feline are ripe with vintage ’70s flair or maybe a touch of psychedelia across it’s six weights and 2 variable axes.

Humanities

• Just as the microscope and telescope extended our vision into spatial realms once too minuscule or too immense for us to see, geology provides a lens through which we can witness time in a way that transcends the limits of our human experiences… Time is marching forward, yet by all measures, our inability to assess and engage in present realities is becoming a critical flaw.
• Now what I think is that kindness has so much to do with your ability to be in a moment without a whole lot of monkey mind going on. Based on this interview, I really need to read George Saunders Vigil.
• I sort of fell off keeping tabs on the latest with the James Webb Space Telescope, but this somewhat new image of a portion of the Helix Nebula is outstanding.
• Anil Dash is dead on the money on the state of tech in the Valley. They've Pickled Each Other's Brains.
• Resist and Unsubscribe. Just leaving this here. No reason.

Music & Film

• Broken Social Scene are back! And they brought back some old friends and some new ones (including Hannah Georgas who I’m excited to see in March when she opens for Matt Berninger).
• Kathleen Edwards performs FLA from her latest album, Billionaire in FLA, or more specifically, Jack Kerouac House. Looking forward to seeing her in a couple weeks when her band passes through San Francisco.
• For All Mankind is coming back for a fifth season. They probably should have stopped after season 3 but I’ll be happy to be proven wrong.
• A solid lineup for the forthcoming Taskmaster Season 21 featuring Amy Gledhill, Armando Iannucci, Joanna Page, Joel Dommett — and Kumail Nanjiani.

I started off the year thinking I might not continue with these Through Line posts, and given how busy I’ve found myself with other activities (an iOS app, a new Riso and hours of drum maintenance to name two things other than generally trying to be less online), I’d pretty much given them up for dead myself. But maybe not just yet. They are getting harder to cobble together week after week and so I think once I hit 300, that’s going to be it. What comes after that remains to be seen. Maybe something new. I think I’ll be content if the next one comes in around two weeks instead of six.

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If you ever wondered what the inside of a Risograph ink drum looks like — this gives you a good idea. It’s a lot less fun when the insides are splattered in goopy rice bran-based ink, I can tell you that. And now after servicing eight drums over the last month or so, I’ve gotten really good and disassembling, cleaning, and reassembling them¹ — something I do not care to do again for a long time.

I’m still debating the name for the new machine that’s entered the studio but since it’s a two-drum model, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is the leading contender at the moment.

Footnotes

1. Technically, I have six drums waiting for reassembly. Five that are ready to go once the needed parts arrive in a couple days, and one that’s also waiting on a replacement gear that should arrive within a couple weeks. ↩

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For a few weeks now I’ve been tinkering with an iOS app I’m calling Where Now? which came from the idea of capturing ambient geo-location data to augment data I was already manually recording on my own.

This has proven to be an interesting experiment since I’m not an engineer in any conventional sense despite years of exposure to writing code in a number of different languages (PHP, Javascript, HTML, CSS, Python, Shell Scripts, etc.) and digging through open-source code as a means to learn. Before this, I’ve never written a lick of Swift code or really used Xcode other than to stumble my way through building open-source apps.

To my surprise, it didn’t take long to get an initial implementation of what I had in mind working and running on my own device. And from there it’s been fun to design the app iteratively in code. Swift UI is a blessing because it makes this fairly easy — allowing me to add new features and other improvements sometimes in just a matter of minutes. The fact that there are parts of it that feel a bit like applying CSS styles helps.

The app is stable. There are no known crashes and it compiles cleanly for iOS 18 and 26. I’m not done yet adding features, but version 1 is open for testing via Test Flight with a limited number of open spots. I may extend this further if there’s enough interest and as upcoming main features land¹.

Thoughts, feedback, and suggestions are all welcome and encouraged as this inches towards release².

Footnotes

1. Currently the app requires the use of a remote API endpoint for core functionality. It’s pretty easy to setup and has been working very well in my environment for a few weeks, but the real end goal is to also add private, on-device logging, optional remote sync, and data export to JSON format. I have two of the three things working in a newer build but have more work to do to configuring syncing along with some other general UX improvements. ↩
2. It should go without saying that there is no telemetry data being sent back and that privacy, data sovereignty and interoperability are prime directives for the app. ↩

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It wasn’t an stress-free experience ripping apart the two Riso ink drums I recently finished servicing. The first went very smoothly while the other — the one which needed a more thorough cleaning, went well — until it didn’t.

During final reassembly (for the third time) after resolving an issue with a bent sensor wire that was incorrectly completing a circuit within the drum, the very last screw lost its head. You don’t realize how soft metals are until the right combination of stress and friction come into play. Luckily I was able to methodically drill out the broken screw and repair things well enough to then reprogrammed to use Risofederal Blue — and get it back in action.

I owe a sincere debt of gratitude to traveling Riso technician extraordinaire, Robert Baxter, who taught me a few new tricks and really helped save the day.

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