I’ve been using Photoshop since the mid-90s. First at school, with Photoshop 3, then through work. I bought my first boxed copy of CS2 in 2005, then upgraded to CS5 in 2010. I subscribed to Photoshop Creative Cloud on day one. Today, I uninstalled it. I hope I never have to use Adobe software ever again. Photoshop used to be a joy to use. Whenever I got access to an upgraded version, I’d always have fun exploring the new features. I got really good at using it. When Adobe launched the Creative…
If you've tried installing Windows 11 recently, you'll know Microsoft really wants you to sign in with a Microsoft account. Unfortunately, the old method to bypass adding a Microsoft account stopped working. However, there's another trick to skip that and set up a local account instead. When you reach the "Let's sign in" screen (or any network/account screen during setup), press Shift + F10. This opens a Command Prompt window. Type the following and press Enter: start ms-cxh:localonly The…
In a highly uncharacteristic move, I recently purchased a brand new device: an Xteink X4 e-reader. The X4 is a minimalist e-reader that is the size of an old smartphone, but much thinner and lighter. Speaking of smartphones, a portable e-reader is great alternative to absentmindedly unlocking your smartphone and vanishing alarmingly large chunks of time. I feel much better about finishing reading a book than I do about finishing reading a list of misleading headlines. Here's what the X4 looks…
Just saw this over on Bubbles and had to reply because I so understand how this blogger feels! Gavin writes about his Photoshop frustrations in An Infuriating Goodbye to Photoshop. I had also been using Photoshop for years. I admit that way back around the mid-90s, when it was totally unaffordable for skint bloggers like me, I used a pirated version. I didn’t feel bad about this as I would never have paid for it anyway. Let’s just say that while I don’t pirate software anymore, Adobe is one of…
Why is this an “app”? This summer, the kids’ performing arts school are singing and dancing in a show at Disneyland. We’re all very excited, but my excitement, at least, was muted a little when I was told to install the “Travelbound” app in order to get access to the itinerary, travel arrangements, and accommodation details. Fuck that noise. This should have been a webpage. Why do you want me to install a(nother) shitty app just to tell me something that could have been a (smaller, faster, more…
I came across this article by Panayotis, for whom “AI-generated blog post images are not cool any more”. It’s not the first article on that topic I have read1, and I feel particularly targeted, since I use AI-generated cover images for most of my articles, this one included. I’m totally fine with that. I think it’s a usage of AI which is fun and even creative. I think it’s more original and personal than looking for and using an image I would not have created myself. For that matter, I…
What happens when you mention to your D&D group, who mostly have ADHD, that your tumble dryer is broken? Free labour! About six months ago, my tumble dryer started making a small grinding sound, as if something had been dislodged. Past Phill decided that this was very much a Future Phill problem. Two weeks ago Future Phill had to deal with Past Phill’s laziness when the dryer began vibrating itself off the shelf it was on. Our tumble dryer (a DV70F5E0HGW/EU) was manufactured in 2014 (in Korea),…
Anonymous Group Chats Group chats cannot be named, they are only listed by the members in the group chat listed alphabetically and comma separated. This makes differentiating group chats that share members from each other very difficult. I assume this is to funnel users into using channels, but there are many short term conversations that don't necessarily fit into channels well, I feel that group chats are inevitable. If they wanted to funnel people I would go one step further and not allow…
Ever since I’ve had a website, I’ve been curious to know who is visiting it and what they do while they’re there. Am I posting into an empty space, or is somebody actually reading? I don’t need (or desire) to write about the development and ethics of the analytics industry - we all know what Google is doing with our data. Instead I want to write about collecting data with respect for our readers. Because it is possible. The biggest attraction to me is knowing what parts of my website people are…
Last week, I found this question on a dev.to post: “Is it just me, or has anyone noticed that articles on dev.to don’t get as many reads/views as they used to before?” Yes! On dev.to, Medium, and on the Internet overall. There’s no point in writing how-to tutorials anymore, unless you’re starting your coding or writing journey with TIL posts. For step-by-step guidance on coding tasks, there’s a magical text-area that seems to understands you and spits out answers fast. Less people are landing…
Link: White House Directed Patel to Oversee Investigation Involving Times Reporting, by Devlin Barrett, Glenn Thrush, and Maggie Haberman at the New York TimesThe White House personally directed FBI Director Kash Patel to issue subpoenas to journalists reporting on the President’s new Qatari-gifted Air Force One.“The White House’s deep involvement in the case came after officials said that President Trump was enraged about the coverage of the Qatari-donated plane, which The Times reported…
They have too much data.#Contents Footnotes Every now and then I come across something that reminds me just how much data Meta has on us. A friend pointed me to this option in Meta Accounts Center called “Activity from other businesses”, which shows “activity sent from other businesses or organizations to show you relevant content.” Their main help page doesn’t even work in my region :/ I thought I’d already turned off all the data-farming settings, but apparently not. To my surprise, I found…
We often forget how inexpensive it is (often free, in fact) it is to completely make someone’s day/week/year or, even, give them a memory they will cherish for life.
Markdown - 2 lines # Contact forms Is any channel worse for communication than a contact form? Maybe a postcard when you don't know the address. Minimal HTML - 10 lines <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>Contact forms</title> </head> <body> <h1>Contact forms</h1> <p>Is any channel worse for communication than a contact form? Maybe a postcard when you don't know the address.</p> </body> </html> Real world HTML - 42 lines + image + CSS file <!DOCTYPE html> <html lang="en"> <head> <meta…
Gareth's been in a mood all week. Turns out it started with a hosting bill. Not his own, mind. He doesn't have a website. Gareth thinks websites are for people who've run out of pub to shout in. But he heard about someone switching platforms, and it set him off on one of his tangents, the kind that starts with "you know what really gets me" and ends forty minutes later with him accusing a cookie banner of moral cowardice. Apparently someone had moved from a platform that wanted to squeeze money…
I am the proud owner of a lightly used bread machine.It’s a white appliance about the size of a microwave, and it sits on my kitchen counter,It cost about a hundred bucks.The ingredients for a basic loaf are flour, water, yeast, and salt. A bag of flour costs two or three dollars and yields maybe ten loaves. A jar of yeast lasts for months. Salt costs almost nothing. The machine does almost everything: it kneads, it proofs, it bakes. I dump the ingredients in, press a button, and three hours…
Juliette wrote last week about Deadpan photography. I was intrigued because it’s a term I had seen start appearing all over the place lately and I wasn’t sure what it was. So I did a deep dive to understand for myself (unpublished on Substack as it’s not an opinion piece). But in turn it got me thinking about what Deadpan was doing and how. Andreas Gursky, 99 Cent (1999), image found on Flikr Look at Andreas Gursky’s 99 Cent. Let your eye travel along those shelves. Notice the grid, the…
I'm just so bored of talking about AI. It's like listening to vapers tell me how delicious their flavoured poison is. Did you ever meet someone at university who'd just tried drugs for the first time? Listening to a stoner ramble on about their mystic crystal revelations is amusing for the first five minutes, but quickly gets tiresome. Wow! You got your little computer friend to automate calling your mum? Great job, mate! Can we talk about something interesting now? Just as bad are the people…
I'm awake at a weird hour because of piloerection. I assure you piloerection is an actual term and a condition of the human body even though the Bear Blog editor insists on underlining it as a misspelling. It means the erection or bristling of hairs due to the involuntary contraction of small muscles at the base of hair follicles that occurs as a reflexive response of the sympathetic nervous system especially to cold, shock, or fright. Basically I'm too aware of my body hair despite not having…
Man, I've been circling on this idea for some weeks now and couldn't quite figure out the best way to open, but I think this is a great one: About a month ago, Flathub announced a ban on slopcoded applications. Evangelos “GeopJr” Paterakis, developer of a number of popular Linux applications and ton of other things, did some research into just how many applications tagged with “AI slop”, a tag Flathub reviewers used to keep track of slopcoded applications submitted to Flathub, actually survived…
I was introduced to fruitsticker.de through Mike Egan a very long time ago - February of 2025, I think - and it's been an open tab in my browser since then for reasons not even I can fully explain. This website catalogs fruit sticker scans from all over the world. All these stickers seem to belong to a guy called Angelo. It has a sticker exchange community and can be browsed in 31 different languages. Any time you want, day or night, you can just go on here and see any one of 65883 unique fruit…
You share your blog post on X, Facebook, Bluesky, etc and you know it will be presented so much better if it has an image. Sometimes it's easy. You blog about something that has a visual element and it's easy to use a diagram, a product photo, a landscape —you would have done it anyway. But many times, you just want to share a thought or an idea, or some code. In the past, the only way for most of us was to hunt for images under Creative Commons licenses. Writting a post about the history of…
I wrote before about my (mis)adventures in photo backup along with some technical musings about bit rot which can lead to corruption of old files across backups. Ever since I wrote those posts I have been working on a solution custom built for my use case: an Apple Photomator and Apple Photos user who wants an easy way to backup albums into external storage (including cloud backup) while ensuring integrity and with built-in error correction. The outcome of that work is LumiVault, a macOS app…
Previously I opined that Valve was about to win the console generation. I couldn't have possibly predicted that both Microsoft and Sony would just self-sabotage so hard that they're both going to lose. Between Microsoft's decimation of the Xbox division, slaughtering off the IdTech team, and continued increases of Xbox hardware prices; there's nothing to really be excited about with the Xbox. Sure their most recent presentation showed off a bunch of exclusives, but none of them really made me…
This week, GlitchyZorua brought to my attention the Ibiblio Icon Browser, a collection of many thousands of GIF icons curated in the 1990s by Gioacchino La Vecchia. Glitchy’s goal was to archive a copy of all of the icons, which was turning out to be… challenging. A more-90s website you’re unlikely to see today. It looks pretty simple: (a) an index page, leading to (b) 24 sub-index pages, leading to (c) 57 icon directory pages, representing (d) 114 icon collections, containing anywhere up to…
For 94 minutes at least, all the countries in the world (except the US) were rooting for Belgium. And did they deliver. 4-1 to Belgium and US was knocked-out of the Round of 16. Even if Belgium were to lose to Spain in the quarter-finals, they are heroes for showing that even corruption can't overcome quality. I don't have anything against the USMNT itself, but when politicians try to influence sports, sportsmen inevitably become tarnished by politics.
We're living in split realities. There's what modern software is actually capable of, and then there's the gargantuan pile of "AI" hype, fraud, and bullshit our biggest tech companies (and their lazy enablers in the tech press) have shoveled down the public's throat for the better part of the last five years. There's useful automation software that makes it easier to code, draft a new resume, or study vast repositories of scientific knowledge. And then there's a parade of technofascist…
I like Angela Collier’s videos about physics and I was delighted to discover this 18-minute one… …because it’s a great continuation to the thread about the complexity of Microsoft Office I shared recently. Collier talks about why physicists prefer LaTeX to Word. LaTeX is sort of a nerdy HTML that predates HTML. It looks like this… …and given how nerdy HTML already is, you might imagine this is a power-user tool that’s chiefly about power and control. But Collier makes the argument that there…
A ghost bike is a memorial for a cyclist who has been killed in a motor vehicle accident. These bikes can be seen all over the world, painted white and located at, or near the site of the accident. As well as celebrating the life of the cyclist, ghost bikes are intended to raise public awareness of bikes on the road. A ghost bike memorial project was started in St. Louis, Missouri, in October 2003. After observing a motorist strike a bicyclist in a bike lane on Holly Hills Boulevard, Patrick…
For over two centuries, enslaved people across North America risked everything to escape bondage, and slaveholders had a ready tool to try to stop them: the local newspaper. As print publications spread through American towns and cities in the 18th and 19th centuries, enslavers turned to their pages to post detailed notices seeking the capture […]
