Peter Saint-Andre on pair reading. I’ve been doing a form of this for the last year and a half and have really enjoyed it.

epub-merge, a tool I recently used to merge two EPUBs from Project Gutenberg. Worked great.

Matt Glassman on proportional representation in the House of Representatives. Ooh, I like this idea.

Blain Smith on the bare essentials of development tools. I’m not quite as minimalist as this, but the principles resonate with me. I’ve been working recently on slimming down my Neovim config (I’m planning to post about that sometime soon) and hope to move further in this direction. I also quite liked the posts on software engineering discipline and posture and humanities in the machine.

Sava on living in the terminal. (On one’s computer, that is, not at the airport.) I, too, find the terminal to be soothing and quiet, and using it sparks joy for me.

Ashur Cabrera on asking what you’ve tried, when debugging things. “Eventually I learned to compile this list before asking for help. And, reader, what a difference!”

Frederick Chan on setting up a free locality domain. “In the US, can get a domain name like somename.city.state.us for free.” Had no idea.

Riley Walz’s Empty Screenings, a little web app to show you which AMC theaters around you haven’t sold many tickets, for people who prefer their theaters on the empty side.

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The Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim, published 1922, fiction, 299 pages. I loved it! Delightful, witty, well-wrought, and the voice was a great fit for me. Very much looking forward to reading all the rest of von Arnim’s books. Her Vera was apparently an inspiration for Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, which I still haven’t read but need to.

Truth Has a Power of Its Own: Conversations About A People’s History, by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez, published 2022, history, 155 pages. I would rather know the truth even if it’s ugly, and I have zero interest in whitewashing history to be more palatable, but whew, this book ended up being depressing and deflating, because the actual history is depressing and deflating. Greed continues to wreak havoc throughout the human story. Slavery: bad. Wealth disparity: bad. War: bad. Speaking of which, here are a few war-related passages from the book that resonated with me: “War is terrorism on a very large scale.” “I came to the conclusion that war itself should not be tolerated, not even a so-called Good War, not even a war against an evil enemy. Because war is inevitably the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of innocent people, and I don’t think it can be morally justified.” “We can no longer accept war as a way of solving problems. In fact, you might say that this is the great challenge before the human race in our time: how to solve problems of tyranny, aggression, and injustice without killing huge numbers of people.” Hear, hear.

Richard Nixon: The Life, by John A. Farrell, published 2017, biography, 940 pages. I really liked this and recommend it for those interested in political biographies. It’s readable and seemed reasonably evenhanded, at least as far as I could tell — I went into it not liking Nixon at all but came out with more understanding and compassion, even if I still disagree with much of what Nixon did. (I also don’t think every book needs to be evenhanded; there’s value in reading books from other perspectives.) The Chambers/Hess part was particularly compelling for me and I’m looking forward to reading Sam Tanenhaus’s Whittaker Chambers.

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Also, Lincoln H. Blumell’s article Is Jesus’s Yoke “Easy”? is accompanied by both My Yoke Is Easy and (at the end) I Will Give You Rest IV.

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Matt Glassman on influencing politics (by talking with policymakers). Liked this.

Rob Henderson on how he reads. Also see James Marriott’s similar post. I love these kinds of posts.

L. M. Sacasas on reading as counter-practice. “By counter-practice, I mean a deliberately chosen discipline that can form us in ways that run counter to the default settings of our techno-social milieu.”

Hollie on commonplace books. I’m trying to do more of this when I’m reading. (Normally I just read and don’t take notes.)

Sebastian Pagel’s Termcraft, a 2D sandbox survival game in the terminal. Wow.

Ibrahim Diallo on being comfortable modifying hardware to meet your needs. “If you own a tool, whether it’s a car, a computer, or a line of code, you own the right to change it. The manufacturer designed it for the ‘average’ user, but you are a specific human with specific needs.” I don’t think I’m comfortable filing down the edges of my MacBook (at least in part because I might want to trade it in eventually), but the mentality here is still good to remember.

The No CSS Club. Fun! So much nostalgia. While I don’t think I’m realistically going to join the club, lately I’ve been itching to scale back the amount of CSS on this site, to go as minimal as possible while still being something I’m happy with. We’ll see!

David at Raptitude on how social media is the opposite of social life. “This is because social media doesn’t really allow you to interact with people. People are living beings with beating hearts and live emotions. Social life has always been about engaging in the immediate physical presence of such beings. Social media avoids exactly that part, while allowing you to exchange information and symbols of approval.” Yep. I don’t regret leaving social media behind.

Chris Ferdinandi on the anti-work movement. “But this obsession with hard work as a virtue, as a good and righteous thing to do, the glorification of toil and sweat and labor… that’s a tool the wealthy who don’t work for a living use to oppress those who do.”

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Isaac Kolding on how reading is good for you and how it expands your effective freedom. I also enjoyed the post on inefficient books and very much agree.

BDM on how sometimes books are hard to read. “Being easy to read is not the only virtue a book must possess to be enjoyable. If something is not easy to read, that is not a sign that the reader is stupid. Sometimes it is the knowledge that you will need to return to a text over and over that forms the basis of your enjoyment. You are encountering something that cannot be grasped in a single experience.”

Mat Marquis on the end of responsive images. “I’ve been waiting for fourteen years to write this article. Fourteen years to tell you about one relatively new addition to the way images work on the web. For you, just a handful of characters will mean improvements to the fundamental ergonomics of working with images. For users, it will mean invisible, seamless, and potentially massive improvements to front-end performance, forever stitched into the fabric of the web. For me, it means the time has finally come to confess to my sinister machinations — a confession almost a decade and a half in the making.” A fun read.

Sal on cleaning scratches off ceramic dinnerware. I did not know this was possible.

Justin Parpan on painting loose at first. Also enjoyed the post on thinking about texture.

Marco on putting custom firmware on the Xteink X4. I haven’t gotten 0ne yet but it’s getting more and more tempting. (Mostly because of the size, I think. And the weight — 74 grams! My phone is 171 grams, for comparison.)

Ben introduces Bubbles Briefing, a finite-edition blog aggregator. I’ve been subscribed for the past week or two and have found the form factor to be nice.

JTR on writing emails to other bloggers. I need to do more of this.

Jim Grey on how your blog is like a radio station. “Every time you publish a post, you are programming your station. You are choosing what goes into rotation. Some post types are your familiars, the topics and themes readers already associate with you. Some are deeper cuts, things that matter to you but may not matter to everyone. Some are experiments, signals sent into the dark to see if anyone recognizes them.”

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Desperate Remedies, by Thomas Hardy, published 1871, fiction, 538 pages. Quite liked it. Good prose. The second half turned out to be more of a thriller than I expected. Looking forward to reading the rest of Hardy (for the prose and the characters, not the thrillerness), which I’m planning to do in publication order, as is now often my custom. Also, I didn’t expect to come across a “dang it” in the book. Apparently the phrase is not as modern as I thought.

Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization, by Ed Conway, published 2023, nonfiction, 518 pages. Fascinating book! Sand, salt, oil, iron, copper, and lithium. If that list makes you say “ooh,” this will be a good book for you. Recycled steel is exciting. The fragile bottlenecks scattered throughout our material supply chains, however, are concerning — for example, 70% of the world’s niobium comes from a single mine in Brazil, and there are several similar bottlenecks for other things. (The percentage doesn’t even need to be that large for this to be an issue, as we’re seeing with the Strait of Hormuz.) A couple random facts that boggled my mind a bit: before standardization, there were 994,840 different types of axes (plural of axe, not axis) in the United States. And RAM is over 500 million times cheaper than it was in 1960. Whew. Looking forward to Conway’s new book, Trade World, which as it happens he announced the very day I finished reading this one.

Othello, by William Shakespeare, published 1603, play, 104 pages. Quite liked it, sad though it is. (So yes, further confirmation that I much prefer the tragedies to the comedies.)

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The Two Gentlemen of Verona, by William Shakespeare, published 1594, play, 68 pages. Possibly the first of Shakespeare’s plays. His comedies don’t appeal to me anywhere near as much as his tragedies (have I said this before? I probably have and probably will again), but I’m on a quest to read all of his plays and I’d still say I enjoyed this one.

Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, by Karen Hao, published 2025, history, 426 pages. A morbidly fascinating history of OpenAI from the angle of oh wow, this company is swallowing up resources like one of the colonial empires that wrought so much suffering and destruction. It made me, if such a thing can be believed, want to use AI even less. Also, Sam Altman really, really is not trustworthy. Goodness. While the book is fine (I recommend it), I’m glad to be done with it so I can get back to spending less time thinking about AI and the slimy corporations spray-painting the world with it.

Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson, published 2002, fiction, 114 pages. So. Much. Death. (For a novella, anyway.) I don’t inherently mind bleak books drenched in death, but I don’t think I liked this one, reasonably well written though it was. Not sure why. I’m aware of the film, by the way, but haven’t seen it, so I don’t know how it compares.

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Craig Mod on the MacBook Neo and the iPad. Yes, this. I rarely use my iPad these days but could see myself doing so if iPadOS were a better fit for the device.

David Aerne’s Charcuterie, a cool visual Unicode explorer.

ReadBeanIceCream on serving up text files instead of HTML for websites. While I kind of love this delightfully retro idea, the lack of clickable links does make the UX a bit onerous. If you used a browser that automatically linkified URLs, though, then it would work, I think. But at that point you may as well just use the Gemini protocol instead.

John Gruber on how to format ten-digit phone numbers. Hyphens all the way.

Pinery, a macOS app for making ebooks (EPUB and PDF). I haven’t used it, but it looks like it could be nice.

Benjamin Breen on the handmade beauty of Machine Age data visualizations, with some lovely work from William James’s books among others.

Screen Wake Lock API. Had no idea this existed. At the moment it doesn’t work on iOS, though, which is sad. (I want to use it in Scroll, my ebook reader.) Hopefully someday!

Attic, a command-line tool for backing your iCloud Photos up to S3. I don’t use iCloud Photos because I want to have my own copy of the files, but with this maybe it’s now worth looking into.

The making of iA Notebook (video). Enjoyed this. The notebook itself looks very nice, but oof, that price tag. $79 would get you around fifteen Field Notes notebooks (from the National Parks set, naturally), 720 pages altogether. Even though I know the comparison isn’t fair, still I find I’d rather have the Field Notes.

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The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, by Timothy Egan, published 2006, history, 416 pages. Whew, that was harrowing — all the more so because the tragedy was avoidable, if only they’d known what they were doing. For me, the whole thing was a strong warning against having a careless relationship with the earth, and a reminder that there are better, healthier ways to meet our human needs without plundering and savaging this precious world we live in. Greed continues to ruin everything, as always.

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, by Brian Merchant, published 2023, history, 561 pages. An important book, and one that feels particularly relevant right now, at least to me, as I watch my chosen industry mutating in ways I find reprehensible. I am a Luddite in spirit. Enjoyed the interwoven literary angle — Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Lord Byron — and reading about George IV as prince regent shortly after reading Greville’s memoirs, and about Mary Wollstonecraft shortly after reading Godwin’s biography. I like making things and I’ve found factories interesting from that perspective, but the human cost doesn’t seem worth it to me — the horrendous working conditions, the effects on the workers they replace, etc. There must be a better way. From the book:

But it is much more absurd to pretend there are no possible alternative arrangements—to think that technology, the product of concerted human invention and innovation, can only be introduced to society through reckless disruption, or that it’s unthinkable that advancements in technology might be integrated into our lives democratically and with care. If we are ingenious enough to automate large-scale production, build spacecraft, and invent artificial intelligences, are we not ingenious enough to ensure that advancing technology benefits all, and not just a few?

Stoner, by John Williams, published 1965, fiction, 219 pages. This has nothing to do with drugs, and no, not that John Williams. This is the fictional biography (a form I love) of an English professor in the first half of the twentieth century. Other than the earthy parts, I found it compelling even in its mundanity, though happy it is not. Humanity is messy. In the course of reading it I realized it was making me want to be a compassionate person, one who builds up those whose paths I cross in life. (I don’t remember what it was about the book that spawned those feelings, though.)

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