Updated October 2, 2024

Fork me on GitHub * Convert this blog to Hugo * Write more blogs about epaper * Finish homeassistant * Plan for a mortgage * Buy Apartment * Build out my own ‘data lake’ of personal stuff along with a home airflow instance _Inspired by aboutideasnow_

Updated November 5, 2024

I’ve been making websites for over twenty-five years, working as a web developer (front-end, back-end, or full-stack) for both companies and charities, small and large, in a variety of programming languages. I’ve written two books, a course, and a video series on topics related to software development and have been writing about web development online for years. My preference and primary expertise these days is concentrated on web languages: CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. My JS experience covers Node, Deno, and the Browser, both with frameworks or without. Projects and code I’ve worked on are being used in production on a number of ecommerce and business sites across the world. I strongly prefer non-framework solutions – not because I can’t but because standard JS is usually the most cost-effective and efficient approach for most web software projects. _You can find me online at Bluesky, Mastodon, this blog, or my newsletter._ Email me to see how I can help you. * * * This site has three main sections: * Essays * Coding Notes * Notes I try to publish the essays on, roughly, a weekly schedule, and they are what I send out to the newsletter. (So, if you’re subscribed to one of this site’s feed, you don’t need to subscribe to the newsletter.) The notes are published more sporadically and I usually only include them as links in the newsletter. If you want to follow everything on this site, I recommend the main feed, but I also offer feeds for each individual section. You can find all the feeds listed on the feeds page.

Updated November 4, 2024

Ben Daubney ----------- Home About me Contact **Last updated:** 04 Nov, 2024 This is a /now page, listing out the stuff that's going on with me at the moment. If you have your own site, you should make one too. What I’m listening to: ---------------------- * **Blur** - 'The Great Escape' · An album I bought on release and know inside out because I was eleven at the time. Nostalgic. * **Ruthven** - 'Rough & Ready' · A late contender for album of the year. Just superb. * **Public Service Broadcasting** - 'The Last Flight' * **Hinds** - 'Viva Hinds' What I’m reading: ----------------- I maintain an archive of the books I read over on The Storygraph. Here's my current selection: * **The Woman In Me** by Britney Spears · Not my usual reading. Very biased and very painfully ghostwritten, but oddly fascinating as a casual fan * **The List** by Yomi Adegoke · Loved it. Highly recommended as a meditation on online hate dressed up as left-wing piety dressed up as an entertaining story * **Private Eye** What I’m watching: ------------------ * **Sunny** * **We Might Regret This** * **Parks and Recreation** * **Bob's Burgers** Other things I’m enjoying: -------------------------- * Having a fancy meal with a good pal. * Loads of prep for house moving in about three weeks' time! * Migrating a whole load of forgotten blog posts over onto this site. A lot going on at the moment. Current status: ---------------

Updated November 5, 2024

This is my now page, where I list my current focus and interests. **Last updated: Tue, November 5, 2024**. * I am working on scaling Typefully: the product, the team, the company. More specifically, we're tackling some long-standing tech debt by unifying our editors' architecture, implementing login with email and other social media, and adding support for more platforms like Bluesky. * I am training at the gym with a PPL split. * I am reading **Slow Productivity** and What's Our Problem?. * I am playing **Factorio** on weekends.

Updated November 4, 2024

A brief overview of my activities and focus of the past few months. You can also read more about the now page concept. Last updated on November 4, 2024. * * * I don’t foresee any significant availability for new client projects in the near future, but don’t let that stop you from saying hello anyway. ### Client work I’m continuing to work with a few clients right now, including a new one starting up this week doing some hardware-connected iPad work. I’d say I’m keeping things at about 1/2 to 2/3 of my working time on things for others. It’s a balance I continue to struggle with, because I’m still trying to squirrel away time for… ### Long-term personal product/project My hardware & software project continues to creep along. I’ve been spending a lot of time on the language side of things, especially with Lisp and Lisp-derived languages (tiny Lisps, Fennel, Janet). On the hardware side, I’ve been prototyping and testing tiny keyboards and battery charging circuits. ### Hands-on projects I revived Catch the Wave for both local science museum and Girl Scout STEM Day events again, as well as put together some nice video overviews of what the project actually is. And I tried something new — an in-person popup museum of some of my retrocomputing collection for Portland Design Month. I had several dozen people out to my house for a number of events and it was very rewarding to let people experience these things hands-on. I had a lot of fun curating hardware & software setups for all of the systems, which covered almost twenty years of computing history.

Updated November 6, 2024

Hello! I'm Marc Littlemore. 👋 I'm an Engineering Manager at n8n. I love building diverse and inclusive software engineering team and love lifting my team up. I really enjoy helping people like you learn to be a better intentional technical leader. I've been around ---------------- Permalink to "I've been around" I'm a veteran (old!) software engineer and started my love for computers when our family got a Commodore Vic-20 back in the early 80s. I spent my teenage years programming BASIC on various home computers and ended up at Manchester University from 1990 to 1993 studying Computer Science. I spent a year writing gas chromatography software to move robot arms but my passion at the time was video games. For 19 years I ended up making many video games on PC, PlayStation 2 and 3, and XBox 360. I worked for lots of famous games companies from the 90s and 2000s such as Ocean, Infogrames, Acclaim, Sony, and EA. In 2013, I decided to leave the world of video games and find a better work/life balance. I became a Principal Software Engineer at the BBC and helped to build their gaming APIs. I quickly learnt a lot about web technologies and cloud infrastructure. In 2015, my team became responsible for building BBC Account - the authentication and authorisation services for every audience member who uses the BBC's services. We enabled personalisation on a huge scale! While building BBC Account I learnt a lot about microservice architecture, Node.js and the npm ecosystem, the React JavaScript library, JavaScript testing, AWS infrastructure, and building scalable, resilient services. There's a quick learning curve when your services have to handle the spike of traffic that the Strictly Come Dancing vote brings you! Although I managed teams back at Sony in the mid-2000s, I properly transitioned from a Principal Engineer role into a Software Engineering Team Lead management role at the BBC. This really changed my thinking about how to build effective software engineering teams. It allowed me to ensure we had a culture of inclusion and psychological safety. There's no such thing as a silly question in my team. Moving to team leadership made me think more about diversity and inclusing and how I can help to enable any software engineer to thrive. I've continued my journey into technical leadership after leaving the BBC with a number of Engineering Manager roles at different companies. I'm now settled as an Engineering Manager at n8n. I almost died ------------- Permalink to "I almost died" Life also throws you curveballs sometimes. In June 2014, I contracted a streptococcal infection which caused sepsis. My body shut down and I suffered multiple organ failure. I almost died. I spent 45 days in intensive care, learning how to breathe, and eat again. I spent another 45 days on a hospital ward learning how to move my arms and walk again. It was tough going. Thankfully, I managed to survive but it's changed the way I look at life. My wife Clare also wrote about the experience for her and our children in more details. You should read her Out Of The Woods Blog where she gives an honest view of the challenges she had. I've always loved music and in the early-80s hip-hop arrived in the UK. My brother and I loved to listen to the Streetsounds Electro compilations. Back in 1988 I realised I was never going to be a rapper so I convinced my parents to help me to buy a set of Technics 1210s and a Radio Shack Realistic DJ mixer. This helped me to learn how to mix 2 records together and how to cut and scratch. Although I continue to love hip-hop, the late 80s acid house movement gained pace and I went with it. I moved to Manchester in 1990 and spent my weekends clubbing at places like The Haçienda, The Boardwalk, The Academy, and The Millionaire's Club listening to the best house DJs of the time. I because a DJ regular on the Manchester house music circuit and DJed at lots of clubs in the city. I was a resident DJ at DNA and 2Kinky for many years. Through my good friend Mark Wyss, I started DJing in Germany under my pseudonym DJ Cruze. I continued to DJ in Germany from 1993 until around 2012 and played at many of Germany's finest club nights. Good times! Although rarely commercially released, I've been making dance music since the late 90s. You can find some of my tunes on my Soundcloud. Outside of work you'll find me helping my beautiful wife Clare Littlemore to persue her writing career. She writes Young Adult dystopian fiction which you can find on her Amazon author page. I help her with anything digital so she can concentrate on writing. I also love playing with my two teenage children and helping them to grow up to be wonderful human beings.

Updated November 5, 2024

I'm \[\[Markus Heurung\]\], a family guy with a loving partner, three great kids and a cuddly and very patient labradoodle. Based in Hammelburg, Germany. Born at 331ppm. This is my happy place on the internet. I guess most things here are only useful for myself, it's my public journal, but I plan to integrate a lot of notes from text files that grew only offline. Not a lot, but it's growing. Feel free to \[\[follow\]\]! Now * * * Ideas * * * Q&A * * * Blogroll * * * My old blog * * * Mastodon * * * OMG.LOL * * * German blog * * * Livestream * * * Notes ----- Recent notes RSS Latest: November 5, 2024 Just upgraded #GotoSocial with a few commands. Stop systemd unit, make a DB copy, unpack new release, adapt symlink, start systemd unit. Easy peasy and the same way I handle my #Forgejo on code.muhh.lol and #Owncast on watch.muhh.lol. KISS. * * * Posts ----- RSS * $ GOTO muhh :lol: October 17, 2024 * Why? May 10, 2024 * I failed May 7, 2024 * how I currently run this site May 2, 2024 * It's Weblog Posting Month! May 1, 2024 * Blogging is a conversation April 9, 2024 * Ha! February 19, 2024

Updated October 22, 2024

← ~ muhh internet happy place ### A list of things I want to do It’s a partner to \[\[about\]\] and \[\[now\]\]. Read more about aboutideasnow.com. There are **a lot** of different projects I want to do, more than I can in a reasonable time. But that’s ok. Last update: 2024-10-22. #### Website * integrate bidirectional link plugin and some others from that repo. * Photos * convert /notes to /journal and setup notes like a wiki. * switch theme to \[\[everforest\]\]. * import bookmarks from omnivore * fetch updates from my status page to get them home * mobile publish workflow, something over ssh should be not too much to build * pull in data from /now and display it here. create an archive from it. * add some more slashpages * improve the feeds * integrate GOTO $muhh, backlink style. #### Homelab * Build split keyboard * Plug new GPU card into \[\[cube\]\] * Setup \[\[homeassistant\]\] * Migrate that one Ubuntu VPS to \[\[NixOS\]\].

Updated November 5, 2024

modernity is stupid: a rant not about politics ---------------------------------------------- November 05, 2024 • 1,754 words Omnivore is a read-later app. You know, one of those things that lets you save interesting articles you encounter throughout the day and the service will go crawl the page and download the content in a nice readable format and zap it to whatever device you wanted to zap it to, so that later when you’re not anxiously toggling between the same seven feed aggregators for fifteen seconds at a time, like maybe you’re waiting in line in the grocery store and you can’t do the NYT mini because they’re on strike and you don’t cross picket lines and god forbid you have a single second of mental silence, you can open the app and begrudgingly educate yourself on something that you alleged wanted to learn about at some point in time. continue reading → leadership ---------- November 11, 2022 • 789 words I’ve been thinking a lot about leadership lately, for no reason at all connected to the news or the state of social media or the way we’ve constructed an economic sytem that allows petulant man-children to set billions of dollars on metaphorical fire because strangers on the internet made fun of him while simultaneously pretending that homelessness is an intractable inevitability that can only be solved by brutalizing the unhoused rather than taking away those billions of dollars from aforementioned megalomaniacs. Sorry, where was I. continue reading → labour of love -------------- October 18, 2022 • 1,533 words The concept of “work” is a Rorschach test, an inkblot that you can project pretty much anything onto. There are definitions that speak of a meaningless Sisyphean grind inside an oppressive and cruel economic system designed to extract the maximum possible short-term value from all its constituent parts. There are also definitions that evoke the sincere joy of putting care and attention toward something worth nurturing, and shepherding its growth through consistent, deliberate effort. Your definition of work probably says more about you than the actual concept itself. continue reading → unoriginal ---------- July 08, 2022 • 438 words Sometimes it feels like there’s no point to writing unless I have a competely original idea. This is an impossibly high bar to clear—there aren’t _no_ original thoughts left, but they are exceedingly rare. Often I’ll discover while researching that the core of my idea showed up in three thinkpieces within the last two weeks alone, or more likely that Ursula Franklin already figured it all out the year I was born. This mainly means that I’m not immune to the zeitgeist and that no one is immune to Ursula Franklin, but in the moment it always feels like my words are derivative and pointless. I don’t really have a good answer for why I prize originality above all else, above craft and emotion and consistency, other than ego. Some small part of me still believes in my weakest moments that words are enough to change things, and I want to be the one to find those words. Of course, that’s not how change actually happens, even with truly revolutionary ideas (and I certainly don’t pretend to have any of those). It’s not like there can be one perfectly constructed essay that will stir hearts and minds and everyone will applaud and think to themselves how cool and smart and pretty the author is before they sally forth to implement her policies. Ideas take careful stewardship and tireless repetition over decades or even centuries to catch on and spur people into action. If I want the things I believe in to flourish, then being one refrain in the chorus matters even if I didn’t compose the song. Dominant western forms of storytelling don’t do a great job of portraying that kind of collective sensemaking. Most of the stories we’re told from a young age feature one person or a small group of people who made the difference, one act of bravery we’re meant to emulate. This narrative bias is a barrier to progressive social change: it’s easy to become demoralized when individual effort doesn’t have the seismic impact it does in our stories, much harder to keep faith in the immense and diffuse work required to organize and sustain a movement in the real world. My preoccupation with originality is part of that same problem. Ultimately, I suspect I care about being original because I want to stand out from the crowd, which is the opposite of the politics I try to practice. I believe that individual snowflakes can add up to an avalanche, but that means I have to be okay with being one speck of crystallized ice amongst billions. At least it’ll still be pretty. permalink • a meta note ----------- July 04, 2022 • 412 words At any given point in my life I’ve wanted to be spending more time writing. This includes the tween years in which I wrote and published fanfiction every afternoon after school, undergrad when I studiously scheduled three blog posts a week despite having very little of substance to say, and that year and a half when I ran a daily newsletter that took over my life. I’m very happy I chose not to pursue writing as a career. I’m very happy with the career that I do have, and I’m very glad that I get to keep writing for no reason other than to write. I have never pitched a publication not because I think my words are in any way precious (I desperately need an editor) but because I didn’t want to worry about anything other than the writing. I can afford not to think about the profit incentives of publishing or the imagined audience of an institution, and so I don’t. Writing as _just_ a hobby, though, means that I’ve never figured out how to carve out a satisfying amount of time for it. It was a thing I did for myself, which means I could always find a reason why it wasn’t as important as something else I needed to do for someone else. And because writing time was scarce, I didn’t want to spend any of it frivolously, working through anything other than Deep Ideas I’ve already been chewing on in my head for months. I like that my thoughts come slowly. I think the writing I produce when I’m using it to figure out what I think is leagues better than the writing I do when I’m broadcasting conclusions. But it does mean that there are lots of subjects I want to explore that I discard because they’re not worth 3,000 words wrung out over 8 months, and while that’s not exactly a loss to the world I do think that prevents me from growing as a writer. Essentially, inside me there are two wolves. One knows that the only way to get better at writing is to write more, and the other doesn’t ever want to publish anything I haven’t obsessively thought through for half a year. The second one has anxiety and should not be listened to, which is to say that I’m going to try and write more short things that may not be fully formed. Please do not yell at the anxious wolf. permalink •

Updated October 28, 2024

##### Last updated on 28-10-2024 This is a public list of ideas that I would like to work on someday. This is a copy of the ideas note I have in my Obsidian vault, where I jot down interesting projects, concepts, and thoughts that I find intriguing and might want to explore in the future. Since it is not practically possible for anyone to work on every idea they have, I thought it would be better to make this note public so that someone else might build it someday. Ideas that I’m currently working on are crossed out and have been moved to my projects page. Against each idea, I’ve added a short description to provide more context. If you are interested in any of the ideas mentioned below and want to work on them or collaborate with me, feel free to contact me. In case any of the ideas already exist, please let me know, and I will cross them out with a backlink to the project. **A Search Engine for Personal Blogs**I’m unable to search for content in personal blogs on google or any other search engine. Kagi small web is there, but it’s not personal blog specific.**A World Travel Lottery**A lottery with the grand prize as a fully-expensed, world travel package to visit n countries across all continents**Cricket Guard Line Projector**If you watch cricket, you can see batsmen often marking guard lines against the stumps by asking the umpire. Why can’t we have a laser projection of the stumps controlled by the umpire with a remote?**A cheap running tracker**There are multiple running trackers that you can attach to shoes, like Stryd , but these are quite expensive. Why is it so hard to make cheaper running trackers?**A platform to read both sides of an argument.**A moderated platform where a dedicated page is present for popular topics, and people can read about both sides of the argument.**Indian News Aggregator with relevance**India is struggling with misinformation and rigged news. The magnitude is quite high, considering the huge population, the demographics, and the rising internet penetration. A platform like News Minimalist that removes clickbait titles and filters relevant news would be useful for India.**Global Fish Database in different languages**Fishnames are tricky if you travel around the world. Within a country itself, fish names would be different. A global database of fishnames in all different languages would be great!**Bookmark for Videos & Podcasts**I wish there was a tool to record a particular timestamp on a video or a podcast so that I can watch it from the saved timestamp when I resume, rather than scrolling and finding the time.**Strava for Writers**Strava is a great tool to track your activities. As a writer, such a tool would be great to see the number of words written every day and also get a sneak peek at others’ writings.**About Me Collection**I love reading the About Me sections of various personal blogs. A curated list of the best about pages would be cool.**Evergreen Hosting** People put a lot of effort into their blogs, and most often, after the person passes away, these blogs go obsolete. How about a service that you can pay for one-time or in installments, ensuring that your blog stays live forever? _Update: I wrote about in detail here . Also, checkout Digital Legacy Trust by Derek Sivers._ Comments -------- ##### Leave a comment below. All comments are moderated and will appear after approval. Your email, if provided, is optional and won't be shared or used to send any spam. If your comment requires a personal response beyond a public reply, I will reach out to you via email. Comments are static, with no notifications or backlinks.

Updated November 6, 2024

This is a "/now" page highlighting stuff I'm into or doing currently. Check out other personal website /about, /ideas, and /now pages on aboutideasnow.com. **Last Updated: 11/6/2024** Social ------ * Created yet another account on the Fediverse. Posting cartoons and procedural art for now. Thinking of maybe having a separate account or accounts for the art in the future. Website ------- * Scrapping my ActivityPub experiment for interime — it's taking too much time away from art creation. Creative -------- * Adapting a rather large Processing sketch, written originally on Windows, to work on Linux and creating new art after a long spell.

Updated October 25, 2024

**Published**: 2 Aug 2024 | **Updated**: 25 Oct 2024 Herein you'll find a considerable list of my ideas: for almost anything. Things I want to create or write, ideas that've caught my interest... Have a browse! My contribution to /ideas, created by Artem Tyurin, and compiled by Peter Hagen and Louis Barclay. See more folks' here. **Table Of Contents** * Artworks * Essays * Fiction * Notes * Pages * Poetry * Road Less Read Artworks -------- * A screenshot garden. * A series inspired by my favorite books. * My portfolio. * My photo gallery. Essays ------ * Albums that mean much to me. * How I built my site. * Life advice I hold onto. * Things I've noticed about countries I've visited. Fiction ------- * Behind-the-scenes during an amateur theatre production. * Falling Behind The Rotating World: A drama about multi-generational blended artistic family headed by a single father set in the near future. * Finish Don't Burn Too Bright. * The highs-and-lows of a young band growing up in the limelight. Notes ----- * A directory of interesting sites. * Experiences I want to have. * My favorite quotes. * My influences. * My music listening stats. * My zine collection. * Places I want to travel. * Proust's questionnaire. * Send Something stats. * Tutorials for making envelopes from magazines, squiggly patterns, bouncy paper chains, and 'cheap wallpaper.' Pages ----- * Hacks: useful things I've picked up for living. * My resume. * My zines. * Podroll. Poetry ------ * A chapbook inspired by lyrics from my favorite songs. * Blackout poetry collection. * Pieces inspired by my favorite films and tv shows. Road Less Read -------------- * A zine-themed directory. * Best practices for making zines. * Blurbs and miniature essays for books I love. * Compile my books read and my notes. * Convert Road Less Read from WordPress to static HTML. * Yearly reading statistics. •--♡--• **Copy & Share**: zacharykai.net/ideas **Statistics** → Word Count: 274 | Reading Time: 1:28 mins