Inspired by Jedda’s Postroll, here is an incomplete list of blog posts that I’ve read and enjoyed in the last 3 months. This list refreshes daily.
If you find any of these posts interesting, I suggest that you give them a follow!
A theory on why contact forms get more spam than email addresses by
This theory checks out to me and is unfortunately a strong reason why I don’t have comments enabled currently on my own website.
Also, I like getting emails from people. For some reason it feels more intimate to me.
Added: October 9, 2025
Congratluations to the Immich team on their big stable release! I’ve been using them for a year now and love the improvements they’ve been making. Very happy to see so much love and support for this project. I’ve bought their retro CD to commemorate this milestone.
Added: October 3, 2025
Where's Eric? Tracking NY politicians' public schedules by
Where’s Eric? is such a cool project. Holding our leaders accountable is important and part of that is knowing what they’re roughly up to on a daily basis. This website focuses on a few New York politicians as collected by Politico’s New York Playbook. Some politicians like Bill de Blasio and Kathy Hochul take public disclosure seriously, while others like Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo rather not.
Added: October 3, 2025
analyzing subscriptions and budgets by
I like the idea of coming up with a rule of thumb for price per hour of entertainment. However, I find this concept difficult to apply in practice. This is mainly since I personally track my cashflow on a monthly basis. Let’s run through a calculation.
For sake of example, let’s say that I’m willing to spend $50/month on video games. With just this piece of information, I can’t determine a price per hour of video gaming since I haven’t budgeted how much time I want to play video games per month. Though let’s humor the calculation, let’s say that my schedule and interest stays constant and I determined that I want to spend 10 hours/week playing video games.
To determine the price per hour we should take our total budget (b) and divide it by the number of hours we want to spend on that activity per month (f). For my example, this means that I should spend around 50 / (10 * 4) or $1.25 per hour of video gaming.
This process required budgeting both money and time. Another alternative that I don’t like is to look at your cashflow in an hourly perspective by taking your monthly income and dividing it by 672. However, all hours are definitely not the same.
Honestly the point of budgeting is to make sure you don’t spend more than you make in a given month and save on top of that. I find it easier to just set aside a set amount in savings every month and then treat the money left over after fixed costs as disposable income. This may mean that I spend extra money paying for a video game that I don’t play much of, but does that matter if the rest of the monthly budget is in check?
Added: October 2, 2025
Cat Bells by
I need to find a place around where I live that has sheep by a hiking trail.
Added: October 2, 2025
In the economy of user effort, be a bargain, not a scam by
A well crafted essay discussing why we should always put the user first. I love that she includes examples from many different products such as Google Calendar, Airbnb, and more.
Added: October 2, 2025
Notes from the trail 10.01 (Sun Never Sets Edition) by
The sun never sets on an Automattic 5k relay is a fun idea to show how globally distributed the Automattic organization is. Here’s the link to the direct website which shows all the participants.
Added: October 2, 2025
Currently the finalists are out for the 2024 Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year. I haven’t contributed anything to Wikimedia Commons so unfortunately I cannot vote. However, I’m a huge sucker for landscape photos. Especially if it’s a different scene than what I’m used to :)
Added: October 2, 2025
A fun and silly little game on what it feels like to browse the internet nowadays. I’m a human, I swear!
Added: September 28, 2025
I don’t follow the developments of Bitcoin, but generally I find the protocols interesting from an academic perspective. The “Silent Payments” proposal, as summarized in the linked blog post is a great example of this.
The name is a little weird since the transactions are still recorded on the blockchain, but the idea is to minimize address reuse by allowing the recipient to share a technique for generating bitcoin addresses that they control. The sender would then send to one of these addresses. This is called a silent payment because the sender does not notify the recipient, but instead the recipient scans the blockchain for any updates.
For the mathematics behind how it works, check out the full proposal.
Added: September 26, 2025
Silly booby traps in FreeBSD and NetBSD by
It’s a fun (and scary!) idea to setup some honeypot VMs. I wonder if some of these automated bots write scripts in a “easier to ask for forgiveness than permission” (EAFP) style. That is to say, it’ll attempt to run a command like apt and if that fails, it’ll assume that it’s not a debian-based system and try something else.
Having a script like Rubenerd’s silly which aliases to common commands helps throw off that programming style.
Added: September 25, 2025
The Get Your Shit Together Day by
Picking a day every so often to tackle those low priority tasks is a great idea. It reminds me of software projects where you have some issues in the tracker dating multiple years because no one has deemed it “important enough” to work on over another task. But for your life!
Added: September 25, 2025
How FOSS Projects Handle Legal Takedown Requests by
The F-Droid project have recently been sharing blog posts on how to increase an open-source project’s legal resilience. It’s awesome that they are not only transparent in their process, but outline a procedure in which other projects can follow suit.
Added: September 16, 2025
How to Own Expensive Things for Little Money by
In this piece, Jose argues that instead of only looking at the cost of an item, we should consider its resale value as well.
I like how this gets me thinking about potentially selling some of my items instead of keeping it forever. Or as Jose puts it, we’re “renting” our items.
However, I don’t think we should use this to justify being something we can’t afford. The resale value of an item may change.
Added: September 16, 2025
Candle Flame Oscillations as a Clock by
Fun deep dive on the flicker of candles. It’s crazy for me to think that so much effort has gone into making candles flicker less, and how it’s not too difficult to disturb that balance.
Added: September 6, 2025
Charlottetown Boulder Park in the News by
This blog post is a great reminder that even though the Internet is full of knowledge, it is not a reflection of the real world. It’s cool that Peter took the time to document his surroundings and he encourages everyone to do the same.
Added: August 31, 2025
Misc parenting ideas for summer by
I’m not a parent, but this post has a recipe for making giant bubbles that is super cool! If you try it out, make sure that the cotton string you use is thick enough. It needs to absorb enough of the bubble liquid to make the giant bubbles.
Added: August 31, 2025
I’ve always felt weird about status pages shown on major services like Overleaf and Discord. I’m glad James took the time to investigate why they don’t exactly match the reality we face when using these services.
I won’t spoil the findings, so go check it out :)
Added: August 31, 2025
The vulnerability might be in the proof-of-concept by
I’m not a security expert, however, I do have a formal methods background. To me, I would say that a piece of code has a vulnerability if we’re able to perform more capabilities than otherwise specified/intended.
Seth argues in this piece that while a user-submitted report may contain a vulnerability, this vulnerability may not lie with the standard library itself but with the report.
I agree with this take. Just because each individual component is secure, does not mean that their combinations are. That is what makes security hard to get right.
This is why it’s important to establish clear contracts with the code. If a user calls a function with these constraints, then they’re guarenteed to get these outcomes. It’s then up to the developer/toolchain to ensure these contracts are met and their code adheres to their specificiation.
Library and tool builders can help their users by documenting how to securely implement common patterns. This is something the Python documentation already does quite well.
Added: August 31, 2025
A whole PeerTube instance dedicated to watching birds splash around in a little bird bath. What more can you want?
Chris, I gotta know how you set this all up. Do you have an automatic way of cropping the videos?
Added: August 3, 2025
Consumerism and my Relationship with Money by
The author here shares a range of thoughts regarding spending money. I’ll chip in my few cents as well.
Advertising, I feel, plays a huge role in convincing people to spend money. This topic is better suited for a longer blog post, but I’ll share some of my opinions.
I try to minimize the number of ads I see. I browse with an ad-blocker, don’t watch TV or the radio, pay for YouTube premium, and join the ad-free membership programs of most of the podcasts I listen to. That’s not to say that I never see ads, but I suspect that I see a lot less than the average American.
Every ad is trying to convince you to spend money. To buy the latest phone, gamble, or go on vacation. I’m not suggesting that spending money is inherently evil. I don’t believe that at all; economic activity is a sign of a healthy society.
We all don’t need to be spending our money on the same things.
Added: August 3, 2025
Covers as a way of learning music and code by
This post is a great reminder to those of us working professionally and it goes beyond programming. When we’re being taught a skill we rehearse the basics and practice an already existing concept (a cover).
However, after a point, some of us forget this and believe the way to level up is to solve new problems. That’s definitely not the only way and there’s tons of great resources out there on learning how to design programming languages, operating systems, build compilers, etc.
Added: August 3, 2025
Cryptography for the Everyday Developer: Confusion, Diffusion, and Substitution-Permutation Networks by
Cryptography is a really interesting and challenging field and it’s cool that Kevin started this series to help educate us on some of the basics.
Substitution-Permutation networks are a type of block cipher which generates fixed-length ciphertexts given a fixed-length plaintext. The most compelling visualization I’ve seen for why we need these complicated algorithms is the ECB-encrypted Tux Penguin.
As such, it’s not good enough to only perform a simple substitution. The networks described in this blog post talks about how an additional permutation stage helps.
Added: August 3, 2025
So how was the Camino?
I don’t personally know anyone who has walked the Camino, the Appalachian trail, or any other multi-week hiking experience. Matthew here provides a few lenses of how the experience went for him.
A long hike acts as a shared bonding experience between everyone involved, even when they haven’t met before. I find that the impressions of these shared experiences are deeper than meeting someone and relating over shared attributes. For example, as a PhD student, I relate to other PhD students. However, this doesn’t necessarily create an emotional connection.
Overall it seems that the experience was really valuable to Matthew. It reminds me of Jason Evangelho’s series on walking the Oregon trail.
Added: August 3, 2025
I agree with Anton’s take on API design. Another reason to design modules to be deep rather than shallow is that it help’s make the most common use case easier to find.
Added: August 3, 2025