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Shoutouts is now running on a new server. Everything is looking good and healthy. Let me know if you encounter any issues at all ✌️❤️ 

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Went to our local Trader Joe’s for the weekly shopping. This moral of Queen St and the Spite House is behind their flower section.

I'll be attempting to move shoutouts to a new server between now and over the weekend. Whilst I don't imagine any downtime, please know that there might be a few minutes of slow response times. However, you should feel nothing is different as such. I'll do another update after the migration is complete.

• 🚀 In addition to customising your reader view, you can now also page through posts at the bottom of the page for a given feed. Here is a video: • 🚀 Also new is the ability to show a special reader view for your timeline for new items that have come through. Clicking on the reader button will automatically take you to the first new post since the last time you've visited (anything showing above your marker). Page through as you read. Bliss.

Customise reader view & feed fetching

Today I worked on allowing you to customise your reader view a little more beyond just fonts. You see I like to have my computer in dark mode but prefer reading on lighter texture, with a slightly larger font. So now you can do exactly that, including a few more themes that should serve well. Here is a quick video:You can see a nice little paintbrush to the bottom right of the reader view and selecting it will open up your options. The view will update as you change settings. These settings are saved to your account and will apply wherever you are logged in. Here is a screenshot in case you didn't look at the video 😋I hope you enjoy this and that it's useful for some of you. Feed FetchingFor some time now I wanted a quick way to manually fetch a feed, for example if there was...

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“You got any of dem tweets?!”

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Beautiful morning walk along the Potomac past Ford’s Point.

Rollercoaster of emotions time!

Yesterday's mood was one of pure, unadulterated anger. Overnight, this has turned into anxiety and sadness, including lack of sleep.  I've been through my fair share of redundancies over the years. The worst one was when I was due to get married and the company I was working for decided it was going to downsize and move into deepest, darkest Essex from Kingston upon Thames. Having spent a not inconsiderable amount of money on the wedding and honeymoon (Bora Bora, then two weeks in New Zealand), it was too late to do anything. So I went and got married whilst unemployed. Went to one of the most expensive places on Earth—unemployed. Backpacked around one of the most beautiful countries on Earth—unemployed. If it weren't for savings, I'd be royally buggered. Thanks to my cousin, I decided to pursue a career in VFX, and after a very good (but ultimately unsuccessful)...

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The front door of 810 Prince St. The townhome is currently for sale; asking price $4M. Whatever you’re imagining the inside looks like based on this door is correct. Search for it on your favorite real estate website and find out.

It's funny that..

.. one day you're enjoying ice cream from an ice cream van hired by your employers and the next you're discovering that your job is at risk - again - because "the games industry".  I cannot (and won't) go into details, but to say I am hugely disappointed is an understatement.  The creative industries have got a lot to answer for these days; watching my former employers MPC die earlier this year was an especially painful reminder of this. In the meantime, can anybody 'gis a job (winking emoji followed immediately by a sad/crying emoji)?  Details via the About Martyn link and via my newly reconstructed LinkedIn page.

Logo Concept 04-Freight First Logo

Logo Concept SeriesI decided to expand my skills in icon mark and typography to broaden my design range, especially for logo design. While exploring this journey, I came across a daily logo challenge from Logo Core and decided to take it on. So, I will showcase the results of my logo practice based on the provided briefs.  “Think of this post as a presentation of the initial concept to an imaginary client. It's my way of discussing my thought process and my design choices before exchanging feedback and revisions. ” Please keep in mind that creating a polished logo design typically requires more than just a few days. Therefore, consider everything from this challenge as a rough draft that will need further feedback from clients for refinement to truly shine.  While these designs may not be fully refined, I believe they will offer us a general idea of the concept.  That...

“The art of happiness is also the art of suffering well”

You wouldn’t think that a book about suffering is also, intrinsically, a book about happiness, but such is the case with No Mud, No Lotus. I read it some years ago, but its central ideas have stuck with me, and in times of trouble I find myself thinking back to the lessons it contains. Here’s what I highlighted: “When you love someone, you have to offer that person the best you have. The best thing we can offer another person is our true presence.” “The main affliction of our modern civilization is that we don’t know how to handle the suffering inside us and we try to cover it up with all kinds of consumption.” “Part of the art of suffering well is learning not to magnify our pain by getting carried away in fear, anger, and despair. We build and maintain our energy reserves to handle the big sufferings;...

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We decided to have happy hour dinner at Urbano tonight. Split nachos and each had a margarita.

Old Tech, New Posts: My Most Productive Blogging Year Yet

I have so many ideas running around in my head. I've been blogging more than ever this year, and it's been my most productive stretch since I started blogging and building my own website—23 years ago. Although I don’t think I have many readers, and what I write may not be interesting enough to spark much interaction, I still enjoy doing it. I remember when ISPs gave you what seemed like generous personal website space. My first real ISP was GTE, now Verizon. Before that, I had dial-up with AOL and those limited minutes, but I mostly used it for email and a bit of web surfing—usually hunting for information about new computer games. Getting DSL from GTE was a game changer. That’s when I really got into building my own website. It was rudimentary back then, and I probably overloaded it with information while trying to figure out how...

Today I am mostly..

.. very angry with HP (Hewlett Packard) and their [bleeping] servers.  And I am especially annoyed when they remove vital software (albeit discontinued) from their site which leads me to look at potentially dangerous sites for somebody who has bothered to mirror it.  

🕖 Now — Updated Morning Routine

For the past few weeks, I have a new morning routine to take the pulse of what is happening in the field of the Internet and technology. I systematically check the following sites, in this order: 1. Micro.blog timeline where Micro.blog, Bluesky and Mastodon users posts are converged in a single timeline. 2. Digg (still in beta but still worth it because the community there is rather motivated to share great links) 3. Hacker News 4. Techmeme 5. The Register 6. Inoreader for the rest through a plethora of RSS feeds from news sites.  The next step will be to ask ChatGPT agent to create a summary report of those news sources in a morning. I'm not sure if this is something that is possible, yet.

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After a full day of chores, we relaxed with a cocktail and I grilled chicken, corn, and packet potatoes.

Ed Zitron Might Be Right, But I’m Still Using AI Every Day

Lately, I’ve been listening to Ed Zitron and his podcast Better Offline. He’s not shy about his views: he believes that most AI companies are burning through cash and are likely to fail because they don’t have viable products. I respect his perspective. He clearly understands the tech industry and sees AI as mostly a kind of “magic trick”—a system that assembles words in ways that appear intelligent, but in reality don’t demonstrate real understanding. That’s my paraphrase, not his. As for me, I don’t claim to fully understand the business models of these companies or whether they’re financially sustainable in the long term. But to be honest, I’m not especially concerned. I’m not investing in them. The only money I’ve put into this space is my $20 per month subscription to ChatGPT from OpenAI, and for that amount, I get value in return. For me, AI is a tool....

Launching VerbaMea

When is a blog not a blog? When it’s a page! There are occasions when it’s great to get something written down online; something you can share with others, perhaps via email or social media. Blogs are great for that, but what about something random — a post/comment/opinion that has no connection to your blog, or you want to keep it separate from your usual articles.  Perhaps you don't have a blog but need somewhere to occasionally publish. I’ve created just such a tool.  It’s simply a blank page and you type whatever you want.  Save it; share it.  No login, No verification.  No hassle.  You’re not asked for any personal details to get published. It’s not discoverable in any list of pages, so it's relatively private. Extras • Optionally you can add a password, which means you have the ability to edit the page in the future. • You can...

The end of an (extremely tiny) era. This will be the last post here on Just so. I will continue to post on Thisness at micro.blog. 👋

📡✨ Restart?

I mostly forgot about my Photo Legend blog post series. Should I restart it? Hit the Kudos button to cast your vote!

It doesn’t take much reflection to reveal how much of our experience is made up of our opinions about experience. It is enormously liberating to simply be what is happening rather than getting trapped in an opinion about it.

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On Saturday the wife got a new tattoo and we visited CD Cellar in Falls Church. Scored a decent little haul of albums.

Logo Concept 03-TripleWP Logo

Logo Concept SeriesI decided to expand my skills in icon mark and typography to broaden my design range, especially for logo design. While exploring this journey, I came across a daily logo challenge from Logo Core and decided to take it on. So, I will showcase the results of my logo practice based on the provided briefs.  “Think of this post as a presentation of the initial concept to an imaginary client. It's my way of discussing my thought process and my design choices before exchanging feedback and revisions. ” Please keep in mind that creating a polished logo design typically requires more than just a few days. Therefore, consider everything from this challenge as a rough draft that will need further feedback from clients for refinement to truly shine.  While these designs may not be fully refined, I believe they will offer us a general idea of the concept.  That...

Good morning.

This morning, gentle rain. The brook babbles a little louder. Cars hiss by while the dog snores.

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Morning walk past the Torpedo Factory.

If we don’t assimilate and integrate traditional ancient wisdom into the ordinary reality of our own lived experience then we’re completely missing the point.

Tron: Ares - about as innovative as a spoon

When Tron opened in 1982 it sat squarely at the cutting edge of cinema technology. Its ground-breaking computer-generated imagery—created on mighty mainframes such as the Foonly F-1 and DEC PDP-10—was combined with tens of thousands of hand-inked, back-lit animation cels. Much of that painstaking colouring work was carried out by artists at Wang Film Productions in Taiwan, giving the finished film its unmistakable neon glow. (I once used a similar DEC machine at university and immediately took a dislike to the VAX operating system. However, when I got my hands on an SGI Onyx workstation, I found that the IRIX OS suited me perfectly. To be fair, by the time I entered the VFX industry, Linux had already made significant inroads into the space, and, as a result, SGI was becoming less relevant, especially with access to much cheaper (and more powerful) hardware.) I have now seen the trailer for...

Paying close attention to our mind and the myriad thoughts that arise, it’s possible to see the difference between thoughts ‘of’ experience and thoughts ‘about’ experience. The former arise, observe then pass away. The latter indulge in story making and identification with self and  perpetuate themselves until the stories occlude experience.

So much unnecessary fear, anxiety and suffering (as well as groundless hope and optimism) is caused by confusing a story about what is going on with the reality of what is actually happening. Can we tell the difference between feeling life and feeling something about life?

Micronauts

Some day ago I found a picture of a beloved toys from the '80s. I've lost even the memory of the end of mine, but I clearly remember playing with it with my friend Nicola (same name as mine), and his copy of the black Baron Karza (I think that was the name of it). Did you play with Micronauts toys too when you were younger?

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Off in the background is the George Washington Masonic Memorial; at the top of the hill at the end of King St. (not really the end, just where it veers off towards Arlington).

• 📖 Added 3 "system" based reader fonts for you to choose from. System Serif, System Sans Serif, and System Mono. They'll work across different platforms also as it uses the built in system fonts for various systems. • 💨 Fixed an issue where loading your feed was slow due to processing images on the fly. This functionality has now been removed so that images load async without all the extra background stuff that was causing things to just go so slow. Sorry about that.

currently playing with... parian porcelain

I love experimenting with shapes and thicknesses of clay, seeing how far I can take the medium before it breaks, bends, or cracks! At the moment I've been playing with porcelain—parian porcelain to be exact. Parian ware is a type of bisque porcelain that imitates marble. It was developed around 1845 by the Staffordshire pottery manufacturer Mintons, and named after Paros, the Greek island renowned for its fine-textured white marbles, used in ancient times for sculpture.  This is a gorgeous casting slip. The thickness of the final piece is all down to the length of time you leave it in the plaster mold. I wanted to see how fine I could cast a bowl so I could get a butterfly image in the base if you held it up to the light. I had seen images of boats in the bottom of my grandmother's bone china cups years ago, and...

This is how I see all brands, slogans and advertising.

““Finding meaning is merely a matter of finding a better story. Stories put your pains and pleasures into a context you can accept. But when your attention is truly free in the present, the question of meaning doesn't arise.”” — Sam Harris

"Someone that you'd high five but not hug"

The more I learn about anxiety, the more I begin to see evidence of its presence all around. In the world, and in the lives of those close to me. In a recent episode of the wonderful Ologies podcast about "ergopathology", Dr. Kandi Wiens joined host Allie Ward to discuss the study of burnout. Burnout is just one of many ways anxiety can push people to the brink, and I’m glad folks like Dr. Weins are working to understand how it happens and how we can learn to recognize it early. Sidebar: I adore the idea of "someone you'd high-five, but not hug" as a simple, instinctual way to gauge the closeness of a friendship. I think life gets better the more "hug" friends you have. Here’s what I highlighted: “Ergopathology, it's the science of Ergon, which is work in Greek, and pathology, which is something bad. But what exactly...

My Sky "Complainty" is resolved!

(Well, hopefully.  A solution has been proposed, I have accepted.) Good to see Sky stepping up (finally) and have acknowledged my complaint(y), and what's good is that they haven't tried to palm me off with a refund or cash - just a straight forward resolution that gets the matter resolved.  I appreciate the resolution team's efforts.  Thank you. (See the original post, My Sky "Complainty", for more info)

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Spotted this nifty vintage Jeep on S Pitt St.