Seeing quite a few more music concerts than usual this year. Here’s a few coming up:
Gemini CLI continues to get hung up on fairly simple things. It’s the free version, using a lightweight model, so I don’t mean to complain too much. Sort of stuck in a loop of trying to update CSS files:
I apologize for the repeated issues with the replace tool. It seems I’m still struggling with the exact string matching. I will try a different approach to remove the old media query block. I will read the file content, manually remove the block from the content, and then write the modified content back to the file. This should bypass the strict matching issues.
Still pretty amazing, though.
After road trips across the country, to California multiple times, all over Texas, through Utah, and to New York… My good luck with the Honda Element ran out this week. Fender bender in a parking lot ripped off my back bumper. It was cracked anyway, so guess it was past time to replace.
Great point from Jeff Johnson on the arbitrary tier 1 / tier 2 differences in Apple’s proposed EU rules:
What I found striking about the search differences between Tier 1 and Tier 2 is that in creating this distinction, Apple clearly considers App Store search to be a developer feature rather than a user feature. In other words, the user’s interest in finding an app via search is disregarded, and Apple is willing to be less helpful to users to the extent that app developers pay a lesser commission to Apple.
Then we got to the first one, and it looked almost brand new. When I mentioned that, he said:
“Oh no, this must’ve been redone at least… let me think… five years ago.”
Crazy! No matter how much money someone has, that kind of thing still blows my mind. It’s a waste, and completely unsustainable.
Unfortunately, even though that case was extreme, it’s not uncommon for people to renovate just for the sake of it. They want a slightly lighter shade of gray for the bathroom tiles, so they rip everything out (even if it’s newer and more expensive than what most of us could dream of affording). Same with kitchens. “I want the sink one foot more to the left.”
That’s why it’s such a joy to visit homes like the one I did today…
This happy old couple had a clothing centrifuge from the 1950s — still working. They also owned the first microwave oven ever sold in Sweden (it worked too, even though they didn’t use it). And they had this fantastic calendar they’d received as a gift many, many years ago.
Honestly, it was a pure joy walking around their home.
They had modern stuff too, of course. And one of them, though retired, was still doing some work in the AR & VR industry.
They were what I’d call “old modern people.” They appreciated things that were well-made, timeless, and built to last — beautiful in their own quiet way — while still taking full advantage of the convenience and possibilities of today’s technology.
All in a beautiful balance.
I was asked this week about our policy when a subscription expires or sadly even if someone passes away. I know I’ve blogged about this, but I don’t think it was formally documented, so I wrote up a simple help page for it.
📹 I spotted this cool calendar at one of the houses I inspected today. I love the minimalistic, abstract look, and the fact that it still manages to be super clear and easy to use.
Design at its best!
Enjoyed listening to the copyright discussion on SharpTech this week. Copyright is not a universal truth. It’s effectively a limited monopoly given to creators. That’s helpful, but it must be balanced with the public good. Sometimes we go too far, like Mickey Mouse’s 95-year copyright.
Experimenting with Gemini CLI to iterate on some web page changes. It’s free for basic usage. It does get confused sometimes, having to re-read files and apply changes multiple times, which makes it feel slow and a little wasteful.
This is the 96th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have David Wertheimer and his blog, Ideapad
I love to have people who started blogging in the 90s as guests because I can only assume there are probably not many of them still out there. A lot of things can change in 25+ years and maintaining a constant online presence for more than a quarter of a century is no small feat if you think about it.
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Hi! I'm David Wertheimer. I live in New York City with my wife, two teenage children and our dog. I am a fan of the New York Yankees, minor chords and chocolate mint.
Digitally, I've been online since 1987, when I got a 300/1200 baud modem, and began calling local BBSes and chat systems as a high school freshman. After college I had just started a job in book production when I got a call to work as an online editorial assistant instead. My online hobby became a career--this was October 1995; my first professional software suite included Netscape 1.1N--and I never looked back.
I first put up a personal web page in 1996. Websites then were for all manner of creative expression, from writing to visual, textural experiences. Sites like 0sil8, Superbad and the Fray were inventing new paradigms monthly. I tried this with my own site, with middling results.
By 1998, weblogs had become a thing, and inspired by a number of early bloggers (like Jason Kottke, who had begun writing alongside his 0sil8) I put up my own and called it the Idea Pad. From there, I just kept going.
Back then, I often published multiple times a day, everything from long expositions to quick-hit notes, one-liner jokes, and broad commentary on everything from industry news to my love life. I'm still a generalist in that way. My recent posts are largely personal, but I could put out a thousand words on user experience next week if the mood strikes.
My blog proudly hit 25 years last fall, and while my pace has shifted dramatically over the years, I see no end in sight.
When I have something I want to put out into the world, whether to share an idea with an audience, exercise my writing muscles, or just get something off my chest, I'll pop open a blank page and start writing.
Sometimes I bang out an essay in one shot, which is satisfying. Other times, I'll work on a draft for awhile, with unlimited rounds of revision and reconsideration. I have dozens of unpublished posts in my CMS. A little ways back, I actually spent some time revisiting and cleaning up some drafts to share belatedly. That was entertaining, although many of those drafts are unpublished for a reason.
Which brings me to a fun, shameful fact: much of the time, I write straight in WordPress. I don't even like the editor that much, I just appreciate the immediacy. Since my blog is so personal, and I'm not garnering thousands of views at any given moment, I even tweak posts on the fly right after I first hit Publish. Awful best practices! But it makes me happy.
If I'm doing serious writing and editing, put me in a setting with steady background noise and nothing else to do. But after 25 years, writing for myself is innate. When I get inspired, I'll just pop open a Notes file or an email draft and capture an idea.
At inception, I was hand-coding posts in HTML in BBEdit and uploading them with Fetch. Then I had a home-rolled PHP publishing system, built by a friend who kept the duct tape from falling off the pipes for a long while. I eventually moved to WordPress and stayed. Plenty of pages on my site are still hand-crafted from back when I knew something about front-end code.
I've been using the same web host (and its registrar) for probably 20 years now and generally leave it alone.
One of my few memorable regrets was that I didn't register ideapad.com, and a couple of years after I started writing that became the name of a line of laptops. (I also regret my choice of domain name, but I'm stuck with it.)
One thing I'd definitely not do differently is maintain my archive. Linkrot is a terrible outgrowth of digital longevity. I promised myself early on that I'd try to avoid it, and now my kids can read my old posts, as can you, or my coworkers, or my friends from grade school who I name-checked that one time. You can find your way to things I made when I was 24. You can search Google for "furnident" and land on my post from 2002.
That relative permanence is meaningful to me. I'm not exactly proud of all my old work, but I am proud that each item is right where it was the day it got posted.
The hosting costs are the only real expense. The only money I've directly made off my website was when a little side project went viral and I slapped an ad banner on it.
I have indirectly monetized my blog in many ways, from networking to consulting to speaking engagements to book deals, and with the people I've met and interacted with along the way.
I spent some time reading other surveys and realized there's not much I could recommend that hasn't been mentioned by someone else. But here are half a dozen that aren't obvious picks and that make me go "ooh" when I see new posts appear in my Feedly:
Two-thirds of those links actually point to newsletters. One nice thing about reading in RSS is that I blur the lines between points of origin. They may be emailed, but they look like blogs to me.
Also, I still read most of the old-timers from my era that are still publishing, all of whom are still a delight: Kottke, Sippey, Storey, Gruber, Dash, Garrity, Webb, Knauss, the list goes on.
My favorite side project of recent vintage has been retired but is still great: I spent a decade-plus tweeting when either of my kids said something funny, poignant or memorable. They've outgrown it now (and we've largely outgrown Twitter) but their feeds are special.
The best stuff is back a couple of years, when they were younger and goofier.
Thanks again for having me!
This was the 96th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Dave. Make sure to follow his blog (RSS) and get in touch with him if you have any questions.
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