We talk a lot about the “smart phone era”, but I think the transition from spinning disk to SSD, low to high DPI screens, and X86 to ARM have collectively been just as impactful.

Apparently a pretty cool looking guitar shop opened up walking distance from my house about a year ago and I had no idea!

Yesterday, the Baltimore Flower Mart proved to be the anti-Artscape. Quite obviously was the best weather we’ll see all year.

I bought my first guitar at Sam Ash. In fact, it was a Fender Sam Ash 48th Street Special Stratocaster I still own. Crazy that at 100 years, they’re shutting down. Being a musician in New York will be forever different.

Well. Here’s something that unexpectedly hit hard this afternoon.

I appreciate all the well wishes after Gracie’s passing. I’m experiencing a lot of things today for the first time ever without her. One thing that has helped is looking through thousands of pictures and videos of we have. We are so fortunate to have had her in an age of iPhones.

April in Baltimore concluded with 10 homicide victims, the second-fewest ever recorded here in the month of April. Homicides are down 33% from this time last year and 47% from this time in 2022.

In a city where crime is almost always the top issue, somehow our current mayor may be ousted by a former mayor who left in disgrace for stealing gift cards from needy kids while in office. Make it make sense.

Apple’s Get Up! Mix started with five straight banger tracks.

Sometimes the algorithms are good.

Gracie is gone. Our love for her was deeper than deep. But she couldn’t live on our love alone, or she would have lived until at least 120.

People often bemoan something is enshitification when it’s actually just a company trying to have a business model and survive. We want jobs that treat us well and are “calm” and we want services and products that serve us well but reject paying the margin needed.

Pretty remarkable constellation of interacting policies and consequences (sometimes intentional!) leading to the bloat of American cars.

If you’ve never had paronychia, I do not recommend it. The pain is pretty considerable and I have an incredibly mild case (based on the disgusting Google images).

What am I hoping to do with writing on the web? Well, for one, it’s an outlet for my thoughts that I want to remember and return to. But that alone is a diary or a journal. These are also thoughts that I hope others will read and engage with in some form or fashion. These are ideas that are satisfying to me because sometimes whispering our thoughts quietly to ourselves is important and sometimes shouting them into the void is important and sometimes we hope the void shouts back.

For years, I had Google Analytics on my personal websites because it was free and worked fine. But for various reasons, I got turned off by the service and the idea of analytics for a bit. So I turned everything off. And being hosted on Micro.blog, despite crossposting to Twitter (when it was available) and Mastodon and just about wherever else, I broadly didn’t know about readership, followers, etc. Interactions were my main measure of reach– do people choose to reply to my posts on their platform of choice?

I think that’s largely my goal– I want to know if people are responding to my writing on their platform of choice.

But there’s a huge problem with this idea today– webmentions. Webmentions is a shit show of a standard. It seems to only kind of work. It definitely confuses and perplexes many writers who are bought into the IndieWeb in spirit but are not writing their own (seemingly always PHP) CMS to implement standards. Folks who are writers first and non-developer tinkerers are met with bad plug-ins, inconsistent behavior, poorly documented inconsistencies, and a whole manner of things that cause them to give up ¹. Still, others have decided the very idea of a webmention, especially extended to social posts, and specifically displaying that others have linked (publicly) to your blog post is a privacy concern.

Why are webmentions a problem? Because if I want to know that people are responding to my writing on their platform of choice, I want to know when people write on their blogs and link to my content. Of course I do… my own blog is my personal platform of choice for commenting on the web! Webmentions was supposed to solve this– when someone links to my site, they add the right classes to that link and their server lets my server know that they’ve linked to my site or a specific post. Brilliant– pingbacks/trackbacks for the open web. But it’s just not working and it’s not complete enough. Adoption is low and horribly inconsistent. I’m glad I receive webmentions, but they are exceedingly rare.

Which brings me to my defense of analytics and my own use of tinylytics.app. I don’t care about the number of “hits” my blog gets. Considering how many places I post my content and my own hope that RSS is how most people read my site, hits are almost certainly no more than directionally accurate about readership. What I do care about are referrers. Without webmentions proactively telling me when folks on the web mention my content, I can see if anyone who read that post clicked on the link to my site and ended up here. I have discovered at least three blogs in the last year that linked to me that I now follow through this method. Somehow they found what I wrote. They linked to it, either with short commentary or even a fully on response, and then, because at least one person clicked the link over to my site, I learned about their blog post.

Without analytics on referrers, I’d never know these people were a part of my small circle of the internet in conversation with my writing. So for now, I’m all in on having analytics. It’s one of the few reliable ways to know that someone had written about your content. I still want people to respond on their platform of choice, and I don’t want to lose their voice or conversation.

Micro.blog covers all of the features of EchoFeed that I’d want today. But I’m grateful it exists, because if I ever decide to write my own blogging engine (as I’ve often threatened), there’s a whole set of features I no longer need to build.

I’ve been living this life for some time (I’ve had a Mac mini as my main personal computer for over a decade) and agree with almost all of this. The only thing is, I don’t need any extra ports because the current Mac mini + Studio Display has me covered.

At first, I was pretty disappointed only energy production has lowered carbon emissions in the US. But then I saw how much room we have to go de-commissioning coal and then reducing natural gas and I got a little hopeful. We need major investment in more efficient industry (and living).

April is a good month for “good enough”. Most years, including this one, April is when I celebrate Passover. During the seder, we sing an over 1000 year old song, Dayenu – “it would have been enough”.

This year “enough” has been on my mind. My parents are nearing retirement and I am nearing middle age. Both of those feel like milestones to think about “what is enough”.

I feel bombarded with messaging about “enough”– all the new crop of pop-financial advice is about “enough”. Die with Zero, Living Your Rich Life, and FIRE are all, to a degree, about understanding what is “enough” when it comes to money. My own experience, being fortunate enough to see my income and wealth grow over time, is it’s hard to feel “enough”. My mind knows that I can live with less fear, but my body still feels nervous, like ruin and catastrophe is always around the corner.

My two nervous systems have a different idea about what is enough.

I’ve continued to struggle with my weight and my body like I have all my life. For me, it’s not what I eat so much, but it’s about portion control. I am hungry– often. It’s hard to feel satisfied. I want to be entertained by my food and can’t make myself have a purely instrumental relationship with food.

My mind and my stomach and my body all have different ideas about what is “enough”

I let this blog post sit in almost this exact state for most of April. I sat on my blog redesign for almost 6 months before just releasing it as is for the same reason.

My energy level to write and my idealized version of this blog post (and blog) have different ideas about what is “enough”.

This month’s indieweb carnival is actually about “good enough”. But I don’t really have problem with the “good” part– I have problems with the “enough” part. If it’s enough, it’s always good. And my problem is really about allowing myself to recognize and feel when we’ve hit “good” so that I can say “enough”.

I deeply admire Cleo Abram’s optimism and storytelling talent.

I am often told I’m an extrovert, but after 11 meetings at work today I’m not looking forward to a Gala event tonight.

People who speak at large dinner events when someone else is on the mic are bad people.

A lot of people will give you advice about how you should run a company and then put in small text: “you need astronomical margins”. They never talk about how high margins are rare, hard as hell, and typically constantly under threat from competition on price.

Our friend @jarrod has a great idea on how to use ChatGPT to reinforce what you’re learning by asking for a quiz.

The pandemic forced a change. I was no longer commuting a mile to an office each day for work, work happened at home. I lived that life before I moved to Baltimore, but at that time Elsa and I lived together in a small one bedroom condo and my desk was in the bedroom. Working from my bedroom was not always great. But this time, we had a large house and I could set myself up at home. Previously, I had a small desk on the top floor where Elsa kept her office. Working from home full time meant making a more permanent space, hopefully with greater separation between Elsa and myself.

So we made an adjustment I had thought about for some time, moving all of our gym equipment out from one of the smaller bedrooms and up to the loft where my desk was. Down went my desk into the bedroom and I now had a dedicated room at home for me. It is clearly my office, but it also opened up another opportunity.

From the time I was 14 until college, I played guitar for hours every day. Slowly through college, I played a bit less all the time– it’s hard to be loud in dorms and apartments, but I still played all the time and was deeply invested in my identity as a guitar player. But grad school came, and so did work, and suddenly I basically stopped, almost entirely. I know that this happens to a lot of folks, but to this day I remain surprised. Guitar was a huge part of my identity, not just a thing I did sometimes. I played in bands all throughout high school. I obsessed over gear. I used to drive to find new guitar shops or even return to ones I frequent to see what new used equipment was there and play for hours. But a part of living is shedding parts of ourselves to make room for new things and somehow guitar was a casualty.

Like many folks who rediscovered hobbies during the pandemic, guitar crept back into my life. In this instance, however, I’m not so sure how much of my playing was about having time. I think a fair bit of my resurgence came from having space. As I put together my office, rather than fill the walls just with art or furniture, I hung my primary electric and acoustic guitars. They were now right behind, in reach, in a room with a door. Just that difference was enough to start me playing a bit again.

I’ve never taken up guitar like I used to–there’s very little which I can dedicate even one hour a day to. But I’ve been more consistent than in years. Some weeks it may only be twenty minutes of noodling, other weeks I pick it up for a bit every day. Slowly, I’ve at least started to redevelop and maintain my calluses. I don’t play nearly as well as I used to– I can feel the difference in my dexterity and confidence– but I’m getting to passably close to where I was.

For the first time in over a decade, I’m starting to play with other people again. The last few Saturday afternoons I’ve piled into a small basement with my guitar and amp and hung out playing with a drummer, two keyboardist/synth players, and another guitarist. And we’ve been improvising over a few things and writing some new music. It’s music I’d listen to, and I’m having a blast. Yesterday we played for almost 15 minutes straight off of a small riff I wrote in April of 2020. It was just something I recorded to my phone because it sounded cooler than I expected. I was playing it to practice my picking and timing, and now I’ve got my own song (really our song now– it’s gone so much beyond my start point) stuck in my head.

It’s funny. My senior year of high school I went to the gym to lift weights at least a couple of times a week. I was playing volleyball every day after school in the spring. And most weekends, and even some weekdays, I got together with friends and played guitar and wrote music. Twenty plus years later, I’m going to the gym 3 days a week to lift weights. I’m playing volleyball 2-3 nights a week. And most weekends, I am getting together with friends and playing guitar and writing music.

I am not sure if the 20 years I spent (largely) away from these things would have been better if I tried to keep it up. I think it was important for me to grow out of the things I loved to do for a while. But about 6 years ago I started lifting weights again. And about 3 years ago I started playing volleyball again. And although I started playing guitar at home a bit more starting 4 years ago as well, it’s really just the last few months I’ve started playing with other people and writing music again. All of these things are utterly recreational. I can do them entirely with a joy and ease that I didn’t have when I was younger. I have returned to them all way more willing to be silly and without expectations. And I’m just having so much fun.

I have a 2x 6V6 22W amp with a master volume. I can barely go past when the amp becomes audible and I’m perfectly balanced with a drummer, another guitarist, and two keyboard players. Why the hell do 100W tube amps exist?

(I have owned 100W tube amps)

All of the news has been about emulators, but do these new Apple guidelines mean that non-Safari browsers can have extensions on iOS now?

Apps may offer certain software that is not embedded in the binary, specifically HTML5 mini apps and mini games, streaming games, chatbots, and plug-ins.