Fairy Pools, Isle of Skye, Scotland

You can really get an incredible perspective of the smoke hanging over the US from the GOES satellite.

The animation loops are fascinating too.

Headset hot take: people will buy it for entertainment, but it’ll be a small market at that price. I don’t think the productivity use cases are compelling enough.

Yesterday’s guided mountain bike ride around North Carolina’s DuPont State Forest was perhaps one of the most challenging physical activities I’ve done, especially as a beginner on the mountain bike, but also one of the most rewarding!

Strava

Mount Mitchell, highest peak east of the Mississippi.

Daniel Ridge Falls hike

In Asheville for the weekend

Mountain biking at Blankets Creek and later a little hike around the Decatur Waterworks.

Sweetwater Creek State Park

Finished reading: The Apple II Age by Laine Nooney 📚

I enjoyed this book’s historical look at the origins of personal computing through the lens of Apple II software. It takes a perspective that differs from what you’d hear from Apple itself or any other company that survived this age.

Thought I would be able to hold off until I have more time for gaming, but couldn’t help myself and started Zelda Tears of the Kingdom this morning!

Trying out cross posting from doug.pub to BlueSky, where I’m @dfj.bsky.social

A few photos from a weekend in Charleston, SC.

The sunset from Folly Beach.

The “Angel Oak” tree, which is 400 years old and hard to capture in a photo.

The Easy Roll and Slow Burn of Cassette-Based Software | Internet Archive Blogs

But nestled in a relatively short span of time is the era of cassette-based loading, where actual audio tapes could have data stored on them, and played back to load into computers. In terms of adoption, the cassette-based software period is marked by people entering it and almost immediately clawing their way out of it as soon as they can afford to.

My earliest computing memories are thoroughly in the floppy and hard drive era, so this was a fun read of what life was like just before this and how it connects to modern emulation.

I’ve been using the Arc Browser as my daily driver for the past few months. It’s a game changer for me. I’ve never felt like I’ve had my browser tabs so under control. If you are interested in an invite, let me know!

I’m reading about the Nostr protocol.

I don’t really feel the need for another social network in my life. But UseNostr shows some use cases for the protocol beyond social networking. Not sure how compelling any of this is…but maybe worth keeping an eye on.

I built some prototype stuff with Deno (a modern JavaScript/Typescript runtime) and Fresh (a server-side/edge rendering web framework) this week and it was a promising experience. I’d bet this is going to be popular.

🌎Happy Earth Day🌍

Currently reading: The Apple II Age by Laine Nooney 📚

Kottke is celebrating turning 25 years old which is an interesting look back at his experience with the web and how it has changed over the years.

I especially enjoyed the linked 2016 post about the web as it appeared on Halt and Catch Fire. I loved that show when it was on the air and reading this made me miss it.

Despite the nostalgia, this post ends on a concerned note:

But the open Web enthusiasts and advocates missed an opportunity to take what the Web was in the 90s and make that available to everyone. Instead of walled gardens like Facebook, Pinterest, and Medium (which echo the closed online services like AOL, Prodigy, and Compuserve that predated the Web), imagine a bunch of smaller services bound together with open protocols where individuals have both freedom and convenience. At this stage, building an open Twitter or open Facebook is nearly impossible, but it wouldn’t have been 10-12 years ago. I hope I’m wrong, but with all of the entrenched incumbents and money pumping into online services, I’m afraid that time has truly passed. And it’s breaking my heart.

It’s interesting to look back and think about how the open Web landscape has or has not changed since 2016. As recently as the past year, I felt that the open Web was in a more precarious position than ever. Between mobile apps and strict “app store only” policies, Web3 (which really seemed to be more about walled gardens accessed by crypto rather than the open Web), and social networks, things felt dire.

But today? It feels like there’s a little more hope in the air. Perhaps I’m overly weighting the decline of Twitter and rise of Mastodon/ActivityPub (even RSS is getting more attention recently!), but it feels like things are shifting in a positive direction.