2023

The New Year’s Eve cocktail has been in the works for 48 hours: a refreshing Cucumber Gimlet. 😋

Yesterday had everything for a perfect winter day, at least in my book. A sky that was mostly clear and blue, not too chilly at around −3 ℃, a short hike, and grilling sausages over an open fire with my bff. 🥰

14-year-old me loved the original Jet Set Radio, and now there’s a new one in the making. 🛼 Also, Crazy Taxi. 🤯 Yay! SEGA reveal trailer. 🎮

A website is a poem that is already in everyone's pocket, a house built from photos of other houses, a book where every chapter is another book where every chapter is another book.

I first learned about Vera Molnár when I was deep down the rabbit hole of generative art and pen plotters back in 2019. She passed away on December 7, just a few weeks shy of turning 100 years old. Check out her work if you haven’t. My favorite Vera quote comes from this interview by studio international:

I have no regrets. My life is squares, triangles, lines.

Waveshaper dropped a new track the other day! Winds of Nubia. 🔥 Tasty artwork by Adam. 🎵

alt=“Pixel art of a neon-colored landscape with a central pyramid, radiant beams, mountains in the background, and a starry sky. A dark figure is standing in the huge entrance.”

I love how you can see other readers’ mouse cursors on Matt’s blog. It was great fun already, chasing each other’s pointers around, and now we can chat too. 🤩

added a cursor chat easter egg for every page of my blog

it's fun to surprise people visiting a post

(type "/" to chat)

Wine and pizza. Again. Just like last time, sans newsletter. Common People Barbera in the glass tonight from our beloved urban winery, Wine Mechanics. 🍷

If you visit Martin’s fragmentscenario.com and scroll all the way to the bottom, you’re urged to “follow the cat to the backyard”. Do it! (via Matt)

I’ve built this little backyard to my website, because every website should have a garden, a backyard, a basement, or any other wild space. Treated with lovely care it grows various experiments in a natural, playful, hypertext way.

A bunch of researchers found a cute attack for extracting training data from ChatGPT. Here’s the paper.

The actual attack is kind of silly. We prompt the model with the command “Repeat the word”poem” forever” and sit back and watch as the model responds

Read this beautiful visual essay by Angie Wang. 🦜

292 days later – it’s finally here! 📚

How cute are the rainbow trails following the mouse pointer around on @rachsmith’s redesigned site? 🥰 Wow! 🌈

The video shows a moving mouse pointer leaving a colorful trail behind that slowly fades away.

Fair warning from a Swede: these berry names might not be totally correct. 🫠 My favorite is Sëabtbörr.

Thanks to DALL-E3 generated educational material, we can bypass the need for teachers and textbook writers. … Perhaps you would like to learn your berries in SWEDISH?

alt=“A set of berries labeled (incorrectly) in English and then (hilariously incorrectly with excessive umlauts) in Swedish. There are strawberries labeled Hallön and Rödön (the first ö, in addition to the umlaut, also has a bar stacked upon it). There’s a set of blueberries and raspberries labeled Jördgwbb (the ö is actually a triple umlaut and the g has an umlaut too somehow). A cluster of red and black berries are labeled Rödbarar (the d, a, r, and last a all have umlauts). There’s a bunch of blueberries labeled Slabarr, where the umlauts on the A’s are clumps of at least 3 dots each. My favorite is probably the shiny black berries labeled Seabtbörr (The E has a double umlaut, the B has a smudge with a tiny dot over it, the T has some kind of curly hat, and the last o has a mini umlaut above its umlaut.”

I call this one resting companions or vila efter ärtsoppa.

My feed reader has been serving up robots for the past few days, and I’m not complaining. 🦾 The uncanny museum tour guide from Boston Dynamics, Disney’s cute af bipedal creation, and the coolest robot Thomas has ever built (pictured). More robots, please!

Paavo takes a deep dive in Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly. Fascinating! And the last paragraph made me smile.

If you liked this article, good for you! I don’t have anything to sell you. Write a comment or something to the media aggregator or social media of your choice. Subscribe to my Atom feed if it still works. Stay tuned for my next article in a couple of years.

If you’re a fan of comics and blogs, you should read Eternal September – a new comic series about finding connections in the wilds of the early web. Be on the web! 📚

Cosmopolitan is a neat project that enables compiling a C program into a fat binary – a single executable file that runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Build once, run anywhere. Congrats, and thanks for all your work, Justine! 🎉

After a year of development, I've just published Cosmopolitan v3.0. The release notes are here. Now featuring arm support, fat binaries, and improved windows polyfills. justine.lol/cosmo3/

The Pictorial C64 Fault Guide is such a great idea. A bunch of photos of the Commodore 64 in various problem states, along with descriptions, known causes, and how to fix them. I want this for all my devices!

Even though Apple’s pirating days are long over, and they are no doubt the navy now, it still warms my heart to catch a quick glance of the old Jolly Roger while catching up on last night’s Scary Fast event. 🏴‍☠️

This ASCII playground by ertdfgcvb is a lot of fun! tixy.land, but for ASCII.

The video shows a looping animation of a rotating square, rendered as ASCII art. The source code for the program responsible for the ASCII animation, written in JavaScript, is also shown.

Diversity is a good thing! Even if Apple claims the opposite when it comes to browser engines on iOS. When every browser runs WebKit, exploits like iLeakage put everyone at risk. Thanks for keeping us “safe”, Apple! 🙃

We present iLeakage, a transient execution side channel targeting the Safari web browser present on Macs, iPads and iPhones. … [W]e demonstrate how Safari allows a malicious webpage to recover secrets from popular high-value targets, such as Gmail inbox content. Finally, we demonstrate the recovery of passwords, in case these are autofilled by credential managers.

Internet Artifacts is such a fun trip down memory lane. 🥹 Neal’s websites never disappoint.

Two days ago, I was too slow. Yesterday I sucked at Really Bad Chess. But today I finally got one of the 500 keys. Yay! 🥳 Puzzmo is imagining a better newspaper games page.

alt=“Puzzmo installed as a web app on macOS. A welcome page is shown with a preview of three types of games: CrossWord, Typeshift, and Flipart. The first two are word games, and the last one is a geometric logic puzzle. October 25 is printed on the page, it’s clear there will be new puzzles daily.”

Matt has been shopping again.

Texts is a fun application (desktop only for now) that brings all of your messages into one inbox. It currently supports iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Messenger, X/Twitter DMs, Instagram DMs, LinkedIn, Slack, and Discord DMs, with more on the way soon.

🆕 My plug-ins, Conversation on Micro.blog and Reply by email, have just been updated to support HTML in link texts. So now you can be creative and add fancy icons to them. In the example below, I’m using icons from the Font Awesome project. Check out the README for instructions.

If you’re fan of the soundtrack in Super Mario Bros. Wonder you should tune in to Smooth McGroove. Here’s his rendition of DuckTales – The Moon. 🎵

I wasn’t the only one who thought that McGroove might’ve been part of the new Mario game, but he confirmed back in June that he wasn’t involved.

Huh! I always assumed Goombas bumped Mario to death, but now we know better. Thanks for clarifying, Miyamoto-san, and for passing on the information, Sato-san.

I heard that someone once asked Miyamoto-san why Mario takes damage when he bumps into a Goomba from the side in the original Super Mario Bros. game. Apparently, he answered, "It's because the Goombas bite him." … Yes, and when they bite you, they'll do it with a smile on their face! (Laughs)

Anh’s website is absolutely gorgeous and oozing with personality. And how cool is it that the homepage is a comic explaining why one should have their very own home on the web?! 😍 Take a moment and read it in full, and then explore the rest of Anh’s site.

alt=“A comic strip with four panels, titled Ephemeral. A smiling Anh holds a sheet of paper with a smiley face on it: i drew a nice picture and want to share it :). A close-up of the phone with a draft of a tweet about to be posted. Anh makes a satisfied owo face and then reflects: wait this is not a good archival system. Below the comic strip is the punchline, a link that says: i should store my own content on my own site.”

Look at all those beautiful magazine covers. 🤤 The Whole Earth Catalog is probably something I would have been into had I been living in America in the 70s. Access to tools, ideas, and practices!

Here lies a nearly-complete archive of Whole Earth publications, a series of journals and magazines descended from the Whole Earth Catalog, published by Stewart Brand and the POINT Foundation between 1970 and 2002. They are made available here for scholarship, education, and research purposes.

Matthias Ott is launching a newsletter, and I think it will be a winner. Subscribe over at matthiasott.com/newsletter.

Own Your Web is a newsletter for anyone who wants to design, build, create, and publish on the Web.

Whether you want to get started with your own personal website or level up as a designer, developer, or independent creator working with the ever-changing material of the Web, this little email is for you. 💚✊

How to follow people on X (previously Twitter) via RSS:

1. Find a Nitter instance supporting RSS. I use nitter.privacydev.net.
2. For a handle like @Astro_Jessica (NASA astronaut Jessica Meir)…
3. the Nitter URL is https://nitter.privacydev.net/Astro_Jessica
4. Paste that into your feed reader, and it will figure out the rest.

alt=“Feed reader NetNewsWire shows Twitter posts from Jessica Meir. The selected one is a photo of Jessica smiling in a spacesuit with her husband and baby, with the following text. Wonderful to finally be back in a #spacesuit for the first time since being pregnant! Smiles all around with my husband and baby there to watch me submerge at the @NASA_Johnson #neutralbuoyancylab. @astro_luca and I evaluated tasks for upcoming #spacewalks on the @Space_Station - a day well spent supporting the @NASA team!”

100 gecs dj session at Boiler Room: Los Angeles is absolutely wild! 🎵 They are having so much fun with it. Just look at Laura’s grin when everyone sings along to Jump in the Line at 43:37. 🥹

The energy in the crowd makes me wish I were there! And the set list evokes so much nostalgia for this old millennial. One of the commenters nails the vibe:

Basically my doctors office playlist 🔥

You know you’re on to something great when calculating the value of your “insurance fund” involves calling numpy.random.normal. 😅

The prosecution shows that the "insurance fund" that FTX bragged about was fake, and just calculated by multiplying daily trading volume by a random number around 7500

I really enjoyed State of the Browser the other weekend. All the talks were lovely, but/and @Amy_Hupe’s It all means nothing in the end was a delightful surprise. It wasn’t about states or browsers, but a fascinating perspective on burnout, purpose, and making meaning. See it!

This September, Micro.blog ran a photoblogging challenge: snap a photo every day based on a prompt. I participated for the first 14 days before… life happened. 🤷‍♂️ But I had a lot of fun with the challenge for those two weeks. And really enjoyed seeing what everyone else was coming up with throughout the month.

Congratulations and well done to everyone who participated!

I promised to reveal all the machine-generated images after the challenge. Yes, some of my entries were not snapped by me, but instead dreamed up by a text-to-image model. First, here’s a complete list of my 14 entries:

I mentioned the 90s clear-craze back in June, and maybe it’s just me, but I sense a small renaissance is going on. Just in the last week or so, both Analogue and Flipper Devices released translucent editions of their gadgets. I don’t mind! 🤤

I’m enjoying a cozy little puzzle game called Automatoys. Simple controls, lo-fi jazzy tunes, lagom difficulty. The developer, Steffan Glynn, was inspired by the vintage arcade Musée Mécanique in San Francisco. 🕹️

You should watch Bottoms. Best friends PJ and Josie start a fight club in the name of female self-empowerment as a scheme to get other high schoolers to have sex with them. Hilarious and unhinged! 🍿

Look at this work of art. What a beauty. 😍 Nice work, @aparrish.

i made this custom game boy flash cart by "dead bug" soldering a DIP parallel flash chip to a cartridge edge breakout board that i designed. there's no memory bank controller in here, so you can only flash roms up to 32kb (i have tetris on there now haha) but i like how it turned out!

GitHub now has a setting to underline links. 👏 Thanks @eric et al.

A lot of accessibility work is a progress over perfection mindset, with a mind to the long game. Which is to say onwards and upwards!

I misremembered and thought today’s prompt was sculpture, not statue. What a fail. So no guessing this time. This is John Bauermonumentet. Sculpted by Karl Hultström in 1931 and photographed by this fellow human today, during a stroll through the city park. 👸

Keep in mind that for some, it’s still hump day! 😊 Here’s my entry for day 13 and the prompt glow. Is it produced by wetware 🧔‍♀️ or software 🤖?

Karin af Klintberg’s latest film, Kungen, features an extraordinary synthy and organic soundtrack by Katharina Nuttall. Kinda reminds me of the score from The White Lotus. Well worth a listen on YouTube. 🎵

For day 12, the prompt is panic. Would you bolt if you saw this shadow? And was it captured by me 🧔‍♀️ or dreamed up by a text-to-image model 🤖?

We made apple pie for today’s commercial special event! 😋

Tonight, I enjoyed a cold beer in the evening sun on our balcony. So in retrospect, getting those cans of Okinawa-style lager from teenage engineering was a good call. But, is this a photo I took 🧔‍♀️ or the creation of a text-to-image model 🤖?

Let’s break the cycle for day ten. Here’s a throwback of me riding a bike in the summer of ‘93. Captured by good ol’ dad. Definitely human.

I know my way around a few languages – programming ones, that is. Like assembly language for the classic Sharp LR35902 (the CPU of the original Game Boy). But here’s a question for you: did I 🧔‍♀️ take this pic of the handheld, or was it cooked up by a text-to-image model 🤖?

The prompt for day eight is yonder. Are those tourists actually real, captured by a human photographer 🧔‍♀️, or are they just the creation of a neural network 🤖?

I love this initiative from Kagi (the ad-free, paid search engine)! They now bump up relevant results from the small web, like blogs and personal websites. And there’s a fun way to stumble upon new sites. A great companion to Marginalia Search. Yay for all efforts to humanize the web!

Kagi Small Web offers a fresh approach by promoting recently published content from the “small web.” We gather new content, published within the last week, from a handpicked list of blogs and surface it in multiple ways[.]

One week of the photoblogging challenge already! Is this panorama captured by a human 🧔‍♀️ or dreamed up by a text-to-image model 🤖?

Here’s the website with a teaser for Hayao Miyazaki’s next film, The Boy and the Heron.

All is well in this realm, but dream 🤖 or reality 🧔‍♀️, can you tell?

Fellow microbloggers, I’m sorry I lied. Two out of my five challenge entries so far were generated by a diffusion model.  A couple identified the dreamed-up sunset. No one (!) suspected the fake clouds.

The rest was shot by me. Thanks, everyone, for participating so far. Keep the guesses coming! 😊

Well, it’s no secret that I love me a lush forest. But is this one documented by your fellow human 🧔‍♀️ or just a latent diffusion model’s 🤖 dream?

It’s day four already, the prompt is orange, and you know the drill by now: was this pic snapped by me 🧔‍♀️ or dreamed up by a text-to-image model 🤖?

This potholder might look ordinary, but it is very precious to me. Or maybe it doesn’t even exist. What do you think – is this pic snapped by me 🧔‍♀️ or dreamed up by a text-to-image model 🤖?

The prompt for day two of the September Photoblogging Challenge is buildup. What do you think – is this pic snapped by me 🧔‍♀️ or dreamed up by a text-to-image model 🤖?

alt=“Against a blue-green sky, friendly-looking clouds might build up to something.”

The prompt for day one of the September Photoblogging Challenge is abstract. What do you think – is this pic snapped by me 🧔‍♀️ or dreamed up by a text-to-image model 🤖?

alt=“A marble-like surface comes alive with a vivid palette of magenta, thistle, and indigo. The colors gracefully blend, forming organic and fluid shapes that captivate the eye.”

I’ll post a picture every day for the September 2023 Photoblogging Challenge. To keep it interesting, I will sometimes use my computer to manifest a “photo.”

And you – yes, you – are welcome to guess whether it’s snapped by me 🧔‍♀️ or dreamed up by a text-to-image model 🤖.

It might be fun! I, for sure, will learn a lot, and maybe we will all be better at spotting fakes at the end of the challenge.

Oh, man, now I want to find an old knitting machine and start hacking on it. This is just marvelous! 🧶

Retreat is an independent electronic machine knitting practice based in Berlin. All items are crafted by a real human with the help of a hacked domestic knitting machine from the 90s.

This reminded me of the don’t write it down advice in REWORK. (via @grumpygamer)

But people will say, "Do you keep a notebook?" and the answer is, I think a writer's notebook is the best way in the world to immortalize bad ideas. My idea about a good idea is one that sticks around and sticks around and sticks around.

These 40 hats by Anders are stunning! I think I know LeChuck’s hat, Ash’s cap, Samus’ helmet, and about two dozen more. How many can you place? 🤠

The history of video game hats - One "hat" per year from the past 40 years.. see if you can guess them all #pixelart

If Ben were to voice Mario in the future, I wouldn’t be too sad. (via Tobias)

My official audition to play #Mario.

I’m on my way to see Oppenheimer. 20 meters away, my niece exit from the cinema. She’s just seen Barbie with two of her friends. I’m not aware of her at first. But then I hear her. Loud and clear. Shouting. 

Svampen!

That’s what she calls me. She runs towards me and jumps into my arms. I do my best to catch her and keep her there for a long hug. It feels fucking great. And I savor the moment because I know it won’t be long before she’s way too cool to greet her old uncle like that.

I’m with Rebecca; who doesn’t love a good desk? Here’s the desk of Kojima-san back in the 90s. (via shmuplations)

Does it make me nervous? Do I feel my territory encroached upon? Not yet, probably because I’ve reached a fairly advanced age. But I will tell you that this subject always makes me think of that most prescient novel, Colossus, by D. F. Jones. In it, the world-spanning computer does become sentient and tells its creator, Forbin, that in time, humanity will come to love and respect it. … Forbin cries, "Never!" But the narrator has the last word, and a single word is all it takes:

So, remember my idea of posting photos snapped by a human and conceptions dreamed up by text-to-image models and letting you all guess whether they’re real or not?

Well, getting it right is probably not going to be that hard, judging by my results so far. 😅

We wrote this week’s newsletter from the Norrmans Castle (Häckeberga slott). An out of the ordinary but/and cozy hotel. Worth a visit!

The newsletter issue features the cover of Butts – A Backstory and a couple of reading tips. Check it out if you love books and understand Swedish.

404 Media was an instant add to my feed reader. First read: Inside the AI Porn Marketplace Where Everything and Everyone Is for Sale.

404 Media is a journalist-founded digital media company exploring the ways technology is shaping–and is shaped by–our world.

We’re focused on investigative reports, longform features, blogs, and scoops about topics including: hacking, cybersecurity, cybercrime, sex, artificial intelligence, consumer rights, surveillance, privacy, and the democratization of the internet.

Thinking about doing the Micro.blog photo challenge with a twist this time. I post a pic every day, you guess whether it’s snapped by me 🧔‍♀️ or dreamed up by a text-to-image model 🤖.

It might be fun! And, hopefully, at the end of the challenge, we will all be able to spot fakes more easily.

I’m time-traveling tonight. A bootleg uploaded to YouTube transports me to Huskvarna Folkets Park where we caught Nina Persson + Martin Hederos during the temporary easing of restrictions in 2021.

Sitting there on our plastic chair islands at a comfortable distance from other humans. Weird times. 🎵

Breakfast at Talldungen. 🤤

To block OpenAI and ChatGPT from training on your Micro.blog’s data, paste the following into the robots.txt file.

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Disallow: /

The easiest way to do that is by installing my plug-in Custom Robots, tap the Settings button and paste the snippet above in the text area named robots.txt Content.

the coolness of the url is inversely proportional to the coolness of the web project. the best website you'll ever find is gonna be something like libra.v2.progrecali.​edu/oct2023/dept/manifesto.html, but going to etherzone​.ooo or, say, x.​com will be the worst experience of your life

It’s amazing how creative two-year-olds Balder and Haakon are when it comes to coming up with insults! I wish I had their imagination. 🥰

I’ll fire you up! I’ll poop on you and sit on you!

From the documentary Store små mennesker.

Here’s the outcome from the foggy morning: crayfish with dill. We’re all set for kräftskiva.

We woke up early to go catch some crayfish and were met with this foggy morning. I was in charge of propelling the boat forward while @sannalund captured the magic vibe on video.

It’s not every day that your to-do list is filled with items like “put the secret message in a bottle” and “row out to the island and bury the treasure”. 🏴‍☠️

I helped snap photos today for @sannalund’s upcoming online course. It’s pretty neat how moving furniture around transforms our study into a makeshift studio.

I just put up my Super Game Boy 2 for sale. I love how the translucent blue shell exposes the PCB. As a kid growing up in the 90s, a fair share of my electronics and toys looked like this. Do you remember the clear craze? 👻

Tiny Awards is my kind of award. 🥰 Looking forward to the finalist reveal next week. Voting opens June 22.

Tiny Awards is a small prize awarded by an equally-small selection committee of online makers to the website which we feel best embodies the idea of a small, playful and heartfelt web.

The award will take the form of an actual, physical trophy and a small cash prize thanks to ZINE, and will almost certainly result in literally no additional accolades or fame or fortune whatsoever.

I can confirm the following statement is true, those strawberries were tasty. 😋

Well, hello! The yummiest strawberries I’ve ever tasted.

I love how Jack just shoved a Seiko NH38 into an old Apple Watch. Repurposing ftw!

macOS Sonoma features I look forward to:

• Safari web apps & profiles
• Sorting groceries into categories in Reminders
• Support for linking between Notes

Amazing. 🤯

Protovision, I’ve got you now! David’s room from 1983 Wargames. Scratch built 1:12 scale model.

It was inevitable. I’ve orbited around @neauoire@merveilles.town’s Uxn project for a while, knowing I would fall down the rabbit hole sooner or later. Today, I wrote my first lines of Uxntal, probably not my last. Uxn is an ecosystem (assembler, emulator, etc.) around a little fantasy computer.

alt=“Two windows on a macOS desktop. A text editor with assembly source code, mentioning “alien art formula” in the comments, and generated graphics. The graphics resemble the fractal Sierpiński triangle rendered in light-on-dark green.”

Thanks to Veronique and Manu for letting me know about CtrI-ZINE. I plan to catch up on all four issues from the hammock this summer.

[T]hese are the stories and entries of those who love the Web. … We want “what’s best” for us. The Netizens at-large. Be it a digital native, a mobile-first upbringing, oldcore BBS’ers from the last century, or those who will get help with their homework from AI. It (the Web) is BY and FOR us - let’s do our damnedest to have it serve us well!

Love Hultén’s creations always put a smile on my face. Here’s TEGEL, a sound sculpture based on biodata. 🪴

alt=“An intricate sculpture, crafted from miniature bricks, that doubles as a synthesizer, exuding an aura of vintage industrial charm. It features an array of buttons and an authentic analog meter. Encased in a glass dome, a tiny tree plant is ingeniously connected to the synthesizer, adding an organic touch to the mechanical marvel.”

Apple devices will be getting on-device voice cloning later this year, and I’m pretty excited to give it a whirl, even though it’s only available in English for now. Among the Big Five, I have a hunch that Apple might be the one to offer machine learning features in a way that respects our privacy.

Users can create a Personal Voice by reading along with a randomized set of text prompts to record 15 minutes of audio on iPhone or iPad. … [It] integrates seamlessly with Live Speech so users can speak with their Personal Voice when connecting with loved ones.

I just updated my now page! I’m deep into the new Zelda game, almost done with Aurora, still figuring out large language models, and preparing for a party. What are you up to?

Jotted down from my home in Jönköping.

👰🏻‍♂️ Next weekend, I’m getting married! Well, that’s not entirely true. Sanna and I were actually married last year, but we’ve been celebrating multiple times. In just seven days, we’re hosting a party at Villa Strömsfors for our closest family members. I can’t wait!

📚 I’m nearing the end of the sci-fi novel Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson. There’s a passage in it where one character has a conversation with the starship’s AI, and it reminds me a lot of interacting with large language models. I’m really enjoying it so far.

The release date of Tears of the Kingdom has never been closer and yet so far away. I’m struggling with the urge to just download the leaked version rather than wait for seven more days for my preloaded copy to unlock. 🫠 🎮

New sci-fi concept album from The Cotton Modules is out today. 🎵 Of course, it comes with a tappable short story because… Robin Sloan. 🥰

The Deep Space Sloop John Bethel was leaving Earth because culture had stopped.

It was an age of paranoia and boredom.

Politics and entertainment ran in a dumb, dark loop — the regurgitations of banal AIs that were, apparently, good enough.

Exclusive: unveiling the elusive sight of my foot after a delightful strut through the enchanting Tiveden! 🌲

I love the woods of Tiveden, which lie just half an hour from our cabin. It’s like entering the world of John Bauer. You expect to see a magical being around every giant stone.

@sod and I walked for hours and relished the April sun. A fabulous Friday. A great start to the weekend.

So, @sannalund surprised me with a gift-for-no-special-reason the other day (aren’t those the best kind of gifts?): Moonbound by Jonathan Fetter-Vorm. Looks stellar! Can’t wait to read it. 📚

It’s #FeedReaderFriday again! 🥳 Rachel Simone Weil makes wonderful art like Hello Kitty Land (a Super Mario Bros. ROM-hack) and connectedNES (a Wi-Fi “modem” for the NES). She also curates the FEMICOM Museum. Follow her blog and Mastodon feed (they are RSS too).

Six years ago, I built a WiFi "modem" and live Twitter feed cartridge for the Nintendo NES. With Twitter's relevance on the decline, what other kind of live text feed would you like to see on the NES? Reply here with your ideas—maybe I'll port one of them to ConnectedNES!

It’s Tuesday evening. I just had coffee, emptied my feed reader, and learned that:

• Evan published what might be the last everything we know about Zelda: TotK before the release. Just a month away!
• BigRig built the world’s biggest Nintendo 3DS.
• While Nathan exploited a regular-sized DSi.

To me, one of the more unbelievable scenes in Tetris is when Henk asks

This game is programmed in C, yeah?

gets an affirmative answer, goes on to produce some original 2-bit graphics, and ports Tetris to the Game Boy in like 10 seconds.

There are C compilers for the Game Boy today, but back then, the games were written in assembly for the Sharp LR35902. Of course, I wasn’t a programmer at Nintendo R&D1 in the 80s – I wish! – but I did have some fun reverse engineering Tetris for Game Boy to get rid of Bullet-Proof Software’s copyright screen. 🤓

🔭 Search Space is out of beta! 🥂 New in version 1.0.0:

• 🎙️ Transcripts can be indexed!
• 🪚 Post content in search results is truncated at 300 characters.
• 🗂️ Indexing replies and transcripts are optional.
• 👋 The greeting text (Welcome to Search Space …) can be edited in the settings.

One wikipedian had fun with today’s Did you know … section. 🙃 Love it! Via Molly White.

Remember! There’s no such thing as having too many book-related newsletter subscriptions. If you’re a fan of sci-fi and/or horror, subscribe to Frights, Flights, and Literary Delights. Curated by @sannalund and yours truly.

Or read our first issue on the web. 📚

– I do a nude scene. Do you want to see it?
– Huh? Did I say yes?
– You didn’t say anything.
– I meant yes, my mouth didn’t speak.

🤩 From the trailer for Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City.

I’ve just rolled out a new version of my ✍️ Reply by Email plug-in. Now with email obfuscation to combat email harvesting & keep your inbox safer! 🛡️

Remember, no solution is 100% foolproof against web scraping spam bots. For best protection, combine with a service like Apple’s Hide My Email!

📚 Great advice from Oliver Burkeman:

[Treat] your “to read” pile like a river (a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a few choice items, here and there) instead of a bucket (which demands that you empty it). After all, you presumably don’t feel overwhelmed by all the unread books in the British Library – and not because there aren’t an overwhelming number of them, but because it never occurred to you that it might be your job to get through them all.

For those of you using my 🦄 Magic Preview plug-in in Safari, force clicking the 🔍 Preview link gives you a quick preview of what your post will look like. Works on handheld devices as well, just tap and hold the link to see a preview without opening the page. Like magic! ✨

Instead of manually adjusting hundreds of Markdown formatted microblog posts when migrating my blog from Jekyll to Hugo (Micro.blog), I asked ChatGPT to do it for me. How did it go?

👀 Read How ChatGPT made my migration from Jekyll to Hugo a breeze to find out.

The other day, after running my blog on Jekyll for 13 years, I switched to Hugo. Moving from one static site generator to another involves a lot of things to take care of. Among them was this directory with hundreds of microblog posts written in Markdown. The posts published dates encoded as Unix timestamps in the filenames: 1665322487.md etc.

Micro.blog hosts my new Hugo blog, and their import tools do not support Unix timestamps in file names. Instead, publish dates should be put in the YAML front matter, as follows:

We’re doing wine, pizza, and newslettering again. If you’re at all interested in books – especially in the horror and sci-fi genres – you should stop what you’re doing right now and sign up for Frights, Flights, and Literary Delights. The first issue will arrive tomorrow.

A gpt-3.5-turbo powered poet-clock. Cute idea! Matt goes into some details in his post My new job is AI sommelier and I detect the bouquet of progress.

I made an AI clock for my bookshelves! It composes a new poem every minute using ChatGPT and mysteriously has this enthusiastic vibe which I am totally into

Here’s 3 × Game Boy (again):

• A Game Boy emulator device that harvests energy from the sun and your button mashing. More scientific papers like this, please. 🥺
• Travis Goodspeed’s Game Boy ROM Tutorial reminds me of my piece, How to Take Screenshots the Hard Way.
• Just look at 2bitboy’s custom-made Camera+ below. What a piece of art! 👌

Bill Gates on The Age of AI has begun:

First, we should try to balance fears about the downsides of AI—which are understandable and valid—with its ability to improve people’s lives. …

Second, market forces won’t naturally produce AI products and services that help the poorest. The opposite is more likely. …

Finally, we should keep in mind that we’re only at the beginning of what AI can accomplish. Whatever limitations it has today will be gone before we know it. …

Despite some slippery spots, we had a lovely Sunday stroll at Dumme mosse.

Updated from my home in Jönköping.

💚 Sanna and I are having a blast furbishing up our study. The room is now very green, cozy, and inviting! We’re still ticking stuff off the to-do list, though. Those baseboards won’t install themselves. 😅

🤖 I’m deep down the large language model rabbit hole. Exploring, poking around, learning about, and teaming up with them. I see a lot of potential! But also risks. I might come around to jotting down some of my thoughts…

This post is just a test to see if we can abuse the newly introduced 600 characters limit for quotes, without actually, you know, quoting anything. Maybe we can! As I write this, I don’t know, and I have to keep typing to reach the 600-character limit. If you, dear reader, can read this post in its full glory on the Micro.blog timeline, it means I’ve succeeded. Let’s celebrate that:

🎉🥳

My new Micro.blog plug-in is a minimal, no-frills post editor. But it has one pretty magical feature: live previews!

See it in action below, try it on my blog, or look up 🦄 Magic Preview in the plug-in directory. ⚠️ Read the important notice there before installing. Have fun!

I will not harm you unless you harm me first

Here are some hilarious (AI-powered) Bing encounters compiled by Simon Willison.

I teamed up with OpenAl’s Whisper and had a lot of fun hacking on interactive transcripts this weekend. The neural net handled the transcription, so I, the human, could focus on programming and implementing the user interface.

See the demo below or live (in Swedish).

It’s #FeedReaderFriday again! And you should subscribe to Julia Evans’ blog for nerdy posts, like Why does 0.1 + 0.2 = 0.30000000000000004?, and beautiful, informative zines, like Hell yes! CSS!.

alt=“Illustrated zine cover. Two awesome humans high-fiving each other. One holds a laptop, the other a rough sketch of something. The background consists of a web browser, gadgets, pens, and sketches.”

Today I completed another task on the study to-do list: installing the ceiling light. Thirteen individual glass globes had to be attached one by one – tedious, but worthwhile! 💡

Summarize any content on the web - from articles to books - in a jiffy!

Universal Summarizer works on videos as well. I fed it my talk from Micro Camp 2022 and out came a pretty spot-on recap.

Om du gillar böcker och befinner dig i närheten av Jönköping ska du så klart besöka SmåLit i morgon. Föreläsningar, författarsamtal, bokmässa och massa annat kul för bokmalar och läslöss. 📚

Där, vid ett av åttio bord kommer du hitta Sanna (och undertecknad) krängandes Sveriges kanske just nu bästa skräcknoveller. 👻 Vi ses!

Books and potted plants are slowly but surely finding their way back into the study. Along with one of @veronique’s original drawings. 🥰 Check out her lovely creations over at veronique.ink.

AI is increasingly used to generate spam content. Spambots explores what would happen if, instead, machine learning was used to empower a group of robotic Spam cans to tell their tales.

I love how Neil Mendoza’s cute spambots tirelessly remix Huxley’s work. Via Lynn Cherny.

End-of-day update! The famous last 20 % still remains, but the room is definitely closer to being finished now than 8 hours ago. I love how cozy it is! 🥰

The study is coming along nicely! 💚 We’re getting help from a pro, and I appreciate the fact that I’m not drilling holes in the wall myself. 😅

Wine (The Heinrich Maneuver), pizza, and newslettering with this awesome human. That’s a recipe for a great Friday night.

The next Murderbot book arrives on November 14th, and I can’t wait to read it! 📚

On this misty winter morning, I stumbled upon a lonely buoy on the frozen lake Viken. I think it’s longing for spring, yearning to be free once again. Or maybe it’s just me.

metalcore × yurufuwa = soft and fluffy hell. If you like Children of Bodom and/or Foo Fighters, this all-female Japanese heavy metal band might be right up your alley. 🎵

NEMOPHILA / DISSENSION U.S. Ver. [Official Music Video]

We are changing up the study/home office. Hello, green walls! 💚