Category: Useful stuff

  • Interview with Mastodon creator, Eugen Rochko

    Interview with Mastodon creator, Eugen Rochko

    Nilay Patel interviewed Mastodon’s creator, Eugen Rochko recently. Listening to Rochko reinforces Mastodon’s importance to me, and why a distributed and open social network like this is so important both today and in the foreseeable future. I recommend listening to the interview and/or reading the transcript.

  • Interview with Stephan Ango, Obsidian CEO

    Interview with Stephan Ango, Obsidian CEO

    I really enjoyed Nicole can der Hoeven’s and Andy Polaine’s interview with Stephan Ango (aka kepano), Obsidian’s CEO, recently.

  • Setting up my own Mastodon instance

    Setting up my own Mastodon instance

    I decided to set up my own Mastodon instance (❓what is Mastodon?). I was pretty happy being on the mastodon.social instance. It was my first instance that I joined back in 2016 and it was my first introduction to this terrific service. As the broader Mastodon network has grown, public instances have had to adapt…

  • Learning vim

    Learning vim

    After procrastinating for a while (probably years at this point), I decided to explore this #vim thing that techie people rave about, last week.

  • Collections in any browser

    Collections in any browser

    One of the features in Microsoft Edge that I’ve grown to really like is Collections. Granted there is some overlap with regular bookmarks. At the same time, Collections feel much more convenient, and immediate. Still, they are limited to Edge (in this form).

  • Plus Codes are the addresses you didn’t know you have

    Plus Codes are the addresses you didn’t know you have

    I’m fascinated by Plus Codes, a @googlemaps initiative to give people without conventional street addresses, a GPS-based address that can be used to receive mail or assistance when they need it. I’ve noticed #PlusCodes in Google Maps, and didn’t really explore them further. Take this one as an example. It’s apparently a beautiful hiking spot…

  • How I use Obsidian for Dungeons and Dragons games

    How I use Obsidian for Dungeons and Dragons games

    After exploring Notion and Dynalist for my game preparation for Dungeons and Dragons games, I’ve settled on Obsidian for Dungeons and Dragons games, as my preferred tool. There are other amazing tools for sure. This is the one that best fits how I like to prepare my games, and I thought I’d share that in…

  • Choosing Signal over WhatsApp is about personal agency

    Choosing Signal over WhatsApp is about personal agency

    Reframing the WhatsApp privacy debate It is tempting to frame the discussion about WhatsApp’s privacy policy change that enables WhatsApp to share your profile data with Facebook (even though it’s been doing this for some time without being clear about this) as being about Facebook being able to read your WhatsApp messages. That interpretation is…