Dan J’s Website

Having just gotten my winter boots repaired, I once again had recourse to Ian Fieggen's indispensible database of shoe-lacing tutorials. But this time I ended up on his homepage and his site is such a joyously retro collection of interesting things (sort of like how I aspire to have this site be.)

So come for the shoelaces, stay for this moving tribute to his father, Chris.

I love a website that's been online since the '90s. Represent, Professor Shoelace.

I just came across musician Teddy Swims, from hearing Lose Control in a hair salon and looking him up. I just listened to his album I've Tried Everything But Therapy (Part 1.5)¹ and I love it.

Sound reminds me of discovering Gnarls Barkley² and Fitz and the Tantrums 15 years ago. Will probably buy a copy of the album—I'm trying to do that more these days instead of streaming.

Austin Churton Fairman (15 November 1924 – 4 April 1997), who used the name Churton Fairman but was more widely known under the pseudonym Mike Raven in the 1960s and early 1970s, was a British radio disc jockey, actor, sculptor, sheep farmer, writer, TV presenter and producer, ballet dancer, flamenco guitarist and photographer.

I love clicking on a person with a curious name in the cast list for some movie and discovering such a strange and interesting life!

The most obvious example is user accounts. In most cases, I, as a user, don’t need an account. Yet programs keep insisting that I, not them, “need” one. I don’t. I have more accounts already than a population of a small town. This is something you want, not me.

I could not agree more with every word of this.

(Also, hey! This dude made one of my favourite fonts!)

This is a free app that lets you download entire websites as single files for offline browsing (their headliner is downloading Wikipedia). Not sure this is immediately useful, but it feels useful. Bookmarked to try sometime.

So much of enjoying something involves knowing how to enjoy it.

This is a post about books, but that there is a truth about everything.

Via Subscriber Writing, September(ish) 2025 - Freddie deBoer

I've been a long-time user of Plex, and a happy one. I have a lifetime Plex Pass from back before it was a subscription. There are great client apps for Plex, like Prologue for managing and listening to your audiobook library.

And yet... Plex is closed-source, and some things about …

A frog has no trouble grabbing a fast-moving fly in midair.

But the same fly, sitting on a leaf, is safe, essentially invisible to the frog.

We’re a lot like frogs sometimes. We choose to pay attention to things when they’re changing, not when they feel normal.

If you want something to get noticed, move it.

And if you want to improve your situation, try looking for things that aren’t moving, but could be improved.

Seth is a master at aphorisms like this, writing little gifts that I read and say (if only inside my head), "Ohhh!"

As I gradually rebuild this website up from nothing, it amused me to have no stylesheet for a while, and just see black text on a white background with blue links that turn purple when you visit them. Talk about a throwback!

But now it’s time to add some …

nb is a command line and local web note‑taking, bookmarking, archiving, and knowledge base application

I came across this the other day while researching plaintext/CLI-based workflows, and my eyes bugged out of my head like in those old cartoons where a wolf sees a pretty woman¹—this looks like exactly the tool I’ve been looking for.

I’ve spent the last few days migrating notes from various other apps into plain text files managed by nb, and I’m really enjoying it so far. Will no doubt have more to report here.

It’s so funny, all the ways I come up with to hold myself back from just making stuff and sharing it with the world, to wit:

I’ve written, or drafted and half-written, lots of posts over the last many, many years that I never posted on my various …

I never remember what plastics I can recycle and what I can’t; this is a handy reminder.

I’m a huge fan of people who dive into arbitrary corners of pop culture in insane amounts of detail.

Therefore, I couldn’t be happier to have found this deep dive into the ending of The Sopranos, inspired by the discussion of the scene found in episode 462 of The Incomparable podcast.

Bless all these nerds. ❤️

This is cool. Coming to you from The Village. 😎

Direct link to scalable image

(via Tim Ferriss's 5-Bullet Friday newsletter)

our lives are
held together with
thoughts of where
we might be tomorrow.
And of disappointed
yesterdays.

(via Tim Ferriss's 5-Bullet Friday newsletter)

I've been looking for guides for how to do .NET development in Vim, because Vim has long appealed to me for a variety of reasons too esoteric to get into right now. And, despite it being what I'm using to write this post, I'm hungry to get away from Visual Studio Code and its "I'm secretly Javascript running on Chrome don't tell anybody"; I mean, I've used WAY worse web-simulacra-of-native-apps (I'm glaring at you, Descript), but still. Code is a little janky (for some reason, File > New Window doesn't seem to work anymore) and I don't need my text editor to swallow 2GB of RAM when I'm not using it.

ANYWAY, I'm bookmarking this article because it looks helpful. Actually, Rudism.com just looks all over like the kind of site I want to have. So, also bookmarked for inspiration.

Someday. Yes, someday. Someday I'm going to spend a lot of money on a mechanical keyboard. ...Probably this one. This guide is a good quick-reference that summarizes some of the many, many, ridiculous number of options available. 😂

“The most important thing to remember is this: To be ready at any moment to give up what you are for what you might become.”

— W.E.B. Du Bois

(via @patrickrhone)

Great little essay by Patrick Rhone, making the argument against relying on a piece of software to hold your journal:

The history of computing has copious evidence to back me up on that bold statement. The evidence shows that Day One (who I will note bills themselves as a “journal for life”) will likely be long gone in 20 years (Go ahead and bookmark this post and come see me then if I’m wrong).

Maybe when the company dies they’ll give you an exit plan to save your work or maybe they won’t.

Day One is a great app, but I've been wanting to move away from it for a long time. Partly to get out from under one more silo—right now, my journal is in their app, on their servers... it doesn't feel under my control.

I'd rather have whatever I write be in plain text—like the source of this post that you're reading. Even then, being able to read write I wrote decades from now depends on the bits that make up this post persisting, being available, being readable... and the history of computing has not borne out the likelihood of that.

Couple things I don't have an obvious replacement for:

• Ease of putting photos into Day One entries
• Geolocation - I like knowing where I was when I wrote something down

Neither of those are insurmountable, even in a hardcopy journal! The lure of convenience keeps me tied to an app. Hopefully not until it's too late to leave.

I've added this to my workouts to start building the strength and stability I'll need to do full overhead presses eventually. Bookmarking for ease of reference.