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Blogs are making a comeback?

Saw an interesting post on Hacker News today, which asserts that the personal blog has made a comeback. I, for one, could not be more thrilled. As someone who has maintained this blog for about 25 years, I thought it was a tragedy to watch the Internet lose its innocence and move on to the crowd-source social media sites. Blogs lost their way when MySpace and Facebook took over. Microblogging on Twitter and Instagram helped seal the fate of the lonesome, personal, WordPress website.

As we’ve watched journalists and people with important things to say pour their words into for-profit sinkholes that support Nazis (ahem, Substack) over the last few years, I have always hoped that someday we’d see a resurgence of the personal blog.

Has that day finally come?

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New Album: Shadow Person – Chronic Disappointment

Shadow Person - Chronic Disappointment album cover
Chronic Disappointment Covers

My fourth album under the moniker Shadow Person was released yesterday. I wrote and performed all of the songs on this album, and I recorded them in my home studio. I am pretty excited about the way it turned out, and I am eager for people to hear it. The name Chronic Disappointment is derived from several areas, including my dismay at social and political events over recent years. You can hear a lot of these themes throughout the songs on this album.

But in addition to that, chronic disappointment is also the feeling I get after every album that I release, because I spend hours upon hours pouring my heart into these songs and recordings, only to have a couple dozen people at most ever listen to them. But hey, that’s okay. It’s the process, right?

Here are many links to the new album for you, to be sure you can choose the best one for your listening needs.

 

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Blogging Platforms in 2025

I’m not sure how many of you readers out there have been following this blog since its inception in 2002, but it has gone through many changes over the years. In the beginning, it was a simple HTML and PHP site that I maintained by hand. I eventually learned more about databases, hosting, and various blogging platforms.

Somewhere around 2003 this blog became powered by B2/Cafelog, from which WordPress was eventually forked by Matt Mullenweg. WordPress quickly became awesome, and that is what powered this blog for decades.

About a year ago, I grew really frustrated with the WordPress ecosystem because every time I’d log into the dashboard, it was slower. I was getting spammed by plugins trying to get me to upgrade or buy related plugins. I realized that sometimes I would install a plugin and it would install other plugins without my permission.

This annoying tactic became totally unacceptable to me. So I looked for a way out and I found Ghost CMS. I set myself up over there on that platform for about four or five months, but I realized customizing it was really difficult. And it was expensive.

Spending $25+ a month for a hobby blog just didn’t feel like it was worth it to me. I do maintain the strong opinion that Ghost is an excellent alternative to Substack, which I refuse to link to, but that is a story for another day.

So I migrated away from Ghost and I found Chyrp Lite, which ran this site for about eight more months, right up until a few weeks ago. Chyrp Lite was really cool. It was a basic PHP-based, MySQL database-driven blog platform that did what it needed to simply and quickly.

It was reminiscent of something you would find around the year 2008. I thought it was pretty cool, but once again, it felt rather limited and difficult to customize. It also didn’t feel like there was a lot of ongoing development to support it.

So I had a stroke of imagination one night and started wondering about forks of WordPress to see if anyone had taken the code base, which is open source, and forked it into something less cluttered and less heavy.

Sure enough, Classic Press existed. It gets rid of the Gutenberg editor in WordPress, which was controversial when it came out in the first place and I never really cared for. Classic Press is like a modern version of WordPress from 10 years ago, but it receives updates and is secure, and it is compatible with a lot of current plugins and themes out there.

That said, I’m trying to keep it simple here and I’ve been using one of the default WordPress themes, Twenty Seventeen, and am customizing that to my liking.

So far, it’s smooth, it’s fast, it’s lean, it’s clean, and I’m not getting spammed on the admin panels. You should check it out if you’re a blogger and you’re tired of how bogged down WordPress has become with all kinds of freemium plugin spam.

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The Tennis Channel App on Roku – Crashes and other problems

I signed up for a year of The Tennis Channel on my Roku TV in March. At first, it worked pretty well, though I noticed the audio and video would get out of sync pretty quickly. Restarting the app would fix it until the next commercial break. That was highly annoying, and I learned that many other people were having the same problem with no resolution.

That said, I discovered that pausing and restarting the stream would fix it, so I learned to live with it.

However, a few weeks ago, the whole app started crashing as soon as I selected a stream to watch – either live or pre-recorded.

I tried all the usual troubleshooting steps: rebooting the Roku, updating everything, reinstalling the Tennis Channel app, but nothing worked. This was the case for my TCL Roku TV and two Roku devices connected to other TV’s in my house.

Frustrated, my wife called Tennis Channel Support and the person on the other end of the line said “many other people are having the same problem.”
They said they’d be sending an email to tech support, which we soon got a response from. The email asked us to do all the same troubleshooting steps we’d already done! I did them again just to be sure, but no, nothing worked.
I started asking for a refund for my unused ~8 months of service, but Tennis Channel gave me a dubious denial:

You are requesting a full refund, which we cannot approve at this time. Your subscription was made with your own personal email, indicating that you signed up and agreed to the terms of service.

Alas, I was not requesting a full refund, I was requesting the remainder of the year I paid for, which I am unable to use because their crappy app isn’t working.
So, I filed a complaint with the FTC, who suggested I also file a complaint with my state’s Attorney General.

Done and done. You should do the same if you are having these problems!

Update – The Next Day – August 6

Turns out reporting them to the FTC actually worked. A day later I got a refund for the unused portion of the year I paid for!

Thank you for contacting Tennis Channel Customer Service!
We can confirm that your membership under this email address is now canceled, so you will not be billed in the future. We have also issued a refund for the remaining months of your subscription.

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Obsidian.md and Plugin Security

Obsidian.md is an awesome note taking system. However, any third party plugin you install has access to all the files on your computer. You must hope the developer is nice or that their GitHub credentials don’t get compromised by a bad actor who then pushes out a malicious update.

The barrier to entry to get a plugin added to the Obsidian marketplace is low, and performed only once. There is not follow-up security review.

Common retorts to these statements, and my replies:

  • It’s the same thing as X app (VS Code, e.g.)
    My reply: Yes, and that is also bad.
  • Plugins with many users are safer because they have more eyes reviewing the code
    My reply: Yes, and they are the more attractive targets. A contributor need only enough time to push a bad update no one notices to infect thousands of computers. So like, 20 minutes?
  • I don’t put anything valuable or private in my notes anyway
    My reply: How about the rest of your computer? Because that’s what they have access to.

In summary, if you use Obsidian, don’t use plugins until or unless they improve this situation.

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Building Fully Remote Team Communication

I lead a team of eleven fully remote people, most of whom have never met in person, so I am always on the lookout for ways to build relationships, strengthen how we communicate with each other, and maintain some of the lost “water cooler chat” you get in an office environment.
I stumbled on this Gitlab Handbook that has some great tips for building what they call Informal Communication.

https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/company/culture/all-remote/informal-communication/

I really like the idea of postcard swapping, which uses something tangible you can hold in your hand to build connection across distributed teams.
Another team-building strategy we used when I worked at CNN were weekly co-working sessions, where we’d meet online for an hour while doing our normal work. This would facilitate all types of discussion, learning, and cross-collaboration. Sometimes, when conversation waned, just being quite and listening to the clacking of each others’ mechanical keyboards was enough to create a sense of belonging. Writing this article reminds me that I want to implement that on my current team!

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Getting out of it what you put into it

It’s been difficult to make myself come here and blog.

Somewhere along the way, things on the internet changed. I used to enjoy writing updates in a blog post, letting friends and family know what had been going on around here, what I was up to, or even just what I was thinking. I knew that there were certain people who followed my blog pretty frequently and would often comment or even just acknowledge that I had posted something. It was a nice community feeling, and I would read other people’s blogs as well. Somewhere along the way this all shifted. I think it probably had something to do with Facebook becoming the predominant platform for people posting updates and being able to keep up with many more people in that format.

It’s a real shame though, because now I’ve gotten myself off of Facebook, off of Instagram, off of Twitter, and I’m largely just biding my time here and on Bluesky.

I find myself not wanting to share content or updates or news or anything like that. I definitely feel more more guarded about what I share online.

Perhaps it’s because of all the horror stories I’ve read about people getting stalked or swatted or whatever, just because they said something someone else didn’t like or disagreed with. I’ve been thinking often about how the internet really has precipitated the downfall of humanity. It’s pretty sad because I thought it was going to be an awesome thing for quite a while.

It definitely had an un-jaded, innocent adolescence phase. However, what happened was that once the World Wide Web became more and more accessible and was starting to be carried around in everyone’s pockets, everything started to change for the worse.

I remember back in college I took a class on how to use the World Wide Web. It was a great introduction into internet culture, what it meant to have a flame war, what spam was, and what good netiquette was.

That’s a word you don’t really hear anymore. Netiquette. It’s a shame. Everyone thinks they have the right to just get very angry at everyone else now, and it’s taken a lot of the fun out of the whole thing.

Maybe if people had been required to take lessons about the internet in order to access it, and had to learn how easily you can be fooled by misinformation and how you need to be able to discern between what’s real and what’s not, we might not be in the predicament we’re in today.

So I don’t know, maybe I’ll take this blog down in the near future. Is anyone reading it? My web statistics say “no”. So this is pretty much an exercise in talking into the ether. I’m putting things into it, but getting out nothing.

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The Toxic Utility of AI

If you’ve ever ventured onto the social media platform called BlueSky (which, I do love and is the only social platform I am on), or certain corners of other platforms like Reddit, you will likely have run across a very passionate set of people who disavow and berate anything related to artificial intelligence technology. They get so rabid in their attacks, they lose sight of the fact that AI actually has some usefulness when applied to certain situations that don’t invade privacy, don’t steal intellectual property, and don’t do things without asking you. However, if you try to point this out, you will get blocked, banned, ridiculed, and blasted for bringing it up. There seems to be no middle ground for these anti-AI people.

It’s very unfortunate. I wholly sympathize with a lot of their concerns. I don’t like the fact that AI is using intellectual property such as artwork, writing, music, and a host of other things that humans have created in order to train itself. I don’t like that this is usually done without asking anyone for their permission. And I don’t like that we’re in this situation where we have to claw back what AI has taken from us. I totally understand why that has pissed some people off entirely because it has pissed me off for the same reasons.

I recently saw someone on LinkedIn post that AI is just a glorified spell checker. And I actually agree. It’s not creative. It’s not smart. It doesn’t make decisions on its own. It relies on everything that it has been fed. So it’s really way less than it’s cracked up to be in many ways.

All of that being said, there are absolutely worthwhile use cases for artificial intelligence.
Personally, I’ve started using voice dictation with AI-assisted technology to help me speed up typing and relieve my aging fingers that have gotten slower and are usually aching by the end of a long workday. I’m enjoying that aspect of AI very much.
In fact, this whole article was written by me using a voice-to-text app called, VoiceInk. It does such an incredible job at recognizing my speech patterns, pauses, and corrections of myself. These things weren’t possible just a few years ago with any sort of voice to text application. And it does it fast.

Anyway, these are just some thoughts I’ve had bugging me and I decided to get them out there.

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Cleaning Up Apple Contacts

Apple Contacts get out-of-sync and become a mess over time, especially if you have multiple email accounts and have amassed a collection of contacts over the years. This problem was driving me nuts for quite a while, so I finally decided to sit down and fix it. Since it wasn’t simple to research, but ended up being simple to fix, I thought I’d share the solution. I am drawing upon some guidance I found on Reddit, but adding some additional tips.

The solution is to get all your devices (iPhone, Mac, iPad, etc) to only use iCloud to sync your contacts. In my case, I had contacts split across multiple email accounts I had collected over the years, and they didn’t sync up. Some cleanup is required.

Pre-requisites

You need both a computer and your phone for this.

Solution

  • Go to your iPhone Contacts app.
  • Click the top-left corner where it says “Lists”:
  • You will see all the accounts housing your contact on this page.
  • At the top of this is is “All Contacts”, which is a collection of everything you see below. Long press the “All Contacts” line (this is the merged list of all Contacts from different accounts). You’ll see an option to export all contacts.
  • Export the backup file (All Contacts.vcf) to your email or iCloud Drive or Airdrop. Whichever you choose, the goal is to send it to your computer and save it there.
  • Log in to iCloud.com from a browser on your computer. This can’t be done from your iPhone.
  • Go to Contacts in iCloud.com and click the + sign, then select Import Contact.
Click Import Contact here
  • Import the VCF file you just saved to your computer.
  • This may end up creating multiple copies of some of your contacts, which is OK, because we will soon merge and remove duplicate contacts.
  • BUT FIRST, you will need to stop syncing contacts for all the accounts you see on your iPhone and your Mac (and any other device), and only sync contacts to iCloud. Here’s what it looks like on the Mac:
  • For each account listed, open it and un-check Contacts.
  • Do the same on your other devices. Have them sync contacts only via iCloud.
  • Back on your phone, load up the Contacts app again.
  • It should notify you the duplicates it found. You can safely click Merge. It may take a little time to sync up, depending on how many contacts you have, but this should solve all of your problems!
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