I saw Simon Willison (one of my favorite blogs writing about AI) recently added a new “notes” feature to his website. He credits Molly White’s micro notes feed as inspiration. As someone who also recently added a similar feature to my blog, I gotta say, I really would love to see this trend continue to spread. It’s been fun and freeing to have a place to post little random one-offs again without the baggage of social media.
Happy opening day … ⚾️
No question about it, I am ready to get hurt again.
First new pair of actual running shoes in over fifteen years. Tried the track on Sundays the last month and decided to follow through with this whole “be more healthy” thing by adding in more cardio to my life.
Taking a little mini vacation for a week. Day one is checking out some Dino Legos at OMSI. Impressive.
Fuck yeah, we can live like this
Jack's Mannequin - "Holiday from Real"
But if you left it up to me
Every day would be
A holiday from real
We'd waste our weeks
Beneath the sun
Listen: https://chorus.fm/share/alb...
Here’s the Python script I wrote that calculates how many words and articles I’ve written on this website. I run this at the end of the year, change the dates, and use it for my yearly stats posts. No idea if it’s of any interest to anyone, but if you run a WordPress blog it should be pretty plug-in-play by changing the URL, author ID, and dates.
Read More “WordPress Words Written Python Script” I think I started naming my computers sometime in high school. If memory serves it was probably something I picked up from my computer networking friends.1 I think it started with Linux servers but has carried over to my desktops and laptops.
Even today my servers have names (Chorus is Melody, the Forum is Overture, the headless Mac Mini in the closet is Harmony).
And my personal computers are named as well. However, it was only in the last, I dunno, ten years or so, that I also started giving them custom icons to go with their names. I heard John Siracusa talk about this on a podcast at some point and I realized I had not actually changed my hard drive icon in years. I remember doing it on Classic Mac OS and one of my earliest computer memories was making my 3.5 floppy disc have a custom Bart Simpson icon. And I change quite a few of my dock icons2 to be, to me, more aesthetically pleasing and similar.
Now I not only change the name of the computer, I also change the hard drive icon.
My desktop, the big beefy boy that he is, is named Optimus:
And the sleek black laptop is named The Batmobile:
The IconFactory has a lot of awesome icons.3 And so does Louie Mantia.
It’s fun. I recommend it.
Ten songs is a weekly playlist from Jason Tate featuring songs enjoyed over the previous week. It is included in every edition of the Liner Notes newsletter and is free to sign up for via email.
This playlist is available on Spotify and Apple Music.
Read More “3/23/25 (Ten Songs)” I got older. The pop-punk universe blessed me. This week’s supporter Q&A post can be found here.
If you’d like this newsletter delivered to your inbox each week (it’s free and available to everyone), you can sign up here.
Read More “Liner Notes (March 23rd, 2025)”
This week’s wall picks is me begging for the sun to come out. Please. Let me blast that Relient K album to a sunny with a high of 75 this week.
Hannah made me whoopie pies for my birthday. I’ll be over here in a sugar coma if anyone needs me.
This morning, I tried listening to the re-record of one of Anberlin’s classic albums, Never Take Friendship Personal, and I do not have positive thoughts:
This sounds like the YouTube covers of songs that I find pretty obnoxious. Like the cover of this album should just be a dude with a beard making a weird face with a yellow font saying “what if Matty Mullins sang for Anberlin?!!”
All the life has been stripped out of these and replaced with vocals that have had every inch of personality mechanically pulled from them. Anberlin’s a top 20 most played band for me and I’m glad they can continue making money I guess, but I really kinda just hate everything about this one? Like … stand on your new music? Between this and the deleting or replying to fans with rude comments on Instagram has really soured me on this era of the band.
However, this whole re-record thing did lead to something positive. I’ve been complaining for years about the online master of the original album on all streaming services. It’s extremely low volume and washed out. Today I saw a comment that the weird three-album-compilation thing Tooth and Nail put on streaming services actually has the better, proper, master. I went to Apple Music to check it out, and holy hell, they’re right! And because Apple Music still lets you change metadata on the Mac app (please never take this away Apple), this means it was very easy to swap this version out in my library. Finally.
Highly recommend. This is the definitive version of this album to me.
I realized that I hadn’t updated my “recommended blogs” page in a while and as I (try to) move away from social media that means I’ve been adding even more to my RSS reader on a regular basis. Since these days more and more people are writing newsletters instead of blogs (bring back the blogs!), Jason Snell has a good reminder on the various ways you can pipe these newsletters directly into your RSS reader. I use NewsBlur as the backend for RSS (which also has an email address you can signup for newsletters with) and then for most of these I need to use ReadKit’s “reader” mode and the result is a newsletter perfectly rendered in the app.
Note: No need to be fancy, you can subscribe to my newsletter directly with RSS. (And this blog too.)
