The Big Five is a podcast from Donovan Woods and Tom Power. Quality Canadian wry humour perfect for a road trip. 

I’ve been blogging for 27 years now. Give or take, blogging has been a thing for just a bit longer than that. 

Over that quarter century of this new medium, we’ve developed precious few tools that assist with the things that are unique to blogging, things like “quoting and linking to something someone else wrote.” I decided to try to solve that.

After using Readwise Reader as my RSS reader of choice for several years, I decamped back to FreshRSS this spring, partially from an accumulation of minor frustrations with Reader’s UI, and partly because I wanted to be able to support Lisa’s RSS reading in a self-hosted way.

But I came back to Reader last month: I missed its full-text search, its ability to receive email newsletters, its highlighting and tagging abilities, and, more than anything else, its API.

My holy grail, as I said, was wanting to be able to highlight a passage in something and have a blog post here automagically created: quoting the work of other writers and posting a short comment is something I do a lot, and I wanted to streamline the process (see also The Three Virtues of a Great Programmer).

The enabling glue for this turned out to be the reader.document.tags_updated webhook, which fires whenever a document’s tags are updated. I wrote a webhook receiver module for Drupal which looks for the presence of the “blog” tag, and, if it finds it, does the following:

• Creates a new blog post here, optionally using title and text added to the passage as a note, and the highlighted text as a block quote.
• Applies any additional tags added to the highlight as topics for the blog post.
• Sends a webmention to the original source.
• Sends me an email summarizing the process.

Here’s what it looked like when I created this post.

First, I highlighted a passage from Wouter’s blog post:

Next, I tap on the “Note” icon and write a note about the passage, using Markdown as needed (with the title preceded by a Markdown “#”):

Finally, I tap the “Tags” icon and apply tags, finishing with the “blog” tag, which fires the webhook and does the magic:

A few seconds later I receive an email with the details:

--------------------------------------------------
NEW ARTICLE GENERATED
--------------------------------------------------
Title: Wouter Turns his Blog into a Book
Local ruk.ca URL: https://ruk.ca/content/wouter-turns-his-blog-book
Webmention Debug Info:
Source URL: https://ruk.ca/content/wouter-turns-his-blog-book
Target URL: https://brainbaking.com/post/2026/06/the-archivist-in-me-turned-this-blog-into-a-book/
Step 1: Commencing endpoint structural lookup request...
-> Header discovery empty. Scanning body markup structure via patterns...
Result: Aborted. Target page did not expose or advertise any valid Webmention endpoints.

The process automatically adds the topic From Readwise Reader, so I can see all the posts I’ve made using this mechanism.

Here’s what showed on my blog as a result of all of this:

I take inspiration from Ton in building a tool like this: he’s built a system of home-cooked apps that lets him do similar things.

After 27+ years, we’ve a lot to continue to explore here.

From The Archivist In Me Turned This Blog Into a Book by Brain Baking:

This was a special experiment with a high probability of failure as I wasn’t sure how it would turn out. What should a Brain Baking book look like compared to browsing this website? How should it feel to flip through the pages? Will I be able to squeeze everything in there (nope)? Do I want to publish this publicly or just generate a .pdf, send it to the presses just for myself and call it a day? And if so, which service to use, as the past ones I’ve relied on all showed their shortcomings?

I’ve long thought about doing the same thing, as a way of preserving the words I’ve written here. In my case it would need to be a multi-volume set, and would take an awfully long time to assemble and edit.

Imprint by Duncan Major:

Chance encounters can leave a lasting imprint, like ink on paper. At 13, Duncan Major met artist Tara Bryan and discovered a shared passion for letterpress printing that shaped his life. In her memory, Duncan created Imprint, a poetic animated film that serves as a heartfelt tribute. Using the letterpress and craft material she passed down to him, the film brings hand-printed art to life with vibrant animation, evocative imagery and a beautifully designed soundscape. Imprint celebrates how the relationships we build echo outward, leaving an enduring legacy.

A deeply beautiful short film. Thanks to Sue Brown for the pointer. 

From The Opposite of Sameness - Lecture at Domus Academy by Gianfranco Chicco:

Care is a superpower. In a world of infinite sameness, the capacity to care, to understand through making, to focus on the details that matter, and to treat each encounter between host and guest (maker and consumer, salesperson and customer, etc) as unrepeatable is the only position that cannot be averaged out.

“Care” is my word for 2026.

Midwinter this year the backup camera in my 2016 Kia Soul EV started to flake out. At first it was just Max Headrooming, but then, after a week of that, it gave up the ghost completely.

I consulted with Dave, my mechanic, and he suspected that it was the camera itself, rather than anything deeper, and suggested I grab a cheap replacement from Amazon rather than paying $400 (part only) to the dealership.

So that’s what I did.

The part arrived Friday, and I installed it today.

Installing the camera itself was easy: just unplug the old one from the wiring connector, remove it, and drop in the new one. It took 5 minutes.

Getting to the point where I could actually do that took a few hours: I had to remove a complex series of things to get access to the camera. First came the interior plastic panel on the inside of the hatchback (screws, then prying off the panel with a spatula to dislodge interior clips), and then a strip of exterior body panel that the camera sits into (more screws, then bolts, then more prying, then more screws).

I managed to avoid breaking any major parts, only lost one screw and one clip, and once the camera was in place and tested, put everything back together in a “good enough” kind of way.

Now I have a backup camera again:

It’s pretty clear what caused the camera to fail, from what I found when I removed the pieces needed to access it: there was pretty serious water infiltration from poor sealing, and so parts are rusty, and I suspect the camera simply got fried from the overwhelm of it all.

About two weeks ago we were listening to Donovan Woods on the car radio, and I declared boldly “if Donovan Woods came to town, I’d 100% get us tickets.”

A week passed.

We were driving to Nova Scotia, listening to Donovan Woods on the car radio again. Lisa casually mentioned that she heard something about him coming to play Charlottetown. I looked it up: she was right, but, alas, he was playing Charlottetown Saturday night, and we’d be in Halifax.

Sigh.

I continued to scroll: he was playing Wolfville on Sunday.

We’d be in Wolfville on Sunday!

Lisa led the charge to carry us through the wormhole of rejigging our plans so we could stay an extra night. (When I was younger, in my “sure, let’s hitchhike to Vancouver” stage, this would have been seamless; my ship  needs more ocean to change course as I age.)

We’re booked a hotel.

We got tickets.

The concert, as it turned out, was being held 35 seconds walk from our hotel, and we ate supper across the street, so little was asked of us, at least as far as moving about.

The crowd was pleasantly multi-generational, the venue just a notch bigger than “intimate setting,” but we were in row H, the last one, so it wasn’t a stadium either.

Woods played two sets, one of tracks from his new EP, with stories of his close collaboration with his late songwriting partner Abe Stoklasa, the other filled with his back catalogue.

He is a gifted songwriter and an accomplished guitarist; my only complaint was that the vocals were mushy-sounding, a combination, I think, of his (self-declared) “whispery” style, the PA, the room, and my old ears.

What the sound lacked in clarity, though, Woods more than made up for with emotional punch: his words get to the heart of the matter better than almost anyone.

It was a good night. I’m happy my ship can still turn, even if it needs more room. 

Phil Gyford has a fascinating chart in his post Laboriously keeping track; it charts his yearly cash withdrawls from his bank account:

I suspect my chart would look very similar. I very rarely need cash: the only regular need is for my haircuts at Ray’s, and for visit to the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market (and even there, the merchants increasingly accept credit cards).

On our trip to Europe last month I withdrew cash only twice (which was good, because there’s a $4 surcharge from international ATMs every time I do), and in both cases it was more “we should probably have some cash” than any specific need.

Go back 30 years to my first trips to Europe and I would have relied on ATMs (or, before then, travellers cheques) to fuel the trip, and finding an ATM would have been the first task in any new place.

(In Belgium, we discovered, the banks are getting out of the ATM business, and have formed an Interac-like consortium to create centralized ATM kiosks under the CASH brand.)

Today it’s more common to find “cards only” than it is to find “cash only,” you can pay for trams, trains, and buses with a tap of the iPhone, and it’s only edge cases, like leaving cash for cleaners, where cash is actually needed.

It seems possible that mine will be the last generation to have used cash for the bulk of our lives; it would not surprise me if it disappeared entirely in the not too distant future.

From Do Things You’ll Love Yourself For by David Cain:

And Present Self definitely sees Future Self as someone else. Think of how often you feel at odds with this hypothetical future version of you, such as when you put off something you ought to do today. You’re just dropping more work onto the desk of Future Self, who … will have enough to do already. You can rationalize it only because he feels like some other guy. He’s not you, not really. You obviously don’t want the task in question on your own desk. Say Present Self wants to sneak in another episodeof The Wire before going to bed, because it’s getting really good. This will cost Future Self something — she now has to carry the day’s already considerable burdens on 6 hours of sleep. But Present Self is the one who gets to choose for both of them.

I have never ever regretted performing acts of service for Future Self. Make the bed. Set out the cereal bowl for the morning. Fold the clothes with a little extra care.

Cain’s suggestion that we regard Future Self as “someone else” makes so much sense, and explains a lot of my own behaviour.