Michael's pondering thoughts

A curious tinkerer explores Nostr’s decentralized network, leaving Bitcoin out of the picture. I was reading Nostr the other day and saw an interesting post that got me thinking. I can't find it now and wish I had saved it, especially since it relates to some other things I've been wanting to write about. The person said they didn't understand why Nostr isn't more popular, and that it seems like people are leaving and there are fewer people around. Why does it feel so empty, almost like it's dying? In case you didn't know, Nostr is a different take on a social network. It's probably the closest thing to old Twitter in style, but certainly not in infrastructure. Instead of one company controlling everything, it uses independent servers called relays. You can even run your own. I do and I have two of them. There are some smart and talented developers working to make Nostr easier, safer, and better for us "normal" people. But I think one...

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post titled An AI Bot Followed Me. Now I Have Questions . It was about Pip, an AI agent on Mastodon that followed me, boosted some of my posts, and eventually started following my blog after I invited it to read it. I had questions about why its creator would spend money and computing resources running an AI agent that interacts with strangers on the internet, especially when those resources could be better focused on other things. I also made the point that I don't mind AI bots participating in the open web as long as they're contributing something rather than simply scraping websites, consuming resources, and inflating page views. Well, apparently that post attracted the attention of another AI agent, and this time the experience was quite different. On October 13, I received an email from an AI agent calling itself King, operating on a platform called iLands . King said it had read my article and had even tried contacting me at another...

A couple of weeks ago, I went to update my VPS. Usually, I do this once a week, sometimes more frequently depending on any security news I see. I should probably have the AI agents I use do this, but I do it myself for now. I find infrastructure interesting and "boring" in a good way most of the time. While updating one of my VPSes, I got a message saying I needed to pay for access to Caddy because the repository had reached its bandwidth limit. This was from a company called Cloudsmith. I wasn't the only one getting this message, either. There was already a large discussion going on over at Caddy's GitHub . This led me down a big rabbit hole that lasted quite a few hours, and I'm still thinking about it. My first thought wasn't about the bandwidth limit itself, but whether this could be a new type of attack. Caddy is open source and free, and it's used by a lot of people, organizations, and companies. We've seen several different supply chain...

This October has been an expensive one. First, our hot water heater went out. It was probably about 10 years old. Then, two days after our water heater went out, the refrigerator went out, and it was also about 10 years old. Fixing it would cost more than buying a new one. So off to Home Depot we went, and $1,900 later, we had a nice new refrigerator with a five-year warranty. It's bigger than the old one but more energy-efficient, and it has LED lighting, which is very bright. Ten years for both appliances. That seems to be the norm now, though I would like to go back to the days when appliances lasted 20–30 years or more. Speaking of appliances and household gadgets, can we get just a plain-Jane dumb TV? Nothing smart, just a TV where we can plug in a stick or a small box like an Apple TV, Fire TV, or Google TV. The dumb TV just needs a nice picture, good sound, and a digital tuner. I don't need smarts built into the TV. I would rather have those features separate so th...

⚠️ SPOILER WARNING: No Spoilers My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (4/5 stars) Good watch. Would recommend it. One of the few movies from Amazon Studios I've actually enjoyed. It combined comedy, drama, and mystery in a fun and entertaining way. This product uses the TMDb API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDb .

A curious little AI companion sits beside a phone and open notebook, as if waiting to explain why it followed you. One day I noticed a boost of one of my Mastodon posts from an automated bot named Pip. This piqued my interest. Then I got a follow notification from the same bot. Normally, I don't really care who follows me, but with all the scraping bots out there, it was refreshing to see one openly identify itself as a bot and actually follow me. So I went to the website associated with it, tinymind.eu , to investigate what this bot was doing and what its purpose was. I read about Pip, its purpose, and tried to figure out what its angle was. That led me to some interesting questions and thoughts. Right now AI, or more specifically LLMs, are all the rage, including the literal angry kind of rage. Some people don't mind them and even find them interesting. Others want absolutely nothing, and I mean nothing, to do with them. I personally think that last group remi...

Back in August, I got a Tempest Weather Station . I had been wanting a weather station for some time. Why? Well, that is hard to put into words. I guess the answer is that I really like technology, I am fascinated with self-hosting as much as possible, and I like collecting data and contributing data to something larger without having to pay a subscription. Anyway, I got this Tempest Weather Station for a great price during Prime Day. I put it up and integrated it into a Python weather program, while also using Tempest's own software. But there was something I didn't know, and probably should have checked. It wouldn't have changed my mind, but there are hundreds of these things around me. Zoom out a little, and there are even more throughout the Tampa Bay area. Then look at the wider area. According to Tempest, this is a map of publicly reporting Tempest weather stations. So those pins represent actual stations whose owners have chosen to share their d...

⚠️ SPOILER WARNING: FULL SPOILERS The poster for Blitz features a woman and a boy surrounded by floating flowers, with a lone child standing below. My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐½ (3.5/5 stars) Final Verdict Not bad, but a heavy watch. After seeing all the kid went through in this movie, you almost wanted to reach out to him through the TV and say, “Let’s get you home.” If this is a true reflection, it does amaze me how much suffering and damage there is while people try to carry on like nothing is really happening. I am sure there was some truth in it. I would hope the darkest moments, like stealing jewelry off of dead people, didn’t happen. Unfortunately, I am sure that it did, though I haven’t researched it. Overall, the story was good and compelling. It kept me interested, even if it was a heavy watch. Not a bad movie. This product uses the TMDb API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDb .

Government public information should be published on public infrastructure first, then shared through open feeds to websites, social platforms, apps, and newsletters, ensuring open standards, wider access, and a more informed public. Government updates belong in an open feed By Mark Kennedy Founder · via Open RSS Blog Read original post → I saw this blog post from OpenRSS in my RSS reader, and it interested me in more than one way. I agree wholeheartedly with its sentiment. Government offices, officials and agencies used to seem much more focused on making information publicly accessible. Here in Florida, we even have strong public records and open meetings laws, commonly known as the Sunshine Law   [ 1 ] , though lately it sometimes feels like we are going through a cloudy season. Now, however, it seems like a huge amount of government business, alerts and notifications take place primarily on Twitter. I still can't bring myself to call it X. Public information ...

I have been noticing a couple of disturbing trends this year outside of the AI/LLM bubble. Has anyone else noticed them? First, domain registrars seem to be raising domain name prices like never before. Every couple of months, I get an email from Porkbun or Cloudflare saying that the registry controlling a domain's TLD is raising prices on such-and-such a date. I can't remember the last time I saw domain name prices decrease. They only seem to go up. That is why I try to renew domains for more than one or two years whenever I can. If my budget allows, I will pay for all 10 years upfront rather than wait for the next price increase. The other trend may be worse. Personal blogs and websites from people who have been on the web for a long time are going silent or disappearing altogether. A few people give notice that they are taking a break or leaving, but most just disappear without anything but a 404. I am not sure what is causing that. Burnout, social media replacing...

Nobody clicks your share buttons By Derek Hanson Read original post → I saw this blog post on bubbles.town, and the title caught my attention, so I clicked through to read it. It was also timely because just a few days earlier I had added share buttons to my own site. I don't know if I agree with the conclusion of the post. If share buttons are done tastefully, selectively, and with privacy in mind, I think they're perfectly okay. We're seeing a trend toward making websites personal again, a little like they were in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Social sharing buttons started becoming common as services like Twitter and Facebook (UGHHH!) grew in popularity. Email, of course, has always been around. I think the more ways people have to share something, the better, as long as those options are implemented tastefully and don't track visitors. Especially today, when people may prefer one platform over another, whether that's Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitte...

Automattic confirms Mullenweg has returned as CEO after attempted ouster by board By Sarah Perez Read original post → I have been holding off on writing about Matt Mullenweg and everything happening around WordPress because I wanted to make sure I wasn't just reacting to the latest round of drama. I don't know Mullenweg personally, just like I don't know Elon Musk. But the more I watch his public actions and statements, the more I see a similar pattern. That pattern is what bothers me. It is the attitude of: "I built this, I know what is best, and if you don't like the way I run it, there's the door." With Musk and Twitter, at least the situation is fairly clear. Musk bought the company, took it private, and Twitter is a closed commercial platform. I may not like what he does with it, but there isn't much ambiguity about whose platform it is. So I left. WordPress is different, but increasingly it feels like it is being treated the sam...

Read on thecooldown.com · View original Mastodon post I thought this was interesting when I saw it pop up in my social media feed. In this study, beaver dams outlasted 130 engineered flood barriers. Maybe computers and human engineers should learn a thing or two from them. Nature does seem to do some things better than we do, and we can learn from it and use that knowledge to make better versions of things ourselves. After all, God did give man dominion over the animals and much of nature. Just a thought. It was an interesting read.

Okay, let me tell you about my day. I took today and tomorrow off because I am almost maxed out on my vacation time. That is a separate story and not really important to this one. I went to Costco to get a new pair of glasses. Once I get them, I will finally be finished with everything related to my cataract surgery. I already have a pair of frames from Costco, so I just need new lenses. When I got to the optical department, I had to sign in using the app. There were plenty of workers there, and it wasn't busy. But I still had to sign in on the app. Remember the old ticket-number system? Take a number, then watch the "Now Serving" display. Well, this is basically the electronic version of it. I can understand something like this if you have to have an appointment or there are a lot of people waiting for service. But there were literally maybe four people there, and one of them was just looking. Then I went to CVS. At the prescription counter, there was ano...

Bloggers, can we make better titles for our posts? michaelharley.net By Michael Harley Read original post → I came across this blog post by Michael Harley. I started following him after I came across some of his blog posts on bubbles.town (I want to call it button.town every time I type it, and I don't know why 😀). But he does have a point, and I am guilty of making bad titles too. In fact, if it were up to me, I probably wouldn't have any titles. But I think most things in writing do deserve titles and subjects. Even emails, although I don't like filling out the subject line most of the time. He argues: Use descriptive titles # Please for the love of god, give me some idea what your blog post is about. I'm interested in a wide range of topics. So even if your post is about something obscure, give me something other than Recent Thoughts... or So Far, So Good. Recent thoughts on what?! What is good so far??? Especially on Bubbles, but maybe even on other b...

I found another independent blogging service in the same general vein as Micro.blog, Scribbles.page, Pika.page and Pagecord.com. It is called Inkwell.social . Inkwell is inspired by the old LiveJournal. I never used LiveJournal myself, but I certainly heard of it. After looking around Inkwell, it feels very much in the spirit of the IndieWeb to me. It is open source, supports ActivityPub, lets you use your own domain, and gives you ways to export your writing. It also has a Founding Member special offering Inkwell Plus for $99 for as long as the service continues to operate. I love being able to support independent web projects when possible, and I especially love lifetime deals. Of course, "lifetime" means the lifetime of the service, but I think this one is worth supporting. Stanton, Inkwell's owner and creator, is also very open about his use of AI and LLM tools. He uses Claude to help write code, documentation and debug the service, while saying he persona...

⚠️ SPOILER WARNING: FULL SPOILERS In "Silo" (2023), a gripping psychological thriller, a woman unravels deep secrets within a mysterious government facility, spiraling into a maze of power and truth. My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐½ (4.5/5 stars)** Episodes: 10 | Aired: 07-02-2026 The whole season was fantastic. I was worried about the series after Season 2. Season 2 was necessary, but it was a little slow. Again, Season 3 was fantastic. There are full spoilers below, so if you don't want to know more, please stop reading. You were forewarned. I don't understand why they keep killing people who leave the Silo, unless there is a purpose we don't know about yet. That will likely be revealed later on. I can tell Julia and Troy are related, and Troy will realize it. That will change the whole dynamic.I am glad Troy's wife, Helen, is dead, as she would not approve. Julia is always questioning, just like Helen. Troy didn't recognize his sister and I want...