Earlier this evening I finally had the opportunity to watch Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse, which I enjoyed a lot.

I have been reflecting on how my experience of films like these (films with teenage protagonists) has changed with age.

Even in my mid-to-late 20s, I would often identify clearly with the teenage protagonists, but over the last few years I have increasingly started identifying with the parents of the protagonists. Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse was no exception to this recent trend.

The data model for bookmarking and highlighting services past and present can generally be distilled down to the following:

* URL
    * Title
    * Scraped Content
    * User Highlight
    * User Annotation
    * ... Other Metadata

The bookmark itself is tied to a URL, and anything else related to the bookmark, such as the title, the scraped content (if the service scrapes on your behalf), highlights and annotations are stored as additional metadata linked to that URL.

For the past three years I have maintained a browser extension that I publish to both the Firefox and Chrome web stores.

I recently received an automated email from the Chrome web store overlords who had decided I was violating the “Use of permissions” policy by requesting the cookies permission “without using it”.

Here is a snippet from the manifest.json for my extension:

{
  "permissions": [
    "activeTab",
    "contextMenus",
    "notifications",
    "cookies",
    "https://<SPECIFIC_WEBSITE_RUN_BY_ME>/"
  ]
}

I request the cookies permission for https://<SPECIFIC_WEBSITE_RUN_BY_ME>/ so that I can transparently use the cookie set by that website when the user logs in to send authenticated HTTP requests from the extension. Nothing crazy:

I have wanted to redesign my website for a while now. In fact, I have wanted to redesign my website ever since I saw Nathan Wentworth’s website. If you haven’t seen it before, check it out. To this day it remains my favourite personal website on the internet.

In my mid-twenties my body was in pretty rough shape. I was suffering from chronic pain and had terrible mobility to the pain where my quality of life and mental state were being severely adversely impacted.

I was also terrified at the idea of entering a gym.

I worked with an excellent chiropractor in Birmingham (UK) who helped to provide significant pain relief and subsequently referred me on to a physical therapist. Through working with the physical therapist I realised that even without entering a gym, I still had a lot of avenues available to me to improve the state of my body.

The past few weeks I have been putting off updating my personal website, which has sat untouched since October 2019. I’ve done quite a lot of interesting work since 2019, so finally this past weekend, I forced myself to sit down, clone the repository, and update it.

My personal website is nothing fancy; just a static website built with Hugo and a community theme, and hosted on S3. This should be simple, right?

While watching the implosion of Twitter in real-time over the past week, I noticed more and more people in my Twitter feed sharing links to their Mastodon accounts.

During that time, https://instances.social was posted to Hacker News as a tool to help people find a Mastodon instance to register with. My initial experience with this was quite poor.

Later in the week, a thread was started in the Rust subreddit titled “Rustaceans worth following on Mastodon?” and saw that quite a lot of people were registered on the Hachyderm Mastodon instance. After spending so long playing with the filters on https://instances.social to try to find an instance and coming away empty-handed, I decided to just bite the bullet and register an account on Hachyderm.

User comments and discussions on the internet have a pretty bad rep these days, to the point where many people have just opted out of online commentary completely, going as far as using a combination of DNS filtering and browser extensions to remove them entirely from their browsing experience.

I, on the other hand, have spent the last couple of years refining ways to separate signal from noise in the cacophony of online user commentary, as I have come to believe that the most valuable knowledge I acquire on a daily basis comes from commentary and discussion rather than publishing.

If you find, as I do, the act of physically marking books indescribably (in the literal sense) disrespectful (to the physical book), you probably felt great the first time you realised that PDFs could be digitally annotated. Equally so when Amazon’s Kindle brought eBooks into the mainstream.

Unfortunately the story of highlights on Kindle has been one of some frustration and disappointment for me, in large part due to the restrictions placed on liberating highlights from the Amazon ecosystem, and the UX of highlighting on an e-ink Kindle, which remains to this today clunky, slow and always just a little too imprecise.

I don’t think I’m alone in having consumed more documentaries on cults between the years of 2020 and 2022 than I had ever before in my entire life. There were many great documentaries, but the one that sticks out in my mind even today is The Vow: A NXIVM Story.

Every time I watch a scene in that or any other documentary about cults in which people are reunited for the first time outside the cult, every muscle in my body feels the reunion that is happening on the screen.