Dan J’s Website

I just came across musician Teddy Swims, from hearing Lose Control in a hair salon and looking him up. I just listened to his album I've Tried Everything But Therapy (Part 1.5)¹ and I love it.

Sound reminds me of discovering Gnarls Barkley² and Fitz and the Tantrums 15 years ago. Will probably buy a copy of the album—I'm trying to do that more these days instead of streaming.

Austin Churton Fairman (15 November 1924 – 4 April 1997), who used the name Churton Fairman but was more widely known under the pseudonym Mike Raven in the 1960s and early 1970s, was a British radio disc jockey, actor, sculptor, sheep farmer, writer, TV presenter and producer, ballet dancer, flamenco guitarist and photographer.

I love clicking on a person with a curious name in the cast list for some movie and discovering such a strange and interesting life!

The most obvious example is user accounts. In most cases, I, as a user, don’t need an account. Yet programs keep insisting that I, not them, “need” one. I don’t. I have more accounts already than a population of a small town. This is something you want, not me.

I could not agree more with every word of this.

(Also, hey! This dude made one of my favourite fonts!)

This is a free app that lets you download entire websites as single files for offline browsing (their headliner is downloading Wikipedia). Not sure this is immediately useful, but it feels useful. Bookmarked to try sometime.

So much of enjoying something involves knowing how to enjoy it.

This is a post about books, but that there is a truth about everything.

Via Subscriber Writing, September(ish) 2025 - Freddie deBoer

A frog has no trouble grabbing a fast-moving fly in midair.

But the same fly, sitting on a leaf, is safe, essentially invisible to the frog.

We’re a lot like frogs sometimes. We choose to pay attention to things when they’re changing, not when they feel normal.

If you want something to get noticed, move it.

And if you want to improve your situation, try looking for things that aren’t moving, but could be improved.

Seth is a master at aphorisms like this, writing little gifts that I read and say (if only inside my head), "Ohhh!"

nb is a command line and local web note‑taking, bookmarking, archiving, and knowledge base application

I came across this the other day while researching plaintext/CLI-based workflows, and my eyes bugged out of my head like in those old cartoons where a wolf sees a pretty woman¹—this looks like exactly the tool I’ve been looking for.

I’ve spent the last few days migrating notes from various other apps into plain text files managed by nb, and I’m really enjoying it so far. Will no doubt have more to report here.

I never remember what plastics I can recycle and what I can’t; this is a handy reminder.

I’m a huge fan of people who dive into arbitrary corners of pop culture in insane amounts of detail.

Therefore, I couldn’t be happier to have found this deep dive into the ending of The Sopranos, inspired by the discussion of the scene found in episode 462 of The Incomparable podcast.

Bless all these nerds. ❤️

This is cool. Coming to you from The Village. 😎

Direct link to scalable image

(via Tim Ferriss's 5-Bullet Friday newsletter)

our lives are
held together with
thoughts of where
we might be tomorrow.
And of disappointed
yesterdays.

(via Tim Ferriss's 5-Bullet Friday newsletter)

I've been looking for guides for how to do .NET development in Vim, because Vim has long appealed to me for a variety of reasons too esoteric to get into right now. And, despite it being what I'm using to write this post, I'm hungry to get away from Visual Studio Code and its "I'm secretly Javascript running on Chrome don't tell anybody"; I mean, I've used WAY worse web-simulacra-of-native-apps (I'm glaring at you, Descript), but still. Code is a little janky (for some reason, File > New Window doesn't seem to work anymore) and I don't need my text editor to swallow 2GB of RAM when I'm not using it.

ANYWAY, I'm bookmarking this article because it looks helpful. Actually, Rudism.com just looks all over like the kind of site I want to have. So, also bookmarked for inspiration.

Someday. Yes, someday. Someday I'm going to spend a lot of money on a mechanical keyboard. ...Probably this one. This guide is a good quick-reference that summarizes some of the many, many, ridiculous number of options available. 😂

Great little essay by Patrick Rhone, making the argument against relying on a piece of software to hold your journal:

The history of computing has copious evidence to back me up on that bold statement. The evidence shows that Day One (who I will note bills themselves as a “journal for life”) will likely be long gone in 20 years (Go ahead and bookmark this post and come see me then if I’m wrong).

Maybe when the company dies they’ll give you an exit plan to save your work or maybe they won’t.

Day One is a great app, but I've been wanting to move away from it for a long time. Partly to get out from under one more silo—right now, my journal is in their app, on their servers... it doesn't feel under my control.

I'd rather have whatever I write be in plain text—like the source of this post that you're reading. Even then, being able to read write I wrote decades from now depends on the bits that make up this post persisting, being available, being readable... and the history of computing has not borne out the likelihood of that.

Couple things I don't have an obvious replacement for:

• Ease of putting photos into Day One entries
• Geolocation - I like knowing where I was when I wrote something down

Neither of those are insurmountable, even in a hardcopy journal! The lure of convenience keeps me tied to an app. Hopefully not until it's too late to leave.

I've added this to my workouts to start building the strength and stability I'll need to do full overhead presses eventually. Bookmarking for ease of reference.

Love this brief post from Rick LePage, especially the bit from Seinfeld. And the bit about the work being hard, and that being by necessity and design. It goes with something I've been thinking a lot lately: that my mood and self-image and maybe mental health in general improve a lot when I do the work and degrade rapidly when I don't.

Also, an apparently-different recent interview with Seinfeld (guess he's being interviewed a lot recently?) produced this, quoted in James Clear's 3-2-1 Newsletter for April 23: "The right way is the hard way."

Sein knows what's up.

(via Daring Fireball)

I always try to do sudo cd /some/restricted/dir and it doesn’t work and I always forget why.

sudo cd won't work because the cd command is built into the shell. So you are saying become root and then run this command. You become root and then the command after sudo is searched for but there is no cd command to find.

The method to use is to switch to the user that owns the directory. Permission 700 is meant as "owner can read, write and execute".

So if root owns the directory sudo -i, password and then cd {dir} is the only correct method. If someone else owns the directory you can still use the 1st method but can also change to that user with su {username} and then use cd as that user.

In summary: cd isn’t a “command”, so you can’t pass it to sudo. Instead, use su to become an appropriate user and then use the shell to change directories.

OMG, you guys… MegaZeux still exists!

I used to fool around with this ASCII-art game/game editor 25 years ago! It was a new, more-advanced version of ZZT, which might technically still exist, too.

A week off + quarantine has made me nostalgic for the games of my youth, and today I remembered MZX… and found it. 🤯🤓

I feel like I "should" be making things instead of consuming them. At least playing old Nintendo games makes me itch to try developing my own, instead of just sinking hours into the couch.

We'll see if that itch leads anywhere.

Nice collection by James Clear. Reading material.

...Point off for incorrectly hyphenating "all time" in the title, though. 😏

Highlights/Notes:

After I wrote the item “do something nice for a friend” – because being a good friend and having good friends is important to me. I completed the pair with the item, “do something nice for myself”. A secondary thought, but still, a thought.

This understanding started reading Burnout (a book that affected me so profoundly I have lost track of the number of women I have bought it for). Burnout is a symptom of the patriarchy.

I wonder where that conclusion comes from (not that I think she’s wrong). Guess I should read Burnout... 🤔