Blaugust 2026 on Toby Geeks Out!

AuguStory - How I started a Blog

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 09:01:14 -0400

I’m already in the middle of Blaugust this month, and then Robert Birming started something called AuguStory. Why not do both, I figured. The idea is simple: write the story of your blog, no template, no fixed questions, then send him a link so he can add you to the list. I loved the idea as soon as I heard about it.

So here’s my AuguStory: how I got into blogging, and what I’ve been doing with it ever since. I’ve been blogging on and off for 22 years now, more pauses and restarts than I can count. But none of that ever stopped me from trying to get back to writing. I’m glad I’m still at it.

My earliest memory of journaling goes back to junior high school. I started writing in it every day, in an actual notebook. It was short-lived, but it was fun while it lasted.

In high school, I always loved to write. I wrote stories and poems, though many of them are probably lost now, saved on old floppy disks that no longer work. One that stands out was a homework assignment, a short story I called The Mystery Runner, about 20 pages long. I’m honestly not sure anymore if I finished it, homework stories being what they were. What I do remember is trying to describe a place that didn’t actually exist, building it out in detail. It was fun and a real challenge.

I graduated in 1994, and after that I tried AOL dial-up and started dabbling online. There were some lost years where I didn’t write much. But then the internet intrigued me; I saw the potential in it, and I took advantage of it, exploring around until I discovered weblogging - that’s what they called it in the beginning, before “blogging” became the word everyone uses now. That’s when I rediscovered my passion for writing again, and I got excited about starting my own blog.

That’s what got me into journaling online. The earliest I can remember was when I tried out LiveJournal, Blogger, and other small blogging platforms (I don’t remember which ones) around 2004. My actual first blog was on Blogger too, deantobias.blogspot.com, but it’s gone now. My second blog is where things really stuck, deanscyberspace.blogspot.com.

I don’t have a single favorite post from back then. I was just excited to be posting anything at all, so here’s my second post from deanscyberspace, April 2004, just me saying good morning to everyone: deanscyberspace.blogspot.com/2004/04/h…. It’s short, but that’s part of the beauty of blogging, you can write as short or as long as you want, whatever the moment calls for.

It’s also a personal post, just a small moment from my day, the kind of thing I don’t write much of anymore. I still bring my own thoughts and personality into what I write now; that hasn’t gone anywhere, but sharing a specific little moment from my actual day like this is different. Reading this back makes me think maybe I should bring a bit of that back too.

In the earliest days, I worried about whether anyone would read my blog at all. I was trying to figure out how to get people to actually find it. Eventually I had between 80 and 150 readers, give or take; I honestly don’t remember the exact number anymore. But at the time, that felt like an exciting moment.

Social media showed up: MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and I got curious and sidetracked. Reposting and reblogging were huge back then, and it was fun to reshare other people’s stuff for a while. That’s really what pulled me away from writing. During that stretch, I was doing mostly microblogging on Tumblr, sharing photos and reblogging things I found interesting.

After Tumblr, I actually started writing again on WordPress, and kept that going until 2022. I was just writing because I wanted to, not for anyone else. Then I toyed with Postcard and Medium for a bit, posting a few things here and there before finally landing on Substack in 2023. Looking back, I guess I almost never really stopped writing, perhaps just short pauses in between. There was always something going on somewhere.

Once I was on Substack, I wrote there for a while, and even explored Beehiiv for a bit early on, just curious if it might be a better fit. But I stuck with Substack.

Then I got laid off in October 2024, and that’s what stopped me. Life got in the way for a long stretch after that, personal things that needed my full attention, and blogging had to wait. I finally settled down around November 2025.

I picked things back up in January 2026. I’d already been drafting most of my posts in Notion for a while by then, and copying them into Substack was still tiring, that’s really what got me looking at other platforms again. I gave Medium and Postcard another look, curious if anything had changed since I first tried them, and tried Feather.so for the first time, it especially caught my eye since it could connect directly to my Notion database. I cross-posted the same content across a few of them to compare, but I kept coming back to Substack, still not entirely sure if anything else was actually better.

So I gave Feather.so a more serious try. But it was unreliable. I remember adding a featured photo to one post, but it just never showed up, even though the image was already in the database. That kind of thing was frustrating. I still had to write everything in Notion first too, so it didn’t stick. And their subscription is expensive. In the end, I only stuck with it for about two or three months before deciding it wasn’t for me.

Substack was great in a lot of ways, but there were things about how they handled things that bothered me too, like the dickover wall they’d throw up before you could even read a post. I wrote more about that here. That was part of what pushed me to keep looking around.

Then I remembered I actually had a micro.blog account from 2022, and started digging into what it could do. I could customize everything exactly how I wanted: run a newsletter, save drafts right there, even build my own version of the editor with the API. I stopped using Notion for drafts altogether; everything lives in micro.blog now. I landed there a few months later, and I’ve been happy ever since.

Looking back, I don’t think what I write about has really shifted that much. Even on Blogger, I wasn’t just writing about tech. I wrote about whatever was on my mind, same as I do today. What’s changed more is the specific things I’ve been drawn to along the way: the environment, food, health, history, and writing itself, all on Substack. That was part of the experiment, seeing which ones I enjoyed writing about most. I even tried politics there for a short time, but that got tiring and tedious fast, so I dropped it.

Even today, I still occasionally write about the same kinds of topics I did cover on Substack, and I’ve picked up some new ones along the way, too: LEGO, movie ratings, watchlists, book progress, home decor once in a while, and even word-definition cards for my Word Nerd Alert posts. But lately, my focus has leaned mostly toward AI and blogging itself. I think that’s because it’s such a hot topic right now.

Since I’m still figuring out what I really want to write about, I try different things to see which ones I actually enjoy most. That’s the journey to finding my voice, and my writing might read a little different depending on when you’re reading it, because of all that.

Writing has always had a hold on me. Even when I turn away from it for a while, I always come back to it. I hope I stick with writing for life. This post alone took a couple of weeks and a lot of revisions to get right, feels fitting, honestly.

If you want the full timeline, every platform, every hiatus, in detail, I put it all together here: The Long Road Here.

We Handed Bullies a Better Weapon

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 13:02:31 -0400

I read a 404 Media story back in May and I still think about it.

At Radnor High School in Pennsylvania, a freshman boy paid $250 for an app and used it to make fake nude pictures of five girls in his class. Real faces. Girls he sat next to every day. He sent messages about it from a school laptop. The next morning he stayed home. The girls came in anyway. So did his friends, who said they didn't see anything.

One of the girls texted her mom about it. Her words: "It's not okay."

She's a teenager, and she had to explain that to her own mom, because nobody else was.

The story is two months old. In tech news, that's ancient, and everybody moved on. But the apps are still up, and the next kid can still find one. Old news doesn't mean solved.

She's right. It is not okay.

If you haven't run into the term, a deepfake is a picture or video that AI made to look real. Feed an app a photo of somebody's face, and it builds a fake body or a fake scene around it. None of it happened. It just looks like it did. The ones built for this are called nudify apps, and they need exactly one clear photo. A school picture works fine. Most of these sites ask if you're 18 and then take your word for it.

And this isn't one strange kid at one school. Teachers have a name for it now. The NEA calls it a trend in school cyberbullying. Here's the number that stopped me: reports of AI-made child abuse images to the national tipline went from 4,700 in all of 2023 to 440,000 in the first six months of 2025. Radnor is just the one that got written about.

I got bullied in high school. I won't get into it. But I know what it's like to walk into a building where everyone already decided who you are, and you can't do anything about it. Back then it was words. Rumors, notes, jokes to my face. Bad enough, but it faded. People got bored. Somebody new next month.

Photo shaming isn't new either. Back in my day somebody printed a picture and passed it around the hallway. That was bad, but it was paper. There were only so many copies, and you could rip one up. Then it went digital and nothing gets torn up anymore. A fake picture doesn't get bored. It gets saved, sent, posted again, and it sits on somebody's hard drive for the rest of her life. Now it's AI, and a kid can make something that never happened and put it in front of the whole school before lunch. What I dealt with was nothing close to this.

What bugs me most is how easy it was. He didn't hack anything. He didn't need any skill. He opened an app store, paid, uploaded photos of his classmates, got abuse material back. That's a product. Somebody built it, listed it, took his money, kept a cut. Pennsylvania made this a crime back in 2024 and it still only took a credit card.

I write about AI here a lot, mostly because I like it. I use it every day. But this part I can't wave off. The same tools I like did this to five girls. "It's just tech, people misuse everything" is a lazy answer. A nudify app has one job. Nobody points it at a kid by accident.

I hope the companies do something. Not a statement. Not a policy page nobody reads. I mean the app stores that carry these apps, the payment companies that take the money, the AI companies that build the models. A ninth grader found this app, paid with a card, and aimed it at his classmates. Any one of them could have stopped it before it got to him. Build tools that can't do this, or pull the ones that already do. That's not a big ask.

Then there are the adults. Parents told 404 Media that the school handled it badly, and that it took the governor stepping in before anyone treated it seriously. Louisiana was worse. Two boys were charged for making images of their classmates, but before that happened, one of the girls they targeted got expelled for fighting the boy she accused. She got punished first. Schools were slow with the old kind of bullying too, but this one has a legal name, and the name isn't bullying. It's child sexual abuse material.

If you have a teenager, have the talk. Not "be careful what you post." Their photos are already out there and always will be. Have it with the boys. Making it is a crime. Having it is a crime. Standing there pretending you didn't see it makes you part of it. If you want help starting, Homeland Security has a tip sheet on AI and deepfakes written for parents and teens.

Those five girls showed up the next day. That's more guts than anybody in that building earned.

Ghost Bikes

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 10:47:05 -0400

I walked past them for years, back when I lived in DC — those all-white bicycles chained to signposts and light poles around the city, sometimes with flowers or a photo tucked into the spokes. I knew they had to be some kind of memorial. What I never knew was what to call them. Then I came across a post about one in Canberra and finally learned they're called ghost bikes. And once you know the name, you can't unsee them.

A ghost bike is a small, quiet kind of memorial. Take a bicycle, strip it down, paint the whole thing white — frame, wheels, seat, everything — and lock it up at or near the spot where a cyclist was killed by a driver. Sometimes there's a sign. Sometimes just flowers, a photo, a stuffed animal. The bike itself becomes the marker.

The practice traces back to St. Louis in October 2003. A man named Patrick Van Der Tuin watched a driver hit a cyclist in a bike lane, and in response, painted an old bike white and left it at the scene with a hand-lettered sign reading "Cyclist Struck Here." He and some friends went on to place more than a dozen additional ghost bikes around the city. Other places picked up the idea soon after — Pittsburgh in 2004, then New York, Seattle, and dozens more cities worldwide in the years since. By one count taken in 2017, more than 630 ghost bikes had appeared across over 210 locations around the globe.

The idea of a painted-white bike actually goes back even further. In 1960s Amsterdam, an anarchist collective started leaving white bicycles around the city as part of a scheme to make bikes free for anyone to grab and ride — an early bike-share experiment tangled up with protest art. The ghost bike movement borrowed the color but flipped the meaning: instead of an invitation to ride, it became a marker of a ride that ended.

I'd seen a couple around DC and figured there were probably more scattered across the city. What I didn't know were the specifics — who each one was for, and the individual history behind it. Take the one in Dupont Circle, where I used to work — I must have walked past it more times than I can count without ever knowing whose story it told. The fuller stories are worth reading on their own, so I've linked a few below.

That's really the whole intent behind them: not decoration, not even just mourning, but a visible, physical reminder planted in the exact spot where the design of a street failed somebody. A ghost bike doesn't ask you to feel sad. It asks you to notice — and maybe to ask why that intersection needed a body before anyone paid attention to it.

Now that I know what to call them, I keep thinking back to the ones I walked past without ever really looking.

Further reading:

Titles, and What I Didn't Think About

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 09:24:51 -0400

Bloggers, can we make better titles for our posts?

by Michael Harley

On where I provide my unsolicited opinion about how you write posts on your blog.

Read post →

Michael Harley wants bloggers to write better titles for their posts. Descriptive titles, no vague ones, no clickbait.

I get why he wants that. It would be nice to know a little of what's inside before you read the whole thing. But it's their blog. They can write a title or not. That's their choice, and it's their risk to take if they want more readers to actually read it. And if they care enough to think about what readers want to see in a post, a better title would be nice, if they can manage it.

I do read blogs with bad titles, misleading ones, even clickbait sometimes. But I'll click anyway and read a few sentences to see if it's worth my time. So whether your title isn't going to win anyone over, or there's no title at all, make those first couple sentences count. That's what actually keeps someone reading.

But again, it's their blog and their writing. Still, it made me look at my own posts a little differently.

I never really thought about it from an RSS subscriber's side before. If someone subscribes to my feed, they want some idea of what's in a post before they click. Reading his post made me realize that, so I'm willing to make my posts with better titles moving forward. I'll still use Micros without a title, as I did in the past, but that'll stay the minimum.

Some link roundups just get a generic label. "Tuesday Links." "Five Links #12." "Weekly Links." I get why. When a post covers five different things, there's no one title that covers all of it.

When I used to write my Friday Haul, five links I found worth reading that week, I thought about just titling it "Friday Haul" plus a date. But I changed my mind and gave it a real title instead, a word or two pointing to what was inside. Funny thing: I'd already made that call before Michael even wrote his post.

It's not just link roundups that get the generic-title treatment. I've seen other bloggers start doing weeknotes, and I like the touch of it. Feels close to journaling, just typed instead of handwritten, and public instead of tucked away in a notebook. Most weeknotes I see are titled the same way: Weeknotes, plus a date. I'd do that differently too. If I ever wrote one, the title wouldn't just say "Weeknotes." It'd say something like "Weeknotes: [whatever that week was actually about]."

Kev Quirk agreed with Michael and ended up changing how his own feed shows notes because of it. James Zhan disagreed, and made a case for bucket posts I hadn't thought about. Worth reading both.

Different bloggers just have different perspectives on this, and none of it is really right or wrong. I don't think blogging has any rules. It comes down to preference in the end. But it's still nice to be thoughtful about it, and think about what your readers would actually like to see.

Funny how a post about other people's titles ended up changing how I title my own.

P.S. — I'll be back with Friday Haul when I'm ready.

600 Million Blogs and Counting

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 11:05:21 -0400

I saw a stat that stopped me for a second in a post by Manton Reece: there are over 600 million blogs out there right now. Not posts. Blogs. Full sites, each one somebody’s little corner of the internet.

That number is bigger than I expected. That same post puts X at about 550 million monthly users, so blogs actually edge past it. X has been the loud one for the last decade. Blogs never got that kind of attention, but they never went anywhere either.

I knew blogging was still around, but I didn’t realize it was bigger than X in numbers. It just feels quiet compared to social media, which has gotten all the attention the last decade. No replies stacking up in real time, no counter climbing while you watch. But quiet doesn’t mean small, and blogging is still alive. 600 million blogs is a massive number for something people keep declaring dead.

I’ll admit it, I like trying new platforms, so I strayed away from blogging to play around with social media for a while. I stopped blogging entirely for stretches. But I missed it, the old days of writing drafts, doing revisions, seeing a piece through from start to finish.

I lost interest in social media somewhere along the way. I liked the old days of it better. I came back to blogging because I simply enjoy writing.

I never really lost touch with it either. I kept reading other people’s blogs off and on the whole time, even when I wasn’t posting my own. Blogging lasted because the people who stuck with it built real communities instead of chasing algorithms.

I haven’t posted on Twitter in over a year. Facebook, maybe once in a blue moon. I do still cross-post to Bluesky and Mastodon though. I’m glad blogging is still here, because I still am too.

Clearly blogging dominates the web, and it’s still going strong today. It might be the most durable thing there is. Everything else changes shape every couple of years. A blog just sits there, doing the same job it’s always done: giving someone a place to say something and keep saying it.

600 million of us doing that quietly is not nothing.

The Robotaxi That Watches Back

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 12:17:28 -0400

I read this story (see below) about two teens in San Mateo, California, who were riding in a Waymo robotaxi and started shooting Orbeez out the windows with water guns. The car pulled over in a parking lot on its own and waited. Police showed up and picked the teens up right there.

That's the part that gets me. This isn't just a car that drives itself. It's a car that's always watching, always recording, and this time it decided to turn its own passengers in.

Waymo says the cameras are there for safety, lost items, and keeping the car clean. Maybe that's mostly true. But this is a reminder that every ride in one of these things is fully monitored, by cameras and by computers, and sometimes by an actual person reviewing the footage.

Is that good or bad? Hard to say. In this case, it caught two teens acting like idiots and probably kept things from getting worse. And there's an argument that self-driving cars are safer here in a specific way: they can't get into a police chase. No high-speed pursuit, no car full of people running from cops. That part could actually make roads safer for everyone, teens included.

But it's still strange to think about self-driving cars as an extension of policing. Robotaxis are only going to get more common, and lawmakers are already working on rules to make them easier to build and deploy. If a car can decide to pull over and wait for police on its own, what else might it decide to do without asking you first?

This isn't a new idea to me. I've seen movies build entire plots around this, machines that watch their passengers and make decisions for them. I, Robot came to mind almost immediately, with a self-driving car making a call that changes everything for the person inside. It used to feel like a movie problem. Now it's a real one.

Taxis are one thing, since a robotaxi is a shared ride you step into for a single trip. But what if this becomes standard in regular electric cars, the ones people actually own and drive themselves? Not a car you rent for a ride, but the car sitting in your own driveway, deciding on its own when to report you.

I don't have an answer for any of this. I just wanted to put it into words and wonder what the future looks like.

Waymo Robotaxi Drives Law-Breaking Riders Straight To Police - BGR

Waymo

bgr.com

The One Set I Can't Fit

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 10:39:56 -0400

I love LEGO. I love Super Mario. Both go way back for me.

It started with Donkey Kong on the Atari 2600. Coleco made that version in 1982, and I played it a lot. Then came Super Mario on the Nintendo, and that was the one that really got me. Years later, I picked it up again on my Switch. That screen is cracked now. Long story.

So last week at Comic-Con, LEGO announced a Donkey Kong Arcade set. 1,367 pieces, $199.99, out August 1. It’s the original brick arcade cabinet, with Jumpman, Donkey Kong, and Lady up on the scaffolds. Pull the lever and a barrel rolls down. Move the joystick, press the button, and Jumpman leaps over it. That’s the part that got me. It’s not just a model sitting there. It actually does something.

I would buy it in a second.

Except I live in 480 square feet. I already have the LEGO Nintendo Entertainment System set. It’s still sealed in the box, sitting in storage, waiting. I haven’t worked out where it would go once it’s built. An arcade cabinet, even a small brick one, needs a shelf of its own. Every flat surface in my house already has a job.

So I do the next best thing. I pull up the photos and zoom in on the build. That part is free, and it takes up no space at all.

Donkey Lego Set

Someday I’ll have the room. Until then, those photos look great.

Your Browser Is Telling on You

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 10:38:47 -0400

I came across this Lifehacker article about browser fingerprinting and figured it was worth talking about. I turned on Brave's fingerprinting protection about two or three years ago on both my Mac and my phone, so I'm already covered. But most people have no idea this kind of tracking even exists.

Every time you visit a website, your browser hands over a bunch of small details about your setup. Screen resolution. Timezone. Installed fonts. Your graphics card. Even how your device renders a tiny hidden image on the page. None of that seems like a big deal by itself. But put all those pieces together, and they create a profile that is almost always unique to you.

Imagine walking into a room full of people. You might share the same hair color with someone. Same height with someone else. But the combination of your hair, height, shoes, the way you walk, and the watch on your wrist? That narrows things down fast. That's what fingerprinting does with your browser.

Here's the part that should bother you. You can't delete a fingerprint the way you delete a cookie. There's nothing stored on your device to clear. The tracking happens on their side, based on what your browser reveals just by showing up. Private browsing mode? Doesn't help. VPN? Doesn't help either. Neither one changes what your browser is sharing about itself.

And with third-party cookies getting phased out across major browsers, fingerprinting has become the go-to replacement for advertisers and tracking networks. It works without your permission and without any notification.

The EFF's Panopticlick study found that 84% of browsers had a unique fingerprint, and that was back in 2010, using just eight data points. Today's fingerprinting techniques collect dozens more, including things like scroll speed and how you type.

What can you do? You can't stop it completely, but you can make it a lot harder to track you.

The biggest move is using a browser that fights fingerprinting by default. Brave randomizes your fingerprint data so every site gets a slightly different version of your browser profile. Firefox blocks known fingerprinting scripts. Safari added Advanced Tracking and Fingerprinting Protection starting with Safari 17. All three are solid options.

Chrome? No built-in fingerprinting protection at all. There are third-party extensions that try to fill the gap, but Chrome's own extension framework now prevents them from kicking in before a page finishes loading. That gives fingerprinting scripts just enough of a head start to grab what they need. If fingerprinting matters to you, Chrome is working against you.

If you want to check how trackable your browser is right now, the EFF's Cover Your Tracks tool runs a quick test. Worth a look.

The LEGO Jaguar I'm Not Sure I'll Buy

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 08:52:22 -0400

LEGO just revealed the new Icons Jaguar Type-E Roadster (11381). Dark green, wire wheels, doors and hood and trunk all open, and the fabric roof folds back too. 1,673 pieces. Comes out August 1st, $139.99. The second I saw the pictures, it reminded me of something.

I'm deaf. ASL is my first language. When I was a kid, my boy cousins never bothered learning sign language. My girl cousins did. So I ended up hanging out with them a lot, especially my two closest cousins. We were what people call double cousins, our parents were siblings who married siblings from another family, so we were related to each other twice over.

We played Barbie dolls together. Constantly. I loved it, changing the dolls into different cool outfits. It was just fun.

Eventually my parents got tired of it. We stopped going to my cousins' house as much, and my parents started buying me toy cars instead. What I am going to do with them?

Then Hot Wheels started putting out cars styled after old classics, vintage-looking, even though they weren't actually old. That's what hooked me. I started collecting those and never stopped. Still have the whole collection today, sitting on a custom shelf my dad made for me on the wall. I've always liked home decor, so having them displayed like that means a lot to me.

So when this LEGO Jaguar showed up, that unmistakable E-Type shape, it clicked right away. This is the grown-up version of what I've been collecting my whole life. It'd sit right next to the Hot Wheels on that same shelf.

But I have a habit of impulsive purchases, and this set isn't cheap. I already have a stack of unbuilt sets in storage that cost me plenty. I'm trying not to add to that pile. It's nice to look at, though. And green isn't even a color I would've picked, I'd go with red or blue. That's part of what's making me hesitate. There's actually a blue LEGO Bugatti out there too, the color I'd have picked. But it's not for sale, only 250 were ever made, handed out at a special event in Denmark. So that's off the table anyway.

Truth is, I'm not as into vintage cars as I used to be. That interest has faded some over the years. So maybe that's the real reason I'm on the fence, not just the price or the color.

P.S. Still waiting on my LEGO E.T. set to arrive.

Keyboard Shortcuts Are the Best Invention

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 10:37:36 -0400

I learned Cmd+` last week. It's the key above Tab, the one with the tilde on it. It switches between windows of the same app. So if I have four browser windows open, that one key moves me through them without kicking me out to a different program.

The annoying part is apps don't tell you their shortcuts. They tuck them into a menu you never open, or a help page you never look for. So you go hunting. Or you get lucky and hit the wrong keys while doing something else, and something useful happens. That's how I found half of mine.

I've been thinking about this since I read Robert Kingett's post, "How Keyboard Shortcuts Are My Superpower." His argument is simple. Using a mouse is slow work. You hunt for a menu, drag the pointer over, wait, scan the list, click. Three seconds to save a file. Ctrl+S does it in a tenth of that. He calls the mouse a leash and the keyboard freedom, and he's right.

I'm with him on all of it. Reaching for the mouse is a detour. Move hand off keys, find pointer, aim, click, move hand back. Five steps to do one thing. A shortcut is one step. Once you feel that difference you don't want to go back.

We're not doing it for the same reason, though. Kingett is blind, so the keyboard isn't a shortcut for him, it's the way in. I'm not blind. I just like being fast, and fast is most of the job when you're writing a post, editing photos, and poking at code all in the same afternoon.

Okay, I do have favorites. J and K move you down and up a list, and they work in more places than you'd expect. Gmail uses them. Facebook uses them. A lot of sites picked up the same pair. Once it's in your hands you stop scrolling with the mouse.

In Gmail I run J down the inbox and hit E to archive as I go. Whole inbox cleared and I never touch the trackpad.

Delete is D for me. That's not the default. Gmail ships with # and I changed it to D. You can remap any of them in Settings under Advanced and set them however suits you. That switch is buried about as well as the shortcuts themselves. Hidden keys, and a hidden switch for changing the keys.

So J and K travel. Archive and delete don't. Every mail app picks its own, so check yours before you assume.

For all that, my most used one isn't fancy. It's copy and paste. Everybody knows it, everybody uses it, and it's still the one doing the most work in my day.

If you want to go looking, both companies keep a full list. Apple's is Mac keyboard shortcuts. Microsoft's is Keyboard shortcuts in Windows. Browsers keep their own too. Here's Safari's and Chrome's, and the Chrome one covers Brave and Edge as well since they're built on the same engine. All of these are long, so don't try to learn them all. Grab two or three that match what you already do every day. Those are the ones that stick.

I'm always looking for an easier way to get around with the keyboard, and when I learn a new one I want to use it constantly. But the ones I really reach for are the plain universal ones everybody already has. Every new one I pick up, I try to keep. They're worth it. Any time there's a shortcut for the thing you're about to do with the mouse, use it. Two keys instead of five steps, a hundred times a day, adds up to real time.

Best invention. I'm not taking questions.

I Lived in DC for 28 Years and Missed This

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 10:28:51 -0400

I lived in Washington, DC for 28 years. Walked past a lot of buildings in that time without ever looking twice.

One of them was the National Academy of Sciences on Constitution Avenue. Big stone building, built in 1924, dedicated by Calvin Coolidge. I don’t remember ever really noticing it. Never went inside.

David Enzel just wrote about that same building. Forty years of walking past it for him too, until a photography workshop got him through the side door on C Street. Inside is the Great Hall — a domed room with a giant painted sun at the center, surrounded by the planets as they were known back then. Architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue designed the building, and an artist named Hildreth Meière painted that whole dome by hand.

Reading it, I asked myself the same thing. How could I have missed that? I’m not down in that area a lot, just once in a while. But if I’d known about that dome, I would’ve gone to check it out in a second.

I love taking photos of architecture and deco details, old historical buildings like that. They’re beautiful to me. Next time I’m there, that building’s on my list. I’ll get a photo of that dome for my Instagram post.

One Hole Down

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 14:35:12 -0400

I bought the tiny house in July 2024. It came prebuilt as a shell, so my dad has spent the two years since finishing the inside, on and off. Walls, floors, electrical, kitchen. I moved in the following spring, and there are still a few projects left. I helped where I could, but he did the work. I don’t know much about building.

One of the projects was installing through-the-wall fans for room-to-room air transfer. We cut holes in the wall above the bathroom and bedroom doors, and then the fans never went in. Those holes stayed open for almost a year. Just a gap in the wall to look at every time I walked past. It is annoying. So why did we want the fans in the first place?

Because there’s one AC, a split unit in the living room. The living room gets all of it, and the bedroom and bathroom don’t. Neither room has an outside vent, so I keep both doors open all the time just to get air moving. Once both fans are in, the rooms should hold the temperature I want whether the doors are open or closed.

That was the worry when we built the place. We put the AC in the living room, and I questioned whether it would keep the other rooms cool in the summer or warm in the winter. A year without fans turned out fine, though. Most nights the bedroom keeps cool on its own in the summer, and it warms up a bit in the winter. I can feel the cold at times, but it doesn’t bother me.

Dad came by last week and finally installed the bedroom one, and now it pushes the hot air out. The trim on the living room side isn’t up yet. The fan had to go in first, because the grille has to sit flat on the wall to be screwed on. Now that it’s in, the trim is next, and he said he’d get to it when he’s ready. One more fan to go: the bathroom. He said he will definitely have it in before winter.

As I said, both rooms are manageable on their own, so I may not need the fans much. But I still wanted them installed in case I need to use them. Good news is the fans have a temperature controller, so they turn themselves on once the room gets past the temperature I set and shut off when it’s back down.

My dad is amazing. He’s in his 70s and still goes out and does hard work. It’s getting harder for him than it used to be, and I’m patient about that. My projects aren’t the only ones on his list either; he helps a lot of people around here. So it means a lot that he didn’t forget about mine.