Théoo

If Laurel Schwulst's website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge, mine is more like Stretch Armstrong; being pulled and torn from both sides because I am unable to make up my mind for any comfortable length of time.
This "place on the internet" as I call it is now changing once again, going from beautiful simple HTML files with a sprinkle of CSS to a wonderful complex Laravel site with all the features my mind can dream up.

And there are many reasons I could use to justify this change. Since the new design has become much more complex than the previous one, it would have been an awful thing to keep it going with bare HTML.
My time would have been spent copying and pasting long and intricate snippets to add the simplest features. Adding a single note would have become a work that asks for many checks to make sure I didn't make mistakes when copying stub markup. That I put it in the right places while stumbling through the previous notes' HTML, that I indeed changed all the links so they actually link to the correct note and aren't broken, optimizing all the images manually and updating the paths to each one so they point to the correct file in the correct folder.

Now you might argue that I was already doing all of this in the previous iteration, and it seemed to be going fine. It's even something you might have heard me praise, saying "I don't need these tools, I can simply copy and paste things and make it all my way!", but in this latest iteration, it's not just notes anymore, it's musics or podcasts I like, links to websites, pictures of books, maybe even pictures I've taken.

And here again, you could and rightly so, argue that I already had all of this.
I'm simply moving my books page or my links page to the homepage, and I already used to take care of them by hands. But the truth is I didn't do it at all. I updated my links page once and hated the experience and my books page hadn't been updated in months, there were several books missing from this digital bookshelf of mine.

Another reason is simply that I have ideas, many ideas, and some need a backend to come to life.
Let me digress a little to make my point clear; I think social medias are a pretty dreadful thing.
They are trying to be as addictive as possible to keep you in for as long as possible to show you ads so that a handful of companies can make ridiculous amounts of money. A lot of them are now filled with AI generated content that you get fed all day long instead of seeing what your friends are actually doing. Which is, may I remind you, the very point of social medias at first! To put people in contact with each other even though they may not be able to meet in real life.
And what a wonderful goal this is, I always think it's a great idea to do something that can make people come together and feel less isolated.
So I am pretty saddened that social medias became evil attention span farms, but that doesn't mean I don't love social medias, or at least the concept of it, in fact I think that many of their ideas are brilliant.

And one of these ideas that I love particularly is stories. I used to be an avid user of Snapchat and then when stories came to Instagram I couldn't be more pleased. I would be able to post whatever I was doing without cluttering my grid, even the not so important things. And best of all, it would be gone after 24 hours, insisting on the trivial nature of the things I would post.
I could snap a picture of me watching a movie and share it with whoever would see it at that time, and maybe get replies from these people who'd be like "Hey I've seen that movie too! What did you think?" and the people who weren't connected while the picture was up were simply not, it was fine.
And I would love to emulate that feeling on my website, that's why I've added a stories feature in my header.

Now I don't have the claim to believe people are going to visit my site everyday just to check if I have posted something by chance. I know very well that most of these stories will be seen by no one but me and this is the beauty of it.
I'm simply gonna be sending pictures to the void, maybe with some text on them, and sometimes, rarely, the void is going to answer. Someone is gonna click the "reply" button and send me an email saying "This looks tasty! What is it?" and it may be the beginning of a new online friendship sparked by me simply sharing my dull life.

To get back to the point, for a feature like this, simple HTML, CSS and JS weren't gonna cut it, I need storage to store the images, a database to keep track of when they were posted to only show these that are less than 24h old as well as a way to send new pictures to the storage from my phone.

But behind all these possibilities, Laravel also comes with it's share of problems.
The most notable to me, as this is the reason I had initially chosen to use simple HTML, is maintenance. I absolutely hate maintaining code, having to update things, then this specific package breaks, so you have to go to the documentation and see they have changed a random function name, now you update your code, and you have lost 3 hours without changing anything to your site, simply so it keeps running like it did before!
It's like driving a car vs going by foot. Going by foot is slow and limiting, you ain't gonna be able to walk for hundreds of kilometers in a day, but it's really simple, put one feet in front of the other and on you go. The car on the other hand, allows you to do many more things. You can go really far really fast, but if something breaks, you are most likely not to know how to fix it. If you are lucky it's just the engine that doesn't have enough oil, but it could also be a broken transmission and I wish you good luck to fix that on your own by the side of the road.

And on top of all of that, there's me, the human factor, the one pulling on my website like a Stretch Armstrong.
Because I love minimal stuff, my favourite code editor is ed, I love reading plaintext and how it looks. And sometimes, I want my website to reflect that. I want it to be just a bunch of black text with blue links on a white background, something you understand in one look and go like "yep that's a blog".
And other times, I love complex maximalist things. Figurines, colorful stuff, sunglasses that scream "LOOK AT ME!". And I want my website to be that way, well as it is right now in fact. Having many features, notes that actually look like real life notes, sounds, images... .

My home is the best example of this complex duality in my brain. I have made the choice to acquire quite a few nice looking pieces of furniture. A striking blue sofa, a frog green armless armchair, a red almost rocking but not quite chair, 3 bookshelves with the faces of the planks painted in different colors, a mustard yellow trolley, 7 different lamps of different shapes and sizes in the same room, many little trinkets that I cherish and remind me of fun times.
And some days I love it, I think my house is so cool and that I could had even more things here and there, and I sit in one of my chairs and am grateful for the place I've imagined.
But other times, I will want to throw everything out the window, keep only white stuff, put the books in piles on the floor instead of bookshelves, remove all the little bloody fucking trinkets that don't even look that good and that I hate so much.
I am like that on many things, oscillating between opposites that I both really like and can't quite coexist together and I'm afraid my website is that way too.

I don't know how long I'm able to make it last the way it is right know, and don't get me wrong, I absolutely love it, I think it looks great. But at the same time I know that the day I feel like going back to simpler stuff, that this website I loved yesterday now feels unusable and cluttered, I will just have to do rm -fr ./theoo.dev && touch index.html. Much simpler than getting rid of all my furniture, too simple even.

I hope this time I'll be able to make this website evolve, endure the updates and the maintenance, and instead of nuking everything when my mood swings, tend to this garden that I'm trying to grow. I want to see this website flourish, not burn to the ground again, I want to be able to look back on it in 10 years and say "well it's a bit messy and imperfect, it has it's quirks and I hate this specific bit, but that's my website, that's how it is, it's grown with me and my life is in these pages".

How long do you think this will last?

I hope you have a good day, bye 👋

Hey there,

Lately, my algorithms have been feeding me a lot of "chronically offline" content.
You know, this is content where people swap their smartphone for a dumbphone, they delete social media apps, they read books, they use an iPod to listen to music, they practise outside activities, etc.
And like, this is really appealing to me, I love the idea that as a society we are slowly falling out of love with the online world and coming back to the real one.

But I'm afraid that all this talk about it online is going to make us miss the point. Like what if it's just another trend?
I feel like if people are going offline, it shouldn't get posted on social media as much. If you deleted social media apps why would you post on them, right?

And maybe this feeling is because what we are seeing online is only the most exacerbated part of it, and there are probably hundreds of people doing their thing in their little corner of the planet without needing to showcase it to the world.
But I would still like to discuss what a healthier way of being chronically offline might be.

So let's start by the dumbphone/iPod thing. At first, I was so into this, I was looking everywhere on the internet to get a second hand iPod for cheap and considering swapping my iPhone for one of my Grandfather's old phones.
But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that this was mostly driven by 90s/2000s nostalgia (a time that I didn't even get to really experience myself) and that I was probably much better of keeping my iPhone.
Texts and calls have improved so much since then and that's what I would do if I had a dumbphone, so might as well do it on my iPhone where I can keep sending pictures, links etc.
And I totally agree that texting from a dumbphone looks so much cooler. Like if I saw a young person doing it, I'd think that they're interesting, but it's in no way a practical thing to do.

And for the iPod bit, OMG would I want one. Apple really cooked when they designed that thing, I never had one as a kid nor did anybody in my entourage; but I so wish they did.
But then again it's like, my iPhone can do music superbly well even without streaming services.
iTunes is still a thing and I could also buy music on Bandcamp and many CDs/Vinyls now offer a QR code to download a digital version of the album.
And even if I'm not a fan of the apple music app, there are plenty of alternatives on the App Store.

Now you might be like "Ok sure but what's the fun in that" and I agree with you, it is so much funnier to go back to separate devices for doing things rather than to use the pocket slab.
But I think it's worth considering if you think you can keep it up in the long run. For me the answer is a big no.
For example, I got a cheap but cool camera that takes pictures exactly like I want them to look, and I still am barely using it because I don't think about taking it with me and because it's less practical than my phone.

So for the people like me who are keeping their iPhone, what they do is delete social media apps. And I so agree with this.
Like personally, I haven't had social media apps on my phone in years. I can still go on them on my computer when I want to and tbh I've never really jumped on the TikTok/Reels wagon, short form scares me because it's too addictive.
But I think there is something quite sad about social medias nowadays (and for quite some time already) in that they have all become places to consume content.

We could call that the "YouTubification" of the other platforms, they became places where you go to distract yourself instead of being places you go to keep in touch with your peers.
But I remember when social media was about your friends, and it was a blast! You'd just post whatever you wanted and your friends would leave comments and you'd comment your friends' stuff etc.
Like maybe you remember how cool Snapchat stories were in the beginning, you could just snap a picture of whatever you were doing, slap some text on top and your friends would reply to it.

It's just that I feel like the problem with social medias isn't the social media itself, but rather the fact that there is an algorithm trying to optimise the content you see. I feel that a social media that would ONLY display the stuff you chose to follow that you could only discover organically or through friends (since there would be no algorithm to make you discover things), would be so so great!

I don't know of an app like that that exists rn and the attempts I've seen here and there didn't quite have the reach of an Instagram or Facebook where literally everyone was on it.
But I hope that someone will build a new platform like this, maybe even a paid one like Are.na, where people will just go to interact with their friends.
And like, another thing that is in this same department is making a website. Maybe we'll see a wave of people building their own little place on the internet where they can share stuff. Gotta say I really like blot personally cause I think it's super approachable, you don't even need to learn markdown!

For the other things like reading books, going outside, talking to people IRL etc, I obviously think this is fantastic, ain't nothing more to add.
My issues are only really about this seemingly complete rejection of online life which I think is an awesome thing if done right.

What do you think?

Have a wonderful day, byeeeeeee

A while back, I shared a note about how I had cut down my phone usage a lot and what it had changed for me.

And for a few months, I actually stuck to it.
But lately, I've been watching or listening to videos from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep. And for the times when I can't watch videos (like when I'm walking in the street, for example), I will put a podcast or music to occupy the space.

I'm not sure why I went back to this sluggish state when I had been doing so well for a long time, but I think it's because I actually missed watching specific YouTubers and listening to specific podcasts. So I allowed some back into my life and then some more and eventually, it took over.

Which leaves me in a weird situation, because I now know that no YouTube at all is disappointing. There is some content that I actually like and don't want to stop watching, especially since it's only like at most 2 hours per week plus the occasional GeoWizard adventure.
But at the same time, I know that if I let these back in, I won't be able to stop myself, because there is a ton of content that I like, content that I wouldn't miss if I didn't watch it, but that is still nice to watch.
I could try an extension to hide the recommendations, but knowing me, I will probably deactivate it pretty quickly and find an "acceptable" reason why. Worth a try though, I guess.

The other thing that crept back is Spotify. I listen to music (or podcasts, but mostly music) when I'm not watching videos. On the one hand, it's great because I have discovered many new artists lately, but at the same time, I've been feeling more disconnected, irritated when someone is trying to talk to me and I have to remove my AirPods and, overall like my mind can never breathe.
I'd say that the thing that has changed since the last article is that now silence isn't weird anymore. I even enjoy it! But for some reason I always feel this need to listen to something. Plus, I have been questioning my relationship with music lately, but I will talk about it in another note.

Now again, I'm not sure about what the right thing to do is. I definitely don't want to stop listening to music, I enjoy it way too much. But I don't want it to be constant.
Trying to apply time restrictions won't work because I know that I will find "good reasons" to circumvent them.
Maybe something like "you can only listen to music when you do this and that" could work. This has worked for podcasts already, as there are some podcasts that I only listen to when cleaning and others I only listen to when grocery shopping.
Another idea would be to say "You can only listen to music out loud" and not in your AirPods. So that would automatically limit my time, because there are many situations where you can't listen to music out loud.

So where does this leave me? What about the things I said in the previous note about enjoying life without all this?
I guess it's as with all things in life, I need to find balance.

The approach to ditch all music and YouTube was certainly too extreme, but spending my whole days listening to stuff is also too extreme.
Another thing to consider is the fact that I tend to get absorbed by things, both the good and the bad ones.
So when I get to reading a book or programming something, I will just do it for hours upon hours to the point of forgetting to eat. But the same can be said for playing video games and watching videos, which has a much more negative impact.
And I don't know that I should change this, it's just a part of my personality, but I need to learn to put systems in place to prevent it for things that make me rot away.

I don't have a good conclusion yet. Honestly, I think that what would help me would be to have the opinions from a bunch of different people and see how they deal with all this, to try as many options as possible until I find the balance I'm looking for.

For now, I will try to limit Spotify and I will try YouTube "blocking" extensions. If you have any other ideas or want to share your experience, please email me, I'd be grateful to receive it.

I hope you have a great day, bye.

I've been seeing more techno-solutionist talk online lately. Maybe it's just my algorithms that decided to show me more of that or maybe people are actually talking more about it. Either way, it made me think about this subject and it's implications, and also made me quite scared.

When I talk about techno-solutionism in this post, I mean it in relation towards climate change. Here's a definition to make sure we're all thinking about the same thing when reading this article.

Techno-solutionism is the idea that we will fix the climate crisis by using technology so we don't have to change our way of life.

Now let me preface by saying that I personally don't believe in techno-solutionism and I will develop why in this post. But even if you believe in it, I think you should read-on as my goal is not to judge or critisize but rather to ask questions and I think your answers would be as interesting as anyone else's.

The solutions that are often brought up in techno-solutionist discussions are Carbon Capture, AGI that will find the solutions for us, Geoengineering and Nuclear fusion.
As of now, none of these solutions are a reality. We are seeing progress in each of them, but they still pose many challenges that we are yet so solve.

The question then is, do we want to bet on things that we don't know for sure will ever become a reality? Because, you might strongly believe these will someday exist but you can't prove that they will. It's just a belief.
Personally, I don't want to throw the life of future generations of living beings to a bet.

Now, let's say this works and we actually figure these things out! What tells us that we'll figure them out in time?

Because while we are working on these solutions, the climate crisis is still going on. Living beings are quickly dying and becoming extinct, and even if you don't care about non-human forms of life, humans are dying too.

Are we as a species really willing to let so many other forms of life die for us to keep up with our current way of life?

Are we, the people living in privileged countries willing to keep exploiting other humans for our on profit and well being?

And can we really feel well and happy about how we'll live in a world where we have "fixed" the climate crisis but can still feel all the damages it caused?

Maybe your answer to all of these is yes, and maybe you'd even tell me that it's also possible that we will figure techno-solutions in time.
So let's say you are right about this, let's say that by 2050, we've found solutions that allow us to go to negative carbon emissions!

Then the question is, are you willing to let companies decide of the quality of the air you breathe?
Because since we live in a capitalist society, the companies running carbon capture machines and doing the geoengineering required to keep our current living standards will want to make profit.

They won't do it for the sake of being nice to us, when is the last time you've seen a company just trying to be nice and profit off of it?

Now you could argue that we are already trusting companies for many really important things like electricity or transport of goods. But these aren't vital things.
People used to live without electricity and they would grow their own food, but no one would be able to live without breathable air.

My personal opinion on this is that I am definitely not ok with putting my survival and the survival of future generations in the hands of any company. And don't get me wrong, I would love to keep up the life that I currently have, it's so comfortable. And I so wish that every human going forward would have the same comfort of life that I have. But I simply don't think it is possible.

Maybe you are ok with the idea that only a few living beings will have a great life at the cost of all others, in which case, business as usual is perfectly fine. But I am not.

I believe that it is more than overdue that we start rethinking our future.
I don't want of a future where machines are what is keeping us alive like we are some sort of ill person surviving only because of their ventilator.

Let's use what we know and are sure of to build a new collective imagination. A world where yes, we will have lost a lot of our current comfort at the benefit of more equality, more mutual aid, more connexion to nature and each other, more time to think and dream.
A world where we can wake up every day without being stressed by an imminent wall that we seem to being sprinting towards at great speeds.

Sure, we won't be able to eat McDonalds, order stuff from the other side of the world for only a couple bucks and get it delivered the same day, drive a car to go buy food at the big nearby mall, travel for a few hundred euros/dollars to go virtually anywhere in at most 2 days, change phone as we please, etc

But isn't that worth it for the certainty that we and other livings, will be able to live for millennia to come?

We should stop being trapped in our current vision of the world and I'm hopeful that someday we'll look back on this time period like we are looking back on how they lived in the middle ages.

I would love to hear about you opinion on this subject, even if you disagree. So please feel free to send me a mail so we can discuss this matter further.

Have a nice day :))

I consider myself a simple boring guy, I like ed, I enjoy eating plain pasta, I wear only a few clothes in rotation, and my favourite way of writing and reading text is plaintext.

There is something appealing about .txt files for me, it's only characters that all look mostly the same, none are bold, none are bigger, none have a background.
Plaintext works everywhere, every computer can render it, it's fast, it's quiet, it's most likely futureproof, it's portable, I love it.

If I could, I would have everything written in plaintext. It's limitations make it predictable. It doesn't have links or blockquotes, it doesn't render code with fancy colors nor does it bolden or italicize text.
I might make an exception for images, but other than that, plaintext is all I want.

But despite it's seemingly perfect simpleness, plaintext has one big flaw for me, it doesn't work quite well on the web.
I mean, sure your browser can most likely natively render it (in a superb way may I had), and most users will be able to read it with not problems. But that's not how accessibility works, you can't accept 'most users'.

Web pages rely on semantics to convey meaning. Users with assistive technology can jump to headings and links, are warned when entering a list and know how many items are in it, etc.
So if you serve them some plaintext, they will only hear a big blob of text being read, with no way to differentiate between different parts of the text.

And for that people have invented markdown. It's still kinda plaintext, but with some light syntax added so that you can transform it into HTML.
This way, your users get all the benefits of HTML and you only had to write some slightly more verbose plaintext.
But generally, markdown doesn't look like plaintext once rendered, titles are bigger, blockquotes are well... quoted, code is rendered in fancy code blocks, lists have a dot in front of them etc.

And that's why I've written a small CSS file that takes nice semantic HTML and makes it look like 'enhanced' plaintext! You still get your links, your quotes and your images, but the overall vibe is plaintext.

It was deliberately inspired by the default style browsers apply to plaintext as well as the ways man files format their text to look legible. (I'm a huge fan of man files, but that's a story for another time).

If you decide to use it for something, don't hesitate to send me a little email ^^ I'll be super pleased to look at what you wrote with it.

Since my last post, I still haven't written anything, but I've been thinking a lot and working on other bits of this website. In this post, I would like to address some of the things that have changed, evolved or disappeared on this website lately.

All these changes were sparked by my realization that Weeknotes were (almost) the only things I was posting and I wanted to write other stuff. So at first I decided to try adding a journal page were I would add a summary of my day every day, but it quickly turned into a chore and didn't fix the problem of finding the time to write other stuff. I dropped the idea, but the page is still there and I'm still thinking on what to do with it. Maybe I'll try my hand at some fictional writing? Who knows.

Then I took a step back and realized that what I liked about Weeknotes was mostly reading them on other people's websites, but not really write my own. And the enjoyable part mostly came from sharing links at the end of each week.

So I decided to build a links page. It has a pretty simple design and is a bit laborious to keep up (Since I've decided to add an image for each link) but I like it quite a lot! I'll had links there from time to time, probably in batches when I find the courage to go through my backlog.

Another thing I've been trying to have on this website for a while is images. I like the idea of sharing your life through images like on Instagram. But I hate Instagram, Meta sucks, social medias suck.
So instead I built my own memories page. It's an infinite canvas where I can upload images and play around with them. I hope I'm able to keep it up this time, because I love the end result but I hate tending to it, it's a bit of a weird relationship I have with images.

The 'Books I read' note I used to have is now gone in favor of an actual bookshelf! You can find it on the books page

So here's a recap of how my website is structured as of now:

• / — The homepage, used as an index for notes, snippets and other pages
• /links — The index for all the links I want to share. It can be anything from cool websites to articles to recipes.
• /memories — The page where I store my images, so I can look at them later.
• /books — My personal library of books I've read, I really like the way it looks

I haven't written a note in a while. A couple weeks I'd say. And it's not that I don't know what to talk about or that I don't want to. It's just that in life you are given 24 hours each day, and you have to figure out what to do of these 24 hours and writing a new note wasn't it for a while.

My brain is constantly spewing out ideas, be it new pages to make, notes to write, silly songs to sing, stuff to take in pictures or to draw. And yet I only have so much time to fit it all.

And making out priorities is really hard. You have to constantly battle between what you should do, what you could do and what you actually want to do. And sometimes what you want to do is the furthest away from what you should do and then you feel like crap when you do it.
Like when I really want to watch that hour long video but then that's an hour I won't spend creating.

And I feel like creating has been the driving force in my life for a long time, I've always created stuff, whatever it may be. From stories to play with my toys to making cool websites. And there are so many things to create and so many ideas to bring to life that it is always overwhelming to make a choice about what to do.

So I often find refuge in browsing the web, watching series, reading books, etc. All fun but non creative activities; activities that barely ask me to make any choice and where the effort and brain power demanded is minimal.

Maybe the solution would be to choose one thing, only one, and force myself to do that. This means leaving out the other ones, or at least not prioritizing them, but I think that will at least enable me to progress in one area.
And the area I'm most preoccupied by these days is this blog you are reading. So from today onwards, I'm gonna try to block of 30min every morning where all I do is writing. It can be a blog article, or it can be the rest of my journal that I probably wasn't able to finish the previous evening.

We'll see how that goes, I'll keep you posted, bye 👋

EDIT: I failed miserably, I'm writing when I can but this 30min thing went out of the window after 2 days 🫠

Hey 👋 Hope you are doing great! This week is up for a little change, I'm gonna stop dividing these Weeknotes into "parts" like "what I listened to", "what I read" etc. They are gonna become more like an organic list of things that I did this week with all the different stuff mixed in.

Only part I'm keeping separate is the Links of the week part that you can find at the end :))

WHAT HAPPENED THIS WEEK

I started watching La Star Academy... At first, it was pure hate-listening on the side as my SO was listening to it in the background. But eventually I got caught into it and now we watch it together ^^

I finally finished the book I had been stuck on for months The travelling cat chronicles. It's a great book and I thoroughly enjoyed it but OMG is it sad!!! I think that Japanese authors are the best at conveying emotions, maybe because Japanese is a good language for that.

I added two pages to this website, and I think they are really cool!
There is a memories page which is a large (10000px by 10000px) canvas where I can drag and drop images to come back to them later. I made it all using HTML CSS and Vanilla JS which taught me about using JS to animate elements instead of CSS (à la GSAP) and it's actually super simple! Normally, it also works on mobile and if you have JS disabled :))

And I also made a books page which comes to replace the note I had listing all the books I read. I got inspired by this tweet and decided to try to do something akin to the old Delicious Library but with a more sleek modern touch. I ended up with this.

I went on a lot of longer walks in the city's outskirts with Neko and it is much funnier than going to the park. We still meet plenty of dogs, grass and other humans, but we get the benefit of seeing/discovering cool places in a city that I already know so well.
It's always fun when you see a random moss covered staircase as you are going down a street and decide to take it to see where it leads, all that to end up in that other street you knew about but never imagined there was a shortcut to.
Or how lovely it is to simply walk along the river's edge with Neko chasing ducks and pigeons. Going to a Café you know is closed (because it's sunday evening) but still, a quest is a quest.
I've been greatly enjoying the company of the dog. Walks are much slower, like 2 to 3 times slower, but I get someone to talk to that is always listening and doesn't think I'm crazy for talking out loud alone in the street (or at least, I hope Neko doesn't think I'm crazy).

My cats are starting to get their winter coat again, and it's the cutest thing in the world. They look so fluffy and light! Also, since it's colder, they've been getting way more cuddly as a way to heat up. Sometimes this makes it hard to work when they decide the trackpad is the best place to lay, but it's so wonderful to have these little creatures sleeping in your arms. Cats are so great I can't fathom that some people don't like them!

I've gotten a new book by accident. As we were walking with Neko, I noticed a boite à livre [^1] and it had a copy of Caligula by Albert Camus. I thought this book was nice and picked it up.

There is a new Café in town, it's called Baliô and was recommended to me by Jonathan. It's pretty, nice, and they accept dogs! Plus my cappuccino was pleasant.
If you are into great specialty coffee or filter coffee, I wouldn't go there. But if you are looking to spend a great time with nice people and a lovely place, I definitely would!
My SO said their tiramisu tastes great.

LINKS OF THE WEEK

• https://emmi.framer.website/playground
  The website that inspired my memories site! It's a superb looking canvas and you can even water the plants!!!
• https://landonorris.com
  Ok, they cooked so so hard with this one. There are so many great looking UI components and other effects. This is just really impressive. Especially for how fluid this all is.
• https://www.nan.fyi/database
  This article is 1. Super interesting 2. incredibly well written 3. Incredibly well illustrated. If you are even remotely interested in development, you should read this. It's delightful.
• https://www.shipsltd.co.jp/pages/sp_50th_anniversary.aspx
  This website is made with jeans. Ok not really, but you gotta admit that this is all really convincing and that they have done it so so well! This is really creative, and also .aspx wtf?

• [^1]: A sort of box with a roof where people can come and put books they don't want anymore. Then people like me can pass by and pick them up :))

Wow it's already been a month since my first Weeknotes! Time really files ^^

WHAT HAPPENED THIS WEEK

• Neko update! We have had huge progress this week, we took the tram for the first time and it went somewhat alright. She was scared but managed it (Even let a random lady pet her). We also walked a bunch on the foire and in the city and she actually walked without stopping too much.
  There was also progress in the potty department as there was no accident for the past 3 days!
• We got a CampSnap camera to take cool crappy pictures. Well actually, we got 2, the first one had a broken IR filter and was taking all pink pictures 😬 It's a pretty nice camera, I might make a post reviewing it at some point! That would be exciting I think.
• I've had to work on something super fun at work. We have this PHP/Laravel package that allows you to create admin interfaces and it has a Grid component to allow you to position stuff however you like. And I got to refactor it to make it much less verbose and more flexible.
• I've eaten quite a lot of great tasting food this week and I can't be grateful enough for the existence of it. Being vegan really isn't that hard. This week we're going to eat homemade vegan Boulets Liégeois and I'm so excited OMG.
• I wish there was a soundboard integrated into Slack so I could share random memes with my colleagues as reactions to their messages. So I started building my own clone just to add this feature 👹 I don't know if it's gonna lead anywhere, we'll see 🤷‍♀️

LINKS OF THE WEEK

• https://jpolak.org/photo/best-macos-text-editors/
  Hates AI ✅ Has great taste in editors ✅ Takes cool pictures ✅. This is a great article, I totally agree with what he says. I'm a Neovim guy myself, but I love to dabble around looking for other editors.
• https://romi.link/journal
  I love reading about other people's life and feelings. Romi's journal really captures that and her art is absolutely lovely. Big plus for how simple the website looks as well!
• https://www.door.link
  Another project of Romi. I love it, the music mixtapes are just immaculate, I enjoy it way way too much :))

I can't promise anything but I think there will be MANY more links next week. I have a huge backlog of open pages on my phone. It will depend on if I read Monsieur Madame books or if I go online.

WHAT I LISTENED TO THIS WEEK

PODCASTS

• Potterless
  It's a somewhat old podcast about a dude who knows not much about Harry Potter and who reads and critiques the books for the first time. I love it it's really fun.

WHAT HAPPENED THIS WEEK

• We had our first day where Neko didn't poo or pee inside the house at all!!!
• I added a theme picker and a rss feed to this website, let me know what your favourite color theme is 👩‍🎨
• I'm feeling quite tired and for the first time in my life can't wait to be on holiday next week. I have no clue what I'm gonna do during that time apart from sleeping and watching Gilmore Girls.
• I finally called my grandparents and was really pleased to hear from them :)) I learned that they once had a dog! For 2 days only, but that still counts right?

LINKS OF THE WEEK

• http://kira.eight45.net/deconstruction-mindset.html
  Nice article about a world perspective that I'm trying to have more and more. Trash isn't always trash and can be repurposed to do other cool things.

This is the only link this week, I haven't been on the internet much, Gilmore Girl has been my top priority ^^ (Which is a shame since I have a whole internet phone book waiting for me).

WHAT I WATCHED THIS WEEK

• Gilmore Girls
  Finished the first season and it was a blast. My two favourite characters rn are Michel and Luke. I'm so glad I still have 6 seasons to go 🍂

WHAT I LISTENED TO THIS WEEK

MUSIC

I only really listened to one thing, a playlist I'm currently curating called La grignotte[^1] which is basically 90s style French hip hop. (ATK, Starflam, Oxmo, Scred Connexion,...).
I've been in the mood for this type of music for the past couple weeks for some reason 🤷‍♀️. Generally autumn is the period where I listen to Stupeflip the most, but not this time it looks like.

Also, Jyeuhair realeased a new song and I think it's quite a good one! You should definitely check it out.

WHAT I DESIGNED THIS WEEK

I made some cool buttons, very inspired by Tom Things.

• [^1]: Would be translated to something like The snacking in english. I've named it that cause I was hungry for Speculoos at the time.

This post is a reply to this article by Louie Mantia, go check his website out, it's really cool!

This is my first reply post! 🎉 How exciting!!

TLDR; for those that don't want to go read the original article:
To make a damn website, you write html, css, and your rss feed manually. Repeat stuff on different pages. All manual.

So that's what I did! This website is now fully static and only using html files.
I would just like to add my opinion after trying this approach to nuance Louie's article a bit.

First of all, I think that making a website with html is a great idea, especially for a personal website. It's super easy to ship and to change stuff, you don't spend any time configuring things or stuck in dependency hell 🔥.
I feel like I've finally gotten close again to the publishing power I had with my .txt only website but with the added bonus of accessibility!

This approach brings one problem though, writing html sucks ass. When I'm writing a post, I don't want to have to think about tags and semantics. I want to write words and be able to scan them quickly without tags and attributes getting in the way.
Also, it's absolute hell on mobile (though you might be aided by a tool like James' mobile first html editor). I don't want to have to go in the keyboard behind the keyboard and type all the symbols necessary for a html tag. And I write a LOT on my phone because I don't always have my computer on me when I have the time to write.

So the solution I've found to this problem is to write my files in markdown[^1] (using Obsidian) and simply parse them using a tool like this PHP Markdown Dingus[^2] and then copy them inside my html files.
This way I can write both on my phone and my computer without being distracted by having to think about correct html.

Apart from that tiny caveat, I encourage everyone to start building their own website, it's so much fun and actually really easy once you've gone through the deployment phase.
If you have a personal website, feel free to share it with me! I'd be more than pleased to have a look :))

• [^1]: But it could also be txt or whatever you want that doesn't have a terse syntax.
• [^2]: I've personally built a tiny app (with PHPNative) that adds a global shortcut that uses ParsedownExtra to convert my markdown.

WHAT HAPPENED THIS WEEK

• Neko update 🐕 Things are going great, we keep slowly figuring things out and get more bounded every day that passes.
  We've had a bit of problems with sleep patterns (Waking up at 3AM is never fun) but it seems to have gotten back on track.
• The menu bar app I was working on last week is finished! It works super well and converts files as intended. I've also been working on a simple other one which is basically a global shortcut that uses ParsedownExtra to convert markdown to html but more about this in an other post!
• The Foire has officially started and I'm already tired of it. Living 100m away from roller coasters is not the funniest thing in the world ://
• I've been in the process of re-writing this website AGAIN! But this time, there is no way I can simplify it further without compromising accessibility I think.

LINKS OF THE WEEK

• https://birming.com/2025/09/21/publish-dont-polish/
  Hard agree and this is the way I run my own website. I always publish stuff when I feel like it and we'll see about improvements later.
• https://rscottjones.com/getting-the-most-out-of-a-bad-situation/
  An interesting perspective about life that I had never really thought about but am gonna try to implement.
• https://tonsky.me/blog/lockfiles/
  Had never though about lockfiles this way, to me they seemed ubiquitous, but this totally changed my opinion! I'm glad this website runs on super simple tech that doesn't need no packages.
• https://www.holovaty.com/writing/chatgpt-fake-feature/
  This is weird, I don't like that we bow to AI... But at the same time, it must be driving new customers to their app, which is a good this I guess. I don't know what I think about this.
• https://tonsky.me/blog/centering/
  A useful, funny and instructive article about centering things on the web and in apps. I had never realized this was such an issue and I learned a lot reading this article.

WHAT I WATCHED THIS WEEK

• Gilmore Girls
  This is our first time watching this series and I must say that it has probably become my favourite series ever! The cast, the story, the puns, the emotions, the 2000s vibe, everything is perfect and I'm loving every second of it!
  I wish they still used old cameras to film current stuff, this gives it such a cozy vibe...

WHAT I LISTENED TO THIS WEEK

MUSIC

• JeanJass — Goldman & Tous ces ongles rongés Two phenomenal rap albums, both no skips. Goldman has been on repeat for the whole week.
• Aupinard
  He's a staple of my listening and I could almost put him in the list every week. I discovered Bossa Nova because of him and I just love is way of blending genres.
  I'm gonna see him in concert in March next year :))
• Caballero – Dose Héroïque
  An album I weirdly enjoy listening to while I work, I don't know why. Some of the punchlines are absolutely delightful, the prods are great.
• Hologram Lo' & Jungle Jack — CREAMLAND
  Hologram Lo' has cooked soooooo hard on the prods for this album.
• Salut C'est Cool — Sur le thème des grands découvertes I was low on sugar and had to bring back groceries. This never disappoints and is quite trippy.

WHAT I DESIGNED THIS WEEK

I made a text editor in the style of Arc, Dia, Zen,... because I love the look of these! I wish it could exist but I don't have the skills to do a code editor ://

You might have noticed that there are absolutely no dates on this website. And that is because I have a real problem with them.

I think this started with Youtube, I've always felt that since there is so much content constantly appearing, I shouldn't look at older videos. And this might be a valid point, because if I had to catch up with every video of every channel I like, I would never find time to watch the newer ones. But the problem is that I set my expiration date really early. Once a video is like a month old, it becomes pretty much unwatchable to me (Unless it's something I REALLY want to watch). And this attitude has grown to most of my internet usage.

I don't think it's a good thing. Stuff shouldn't feel expired (to me) just because it isn't the newest. So a while back, when I was still watching a lot of content on Youtube, (I've been pretty much using no social media for a couple months now, but more about it in another post), I added an addon that removed all dates from the interface. And all a sudden, I was watching older videos with no problem at all, simply because I didn't know they were old.

And this is the same for everywhere on the web, I have a hard time reading old blog posts sometimes. Even if the content is super interesting, a part of me feels like Yeah but this was written in 2005, you ain't got time for this, it's too old. But I try to force myself anyway and I'm getting better at it :))

The thing about dates is that I only feel this way about them on the web, I do read old books or watch old movies/series with no problem.
It's just that there is so much content on the web and we are always being bombarded with so much of it at the same time that my brain has had to find a way to cut through the noise. Maybe if the web was a calmer place, more organized and caring, I'd have a easier time strolling through old stuff[^1].

So this is why there are not dates on my website, because I can't cope with dates and I would feel like my content would be worthless after a couple weeks. If the dates aren't there, they can't rot, or at least, there is nothing reminding me of it.

• [^1]: Though you do get the web you choose to see. It's been way less stressful since cutting down on Youtube, Twitter and the likes and replacing them by reading blogs of people I like and decide to go on by myself, not by an algorithm.

A couple weeks ago, I went on an adventure. I used to do go on adventures all the time as a teenager, but I don't get around to doing it as much these days, work and responsibilities got in the way. (Though getting a dog will maybe get me to do more).

What I call an adventure, is basically living your life like you're in some fun open world video game. You get out of your house with your stuff in your backpack and you start walking in whatever direction. Eventually, you spot something in the distance, or a street you've never gone through or a building entrance you feel like could become a shortcut if it turns out there is also a door on the other side and you go for it. Then on the way, you will most likely spot something else interesting, and that's where things get fun for real. Because you can either bookmark this thing in a corner of your head (or a note on your phone or whatever) or you can switch directions and go for that new thing instead.

Generally, as you go from point of interest to point of interest, you end up in some random place, late and it's time to get home. On your way, you've probably spoken to a bunch of random people, had some type of sugary treat in a shop you didn't know about, picked up a cool rock or seen some nice birds.

I think this is a great way to experience life and to discover more things about the area that you live in. This is especially fun to do in a city (even better if it's one you don't know much) or in the woods. Here are some of my tips for a great adventure:

• PRIVATE often doesn't mean that much private. A lot of people are cool with you passing by when you explain what you are doing, and those who aren't ok will generally tell you off once they've checked you didn't steal anything.
• Give yourself an hour by which you should be back home and only walk for half of that time. The other half is used to come back! Trust me, you don't want to be trekking in some random woods 10km away from your home at night with no phone battery and your girlfriend waiting home. That doesn't end well.
• Be prepared for dead ends and going back on your steps a bunch. Not all roads lead to where you want and sometimes you take a wrong turn that leads nowhere and you have to walk half an hour back. That's just how it goes.
• Embrace opportunities and expect people to be nice. Especially in more remote places, people will be wondering what you are doing there and ask you about it. Explain your adventure and sometimes they might give you more stuff or they might even tell you about a new point of interest you should check out. Life is surprisingly like a video game when you live it like one.
• Bring ample amounts of water. It sucks to walk in the sun with nothing to drink and sometimes there is nowhere you can ask to refill your bottle.
• Treat yourself. If you see something you'd like to do or eat/drink and you can afford it, don't hesitate! Go for it and enjoy a nice moment in your adventure. Don't worry about the time, it's ok to have to go back home before you got to where you wanted.
• Everything is a path, you don't have to follow roads, cutting through woods or weird parking lots is fun and rarely that dangerous.
• Any means of transport is fine. If you feel like you live in a city you know like the back of your hand, well first, you don't, and second, you can take a train or a bus or your car to go somewhere else and start your adventure there instead! The adventure might even be getting back home from where the train/bus dropped you using your legs. Buses are also a real cheat code to be able to walk further since they make the "getting home" part much faster and can be found pretty much anywhere.

I hope this text could inspire you to try to go on an adventure as well, it doesn't have to be long, walking for an hour can already take you quite far!

If you do try (or maybe you already do this on a regular basis), I would be pleased to hear about fun stuff that happened during your adventures! You can email me at hello@theoo.dev.

This is my first weeknotes note 🎉 I don't really know what's usual about these things. I've read a bunch of Weeknotes on my phone and it seems everyone does as they please, so I'm gonna do the same.

WHAT HAPPENED THIS WEEK

• I got more used to having Neko (My dog) and it feels like a huge win! I'm no longer extra tired and we've been able to settle in a sorta routine that works well. She still pees inside but less so which is encouraging.
• I started working on a weekend project. A simple menu bar app to convert files (at first only to WebP but I plan on adding more file types). I really wanted to try PHPNative and I needed an app to convert files so I thought this would be a great occasion ^^. I will write more about it soon.
  If you're curious, here's a link to the github repo.
• I worked on a few fun things at work and had to do my first price estimation for a project 😬 That was hella scary and I never want to do it again but I will definitely have to... Hopefully I wasn't too off the mark.
• The Foire de Liège[^1] is soon starting and the ferris wheel is right in front of my home. It's always impressive to see them build such a big thing in a matter of a few days. I'm a bit scared for the Foire to start this year cause idk how Neko is going to react. She's really scared of people.
• It's officially Spooky Season! We bought a new XXL blanket to enjoy warm drinks in front of halloween movies with my SO. It's really our favourite season and I can't wait to enjoy it all. The colors are just so nice!!!

LINKS OF THE WEEK

• https://chotrin.org/philosophy/unreachable.html
  An article about being unreachable in the 21st century. I think the perspective and the website are both really interesting.
• https://cursor.com/
  I hate AI, but dang it did the Cursor team do a great website! The interactable windows in the hero section are a masterclass. I also like that they didn't go for the ✨sparky✨, neon AI vibe that we see everywhere. It's simple minimal and well executed.
• https://kedara.eu/organising-feeds-permaculture
  An article about organising RSS feeds based on permaculture principles. This is a super interesting perspective and a system that I think would work great for me in many areas.
• https://mtwb.blog/posts/2025/blaugust2025/not-every-blog-post-needs-to-be-epic/
  I really agree with this post. I like to publish stuff that feels half baked and I don't care about perfection. The point is to throw stuff in the void and sometimes it replies back.
• https://pjonori.blog/posts/i-dont-want-your-email/ A lot of great reasons not to have a newsletter. You can still send me an email if you want though ^^.
• https://fossheim.io/writing/posts/accessible-theme-picker-html-css-js/
  Don't agree with everything here, but this gave me the idea to do the same! So this website will receive a theme picker soon and it's (partly) thanks to this article.
• https://tink.uk/perceived-affordances-and-the-functionality-mismatch/
  Such a great principle of accessibility. Use the stuff that's made for doing the stuff you want to do. Need radio buttons? Use radio buttons. If they don't match your design, the design is to be rethought, not the HTML element.
• https://theoatmeal.com/comics/unhappy
  A fun, comic about the meaningless nature of happiness and how other feelings are much better to express your emotions.
• https://messenger.abeto.co/
  I don't know how they did this, but Abeto cooked so so hard on this website. It's a 3D game in a very Ghibliesque style that is RESPONSIVE (how tf do you make a responsive 3D game) where you deliver mail to residents of a tiny and super detailed planet.
• https://tarneo.fr/posts/minimal_web/
  I love the propositions of this article for a minimal web search engine. The way it's describe and the logic behind it seem great to me and if anyone with the skills to do that passes by, please do it!

WHAT I WATCHED THIS WEEK

• Alice in Borderland (the series)
  I liked season one and two (especially season two) but was really disappointed by season three. The games were less fun and the ending is mighty frustrating. It feels like another Netflix likes money series.
• We Have a Ghost
  What even is that? To be fair, we didn't finish the movie, but it sucked so so hard. It's one of these movies where they push the Netflix woke (Gosh I hate that word) to the max and it just feels forced.

WHAT I LISTENED TO THIS WEEK

MUSIC

• Twenty One Pilots — Breach
  IMO their best album. I hadn't said that since Blurryface. Every song feels TOP.
• Mac DeMarco
  I love all his music. The dude is just too good. His latest album Guitar is so chill and works so well with the season's vibe.
• My Chemical Romance — The Black Parade
  Probably in my top ten albums all time. It never gets old.
• Masayoshi Takanaka
  The dude knows how to play guitar... I'm always impressed and in a good mood when I listen to him.

PODCASTS

• Les Goûts Les Couleurs
  This podcast is so much fun. I listen to it when doing my groceries (and only then, I wait till I have to do my groceries for listening) and always end up laughing to myself in the shop.
• Through the Griffin Door
  A podcast that deep dives on each Harry Potter chapter. To be honest I don't know all that much about the series. I have seen every movie once and the 4 first ones a bunch more and have never read the books. It's a weird way to discover something than to have two really knowledgeable people do a deep dive on something you don't know all that much about.

• [^1]: Here's the French wikipedia page with more infos for those interested and who can read French.

I would love to have a bike, to be precise, a cargo-bike. I live in a flat city and having a fast and easy way to do my groceries and move around would be nice.

But here's the thing, I live in a flat, on the fourth floor of a somewhat old building that doesn't have an elevator. The corridor is already taken by neighbours' bikes or stuff from the restaurant at the bottom floor and I don't have access to a basement.

Because of that, I do everything by foot. And that is slow. Well to be fair I walk fast, but a bike would be much faster. And I think that's also what's good about walking. Since it is slow, you have the time to enjoy your surroundings. I'm often stopping to watch dogs play, or bees going from flower to flower. Sometimes people stop you to ask their way around or so you can take a picture of them and their SO. It allows for situations you hadn't planned, like grabbing a coffee on your way because your favourite coffee shop is open late today, or finding a random street and ending up exploring a neighbourhood you didn't know about.
I also often get ideas of stuff to write or sites to code when walking. Unlike on a bike, you don't have to pay as much attention at where you are going and your mind can wander more freely.

Now that I think about it, even if I had a bike, I might not use it. I like walking too much, I'm too used to it. I would find excuses, exactly like I do currently with the tram, "ah 2 minutes to wait, might as well walk there" or "mhh there will be too many people at this time of the day, it's sunny outside". So maybe I don't want a bike after all.

EDIT: neighbours have changed and the new ones don't have bikes anymore, the restaurant owner has also changed and they don't clutter the corridor, so technically, I could have a bike now 🤔

I went to the hairdresser today, I always go to a random one. I found that it's often faster to go around until you find one that can take you right away rather than wait at one where there is a queue. She did a great job, my hair is now short and dries up in seconds when I'm out of the shower. But while there, I couldn't help but think that, if she decided, she could slit my throat at any moment, and I couldn't do shit.[^1] When you really think about it, the only reason we are alive is because other humans act according to rules.

Same goes for things like crossing the road when the light is green. The only reason you don't get run over is because the other person agrees to say that red means stop.

Here's a list of things that I think are reckless but since everybody agrees on the rules, it's mostly fine:

• Boxing (or any combat sport for that matter)
• Gun/bow ranges
• Going in any means of transport
• Roller coasters
• Anything involving electricity or fire/heat
• Eating food prepared by other humans
• Getting your hair cut

• [^1]: Note that there was nothing weird about the lady cutting my hair. She was nice and even offered some fizzy water.

I am presently waiting in a sandwich shop, radio going in the background, noises of knives against cutting boards, the whooshing of the coffee machine, someone on the phone and cars roaring outside the window. The city is a noisy place, and for a long time, I hadn't noticed. This is because I've always lived either in or near a city, so my soundscape has always been filled with noise. And since city noise isn't the most enjoyable, I've compensated by adding more noise to cover it up. It may have been songs, videos, podcasts and even white noise, I always had something playing in my ears. But recently, that changed. Manuel Moreale was doing a challenge back in June where he was trying to consume less digital stuff, this meant cutting off a lot of time on the phone. And after reading his weekly updates, I decided to tag along.

For me the biggest time sink was Youtube, so I cut that off entierly, but I pushed the concept a tiny bit further and drastically reduced my usage of Spotify for music and podcasts. The hard part about this to me was walking outside with nothing in my ears, being forced to listen to cars vroom by, to people shouting at each other, to kids screaming, dogs barking and my own footsteps. I was scared of going outside and having this overwhelming feeling of city noises, but I had to do it anyway. And it went fine, I quickly got used to it, the sounds weren't nice, but I could deal with them. Eventually, a weird thing started to happen, I would try to put music on when walking and it would feel weird. A bit like if I was less aware of what was going on since I couldn't hear much anymore. Scared that people would ask me something and I'd ignore them. My brain had done a 180. I found that it is actually quite nice actually walking outside and earing the sounds of nature, ear the birds chirp, the trees move in the wind, the ducks honking, and my own footsteps, the problem is that a city doesn't have much of that.

By cutting off from my phone, I realised that the city, this environment I was so accustomed to, that I had liked and worshiped for my whole life, was actually crap. That I didn't want to live there anymore. I don't want to wake up to the sounds of motorbikes going by, or people coming back from a night of partying, I want to hear the crickets, the rustling of the grass, the cows from the nearby farmer mooing. I don't want to breathe car exhaust gases, I want to breathe fresh air. I realized that by modifying the soundscape, I was actually protecting myself from an environement I didn't feel comfortable in. These next years might be weird, because I know that I'm not moving out the city any time soon, I'm way too comfortable here. But at the same time, there is this thing in me that only wants to go away. Maybe I'll get used to it again, maybe I'll even start enjoying the true sounds of the city, who knows. I'll try to make an update on this in a while.

Lately, I've been trying to write more, and it has been going alright. At first, it was really hard, I was second guessing myself a lot and it all felt very messy.
But slowly, my brain started to change. Now, as I go about my day, I have ideas that pop up into my mind, a sentence that fits very well with what I want to say or an example to explain some concept.
In the beginning, I was trying to remember stuff, then I started writing it down in my notes app, but I feel like it's time I go one step further and start writing posts on my phone.

So I went on a little bit of a hunt to find a perfect setup. What I do is I sync the markdown files in iCloud Drive, and edit it in an app called Subtext[^1]. This way I have the same content on my phone and on my computer and I can write from anywhere!

If you also write things, I would be pleased to chat with you about methods for writing :))

EDIT: Since then, I've stopped using Subtext (nothing against them though, it's a great app) in favour of Obsidian. This is because I started using markdown instead of plaintext and Obsidian felt more appropriate for that. The process is still the same though, files synced over iCloud that I can edit on any of my Apple devices.

• [^1]: It's a free app that allows you to open and edit .txt files from any folder on your phone. It is really similar to textedit.

My favourite code editor is ed. For those who don't know, ed is one of the first editors to have been made, it's part of a class of editors called "line editors", which means that you are only editing complete lines of text. You can append after a line, insert before it or change a specific part using regexes, but you cannot put your cusor on a word and edit there. Ed doesn't even have a cursor.

Ed is naturally limiting, it can only do one thing, edit a file. No file searching, no scrolling, no infinite undo/redo, no diagnostics or code actions. If you want things like these, you have to do them in your terminal[^1]. If you make a typo while typing a line of code? You can't go back with your arrow keys to fix it, you need to validate the line with the typo and then correct it using a regex. (Or you could rewrite the whole line if that's what you fancy). And these limitations happen because ed assumes you know what you are doing. You don't need to search for files if you know what you want to edit, you don't need ed to tell you you've misspelled a variable name, because you haven't misspelled it. And if you really aren't confident with yourself, you can use external programs to check after you, ed doesn't kow better than you, it can only edit text.

And for many reasons, I love these limitations. For one, ed is fast, it doesn't have a graphical interface, so of course it is quick to load a file. Also I love that ed forces me to be very sure of what I'm about to do, this forces me to think before I act and often produces cleaner code that I don't have to refactor later. Often using external cli programs to do things is faster than whatever implementation my regular editor would have. A great example is for finding a file, instead of using my editor's fuzzy finder, I can simply do a little ed $(fzf), instead of waiting for diagnostics to refresh, I can run php -l my-file.php and find out exactly where that goddamn missing dollar sign is.
Ed forces you to learn your basic unix tools, and eventually you figure out how powerful they are, you become pro at man pages and old stack overflow threads. It also makes you learn a ton about regexes, which in my opinion are one of the most essential and the funniest parts of software development. And ed's regex engine isn't even featurefull, it lacks a ton of modern features like using \U to uppercase a group, but it forces you to get creative with your regexes. Which remember, you can't fail at writing, or you will have to rewrite them fully again and can only undo once.

But despite my love for this mighty editor, I can't really use it, at least not in my day to day work. Because for all it's beautiful quirks and complex simplicity, ed can never beat the speed of modern editors. Because, obviously it is faster to use a search input to find a function name project wide rather than manually use grep, obviously it is faster to fix a typo by clicking next to it and erasing it rather than writing a regex to fix it, obviously it's faster to use a code action to rename something rather than grep for all the places where it's used and manualy navigate to each one[^2]. And in our world, speed is the second thing that matters the most after money. I think that this is pretty sad, I wish our priorities weren't set on economic growth all the time but rather on human happiness growth. I wish it would be alright for me to go slower and use ed, that I wouldn't have to think about rentability and only think about doing good work that is also fun. I'm afraid that us all as humans are heading in the wrong general direction, and none of us seem to know how to stop it. A lot of us don't want to stop what we are doing at all, it gave them a better life than most other humans, and many other people are just not aware or their life is too complex to take the time to think about these things.
Time is our most valuable asset, and we are giving it away without the slightest thought. Giving it away to a job that allows us to eat and have a roof[^3], to social medias, television and other fun but unfulfilling activities, to going places in highly inneficient modes of public transport or in polluting and isolating cars. We should stop doing this[^4], try to live a more sensible life, a life where time and money aren't the two dominating forces.

• [^1]: Which you can call inside of ed using the ! operator.
• [^2]: To be fair to ed there, if the occurences are in the same file, you can edit them all at once.
• [^3]: It is crazy to me that things like these which are in the UDHR aren't being enforced on governments somehow.
• [^4]: Though I admittedly don't have any clue how.

I have been considered an adult for a few years now, that's to say I've had my own place away from my mother's for a while. And I've noticed something, there is a certain amount of things you aren't taught in pre-adult life, well maybe you were but I wasn't and I know many other people who weren't. Then at some point you become an adult to the world, and you eventually have to face these things. Generally, they aren't hard things, it's stuff like cleaning the shower drain, fixing a tripped circuit breaker, how long you can store food in the fridge, how to pay your taxes, should you drill in this wall or will you hit an electrical cable, how to get rid of stuff that doesn't fit in the trash,...
And for some reason, you have to figure these out on your own. Sure, you can maybe call your family or a friend, you have access to the internet and these days, you can even ask AI. But still, why was I never taught these things? Why aren't we taught, be it by our parents (at least mine) or by school, the stuff that will be useful in our actual life? And I can't even say it's only something about nowadays society, when talking about it to older people, the general concensus is that they also had to figure it out on their own.

Maybe it's something inherently human, we have always relied on other humans for help, therefore there was never really a need to teach such things, you could always ask someone. Which would also explain why the stuff we are taught in school isn't the useful one but the rest. I couldn't have asked my mom or my neighbour to explain some weird Chemistry concept, they probably wouldn't have had a clue or just a rough idea. Because I don't really need a teacher to tell me how to clean my toilets in the correct way. Yet I can't help but shake the feeling that in a more and more isolated world[^1] we might not be able to rely on other people as much. Having to ask a neighbour for something is a hell of an effort, because I hardly know them, only from crossing in the hallways. Calling my family for help feels like a reach when I haven't seen them in months or barely for a couple hours [^2]. And sure there is internet and AI, and they have gotten me out of many situations before, but as useful as these tools are, it seems to me that they also are the primary cause of the lessening of human interactions.

So what should we do as humans? Should we teach useful life things in school instead of the more work-life/make money stuff we are taught? Should we try to rebuild links with our family, friends and neighbourhood? Maybe live together for longer like they used to do? Take care of one another more?
I'm not sure of any of these though I have a pretty positive opinion on most of them. Maybe I'm wrong as well, and figuring these things out by yourself is not as much of a big deal as I make it out to be. After all, none of these things has ever taken me more than a couple hours to figure out.
I don't know what I really think of all of this, and there are many topics addressed in this text that I would like to revisit later, but I think that for now I'm gonna try to have a more sociable life and talk more to other humans and less to the computer.

• [^1]: At least that's how I feel in my life. More isolated than the people before me, partially by my own fault.
• [^2]: Mostly a me problem this one, but I feel that modern life leaves you with little time to spare for yourself, therefore even less for family. I guess this depends on your values and priorities though.

Yesterday I discovered the Internet phone book, and I was really excited to buy one because this project resonates with me.
Unfortunately, it is sold out pretty much everywhere and I'm not going to the USA or Greece to get one (though I wish I could).

EDIT: Since then, they restoked! And I was able to get my hands on one 🙌

Despite this, I still had a thorough look at the website, and I discovered that they have a phone you can use to call the sites from the book!
So what I do now, when I want to take a break but don't want to mindlessly browse Twitter, is dial a random number and visit the site. It almost always leads to a deep rabbit hole and I discover many new cool places on the internet.

One other project I know about that works on a similar principle is the forest. You have a button and it teleports you to a random site somewhere!

If you know of other places like these ones that can be used to explore the small web, I'd be pleased if you can let me know and I will be sure to add them to the list on this page :))

Websites that help you discover other small web websites:

• Internet Phone Book
• The Forest
• Blogroll.org

I have been coding for a few years now, and in that time, I have done nothing but remove complexity from my coding setup and I feel like I've reached a point where I'm happy with it. My favourite editor is ed, but I can't really use it muc, therefore, I've settled on Neovim[^1]. I like the keyboard centric editing it offers, and it's actually really fun to use once you've mastered the Vim language. Neovim is a very capable editor, offering all you could imagine from modern IDEs (LSP, Autocomplete, Fuzzy finding, Plugins, Diagnostics,...), but I try to stray away from all these, keeping a very minimal approach to code editing.

The number one thing I don't have is a colorscheme. My code is black on white with a tiny bit of grey for comments, you might be thinking that this makes it hard to parse code and find what you want, but that's exactly the point. Since my eyes have few visual cues to grab onto, I've been forced to read the code to know what is happening, and that has in turned made me so much better at understanding and reading other people's code quickly. It also feels (to me at least) like my eyes are less strained after a day of working in black and white.

Another thing I don't use is autocomplete, neither the box that appears as you type or inline AI stuff like copilot. I've found that by removing these helpers, I actually had to learn the language I was writing my code in. Learn the order of arguments, the names of functions you only use ever so often, the names of the variables scattered throughout a project, and even namespaces[^2] of the packages installed on the project. Having the completion popup appear all the time was taking me out of my focus to read whatever it had to say and then validate it. Now I just write, without stopping, without breaking the flow. And it is often faster to do it this way rather than parse a list in a popup and select the right one.

I've also stopped using LSPs. This one was a hard choice, because LSPs provide 3 features that I heavily relied on: renaming, go to definition and file outlines. My solution to get rid of those is that I've started using grep or simply, my file finder. For sure it takes more time looking through a package's files to find out where a function is defined, but using ripgrep often makes it much quicker[^3] and I've found that searching manually through code allows you to learn the structure of the packages and over time, you get much better at using them. Another side effect of disabling LSP, is that I don't get squiggly lines when I make a mistake anymore. At first I thought it was gonna be a mess, that I would make so many typos or forget semi-colons and search for them for hours. But my brain quickly adapted, I started making less typos, and always keeping my eye on the back of my cursor to make sure I caught myself writing shit right away. I started double checking my code a lot more, to make sure there was no mistake, which often results in me finding ways to improve the code despite it being correct in the first place. You also become much quicker at finding the typos, your brain knows what common errors you make and searches for these in priority. And finally for the odd times where you can't find it, your language probabbly has some sort of linter you can run on the file that will tell you the problem.

So the only thing I've really kept aside from the ability to write text is a fuzzy finder that can search both file names and file contents[^4]. This is one of the most powerful features of my workflow, because since I don't have LSP to go to definition or other things like that, I use my fuzzy finder to navigate pretty much everywhere. But lately, I've slowly started replacing it with actual ripgrep and fzf in the terminal. When I do that, I also often use bat to preview the files and only jump in nvim when I know exactly what I'm going to modify. Another thing I use is Oil.nvim, it's a file explorer that works like a buffer, meaning you can edit the contents of directories, the names of files etc like if you were writing code. I don't have much to say about this, I just like it and have found it works better than NETRW[^5] for moving files around.

Outside of my editor, I use tmux, a terminal multiplexer which allows me to create many sessions for all the different projects. The terminal I use is Ghostty, it is fast, looks good and that's all I really need from a terminal. For git stuff, I'm a big fan of GitHub Desktop, because its GitHub integrations are on point and it simplifies many hard to remember git commands. My browser of choice is Zen but as I discussed in my blog post about browsers, I'm never really sold or satisfied with the browser I use.

That's it for my coding setup, it might[^6] change in the future, at which point I can write an updated blog post. But for now, I think that this pretty bare bones setup is good for me. It forces me to actually learn the programming languages I use and understand the codebases I work on, the more I code and the more I get a feeling for how code should be written, how to refactor better,... . If I had one change to really recommend from all the above, it would be to disable your autocomplete. I know that in today's coding landscape this is a weird advice with tools like Claude Code or Cursor where AI writes the code for us, but I swear that you will see improvements in your understanding of the code in very little time.

If you have questions, or want to share your coding setup, please feel free to send me an email, I would be pleased to read what you have to say ^^.

• [^1]: A modern version of vim, scripted in lua and with a really active community.
• [^2]: Talking about PHP here, a namespace is this for example Theoo\App\Components. It allows your code to differenciate between two classes with the same name but under different namespaces.
• [^3]: --no-ignore-vcs my beloved ❤️
• [^4]: I'm using Telescope.
• [^5]: Vim's default file explorer.
• [^6]: Will for sure

Rose colored sunglasses on my nose, I walk in the rain waving to the dogs I cross path with that reply by looking back happily with their tongue sticking out and their tails wagging.
I see a puddle, jump over it, almost fall in it then celebrate this new long jump world record.
The rain has stopped and I keep looking at the sky hoping for a rainbow to appear, don't see the red light and almost get run over, this felt like playing crossy roads.

Hear me out, life is the funniest thing ever, you just have to make it fun. The world around us is full of things that were designed for one purpose, but have so many more hidden ones.
See a small fence? Jump over it.
Follow pigeons around, yes they are slow, but they might take you to a random fun place.
A bus stop pole can quickly become a fireman's pole or just a bar to spin around like you are in some sort of musical.
Cartwheels are surprisingly has much fun as an adult as they were as a child. Don't believe me? Try it.
Raindrops on the windows are like dozens of races happening at the same time, which one will get to the bottom first?
Try to remember graffiti signatures and you'll find them in many different places, sometimes even in different countries.
Wear clothes just because you want to, even though it looks awful and even you agree.

The hard part is overcoming people looking at you weirdly, but that's ok, they are just not having as much fun as you are. And from my experience, none of them ever dares to confront you about it anyways, they must just think you are some sort of eccentric.
A thing that helped me with this is to think about who I remember I saw today when walking outside. And the answer is pretty much no one, we just don't care about the people we cross path with. We might remember them for 10 minutes but then they go to the empty abyss of useless brain stuff.

So please, next time you go out, put on your coolest pair of shades (yes even if it's not sunny) and have some fun. Just make sure you don't break or make anything dirty cause that's uncool.
I would love to hear about how you are making your life fun, so don't hesitate to tell me about it and have a great day!

I love brushing my teeth.

The feeling of the hairs of the brush scraping on each tooth removing bits of food and undesirable stuff. The frothing of the toothpaste filling up your mouth more and more as you brush. The clean and minty taste that tingles your tongue, nose and eyes.

For me, it's a moment to reflect, a moment spent with myself in front of the bathroom mirror. A moment to prepare myself for the day ahead, to think about what I'm going to do, who I'm going to spend it with, what the weather will be like. It's generally the last moment before the day starts, 3 to 5 minutes after which I'm going to get engulfed in the movements of daily life.
Then, it's also a moment to wind down in a way. When after a long day, I'm once again faced with myself. It means "you are soon going to bed", it's a time to think about the day that passed, how it went, who I met, how did I feel, how do I feel?

Teeth brushing is a moment where no one will interrupt you. Because you are not going to walk around creating white sticky stains everywhere, because you are not going to talk and spit all over the other person's face, they wouldn't understand any of your gurgly sounds anyway.

I wonder why I used to hate brushing my teeth.

As a kid, I would do anything to avoid it. The toothpaste was stingy, it took precious time I could have used to play, it meant going to school, or going to bed, two activities my kid self despised heavily.
Maybe as a kid, I was simply more in the present moment rather than thinking about what was and what will be. These 2 minutes tops I would spend roughly scratching my teeth were a moment not spent having fun, and what can a moment spent not having fun be worth?

Since I was born in the early 2000s, I've been around browsers most of my life. The first one was Firefox, it was the one installed on the family computer and I didn't even know there were other browsers at the time. To be fair, there was no difference between the browser, the search engine and internet in my mind.
Then I discovered Internet Explorer while trying to kill the time at my grandparents'. I would play random flash games and watch let's plays of Mario Kart Wii on Youtube. At some point, Chrome replaced Firefox on the home computer which had since become a laptop, and would even replace my grandparents' trusty IE. For many years after that, all that existed was Chrome, maybe Safari for the odd times where I used a Mac at school or at some Aunt's place, but I knew no better.

Somehow along the path of my life, I ended up studying web development, and that's when the problems started. Because you see, before that, a browser was just a box with tabs that allowed me to access the internet, nothing more, nothing less. But then it became a tool, and a very important one as well, I wanted it to look good since I would spend most of my days there, but also to be fast and support many features. So at first I downloaded the three main browsers, to be able to test my websites properly, Firefox, Chrome and Safari, and I started to have preferences.
Safari was the sleek good looking one[^1], but so many websites would break when they encountered it and the dev tools sucked. Chrome was the web development beast, it didn't look too bad, its dev-tools were fantastic and it supported every feature under the sun, but it was run by Google... yuck. Firefox, was the ugly one, I hate how base Firefox looks, but at least Mozilla foundation felt less bad than Google or Apple and it supported most features with good enough dev-tools.
I was torn, constantly switching between the three for different tasks, never feeling at home anywhere and I wanted it to stop. So I started looking online for alternatives, and there were many.

That's when my browser frenzy got started, at some point I had 22 different browsers installed on my computer. There were the minimal ones like Min, the featureful ones like Vivaldi, Opera or Orion, the plethora of privacy focused forks, LibreWolf, Mullvad Browser, Waterfox, Ungoogled chromium, Brave, Throium,... a bunch of Vim inspired ones like Vieb or Qutebrowser. I even tried to use terminal based browsers like Lynx or w3m[^2] but quickly gave up on these. I was never satisfied, always looking for a good balance between privacy, my love for the keyboard and good looks. And that's when a new name started to rise discreetly, Arc.

See, Arc definitely didn't tick the privacy nor the keyboard centric box, but it had such good looks[^3] that I couldn't keep looking away. I had it laying on my computer for about a year, using it on an off, never feeling quite at ease, but then it grew on me. At some point I had accepted that what mattered most to me was the way my browser looked[^4] and the ease with which I could use it to develop websites over the privacy aspect. And so I became a happy Arc user, there was little to complain about, after so many attempts and years of searching, I finally had found a browser that I would stick with in the long run.

But then "The Browser Company" decided to stop working on Arc, and that sucked and this Arc breakup re-ignited my frenetic browser search. The novelty of Arc, with it's thursday updates had been able to keep my mind quiet, always having something new to try, but then I didn't have this safeguard anymore. So I went back to previous browsers I had really liked, Orion, LibreWolf and even Chrome... But the Arc way had poisoned my mind, not being able to open something in glance? No folders? No nice catchy animations absolutely everywhere? These had all become necessary things in my way of interacting with the internet.
Fortunately, great folks decided to create Zen. This browser ticks most of these boxes and it is also open source and more private. So I've been using it as my day to day browser for a while, but at the same time I'm still looking around for alternatives.
The thing is, now that I'm not blinded by Arc anymore, I realize that I actually don't fancy the sidebar that much. It's alright, but I love the look of top tabs and the usability of them. And of course, Zen team has already said that they don't plan to support top tabs, ever. "The Browser Company"'s new browser, Dia, could have been a great replacement, but even if it ever reaches feature parity with Arc, I still don't trust "The Browser Company" anymore and I hate the AI and the monetary aspect of it.

So here I am, stuck in this browser landscape, with so many choices but none that perfectly fits me. Maybe it's time I accept that nothing will ever be perfect, and to be at peace with using a browser that is more than good enough. To stop losing time switching and setting up different apps over and over again. I think that's a lesson for my life in general, stop wanting to always change things up, and be satisfied by whatever I have as long as it works.

• [^1]: Sadly, apple killed that statement with their liquid glass update 🫠
• [^2]: On which this webpage works really well btw.
• [^3]: Debatable opinion, but as much as I dislike "The Browser Company", their designers do a pretty dang good job.
• [^4]: Again, very debatable, I don't always feel comfortable with this opinion.