Updated: 05 October 2026

Current projects

I’ve been noodling with NetNewsWire stylesheets to customise the look of the articles I read through the app. Font choices, colours, justification and paragraph-tweaking are hugely important to help me read more, and it has worked well to keep me off the sites that have a toxic amount of surveillance technology built-in. It is also a very consistent reading experience, that allows my brain to get into ‘reading mode’ easily and quickly, making it a joy to use.

Currently Reading

This is a table of the currently on-the-go books that I am some way through:
Cyberlibertarianism David Golumbia
Introduction to Digital Humanism Hannes Werthner
The School of Night Karl Ove Knausgaard
The Sun Also Rises Ernest Hemingway
Radical Infrastructure Britt S. Paris
Bit Rot Douglas Coupland
Typhoon Joseph Conrad
The Black Ghost of Empire Kris Manjapra

2026 appears to have a good twenty or so books in the pipeline. I would hope to read them all. Scratch that. It’s likely to be more like thirty.

Social Media

I have, for the most part, stuck to not using social media. Even my Mastodon presence is reduced to the point of me using it as a lurking/research vehicle, rather than a “social” one. I’m more and more convinced that the net outcome of social media is negative, rather than positive in its current guise. And for all we want to change that, with projects like Mastodon, it just doesn’t stick or translate into much positive.

Using the RSS feeds for YT channels, is by far the best way to experience them. That and draconian ad-blocking. In fact, I go as far as actively not watching something if I cannot block the ads. When you read ads, what you need to hear in your head is “invasive surveillance”.

Photography

I have over 10K photos on Flickr, in breach of the free account limits (it never used to be), so I have requested a download of all my photos. Flickr does not reply to my request to download them, so they can go f’ em selves for now. I have local copies of all the originals and backed them up.

I’m still thinking of hosting them somewhere, but I want to avoid another service for obvious reasons. micro.blog doesn’t look like it is an appropriate service to host and organise this type of photo library.

I’d played with iPhone photography with a purpose-built tripod mount, but it only made me realise how much I hate taking photos using the iPhone. It actively gets in the way and utterly destroys the pleasure I have for taking photographs. Needless to say, I am consequently trying to avail myself of a real camera that I can use for work-related purposes and a little personal use. Before the end of the year if I’m lucky.