Tag: blogging

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I have been busy today, but the weekday streak of Pook-Emu Bee links continues.

1 | California political candidate facing six years in prison after listing dive bar as home address (Marina Peña for the California Post. August 24, 2026.)
This plan was dumb enough to make me wonder whether she lives in a dive bar.

2 | Summer Wars: An Anime With A Cautionary tale About AI (The Ghastly Mirror. August 24, 2026.)
I watched Summer Wars with a friend a long time ago (maybe 2014-15). I recall liking it well enough so I’ll second the recommendation.

3 | Happy 35th Birthday, Linux! (Marius Nestor for Tux Machines. August 25, 2026.)
35? Linux is still just a kid. Happy birthday to my operating system since 2020!

4 | The Data Center Wars – A Massive Proposed Data Center in Texas Drops Request for Tax Abatements (Buck Throckmorton for Ace of Spades HQ. August 25, 2026.)
Pacifico Energy could have saved itself plenty of grief by not requesting the tax abatements in the first place.

5 | 1000 Blog Posts (Chris at Unaccountable Thoughts. July 6, 2026.)
This is 632 here at ECS (not counting my “social” activity posts).

6 | Seen This Week: Butterflies and Fruits (Kate St. John at Outside My Window. August 15, 2026.)
I’m pro-butterfly, so I approve of this photo post. I haven’t seen many in Brooklyn this year but there have been a decent number of bees and dragonflies lately.

7 | Kanon Analysis: Understanding Mai’s Struggle (Zalor at Zalor’s Seminar. July 10, 2026.)
A very interesting in-depth analysis of the struggle of Mai in the excellent 2006-07 anime adaptation of Kanon (on my distant to-review list). This post includes the analysis video along with the full transcript.

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I came across a New York Post opinion column by Lydia Moynihan titled The Gwyneth Paltrow AI controversy only hurts women. This may be rich coming from someone who, in the last month, has published reports on a free air conditioner and free printer left out for the taking in Brooklyn, New York City, but really? When I see that headline, I think “I have a deadline and no ideas, let me scour social media for something to write about.” Far be it from me to tell other internet writers how to live their internet writing lives, but please do not do this.

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I was working late into the night (unfortunately not on articles), but I am back for another Pook-Emu Bee link (one away from Sunday-Friday perfection before we yield the floor on Saturday for The Newsletter Leaf Journal).

My hand holding a tube of Sensodyne Pronamel Kids Berry Twist toothpaste over a sink.
I use SLS-free toothpaste because of canker sores. I also want toothpaste with fluoride. My options at Lot Less in late July were limited. This is what I came up with (photograph from July 29, 2026).

1 | Some Claude users are mad that Anthropic’s new watermarks will catch them using it at their jobs, classes (Lucas Ropek for TechCrunch. August 12, 2026.)
The thought that these people may be too lazy to paste the output into a text editor and sanitize it is almost as concerning as how lazy they are in using Claude.

2 | Twenty-Five in Blog Years (Dave Peck. August 11, 2026.)
I offer my congratulations to Mr. Peck on his blog’s quarter-century anniversary. What was I doing 25 years ago? Elementary school.

3 | Koei Tecmo releases 90-minute Atelier Ryza ASMR featuring Klaudia, picnics, bathing, and ear-cleaning (Amber V for Automation West. August 13, 2026.)
I think it may be time for “Ryza” to join “Palworld” on my gaming-related Miniflux global block list.

4 | Houston Man Charged For Terroristic Threat Over Anime (Rafael Antonio Pineda for Anime News Network. August 13, 2026.)
His rant raises many questions. I don’t think I want the answers.

5 | Bob Iger, Josh Kushner shockingly purchase Lakers months after Mark Walter became majority owner (Ryan Morik for Fox Business. August 12, 2026.)
I went on record when the Lakers went for $10 billion last year noting that the price struck me as high. To be sure, I was not expecting the Lakers to be flipped for $12 billion just over one year later. Perhaps it has something to do with the report’s note that Mr. Walter is under investigation for tax fraud.

6 | Clicks have killed the Inverted Pyramid (Gordon Meyer. August 8, 2026.)
I have more than 200 feeds in my feed collection and many feed items, so I have more than enough to read to allow me to check out when I see what appears to be a rambling SEO introduction. My bigger problem lately has been seeing obvious indicia of AI junk in articles, which also leads to a quick close.

7 | Rite Aid-Replacing Tower for Corner of Smith and President? (Cate Cocoran for Brownstoner. August 11, 2026.)
That is not the nicest stretch of the Carroll Gardens section of Court Street (it looks better from the air than the ground), so this could be an improvement provided that they do not make it too tall. While I cannot say that I am optimistic, I would agree that Carroll Gardens survives pretty well without the benefit of the historic district designation that neighboring Cobble Hill has.

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Replied to AI-generated blog post images are not cool any more by Panagiotis Vryonis (blog.vrypan.net)
But AI-generated images in blog posts are no longer cool. Everyone does it. And with the exception when an image is a really good fit, it looks like a 2000 PowerPoint using animated transitions and WordArt.

I read an interesting blog post by Panagiotis Vryonis titled AI-generated blog post images are not cool any more. My first thought was “they were never cool.” But I read on to see his perspective. While I and many others serve as proof that asserting that “everyone does it” is flippant, he does offer a practical point (from a non-AI skeptic perspective) that enough people use AI images to illustrate blog posts that it has the effect of “look[ing] like a 2000 PowerPoint using animated transitions and WordArt.” Mr. Vryonis offers a sensible AI-powered alternative that is less ocularly offensive than many of the AI images and would not raise that same hard-to-suppress tendency to question whether what follows is genuinely authored by a human being (commenter cmc highlighted that issue well). But I like to be solutions-oriented, so I offer my own take on the issue.

Back before I launched The New Leaf Journal in 2020, I thought it would be fun to use my own photographs and public domain sources such as Project Gutenberg books for photographs and images on my site. As people who frequent my posts know, I have stuck to that approach for more than six years, although some of my articles are illustrated by screen captures instead.

Photograph of two pigeons on the asphalt, separated by a liquid stain of some sort. The pigeon on the left is white and black and we see its back. The pigeon on the right is standard gray with a green neck and we see it in profile.
My photograph of two pigeons in the street in Brooklyn Heights on April 10, 2026. Straight from the camera lens of my LineageOS-powered Google Pixel 3a XL (subsequently cropped and compressed for publication).

While some people may have reasons for not wanting to publish local photographs, I appreciate seeing writers put some work and a human touch into their illustrations. Because Mr. Vryonis also references using images with creative commons licenses, I will note I have done that in a small number of posts, using images from Wikimedia, Flickr, Pixabay, and Pexels with the appropriate licenses, but in general I try to stick to my original approach. I would personally recommend against using AI-generated images, both because the sort of flattening effect Mr. Vryonis describes and their tendency to give off an inhuman vibe about the post as a whole (deserved or not), but I do read some blogs that use them (see Marius’s contrary On Generative AI Imagery take on his interesting blog) and would not go close to so far as to say they raise the same questions as writing bearing obviously inhuman AI markers.

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Replied to JulyReply 2026, a blog connecting month by Robert Birming (Robert Birming)
June is done and Junited 2026 wrapped up. Now it's time for JulyReply, the third edition of this blog connecting event where bloggers reply to each other's posts throughout July.

Last month, I participated in Robert Birming’s “Junited” project, wherein I (and others) shared good blog posts from around the web. I joined late (see my Junited 2026 posts) and failed to share a few that I saved (I was busy in late June), but I nevertheless managed to share 19 blog posts and articles for Junited 2026. Because I enjoyed Junited, I was happy to see that Mr. Birming has a similar event for July called JulyReply, so I throw my hat into the ring for the 2026 edition. As the name suggests, JulyReply is specifically for reply posts, so it is a bit more challenging (I humbly submit) than Junited, but I think I can put together a good selection. I plan to begin JulyReply by replying to some pre-July posts (I may even be able to use some of my un-used Junited links) before transitioning into July 2026-only in the latter half or two-thirds of the month (depending on how many links I come across for July). You can stay abreast of my JulyReply posts in the category archive page and I plan to publish a full write-up in The New Leaf Journal in August. I re-classified a reply post I published yesterday for JulyReply 2026 (I only read about JulyReply this morning, with “this morning” being July 2).

Photograph of the Brooklyn Bridge Park Marina, which is full, taken from inside the Park. In the immediate foreground, there is a barren tree dead center.
I took this photograph of the Brooklyn Bridge Park Marina on the morning of July 1, 2026.

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Favorited The Archivist In Me Turned This Blog Into a Book by Wouter GroeneveldWouter Groeneveld (Brain Baking)
I claimed that Good Blogging Habits Yield a Book Each Year of more than 80k words. That means compiling a hefty tome to compress all these years of productive blogging into a single physical volume might be a bit more challenging than I initially anticipated. Yet not impossible. So the last months, I’ve kept myself busy by doing just that: turning this blog into a book!

Wouter Groeneveld published a blog post on his blog, Brain Baking, titled The Archivist In Me Turned This Blog Into a Book. I have thought about creating a book from the millions of words I have published on The New Leaf Journal, so I read Mr. Groeneveld’s article with interest. His project is along the lines of my thinking, although I think I would “adapt” my articles a bit more aggressively. Perhaps you will read a “New Leaf Journal” someday, but the idea is not yet ripe. Until then, enjoy Mr. Groeveneld’s excellent and detailed article about his blog-to-book process.

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Replied to Where do blogs go when they die? by Robert Birming (Robert Birming)
If you're going to remove your blog, at least save the content, even if you think it's crap. If you want to remove specific posts, turn them into drafts instead of deleting them. ... If you're going to bury your blog, at least have the decency to give it a proper funeral by placing the remains in a coffin.

Robert Birming published an interesting short blog post titled Where do blogs go when they die? He noted having noticed that many blog posts shared in recent years by participants in his Junited initiative are no more. From the outset, I agree with Mr. Birming that bloggers can end their blogs at any time and may have good reasons for wanting to remove them from the internet instead of preserving them. Having granted that much, the post inspired me to think about ways to preserve a blog after sunsetting it. One method is to ensure that posts are saved in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (or similar initiatives such as Ghostarchive), which is something I already do (if you use WordPress, I highly recommend the Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer plugin). However, save for limited cases, Wayback Machine preservation will not ensure that links to the sunsetted blog will continue to work. Someone who kills a blog may understandably be disinclined to continue paying for hosting, but provided they are willing to hold the blog’s domain (assuming arguendo they use a custom domain), free hosting options is an interesting topic. For example, were I to sunset this site or The New Leaf Journal (perish the thought) but were willing to hold the domains, I could look into porting my “content” to a free or low cost service (e.g., Bearblog, which Mr. Birming uses, or to a static website and host such as GitHub/GitLab/Codeberg Pages) where it could live on with the same URLs with little-to-no maintenance. Perhaps someone should look into starting a low-cost service for keeping defunct blogs online with their custom domains and URL structures preserved.

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I had been sitting down to churn out today’s edition of Pook-Emu Bee links when work fell into my lap. But it is now lunch, and lunch means it is time for links.

1. Humpback Whales Sometimes Hold Their Mouths Open for No Clear Reason. Tourists Are Helping Scientists Understand the Rare Behavior (Margherita Bassi for Smithsonian Magazine. May 18, 2026.)

Maybe they’re just messing with everyone.

2. What Trump’s psychedelics order means for healthcare (Maia Anderson for Healthcare Brew. May 18, 2026.)

In the long-run it will mean more people wandering around under the influence of psychedelics.

3. Your blog needs more photos (Robert Birming. May 18, 2026.)

That’s not a problem on New Leaf Journal but this blog could indeed use more photos. I’m on it.

4. Bloat (Herbert Lui. May 18, 2026.)

One tradeoff with being prolific is bloat.

This is not untrue. The best way to mitigate the trade-off is trying to ensure that every article or post is in some respect pleasant or useful.

5. Turning an $80 Android tablet into a Debian Linux PC (Brad Linder for Liliputing. May 18, 2026.)

I like the idea of bringing mainline Linux to Android tablets. Now let us try to expand it to tablets that do not fall into the “why did you buy that in the first place?” category. Signed me.

6. Venezuela Extradites Nicolás Maduro’s Money Man Alex Saab After Biden Freed Him (Christian K. Caruzo for Breitbart. May 18, 2026.)

Sounds like a big shift in Caracas’ thinking. Did something happen? I feel like I missed something.

7. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt booed during graduation speech about AI (Mirna Alsharif and Austin Mullen for NBC. May 17, 2026.)

‘If you’d let me make this point, please —’ Schmidt said amid boos. ‘The point I’d like to make is choose a diversity of perspectives, including the perspective of the immigrant who has so often been the person who came to this country and made it better. America is at its best when we are the country that ambitious people want to come to. Let us not lose that.’

Did the chatbot tell him to try to use immigration policy as a shiny object when his AI lecturing was poorly received?

8. A first-timer’s observations about Watkins Glen International (NASCARCASM. May 12, 2026.)

I had only seen Watkins Glen on TV. Nice views.

9. First NYC casino to offer live table games sets opening day (Carl Campanile for the New York Post. April 20, 2026.)

I often find myself thinking “what can New York City use more of?” Here is our answer: Commercial vice.

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After two missed days due to having many work assignments, I return with a new edition of my Pook-Emu Bee links. Of course, there are no Pook-Emu Bee links tomorrow because of the newsletter and Sunday is hit and miss, so I encourage you to thoroughly enjoy today’s links.

1. Microsoft BitLocker-protected drives can now be opened with just some files on a USB stick — YellowKey zero-day exploit demonstrates an apparent backdoor (Bruno Ferreira for Tom’s Hardware. May 13, 2026.)

I had never heard of Bitlocker until one day in 2022 when someone I know was locked out of his Windows PC due to BitLocker. He managed to get back in but I dare say this security vulnerability could have been very useful. (HT Ambient Irony.)

2. Just stop using these (Hazn. May 13, 2026.)

I largely agree. If only everyone would just stop using those.

3. I want to comment on your blog post (Forking Mad. June 13, 2025.)

I respect the take but the spam on the one NLJ page I have with comments, the Guestbook, is already apocalyptic. But this did give me a fun idea. Stay-tuned.

4. New agents.txt file found on DreamHost (Kelson at K-Squared Ramblings. May 13, 2026.)

VPS providers should probably refrain from “retroactively” adding agents.txt or other files to live websites. At a minimum, I would suggest a warning and explanation.

5. WataMote anime studio Silver Link sees financial losses for third consecutive year, despite revenue growth (Carlos “Zoto” Zotomayor for Automation West. May 14, 2026.)

WataMote aired in 2013 and was not particularly good (I would classify it as “OK”). Thus, my first thought when I read the article was “well yes, if your best example of the studio’s work is a mediocre meme anime that aired 13 years ago.” But Silver Link handled all three seasons of Non Non Biyori, all of which were good (especially season two, which aired in 2015) and the third of which was my fourth-ranked TV anime of 2021. With that being said, Silver Link’s output is a bit bleak. Tearmoon Empire (2023) and Kokoro Connect (2012) were decent. I remember liking the first half of Tanaka-kun Is Always Listless back in 2016. Maybe I should finish that.

6. Android 17, Gemini Intelligence, and Googlebook: My first impressions (Rodrigo Ghedin at Manual do Usuário. May 13, 2026.)

I’m starting to see why Android is taking some dark turns.

7. The Dark Side of Unitree Robot Dogs (Maya Posch for Hackaday. May 12, 2026.)

When digging further into the robot, he found an easy to exploit arbitrary command execution flaw via the Wi-Fi password entry field, a year-old CVE-2025-2894 exploit, as well as highly suspicious traffic to Chinese servers whenever the robot’s software figured that it was not being watched.

I could have guessed the second part without the benefit of the completed research.

8. reMarkable’s Paper Pure is a $399 E Ink writing tablet that replaces the reMarkable 2 (Brad Linder for Liliputing. May 6, 2026.)

No backlight is an interesting design choice. Very nostalgic to me as someone who grew up using a Worm Light with my Game Boy Color.

9. Pedal parking: DOT plans 500 new bike hubs for NYC streets; online feedback encouraged (Barbara Russo-Lennon for amNY. May 4, 2026.)

I will spoil the feedback process for anyone who questions unlimited accommodations for bikes (including effective exemption from traffic laws) in New York City. Heads, bikes win. Tails, you lose.

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Quoted Stop Wasting Your Readers' Time (canro91.github.io)
Telling readers you don’t want to waste their time is already wasting it.

Cesar Aguirre writes “[t]elling readers you don’t want to waste their time is already wasting it.” I agree. It comes off as protesting too much. In Staying the Course in Writing in the LLM Moment, I wrote that “[t]he way to convince people that human writing is worth reading is to write well and in one’s own voice—a principle which applies to other forms of art.” While my focus in that article was encouraging writers to not modify their human writing to avoid frivolous LLM allegations, the advice applies well to “wasting time” disclaimers. The best way for a writer to convince someone that he or she is not wasting their time is to write well. As they say, show instead of tell.

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Another non-Saturday day ending in -day means it is time for a new set of Pook-Emu Bee. However, this will be our last Pook-Emu Bee until fun Monday. Tomorrow, Saturday, is newsletter day (which comes with about three Pook-Emu Bee’s worth of links from around the web. Sunday is Easter. I figure I can give myself Easter off. So I will be back with more Pook-Emu Bee on Monday.

1. How are we preparing for the Long Web? (Brennan Kenneth Brown. March 1, 2026.)

I have backups of my writing. So in theory I could re-constitute NLJ, ECS, and Newsletter Leaf Journal elsewhere if need be.

2. Apple Is Reportedly Buying Up “All Available” Mobile DRAM At Very High Prices To Starve Out Its Competitors (Rohail Saleem for Wccftech. April 2, 2026.)

My understanding is that Apple has been relatively quiet on the AI front but it’s nice to see it’s finding a way to be obnoxious.

3. DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market (Jeff Geerling. April 1, 2026.)

It’s killing all the markets. I am personally more concerned about the non-SBC building and replacement/upgrade parts markets.

4. Nicaragua: Communists Ban Holy Week Processions for the Third Year in a Row (Christian K. Caruzo for Breitbart. April 1, 2026.)

Persecution of Catholics in Nicaragua has been somewhat under-reported due to all of the problems Venezuela was causing and the existence of the communist regime in Cuba, but it continues.

5. Germany: CDU/CSU calls for cannabis rethink 2 years in (Mark Hallam for DW. April 1, 2026.)

I could have told them that the time to re-think marijuana legalization was before the legalization. Unfortunately, none of them asked. No one asked me in New York City either. Now swaths of the City smell like skunk torture cells and the collective IQ has gone down one standard deviation. Of course, even if I had been asked, they wouldn’t have listened. They don’t listen to me.

6. Negative Tennis (Owen Lewis for n+1. March 31, 2026.)

I was curious how long it was going to take for the author to note that Mr. Sinner’s first dominant year happened to be the year he was popped for a doping violation before receiving a very soft penalty. It did come up but the connection was not quite made. That aside, it is a good piece (I haven’t watched much tennis in the last decade). I was always a Roger Federer partisan myself. Watch some highlights/matches of Mr. Federer at the 2007 Australian Open. Perhaps his least dramatic major win, but he was something else. Partisanship aside however, I venture no debate that Novak Djokovic is the most accomplished men’s tennis player of all time in the aggregate.

7. Outrage as Oracle files thousands of foreign-worker requests amid layoff bloodbath (Marc Vartabedian for the New York Post. April 2, 2026.)

Funny how the need to layoff U.S. workers almost never affects the need to file thousands of foreign worker petitions. I think and think but cannot connect the dots. Again today I think.

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Quoted The Old Internet is Still Here by Tyler Gaw (tylergaw.com)
There’s a frequent lament of missing the “old” Internet. It’s different for every person that thinks it, but it’s usually a feeling of loss for things like personal websites, blogs, RSS feeds, quirky sites for special interests and hobbies, forums, etc. A feeling that they don’t exist. That they’ve disappeared from the Internet. While I understand the feeling, it’s misplaced.

Tyler Gaw published a good blog post titled The Old Internet is Still Here, noting that there are many personal websites and blogs worth reading on the web. As he put it, “they just got layered over by time.” I agree with his post and encourage you to read it on his website. For those who are inclined, it is easy enough to use a feed reader to collect good websites from around the web (I suggest combining it with a read-it-later solution) instead of viewing the internet through the prism of Google, social media, and whatever the popular chatbot is next week. Of course, knowing that there are good original websites, articles, and media online and promoting those things to others are separate matters. But I did recently offer some initial thoughts on the subject of promotion.

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Replied to Re; Respond, Don’t Create by Herbert LuiHerbert Lui (herbertlui.net)
For many of us writing online, finding something worth saying is half the battle. And yet, this problem runs counter to one strategy to making ourselves heard: speak loudly and frequently. VaynerMedia CEO Gary Vaynerchuk, a successful user of such a strategy, has talked about how he was releasing 40+ pieces of content per day, but he wanted to figure out ways to release 1,000 pieces of content per day. It increases his chances of winning the social media lottery. His mantra, “Document, don’t create,” has gained a lot of momentum in the marketing world.

I came across a blog post by Herbert Lui titled Respond, Don’t Create, and thought I would respond. For people looking to publish more often, he recommends reading interesting articles from around the web, thinking about them, and then crafting a response from your own perspective. While the article focuses in part on social media, the idea also applies to more substantive writing. I have written many articles prompted by things I read from around the web. However, not all of those articles are responses per se. Meaningfully engaging with something as a reader or viewer can inspire a novel article beyond a “letter to the editor”-style response.

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Replied to Notable links: March 27, 2026 by Ben WerdmullerBen Werdmuller (werd.io)
For the record, my posts aren’t written or conceived with an LLM, although I know an increasing number of people who use one to write a first draft and then edit. I’m not a fan. The whole point of the web — its beauty — is that it’s unrelentingly human and diverse. There are lots of ways in which AI is eating away at that core (fewer search engine referrals, more automated content, more spam), but this is the most insidious: through people who believe they are writing the piece themselves but are actually handing over their creativity to the model.

I came across Ben Werdmuller’s March 27 notable links of the week through Minifeed. One part of his commentary on an NBC article titled AI is changing the style and substance of human writing, study finds (talk about a “yikes” headline) caught my attention for indirectly touching on a topic of recent interest here. Mr. Werdmuller wrote that he, like me, does not make use of AI in writing. Regarding others, he stated that he is not a fan of using AI to produce a “first draft” before applying human edits. That points at a distinction I made a few days ago in Re; On AI in response to: A Positive Technologist Identity (2/4). While I do not use AI at any stage of my online writing work, I distinguished between using AI tools to edit and proofread a human-drafted article and editing and proofreading an AI generated article. Setting the broader philosophical debate aside, the former has a better chance of being worth reading than the latter.

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Favorited Improve the RSS experience of your blog readers by Jatan (journal.jatan.space)
Introduce people to RSS readers in an accessible way and link to such an explainer on your /feeds page. Both cases shouldn’t assume people know or understand the term. When introducing people you know to RSS readers, don’t assume how or what they read and consume on the Web. The concept of an agnostic feed reader can be hard to understand or appreciate at first so make sure you understand the person’s habits and needs before suggesting anything.

Jatan, writing on his Journal J blog, offers good advice for webmasters who want to promote feed subscriptions for their projects. Having tried to pitch people on feeds in real life, I concur entirely with his assessment that explaining what feeds are and how one should use them are good ideas. I do this on NLJ with my Feed Directory (could use a refresher) and Feed introduction article. For people who are not inclined to write their own introduction to feeds, there are plenty around the web (including mine, I humbly submit). I would also recommend explaining the benefits of using feeds and feed readers. See, for example, my articles on using feeds and read-it-later tools and my positive case for feeds. The only point I would offer a point of caution on is recommendation two: “Offer direct subscription links for various popular feed readers on your blog’s /feeds page.” In general, people who could use those direct subscription links already know about feeds, feed readers, and the benefits thereof. While I do not oppose the idea, I would be very careful about ensuring that the framing does not inadvertently give people who are not familiar with feeds and feed readers the impression that using them requires signing up for an external service or hosting their own solution.