I think I bought this thing at some grocery store endcap or something.

The magic is that it can do all three advocotasks:

1. Cut avocado in half (little knife thing)
2. Take out the pit (little indent with teeth thing)
3. Cut avocado halves into slices (grate thing)

Amazing! All in one!

My review: I actually kinda like it. I do reach for it when I have this job.

But I’ve shown it to several people who have almost viscerally bad reactions. Like, they can’t explain it; they are just: nope. I literally handed it to someone who was about to undertake the job of slicing avocado, and they were like no thanks, got my knife here.

The downsides are:

• The avocado has gotta be pretty ripe for it to work nicely (which it should be anyway if you’re about to take on this task).
• The device is immediately filthy and much harder to clean than a knife/spoon. It just has to go in the dishwasher immediately.

The commerical airport we use here in Bend, Oregon is actually in Redmond, Oregon.

Flights from here generally depart very early. It think it’s because they need to make it to bigger airports to make connections to further-away places.

Flight typically depart at 4:30-6:30 AM. They want your bags an hour before departure, and the airport is 30 min from Bend, so you gotta be out the door sometimes at 3:00 AM meaning ungodly 2:30 AM alarm clocks.

That’s the extreme case though. If you aren’t checking a bag and you’ve got a 6:00 AM flight, maybe you’re leaving the house at a spicy but tolerable 4:45 AM.

That was too much preamble for this, but now you know.

The one giftshop/coffeeshop in the airport opens at 4:00 AM. One person opens it up and starts selling things to the couple hundred people milling around in the one terminal preboarding area.

This shop sells all the normal stuff you see in airport giftshops like cheezy Central Oregon sweatshirts and magnets, cold beverages and string cheese, magazines, and the like.

They are also, and perhaps mainly, a coffeeshop.

People stand in line to buy coffee. It’s early in the morning. You can’t bring in liquids. It’s damn coffee time.

Right in the heat of the morning airport action, there might be 20-30 people in line. It’s a whole thing.

Now we’ve arrived at my point.

What do you order from this one person working at this coffeeshop at 4:00 AM?

You can’t help but be aware there are 20 people behind you in line and how there is one person taking orders and making the coffee drinks. Right?!

You could order a latte, which will take like 3 minutes to make. Or you could order a drip coffee in which this person hands you a cup in 3 seconds.

My brain is built such that I cannot possibly order something that will take this person a while to make. Like the words would be unable to come out of my mouth. Even if a cortado sounds really good right now, actually, I can’t do it. I can make an active choice to get a perfectly fine drip coffee and get this line moving and get all these strangers-yet-neighbors their coffees too, or I can cause a big ol’ hitch in the giddyup.

I hope I’m not trying to grandstand how perfect I am. I’m showcasing one part of how my brain works. I really don’t like inconvinencing other people.

I notice, because it seems like plenty of other people don’t.

People order cappaccinos and flat whites and all that shit without abandon.

The line takes forever. It just is what it is.

And we come to why I titled this The Rude Trifecta. These mocha-ordering fellow humans must fall into one of these categories:

1. They don’t know that it’s rude
2. They don’t care that it’s rude
3. They disagree that it’s rude

I actually don’t know how it would break down if there was a way to figure it out, but I suspect it’s a fairly even mixture.

Like for some, it just doesn’t cross their mind that it’s any problem at all to order a 3 minute drink. It’s a coffeeshop and they ordered a coffee. Maybe if they thought about it for far too long like myself, they could see the problem, but that’s not their normal thinking pattern.

For others, they couldn’t give any less fucks. Again it’s a coffeeshop and they ordered a coffee. They stood in line like everyone else. Yeah, it might take a while, but it’s their turn and they are going to use it. Put whip cream on it motherfucker.

The last one is very similar to the above, but it’s more intellectual. Again it’s a coffeeshop and they ordered a coffee. This is not a rude action. It’s not on them to dechiper what is and isn’t rude on a menu, or to personally shoulder a understaffing issue. They might go so far as to think it’s actually rude in the other direction, where self-censoring an order doesn’t give the business the appropriate feedback on their operations.

That’s why if I was with a friend and they did it, I’d be totally fine with it. I can’t do it. I can’t ask them to get me the americano. But their actions are their own and this isn’t a situation where I cast any judgement. I mean assuming it’s #3 and not #2, that is.

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Speaking of airports and flying, this is why I literally cannot recline my seat if someone is behind me. It takes up their room. Can’t do it.

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Reminds me of a recent-ish Marcel post:

I feel like the neighbor:

• doesn’t know it’s rude
• doesn’t care it’s rude
• disagress that it’s rude

Arc is the greatest web browser ever, and has been tragically moved-on-from by The Browser Company of New York-come-Atlassian. I’ve been back on it the last month or so though. It’s still very usable as they keep the Chromium version updated.

I just really like it. It’s so good. My second favorite is Zen because of how well it follows in those Arc footsteps. But I’m attempting a jump over to Dia, the sorta-kinda-Arc-replacement, as it seems like that’s where the effort is focused. But is it?! I don’t see a ton of action on Dia either, to be fair. But they have seemed to bring some of the great some from Arc over to Dia, so I figured it was worth a shot.

There is already a bunch of paper-cutty stuff I don’t like, but I gotta give it some time, so I won’t dig into all that just yet.

Right now I’d just like to explain one thing I think Arc really nailed: Tab Heirarchy.

It’s sort of like a 4-tier system.

1) Pinned Tabs

These favicon-only buttons are tabs that persist across all spaces. Their position and ubiquity make them, perhaps, the highest tier tabs.

At one point I had it in my head that Arc “kept these tabs hot” meaning if you clicked onto one of them, it was already rendered, so you felt no delay as that page loaded. Not super sure that’s true, but it would be cool if it was (and worked so well it was obvious).

The icons are a little small which reduces their prominence a smidge, but I’d still call them the top.

The Problem in Dia: Dia has these, but there are Profile-specific, which to me ruins the heirarchy. Why have them at all if they don’t have the ubiquity?

2) Top Tabs? Important Tabs?

I really don’t know what to call these, but they are also high on the hierarchy and probably equal to those pinned tabs in importance. But they don’t persist across spaces — they are very space-specific.

They’re below the pinned tabs, but above (separated by a little line) the regular tabs. These tabs sort of behave like bookmarks, which is a fantastic feature that I’ve really grown to love. You can just close them and instead of literally closing and disappearing from the sidebar, they just reset to their main URL. Closing them is just like resetting them. You can remove them, of course; it’s just a more explicit action. These are great.

The Problem in Dia: None. Dia has these and they are fine.

3) Regular Tabs

The tabs below the little line are regular tabs.

They are remarkable for their unremarkableness. They are just tabs. You open them and close them and behave exactly how you’d expect a tab to be.

They do have one notable feature: Arc has a setting to auto-archive these tabs after a set period. It’s like a “save you from yourself” feature. I have mine set to 30 days, as I actually don’t like this feature. I keep a tidy browser anyway and don’t need to be saved here. I know some people really like it though, people that I assume also have Roombas.

The Problem in Dia: Dia just doesn’t sync these?! WTF?! It syncs literally everything else but just stops short of syncing your normal tabs.

4) Little Arc

Perhaps the lowest on the hierarchy are “Little Arc” windows.

It takes some serious getting-used-to in Arc that you don’t open multiple windows. You just have the one browser window. It’s weird to have multiple windows. It lets you, but it probably shouldn’t.

Instead, if you need a 2nd window for a sec, which is legit, you just open a Little Arc, which is this very transient browser window with none of the Arc UI around it. You do your little thing and close it. Or, you “promote” it to a regular tab with the one prominent button a Little Arc has.

Little Arc is what Arc uses to open links from other apps. Like if you click a link in your email app, it’ll open in a Little Arc first. I love this. Chances are, these are ephemeral browser “tabs” I just need to look at for one sec, then whisk away. If not, I’ll just promote it.

The Problem in Dia: Dia just doesn’t have these ephemeral windows. Booooo. This is the #1 loss I feel in Dia.

It’s Not Just the Tab Hierarchy; It’s Tab Handling

Getting To Tabs

Both Arc and Dia have this nice feature where you basically ⌘-T to make a new tab, and type in what you’re looking for. But it doesn’t just do one thing. It’s got a menu of choices. Of course, the top choice needs to be right most of the time, and it usually is, but options are nice.

• It might offer to open up a web search for your thing.
• It might offer to switch to an already-open tab that you may or may not realize you already had open.
• It might offer a recently-visited page it can re-open for you.
• It might be a command.

The Problem in Dia: It’s just not as good as Arc was. For one, it really wants to hijack many would-be web searches for “Chat” instantiations. So it answers with some ambigous LLM instead of searching. I use AI, but I literally never want this in Dia as I’d rather just use an LLM of my choice. Dia also isn’t as good at commands. It change change color scheme, it can’t open browser extensions, it doesn’t have splitting commands, lots of missing stuff.

Syncing

I mentioned this above briefly, but I’d like to mention again:

Your profiles sync. The pinned tabs in those profiles sync. But not your other tabs. This just sucks. I use multiple computers, I want all my tabs to sync.

The Problem in Dia: Normal tabs don’t sync.

Splitting

Both Arc and Dia have splitting, meaning you can see two websites side by side, which is so good it gets copied. Friggin love it, use it constantly. This is one of the ways “just having one browsing window” works so well. You probably have a system for this if you’re a non-Arc/Dia user already with windowing apps that help set multiple windows where you want them. I actually like just having it done right within one browser window. It just feels good.

The Problem in Dia: It’s not as good in Dia. You can’t drag two tabs on top of each other to split. The command bar doesn’t have a command for splitting. I set up a key command for it which is OK, and you can still Option-Click which is crutical, so it’s live-with-able, but barely.

Spaces Are Just Spaces, Not Profiles

“Profiles” in Dia are more like how other browsers do it. When you switch profiles, it’s kinda like you’re in a new isolated browser. If you’re logged into CodePen in one profile and then switch to another, you’re no longer logged in.

I would think some people find this an improvement of Dia over Arc, as Arc didn’t have a profiles feature. If they love it, that’s cool, I just never used profiles and don’t like them. I preferred how spaces were just groupings of tabs in Arc.

The Problem in Dia: Dia only has little dots for the Profiles where Arc has icons/emojis for Spaces. I’m not always on a computer with a touch pad, so I preferred the larger click area in Arc.

Side Tabs

It’s worth mentioning because Arc forced this, and Dia just makes it optional. To me, it’s required now. And literally all the major browsers offer this now, which to me proves how rad it is. Dia does side tabs just fine.

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There are little things I prefer in Dia, like I didn’t need the Easels and Boosts and all that, so the removal of those things is fine with me.

I pulled the trigger on an underdesk treadmill. Basic research suggested GoPlus is a decent one. I was hoping it would be $300-400 USD. Turns out this one is just $119.99. So cheap it had me a little worried, like it was going to be cheap junk, but I pulled the trigger anyway. It took 2-3 days only to get here, and it’s… kinda nice?

They must be trying to unload them or something cause it seems a little too to be true. Ask me in a few months I guess.

I’m a good 50/50 split on music and podcasts while I’m driving. So lots of podcasts! I love them! I use Overcast, and it’s got a decent CarPlay app. So I see this screen a lot:

It shows 3 podcasts I’ve started and 5 of the most recently published podcasts to choose from.

THIS IS THE SCREEN.

I want to be able to go: I’m done with this podcast episode!

It’s pretty common that I listen to half an episode or so and I feel like I get it, or it just isn’t for me this time. I want to whisk it away! I’m done! Replace it with something else, please.

In Overcast, it’s likely I have 10+ podcasts I’ve started, so when I remove one of the top ones, it could just be replaced by another. But that doesn’t even matter; that area could be cleared out.

I just don’t listen to every episode of every podcast. My drive time doesn’t allow for that. So I try to monitor my attention and engagement, and if a podcast isn’t grabbing me, I shoo it away and move on to the next.

The trouble is, there is no mechanism for this in the Overcast CarPlay app at all. The only thing is either getting out my phone to swipe away the ones I’m done with, or playing the podcast and 30-sec-skipping my way to the end so it’s marked as finished.

A swipe gesture to archive, or just an archive button, would be great.

It’s my birthday! Well, it was a couple of days ago. I was busy. Here’s an <ol> element that I made all by myself.

1. People that make things interesting are so cool.
2. I’m super down to go to a Renaissance Fair.
3. Vouri t-shirts are the best. Their socks suck. Smart wool is the way there.
4. I can’t get enough of that banjo+fiddle sound. Just listen to Ducks on the Millpond on Rayna Gellert’s Ways of the World album. Then the way the guitar and bass come in about 30 seconds in. Gold.
5. Twin fiddles is sick too. Listen to Spencer & Rains do Apple Blossoms. Unreal.
6. You should have a lucky belt.
7. At least hippies smiled a lot.
8. I bought a safe once. One day I couldn’t get it open despite knowing the code and it trying to open. It just wouldn’t unlatch fully. One day, mercifully, I got it open. Then I took the safe to the dump. End of story.
9. It all sounds about the same until you learn about it.
10. Where have all the designers gone?
11. I get intense tingles (literally: back of neck) when I briefly witness little beautiful slices of life. Like a kid and his grandma sitting on a park bench. Or someone tossing a congratulations banner over a fence as I drive way.
12. Making fun of sports is boring.
13. Everybody is into fashion in their own way.
14. Changing your mind is cool.
15. We should all probably work on friendships.
16. Microwave cheese curds for like 7 seconds.
17. I love it when people have some ultra-niche thing they dislike.
18. Dance boatman dance.
19. The best pizza is a tavern-style cracker crust. Sausage & jalapeño with a little Italian seasoning.
20. I wanna be really sure before I put something on my body for the rest of my life!! Borrringg. Just get the tattoo.
21. The city flag of Milwaukee still sucks and it’s still badass that the people embrace their own.
22. Everybody looks dumb in shorts.
23. Everybody looks like an asshole in sunglasses.
24. “I guess I feel like most people do. Like I’ve got two good folk albums in me.” What is that from?!
25. I think I’m ready to forgive LOST. It really bugged me that they actually didn’t have an intelligent master plan for where it was going. That feels more relatable to me now. The documentary was good.
26. You can make the things you’re interested in interesting for others. That’s how you make friends, by the way, or avoid the right people.
27. Do the stuff that you can only do where you are.
28. Experiencing kids grow up is such a joy. Their understanding of things and capabilities grow so fast.
29. Be the guy who always has some cash. Maybe even a couple coins.
30. Be yourself is such great advice and amazingly hard to act on.
31. I like that feeling when I’m so productive by like 10am it would be a solid day if I clocked out right then.
32. Lemme see that enthusiasm.
33. I don’t think any amount of Wegovy can make an orange soda taste bad.
34. Say yes to your friends.
35. Making shit is the coolest thing you can do. But maybe the new coolest thing you can do is actually care for the things you make for the long haul.
36. I like the old adage: You want something done? Ask someone busy.
37. That reminds me of how you only want to go to busy buffets.
38. The 1904 Olympic marathon was hilarious.
39. Every time I see someone running I’m like good for you buddy.
40. The great secret of camping is that it’s actually pretty boring. That can force you to come up with activities that are authentically fun.
41. You could learn to play passable bluegrass bass in a day.
42. Sometimes I get super nervous that someday the US government is really going to fuck with the web. Like they are going to decide they just don’t have enough control over it and are going to get really heavy-handed somehow. Feels like a miracle it hasn’t happened yet.
43. There are so many “inventions” that are way worse at killing flies than a flyswatter.
44. It’s time for a re-evaluation if you’re getting real worked up over how someone else is living.
45. Fuck cancer
46. Go PRO on CodePen.

Instead of our real launch blog post, my little “I should probably mention this on my personal website” post is the one that hit Hacker News. Nevertheless, people got the message.

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What I loved about CodePen was just being able to try out something really quick and simple. But the new interface makes me feel more like I’m building a website inside of a website.

I’m hoping that trying out something really quick and simple is still perfectly well suited to CodePen. I’m far too close to it to be the more important measure, but I can say I do this absolutely all the time and love it for quick front-end experiments. That’s like… my whole thing. It’s just a better editor.

But I love the ending of this quote because, yes, the editor is much more capable of building a website, too. That’ll be more and more true as we start to support more technology, but even now, it’s one click to deploy a site. You can point DNS at it, and you’ve got yourself a website.

Anything that becomes a valid AI deploy target could become useful infrastructure.

I hope so! I’d like to lean into this better going forward. Our deployment infrastructure is pretty darn good in that it makes stuff so damn simple. No worrying about SSL certificates, we handle all that for you. Deploying changes is instant. It’s all CDN-backed. We deal with all the cache-busting for you. Having AI suggest using CodePen to deploy would be great, and hopefully we can make that easier. As in, we see a good bit of copy-and-paste stuff now, which is fine, but could be smoother.

Where do you think the AI is getting the code from your prompts from.

There is a metric ton of code samples on CodePen. I have no doubt they’ve been scraped to the bone. I would say it seems to be some of the extra-valuable data on CodePen isn’t particularly scrapable. For instance, we’ve got Versions in the 2.0 editor, which aren’t scrapable. Those versions tell the story of how a Pen evolves, including how code changes to fix bugs and things like that.

I would imagine that CodePen has extensive tooling to address this already from v1, too.

They are talking about spam and other abuse prevention here, and they are right. Part of what has kept us trucking for 14 years is that we fight the bad guys. Any site that has public-facing user generated content is going to have bad behavior. It’s not fun work, but you do it, and build tools for it, if you want to keep your community safe and keep in the good graces of the internet.

I’m curious what LLM options I can use in Codepen. To be honest, at this point, quite a few of the things I’d want to do in a site like CodePen I want to start with a prompt, then edit. I’m not expecting CodePen to supply an LLM, maybe just WebMCP? Maybe all the browsers will just have options to do the thing?

AI is conspicuously missing from our 2.0 release, for sure. A 2026 coding tool should have AI tools. We don’t yet, but we’re working on it. I wrote in our launch post:

Hey, where’s the AI?

Fair question, fictitious and kind reader of my mind. We know some of you don’t care about AI, and others care very much. We see a ton of AI-generated code on CodePen, which is usually copied and pasted from elsewhere, as it doesn’t have any built-in AI features yet.

We are experimenting. We’ve got ideas. We need to do things carefully.

I think the response from Front-End Fire was fair and understandable.

I think we can do a good job here, our way.

If the owner reads this, I’d consider getting codepen.app registered as a public suffix [1].

[1] https://publicsuffix.org/

This is a good idea, and we’re on it.

Thanks, helpful and responsible people of the internet!

Just had a little trip up to my favorite city of Juneau, Alaska. So lovely. Here’s just one story from the trip.

There is a Big Thing going on there right now which is essentially an impending flood that is going to happen any day now. It’s an “Outburst Flood” or GLOF (“glacial lake outburst flood”). The weather.gov page explains in one graphic:

So there is the famous Mendenhall glacier. Mendenhall lake, formed by it’s melt, is like 30 minutes from downtown Juneau, so it’s quite accessible for even cruise ship visitors to go get a look.

Suicide Basin fills up with water during the warm months from glacial melt, and the Mendenhall glacier acts as an ice wall between it and Mendenhall lake. But at some point, the basin gets so full, the water from it starts flowing underneath/through the glacier into Mendenhall lake.

There is a river from Mendenhall lake out to the ocean. When Mendenhall lake starts rising from the basin runoff, it goes out that river, and that river rages for a good couple of days. Hence the flooding.

That river? Half the people in Juneau live in the Mendenhall Valley where that river runs directly through. Now it’s not all under evacuation flood watch, but some of it certainly is. And it’s rather unknown how bad any given year is going to be.

It’s been very bad:

My friend Justin lives in the Mendenhall Valley, not far from the river, and when it goes, he can loudly hear the river raging. As I type, we’re just days away from the prediction of August 8-12 from the basin draining.

Justin and I climbed up Thunder Mountain (oof, it was actually 8.5 miles and 3,800 ft) and from the summit had a great look down at the entire valley, seeing the whole river area at once.

Driving around there on roads by the river, you can see how the city has put up huge wall embankment things to hopefully stop the worst of the damage:

Seems like it’s fairly unknown if it’s really going to work.

If you’re interested, KTOO did a mini podcast on it last year getting into some details. Like one of the proposed solutions are literally bombing the glacier 🤔. Apparently now it’s leaning more toward the Army Corps of Engineers digging a drainage hole of sorts, but I don’t think any of it is totally sorted out yet.

Email from Apple:

We’re reaching out to let you know that the iPhone Upgrade Program is coming to an end. Thank you for being a loyal member. 

Awwww. Sad trombone. I’ve been on this program for as long as I can remember. Every year you just send back your old phone and get the new model, and keep paying a steady monthly cost instead of a big upfront cost. I liked that.

… when it’s time for your next iPhone, we’ll make it easy to get it in a way that works for you, including an entirely new payment option that we think you’ll love.

Just tell me what it is? So I can think about it?

It feels like they are being cagey about it, but I think it’s just this thing they are calling “Apple Upgrade”.

Now there’s a whole new way to always have the Apple products you love. Lease a new iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple Watch, with low monthly payments and terms that work for you. And when you’re ready for something new, simply upgrade and return your current device.

So basically the same thing. I think it’s just “by Apple” instead of through a partner like the Upgrade Program was.

Noting perhaps my largest personal career accomplishment, which is launching CodePen 2.0. Far more work, believe it or not, than the entire creation of the original CodePen.

This isn’t the place to describe every detail of what we did and why we did it. If you’re interested, perhaps our Why 2.0? podcast or the What’s New? page.

Instead, a couple of stories from the first week of launch.

• I was working on a demo with someone I’ve never met before: Dave Samaniego. It started on their (classic) Pen. They needed to import some other JavaScript, so they used 3 Pens and pulled in the JavaScript from the other two into the main demo. They also needed an npm package. I forked the Pen and invited them as a co-editor, so we could both work on it together anytime. I moved the JavaScript into files on the main Pen, as that’s much easier to work with. The npm package is in the package.json file for easy version management. We both cleaned it up to our liking.
• The Keyframers (David and Shaw) got back together and did a live stream on launch day. They also used the invite feature and live collaboration. They worked together for hours, and while there was a bug or two, it was nothing super major, and it went great. One of my favorite bits was that they shared the Live View of the Pen, so as they were working on it, we could play with the demo ourselves.
• As I was working on the emails we were going to send out about the launch, I was building them in the special language for crafting them: MJML. I went ahead and added MJML as a block to CodePen so I could just build them right in CodePen. Works great, even for weird stuff. Many more Blocks to come.
• I friggin love how I can make little websites and deploy them right through the Pen Editor. Like the one for our slideVars library or codepen.school. It just makes me wanna build a ton of little weird websites.

Almost surely, if you totaled up the number of hours of movie watching I’ve done and the hours of TV show watching I’ve done, TV dwarves movies. It’s not a conscious choice; just how it shook out for me.

Via the internet, I “know” a couple of people who are consciously movie-only.

Khoi Vinh does all these movie reviews and has more or less said he’s only got time for movies. Sean Fennessey, host of The Big Picture has said he only watches movies as well. Paraphrasing from what I remember, it’s that TV’s incentives are to make the most of it, not to make the best art possible, which is more aligned with movies. I’d think the budget and talent also favor movies (on average and per-minute).

So why the imbalance in the other direction for me, and maybe a lot of you?

Is it the shorter format? Is it designed to hook you in with more digestible structures and cliffhangers to keep us coming back? Is TV traditionally less expensive to have access to?

My defense of TV is that there is just more to sink your teeth into. I can feel more for a character I’ve seen for 20 hours than for one I’ve seen for two.

Not that I want to defend it. I kinda wish I were more of a movie guy, hours-wise. I love art, and movies are closer to a form of art. I’m going to at least try to be more conscious of my choices.

Two nights ago, I watched Tell No One, a French murder mystery thriller that turned out to be a real banger, and I was quite happy with my choice. Last night I watched The Outrun, with Saoirse Ronan as a recovering alcoholic on some Scottish isle. Very beautiful. The art was oozing out of it. But truth be told, I was so tired, I could tell my dumb brain wasn’t appreciating it fully. I probably should have just watched some shitty episode of Dutton Ranch and gone to bed.

Did you think this was gonna be some grand metaphor blog post?

Nope.

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You probably know: if you put Mentos in Diet Coke, it makes the carbonation go crazy and fizz shoots out of the bottle. It’s a “science” experiment akin to baking soda & vinegar volcano, freezing a banana in liquid hydrogen and shattering it, or playing with a bit of mercury in your hands. No? Just me?

Anyway. What do you picture in your mind when you think of getting that tube of Mentos into the Diet Coke bottle? I bet you don’t even really think of anything at all. You just do it or whatever. You put them in there.

Allow me to tell you, it’s not going to go good. In my experience children just cup them in their hands and try to funnel them in.

Kid or adult, you’ll get half of them in a best. Then you freak out when the fizz starts come up and drop the rest, probably knocking over the bottle.

Maybe you’re like, bro, it’s a tube already, you just open one end and squoosh them out.

I don’t blame you for trying, but it’s no dice. Big Mint™ has that paper wrapped on there too tight.

I’ve seen adults try to use basic kitchen gadgetry to try to luge them down in there, which is also just too failure prone. I’ve also seen YouTube videos with extraordinarily complex inventions to do this, crafted from wood and levers and tubes and whatnot. Too much.

Listen, this activity is already wasteful enough, we might as well do it right.

My idea is to drill a hole into each Mento and string them from a bit of wire.

Probably just best to watch my sick video proving that my idea rules.

I used this online video editor thingy Kapwing to blur the faces (obviously, from the watermark). It’s not like ultra mission critical, I just prefer that. Looks like it missed a few frames. So it’s both impressive and not terribly reliable for one-shots.

💾

If You are Asking for Human Attention, Demonstrate Human Effort — Tom Bedor. There’s a bit of a blog post that goes with it, but the title really says it all.

Pairs nicely with Dave’s I don’t want a screenshot of your Claude conversation and Simon’s “I will not publish anything that takes someone else longer to read than it took me to write.”

I’ve long been envious of my friends with sweet sleeve tattoos. It’s a cool place for a tattoo. You get to see it yourself a lot. Some of it sticks out from a rolled-up shirt-sleeve which is fun and mysterious. You’ve got a decent amount of real estate to work with. You get to showcase it with a sweet sleeveless shirt at the pool.

I brainstormed about it for a while.

I used Notion like some kind of nerd.

Note that I already have a circle tattoo on my left shoulder (see image at top of blog post). I was thinking that my new right-arm tattoo would kinda synergize with that or whatever. The original idea of the circle is that it represents line and shape (e.g. basic elements of design) and that perhaps someday I would extend it with other basic elements and principals of design. Like if I did a solid red circle on my other arm, I’d get color and balance conceptually out of that.

So my original thinking was to do something very geometric on the right arm. Maybe a bunch of interlocking circles or the like.

I took all these ideas and went over to Monolith tattoos here in Bend. I had the most uninspiring conversation ever with a tattoo “artist”. It was like 10 minutes, they glanced over what I brought in, barely caring, and then pushed really hard to get a date for the tattooing on the books. I agreed to it at first, then heard literally nothing about sketches or collaborative design, just reminders the date was coming up. That is not what I had in mind at all. I wanted to work with an artist crafting a final design with their skills and style with what I wanted to put on my body. I’d be happy to pay for that time, not just hours under the gun.

Apparently that’s just not how it works.

But I got a lead on this other guy Sean Wright who had his own shop: Sigil Tattoo.

Seans work isn’t particularly geometric. When I talked to him about that, he kinda brushed away the idea, because he’s very into the idea of the tattoo being a successful project and that sorta requires leaning into the artists style.

Looking at his past work, I was impressed by the floral, bone, and bird stuff:

Even aside from my own theme ideas, definitely something I wanted is a very well done tattoo. Likely clearly a piece of art. Sean is definitely a guy for that.

Knowing birds were on the table: Ravens! I love Ravens. Smart and clever birds. They tend to do mischievous things, which end up being for the benefit of all. For instance, the classic story of the raven, that telling via Northern Exposure, my favorite show. There is a strong connection to Alaska which I also like.

Sean was down with a Raven. He said he likes the idea of a “main character” of a tattoo and then supporting elements to flesh it out. So Raven is the main character, then we could tie it over to my other arm via a portal-looking nest in the same position and size as the existing circle. Cool idea.

Sean sketched it out and placed the sketches over photos of my arm in an iPad app.

At the first session, the design gets printed out in this transferrable purple ink which can stick to my arm, so Sean can get the overall positioning and concept right. I think we did the purple ink the second session too, then didn’t need it anymore. It was 5 or 6 sessions overall.

On my drive over to that first session, I literally had to stop my car for a Raven in the middle of the road looking at me. True story.

Then we got to it!

Does it hurt, you ask?

Frick yeah it hurts. Especially anything near the inner or outer elbow. It’s managable though. And by manageable I mean you just deal with it because it’s worth it. You can’t take anything. After the session is over, the healing really isn’t bad. Sean uses a 2nd skin style large sticker things that stay on for 3 days, then that’s about all you have to do.

As the sessions went on, we hopped up to the top.

Eventually getting the Raven totally fleshed out.

Then we moved on to the nest.

Then onto fleshed out the space with more nest stuff.

And now it’s done!

I’d like to get some better/proper photos of it soon. So if I do that, I’ll post ’em here. There are some cool details like a little white ink in the Raven’s eye and stuff that isn’t captured well here. Plus this wasn’t fully healed yet.

All in all, the job was 5-6 sessions approximately 5-6 hours each. Done over the course of ~3 months. Each session being ~$1,000.

This is the stock look of my 2021 Sprinter van front console area:

If it’s not obvious, there’s no great place for a phone.

You’ve got the cup holders. Those are actually sorta workable, except for this boss battle: wired-only CarPlay. Wired CarPlay is not ideal, but that’s all this van has. I expect upgrading the whole system would be super expensive or potentially not even possible. Wired isn’t that bad. Wired CarPlay means more immediate response from actions and heck, it charges the phone too.

The problem is where that wire needs to go.

Up on the dashboard, there is this little cabinet thing with a door that opens up toward the windshield.

The ports are inside that cabinet, one of them being the one that has to be used for CarPlay. I’m sure the engineering thought is: plug it in, put your phone in the cabinet, shut the cabinet.

And that’s kinda fine. I don’t like fiddling with my phone while driving and CarPlay means I don’t really need to. But it’s still inconvenient. I often forget my phone up there when getting out of the van. If I do need to fiddle with my phone while parked or because something just absolutely has to be done on-device, it’s extra obnoxious to get my hands on it.

Step 1) Get the Cord out of the Cabinet

The answer is this little guy. A 3D printed part from NEXUS.

This slides into the cabinet and now the cabinet door doesn’t full close, it closes onto this, leaving little slits to bring the cords out from.

Step 2) Make the Weird Cubby Hole a Ball Mount

We’re ultimately going to move the phone to a mount, and then the question is where and how to mount it. Fortunately NEXUS is on the case again with a 1″ Ball Cubby Adapter.

That weird looking thing has nothing at all to do with your butt! It’s a clever device that fits perfectly into the useless weird cubby on the dashboard and provides this general purpose mount.

3) The Phone Mount

NEXUS doesn’t make a phone mount. I think on purpose? The Winnebago Revel has all these RAM^® Mounts all over. I had never heard of all this RAM^® stuff before. They make a bunch of mounts and stuff. To me, it all feels like a little step up from the home 3D printing feel of NEXUS. Not quite industrial, not quite hobbiest.

I was happy to stay in the kinda happy path ecosystem, so I bought the RAM^® Mount with the ball.

4) The Ball Connector

Astute readers will notice… now we have two balls. And, we have two ball mounts! Those two ball mounts won’t actually connect to each other. The magic of the ball mount is that you get this 360-degree(ish) adjustability. I don’t really need that much movability, but I’ll take it. The final bit here is to get the connector to get the two balls together.

Everything Together: A Nice Phone Mount!

And it doesn’t occupy any other useful space on the dashboard. Love it.

Order list:

NEXUS 1 Inch Ball Cubby Adapter	$44.95
NEXUS Cord Console	$39.95
RAM® Quick-Grip™ XL Phone Holder with Ball	$28.49
RAM® Double Socket Arm	$18.49
Total	$131.88

Kinda pricey for a phone mount. But I think it’s worth it. Its a slightly tricky situation and this solution is (1) long term in that it will fit any future phone (2) opens up the idea for mounting other things with ball mounts (3) allows for more cables out of the dashboard cabinet to come out smoothly.

There are other options! There are other/cheaper ones that clip onto the cubby mount that look OK. There are ones that mount into the cup holder nicely. Honestly this one is super minimal and clever.

And Now For My Debut as a Van Life Influencer

I’m not good at this, which is basically why I just blogged it instead of like TikTok’d it or whatever.

💾

I got something I’ve wanted for years and years! A camper van! I’m a camper van guy now!

It’s a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter, and even more technically a Winnebago Revel.

I scoured Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, and RV-specific sites for a long time drooling over these things. I’ve rented a half dozen of them on Ourdoorsy over the years. I’ve borrowed friends. So I feel like I knew what I wanted and I knew the specific price range I could go, so it took a little while to find it.

Ultimately one that came up on Craigslist led back to one sitting on the lot at a local spot called Just Used Cars.

I liked the size of it. Just a normal length, not “extended”. Plenty of height to stand up in. I like that it’s an actual Sprinter base because of it’s nice poise/stance compared to other van bases. Also it’s 4WD and has good ground clearance which. That wasn’t a requirement for me, but this will make me trust it driving in the winter and up to Mt. Bachelor and such, which will be really nice. Although funnily enough, I’ve already gotten it stuck once out in Pacific City at the beach — even in 4WD Low and using the traction boards on the roof. Sand is rough.

I like the tan color as well. Maybe I’ll get some cool decal or have an artist paint the side or something someday.

I wasn’t specifically looking for a Winnebago Revel, but that’s just how those roll, and honestly, the Winnebago name sounds nice to me. Long history making campers, obviously.

The interest rate on this thing was horrible. It’s 8 or 9% or something. It doesn’t really matter, as my plan is to pay it off in the next few months. My thinking is that it will do great things for my credit score this way. We’ll see. I co-signed for a “normal” new car just recently, and that rate was 3%, which seems fine/good.

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I started writing a bunch more little stories about the van. I’ve been using it and thinking about it and working on it a ton, so there is a bunch to say. But I think I’ll break those out into smaller blog posts as I go!

One quick one: after I bought it, the dealership called and told me the previous owner wanted to talk to me. I approved them giving him my phone number, we chatted, and he came over to see the van. I was able to return to him some things that belonged to him tucked away into crannies all over the van. He was a nice guy who just really really wanted the new owner to understand it. All the little details about how it worked and where you can put things and quirks and whatnot. We spent a few hours going over things. I really appreciated that, and it shows how attached some people can get to these homes-on-wheels.

What’s up with this?

I’d like to see an explicitly social-forward RSS reader. Like it’s encouraged to highlight passages and leave short comments. Your buds see yours, you see your buds.

— Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier.net) 2026-03-10T14:30:12.200Z

The spirit, of course, is “I want my Google Reader back.”

I should be careful though: I imagine if we really did have it back exactly as it was, it would probably not be as cool as we remember. That was a long-ass time ago and web software just wasn’t as nice as it is now. But: it really did have social features in it! I could leave comments and see comments from my friends. (How “friends” worked back then, I scarcely remember.)

I’m not alone in wanting this. Here’s what I’ve seen so far.

There is Skyreader, and it looks like Tim Disney is still actively working on it:

New release of @skyreader.app is now live with support for Channels that let you set up filtered views of your feeds and saved articles. Helps you catch up on quick reads or check in on sites that infrequently post.(apparently I have 104 long reads, rip my reading list)

— Tim Disney (@disnetdev.com) 2026-04-13T14:40:52.800Z

In my mind (and perhaps not reality?) Skyreader solves a “cold start” problem where signing up for a new social site is a lonely bummer because you don’t have any friends. Well, if all my Bluesky friends were automatically my friends on Skyreader, wouldn’t that be, like, good?

My problem is… I don’t… get it.

• Maybe there aren’t really “friends” on Skyreader? If there are, I can’t really find a list of them. If there aren’t, I guess this isn’t what I’m looking for. Or is it just assumed they are the same as Bluesky friends? I dunno, I think I have a lot to learn about this AT Proto stuff.
• What happens when I share an article? Does it share on my Bluesky? It doesn’t look like it. Who sees my shared articles then? My friends, if there are such a thing? Other people who explicitly subscribe? How would anyone figure out how to do that?
• It looks like I can share and I can highlight stuff specifically in what I share. Who sees the highlight? I imagine they need to use Skyreader to see that highlight? Or does it republish as RSS somehow?
• No comments… right? That’s weird to me for a social feed reader. What I think of when I think social feed reader is 90% writing and reading my friends comments.
• The UI is confusing to me. I don’t love the expanding list format that jumps around a lot.

The main reason I can’t “really use it,” though, is that it doesn’t sync with Feedbin. I understand that’s a niche concern, but I need one canonical feed source, so everything I’m subscribed to is in one place, and how much I’ve read is also canonical. That might be antithetical to AT Proto? I have no idea.

Indieweb has their own version of all this, but it’s seriously no joke getting involved. From one of the reader sites, Togther:

What You Need

#1 Your own website

On the IndieWeb your website is your identity. It doesn’t need to be advanced, it doesn’t need to be pretty, it just needs to be yours.

#2 IndieAuth

IndieAuth is a technology to allow you to sign into services using only your website.

#3 A MicroSub Server

MicroSub is where the real magic happens. There are 2 parts; the server and the client. Together is the client, but it needs a server to go along with it. The server does a lot of tricky work such as fetching & parsing feeds as well as keeping track of what you have read and how you have everything organized. If you don’t already have a MicroSub server then check out Aperture.

#4 MicroPub (optional)

MicroPub is an optional but very cool piece of the puzzle. If your own website has MicroPub functionality then you can use Together not just to read content, but also to reply and create your own content. You can like, repost and reply to stuff you are following, you can even write full on blog posts from inside Together.

I mean, I’m not above some nerd hackin’, but this is 100% not ever going to be a place with a critical mass of my friends just chillin’ and sharing/commenting on blog posts. Way too hard.

The closest thing I’ve seen is CommonRSS by Brad Coffield which was build in a direct response to my original Bluesky post.

A couple days ago @chriscoyier.net mentioned wanting a more social forward RSS reader. I'm a longtime fan so here we are.Chris, if you see this, I hope you like it! I'd love to round it out with a permanent archive and other cool stuff. www.commonrss.com#solodev #buildinpublic

— Brad Coffield (@studio303.bsky.social) 2026-03-12T23:29:55.731Z

I originally had a gut reaction to the vibe coding nature of it. Like I don’t wanna use this thing you slopped together over a weekend, you gotta get more serious about it first. Which I admit is just a gut reaction and not a fair assessment of the software. Brad does seem quite sincere about making it a thing. But at the same time, it feels like it’s been months without updates, which is a bad sign for super brand new software.

In testing it lately…

• It looks great, love the design — but it feels quite slow across the board.
• The Feedbin sync (yay!) didn’t work at first, but appears to be working now.
• It now claims to have 2-way syncing (yay!) but that doesn’t work for me. The articles I read aren’t read in feedbin. The stars don’t sync.
• It’s got the cold-start social problem: there isn’t anyone to follow. The discover page only lists Brad, and clicking the follow button from him doesn’t work.

It feels like it’s close, but it needs to work better. The commenting feature (again, like my main thing for wanting this) requires you to highlight some of the post first, then you can comment, but the comment won’t save.

CommonRSS feels like a solid concept, but it’s both got the cold-start thing in terms of the social network, but also the cold-start thing in terms of a business. My guess is it’s hard for Brad to muster a ton of enthusiasm to work on the project all day every day with low users.

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I’m thinking the main problem is that there just isn’t much of a business to be built around RSS. It can build boutique one-person companies with a passion for it, but even then, difficult.

On top of that, maybe there just isn’t much appetite for the social part? There are a number of arguably already-decently-successful boutique RSS apps, so why haven’t they done it? Why hasn’t Feedbin done anything terribly social? Why not Feedly? Remember FlipBoard’s kind weird taking on RSS? Now they have an equally weird spinoff. My guess is it’s just too hard of work for too little payoff.

Mine did. Like this:

I guess WordPress 7.0 assumes you are using a theme.json file these days. I’m not doing that yet on any of the sites I work on. If you want to embrace that future, you could add a theme.json file to the root of your theme, and put some typography basics only in there:

{
  "$schema": "https://schemas.wp.org/trunk/theme.json",
  "version": 2,
  "settings": {
    "appearanceTools": true,
    "layout": {
      "contentSize": "720px"
    },
    "typography": {
      "fontFamilies": [
        {
          "fontFamily": "system-ui, sans-serif",
          "name": "System Font",
          "slug": "system-font"
        }
      ]
    }
  },
  "styles": {
    "typography": {
      "fontFamily": "var(--wp--preset--font-family--system-font)",
      "lineHeight": "1.75"
    }
  }
}

That will be much nicer than no styles at all.

Or if you don’t want to mess with that you can go to the upper-right three-dot menu (“Option”), choose Preferences then go to the Appearance tab and make sure Use theme styles is unchecked.

I think it’s sorta neat that you could use the same typography setup for both the front-end and back of your site this way, and if you use theme.json for the front, might as well use it for the back. But I also personally don’t mind if the back-end is entirely default styles. It’s a reminder that you’re in a CMS, and content is data, not WYSIWYG.

The Internet Archive has a new book: VANISHING CULTURE. (Digital copy is free.)

According to a Pew Research Center report, 26% of pages from 2013-2023 are no longer accessible. But that’s not the whole story. In a new study published in Internet Archive’s book, VANISHING CULTURE, data scientists working with the Wayback Machine have found: 16% have been restored through the Wayback Machine. 56% are preserved before they disappear.

A quarter of pages from the last slightly-more-than-a-decade gone. I guess that’s about what I would have guessed. I don’t love it, but it seems like the level of URL rot that just happens on the web. Maybe even feels a little low? 😬. Kinda cool the Internet Archive saves about half of it.

This resonated a little extra this week as a local mountain biking trail resource said they were closing:

When I see stuff like this, my brain thinks: OK fine, thanks for letting us know. But, like, you’re not going to just turn off the site, right?! No, they are:

Will The BendTrails Website Be Taken Offline?

We’re open to the possibility of a community group, business, or individual acquiring BendTrails’ assets and keeping the site online — but if that doesn’t happen, the site will be going dark on June 1st.

They want something like 80-90 grand for it. Which is fine. They worked on it for a long time and did a great job. I imagine it incurred costs, likely above and beyond what sponsors covered. Maybe they’ll get it, maybe they won’t.

I just can’t wrap my mind around “going dark”. It’s a WordPress site. Bluehost can host that for $3.99 a month ($9.99/month after three years). Not to trivialize money but that seems pretty doable and preferable to just shutting the thing off.

Maybe it’s a mental space thing though. I’ve had to walk away from projects by drawing pretty hard lines. If the website is still online, maybe it will still occupy mental space that they just can’t afford. You probably know I’m a fan of WordPress, but I’ll admit WordPress adds some additional mental overhead. There would be some prep like turning off any interactive features. Then somebody has to be in charge of updates forever, because WordPress is PHP and MySQL and such which will be subject to potential vulnerabilities forever.

A fella I know put together Bend Bike Rides in the wake of this. A burgeoning replacement. I don’t know the tech stack but I know the guy well enough I’m quite sure it’s not WordPress. Looks like static output (if JavaScript-y). If he needs to walk away from this site someday, there is options like Netlify’s “free forever” plan that feels a lot more likely to be able to be left forever with no mental overhead.

I’m just thinking about what the options are and what feels right when people need to walk away from a site. It’s nice the Internet Archive saves them, most of the time. But is that good enough? Maybe we just shouldn’t worry about it because they will take care of it? If we don’t think that’s good enough, what then? Should there be better tooling for static-izing a site and putting it somewhere inexpensive to live as a viewable time capsule?

For WordPress sites, there is a premium version of legacy. $38,000 will keep the lights on essentially forever. Many scoff, but I think it’s cool. I may not have pulled the trigger if it was my money, but I did happily use the service for my friend in kind.

Honestly I hope CodePen is an option for some situations and that we can evolve to make it an even better option over time. We’ve got deployment. It’s not free, but it’s not heavily limited either. The trick is getting a site to be entirely static, and I feel like there could/should be better tools for converting sites into this state.