I love stumbling upon tools that are very easy to install and get setup, but make a huge difference on a day-to-day basis. Usually these tools get rid of a small annoyance, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. Equally important, they shouldn’t require a huge amount of commitment that locks you in if the tool ever disappears. I’ve tried to include a variety of tools, and I hope that one of them gives you an “ah!” moment, the same way they did for me. Also as a plus, this page isn’t filled with ads and gets straight to what you came for when you clicked the title!

Do you know exactly where your Multifactor Authentication (MFA) codes are stored? Are they tied to a device? Up in the cloud? Do you need a password to access them? What happens if you lose your device? These are all important questions to know, given that 80% of people use MFA in some form for their personal accounts. Losing a MFA method is a frequent cause of being locked out of accounts, and getting them back can be a huge pain, if it is possible at all. Yubikeys are small physical devices which you can buy two of (as opposed to the feasibility of buying two phones) and are not nearly as complex as they seem. They can be a great solution for storing MFA codes, and they just work.

Time seems to be moving faster and faster each year. Months seem like weeks and weeks seem like days. Time, for the first time, starts to feel finite. The thirties are approaching, and with that, the pressure to be on the “right track”, whatever that means. Everyone around me seems to be asking themselves three questions: Why do I suddenly have back pain? When did things get so serious? Is this all there is?

This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that both CNN and Reuters are moving to put paywalls in front of their content. Ironically, you probably won’t be able to read that article unless you are a subscriber to the WSJ. Quality news isn’t getting harder to find, but it is getting harder to afford. The cause of this isn’t a single factor, rather a blend of social phenomenal that are all colliding to form the state of the web in 2024. Advertising revenue, while not flat, is dependent on eyeballs on pages. With the introduction of better large language models, copycat sites have begun to spring up, rewriting stories via chatbots. These are next to impossible for news outlets to chase down, and can flood search results to drown out real stories. News outlets are increasingly requiring accounts to read free content, in an effort to avoid this, however they still have to compete with fresh content generated from scratch. It is a hard time to be a journalist, at a time when the work they do should be valued more than ever in a rapidly changing world.

Links are the primary way we navigate the internet. With just a simple string of characters I can point you to specific resource on another server that I think you should check out for one reason or another. This can be incredibly useful for citations, in which researchers want to include many articles worth of knowledge to support their claims, but cannot fit all that text within their own article. These get included at the end of the article, in the References section, and historically they would have included metadata to allow someone to go find a physical resource in a library. In the digital age it is now common and expected to digitally link to the location of the resource on the internet. It is vital that the link placed in the references stays stable and resolveable, because once published scientific papers usually aren’t edited unless there is a necessary revision or retraction. So, what defines these “permalinks”, and are they really as stable as we think?

There is an app for everything. Wondering when to use the washroom during a movie? There’s an app for that. Unhappy with the latitude and longitude system? Why not use three words instead? More choice in software is great at a global scale - it increases the chances that you will be able to find the one app that fits your specific use case - however, we shouldn’t confuse that with a need to use all that software for everything in our individual lives. More software doesn’t necessarily make for a better life. If anything, it carries an administrative burden; more things to keep track of that distract us from focusing on what really matters.

Universal Resource Locator (URL) shorteners have been around since the early 2000’s[1]. A URL shortener takes an otherwise ugly hyperlink and converts it to something short and catchy. This can be helpful if users have to manually type in an address, such as from a PowerPoint presentation, or if the number of characters are limited (such as on an advertisement). However, they also normalize following links where we have no idea what is on the other end. Additionally, using a URL shortening service means that critical communication can be out of the control of the original organization. Here I’ll outline the benefits and pitfalls of URL shortening (as I see them) and why I ultimately don’t see why they are worth it.

The very first project I built was a very simple html and css personal website. It build off a theme and was just a resume in online form. It felt silly next to some of the fancy websites around the web, but it was mine. In setting it up, I actually learned a lot, such as how to buy a domain, how to host a site somewhere, and how to track changes using git. We often learn so many small things by doing. Now many years later, I can setup a new domain in a few minutes, but there are still many things that are at the frontier, and there always will be. Checking for broken links through a CI pipeline may seem to some to be a waste of time (after all, who really cares) but it isn’t about the result, it is about the process. It is precisely because it is so low stakes that makes it such a great learning opportunity. The worst thing that can happen is that the CI pipeline doesn’t run and I go back to the drawing board. This post goes over some of the broader lessons learned throughout the process of learning by building.

Ads are annoying – that is as true now as it was five years ago. According to a report by Blockthrough and Eyeo[1], usage of adblockers is on the rise, growing at a rate of approximately 30% per year. With just under a billion people estimated to be using adblockers of some kind, advertisers are beginning to take note, and browsers like Google Chrome are beginning to limit the ability of adblocking extensions to work effectively. This means that ads may begin to again have the upper hand, and that can have terrible effects on how people browse the modern web. There is a point at which ads begin to completely take over a site, and affect the safety of the user, and here I will outline a couple of sites in which this is the case.

One of the things I don’t “know” are how many ounces are in a litre. It is something that I don’t use on a regular basis, and is easily accessible via a quick web search. Perhaps a better question is “should this be something that I know off the top of my head?”. What do we mean by “knowing” in the first place? Is it enough to know where to find the knowledge? This post is about how I like to think of our human brains working in cached layers to deal with information overload.