Blogging For More Than A Decade

This website, and also gr36.com, has taken on many forms over the years. I often look back at the internet archive and marvel at how undecided I have been about it. It has been a business website, a personal blog, and at some points a place that I have tried to make an income from. Sadly, my words are not where near to the standard that real writers are, but that has stopped me blogging for around 13 years so far, and I can’t imagine not doing it.

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08 Nov 2025

My New App: Micro Shelf

I blame Matt Birchler for numerous things in my life, but this time it’s something very positive. By writing about his new app, Quick Notes, he kicked me in to top gear to get mine in a better shape. It is Micro Shelf. One of the biggest things I miss from moving away from Micro.blog is book tracking. There are, of course, a huge number of other apps out there, but nothing that reflects the simplicity of the books tab I created in Micro Social.

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22 Oct 2025

Power Adapters And Markets

Serial EU moaner John Gruber, responding to a measured approach from Nick Heer: I suspect there are going to be a lot of Europeans who buy a new M5 MacBook Pro and wind up charging it with inexpensive low-watt power adapters meant for things like phones, and wind up with a shitty, slow charging experience. Whilst some of the thoughts on this are measured, most if it is a non issue.

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21 Oct 2025

The Truth Doesn’t Matter

Nick Hilton commenting on Steven Bartlet and posted to LinkedIn: Content being interesting and provocative is more valuable, to creators, than it being accurate or instructional. We’ve known for a long time, stupid headlines get clicks, and this is an extension of that for the video centric world we live in now. Particularly when we discuss short form video, attention-grabbing reels and TikTok’s are all that matters. In a world where everyone is playing the same game it’s a race to the most hyperbolic (aka The Bottom).

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20 Oct 2025

Beware The Hidden Middlemen

Within the first feewpages of reading Enshitification by Cory Doctorow (spoiler alert don’t waste your time, the book is literally a long rambling blog post) I began to think about the word platforms. He describes online platforms as “a business that operates a two-sided market, that is, a system that connects business customers and end users” but I think it goes further than that. Platforms as essentially middlemen (apologies for the random genderification) or gatekeepers between one thing and another.

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19 Oct 2025

Are These Reviews True?

As with most things I write about, something triggers a thought that starts during away in my brain. Once it reaches a critical mass, I either go looking for more information, or other things I consume start triggering the same feelings. I try hard to avoid conformation bias, so more often than not other information crops up to prove the opposite of what I expected, and the thought stops there. Like some kind of Zeigarnik effect.

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18 Oct 2025

Buy My Course

Curtis McHale in Productivity as a Fetish edition of their newsletter 3 Threads: Many of the people touting their system actually have a team behind them getting most of the work done. Their only job is to show you the productivity system, not sit in the morass of expectations that most of us have around us from work and family and our own desires for life. This arrived in my inbox at the same time I am watching Thailand: The Dark Side of Paradise.

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11 Oct 2025

Free Content

Les Orchard (@lmorchard) on Mastodon: Folks pouring so much effort into a thing they seem to think is theirs and absolutely never will be. Doesn’t matter how much noise or how many petitions or how many shitposts. You can’t own a social network by just occupying it and emanating presence and making noise. You are ballast, packing peanuts, slight impulses on a metrics dashboard. They’ll do it without you.

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10 Oct 2025

Algorithm & Adverts

Adam Newbold on Mastodon: if you encounter outrage on traditional social media (X, Facebook, etc.), it’s because it was amplified to boost engagement and drive revenue on that platform. If you encounter outage on Mastodon, it’s because you follow someone who happens to be upset, or you follow someone who’s sharing a post about someone else who’s upset. Many people blame social media for a lot of the harm visible in the world now.

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07 Oct 2025

Scoring Things

Manuel Moreale writing about their inability to Score Books: I suck at this. I genuinely don’t know how to rate things on a scale, which is why the vast majority of the books I rate are either 4 or 4.5. I can’t score things. Not books, not films, not products. I don’t think most people can. Unless your job is to review things all day, every day, the idea of boiling an experience down to a number feels impossible.

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01 Oct 2025

👋 Hello Friends

Recent Photos

Latest Writing

Blogging For More Than A Decade

My New App: Micro Shelf

Power Adapters And Markets

The Truth Doesn’t Matter

Beware The Hidden Middlemen

Are These Reviews True?

Buy My Course

Free Content

Algorithm & Adverts

Scoring Things