Bridges & scruples

For your own sanity, you have to remember that not all problems can be solved. Not all problems can be solved, but all problems can be illuminated. —Ursula Franklin

You don't have to be smart if you can think clearly

When you’re on fire, problems are transparent: they’re solved simply by the act of looking at them. Even complicated layers of multiple problems can simply be glanced through like stacked panes of glass. But nobody can work that way all the time.

We can have a different web

Many yearn for the “good old days” of the web. We could have those good old days back — or something even better — and if anything, it would be easier now than it ever was.

My journey to the heart of the forgotten internet

Slowly but surely, huge swaths of the internet are vanishing. But the artefacts of the early web are still out there, and they have lessons for the future.

VC&G | » My memories of what life was like before the Internet

Adventures in vintage computers and retrogaming. Includes articles on classic games and obsolete computers.

Habbo Hotel Memories - Sneer Campaign

Habbo Hotel has been around since practically the beginning of the internet as we know it. Several of us have been held in its thrall, and maybe still go back to it from time to time. Maybe we are …

My old SoundCloud page is a time capsule

Twenty years of songs, field recordings, and one very awkward job interview. Screenshot 2026-07-24 at 15 I hadn't opened SoundCloud in years, but earli...

An update on leap seconds – Tony Finch

It has been a couple of years since my previous blog post about leap seconds, though I have been tweeting on the topic fairly frequently: see my page on date, time, and leap seconds for an index of threads. But Twitter now seems a lot less likely to stick around, so I’ll aim to collect more of my thinking-out-loud here on my blog.

The Problem with Time & Timezones - Computerphile : Computerphile

A web app that works out how many seconds ago something happened. How hard can coding that be? Tom Scott explains how time twists and turns like a twisty-turny...

People who write extensively about note-writing rarely have a serious context of use

Many bloggers and “life-hackers” have made a full-time job of suggesting how you should organize your journal, or how you should most effectively Write about what you read to internalize texts deeply .NoteLink.Active { background-color: rgba(10, 132, 255, 0.15); } . We should take this advice seriously insofar as those practices have helped the authors achieve meaningful creative work: “Better note-taking” misses the point; what matters is “better thinking” .NoteLink.Active { background-color: rgba(10, 132, 255, 0.15); }

Evergreen note-writing helps insight accumulate

Much of the day-to-day thinking involved in creative work is simply lost, like sand castles in the tide. Ephemerality can actually be useful in low-fidelity thought, but it’s simply an accidental property in many cases. We should do our serious thinking in the form of Evergreen notes .NoteLink.Active { background-color: rgba(10, 132, 255, 0.15); } so that the thinking accumulates.

Types of Notes

Part x of [[getting-started]]

What have note-taking PKMs accomplished, really?

As somebody who writes a lot, I've always been interested in personal knowledge management systems and note-taking apps. But what do these frameworks and methodologies actually give to researchers and the broader world? Has there been a meaningful increase of wisdom since these became popular? I went to look for an answer.

What's the point of a note-taking app?

The true purpose of a note-taking app is to facilitate deep learning through three interconnected processes—externalizing ideas, internalizing them into new insights, and resurfacing them over time—and good design should minimize accidental friction while preserving the productive friction that enables genuine understanding.