Earlier this week we decided to try out a quick camping trip in our VW Buzz EV at Beverly Beach State Park, just outside of Newport, Oregon.

It's only 75 miles away from home so with our 230mi battery, we didn't even need to charge, but more importantly, we wanted to use this trip to test out what sleeping inside the van was like.

Rain was in the forecast so we brought along two awnings to keep us dry. The one attached to our van here is a MoonFab MoonShade, which is basically like a tent that you assemble, and the top sticks to the sunroof glass using suction cups.

Over the picnic table we used a cheap 10 x 10 foot awning we got at a big box store. This comes in clutch on any camping trip we take as it lets us keep our cookware and eating area dry no matter what happens (usually we enjoy it for added shade).

We're still big fans of using electricity as much as possible while camping and on this trip, while we forgot to pack our nice induction cooktop, we grabbed a cheap double hotplate at a Walmart to cook on. The first night we had some amazing green curry with broccoli, snap peas, and chicken with some cilantro lime rice.

We happened to get an RV spot in the tent camping loop of the park, so that meant we had a 120v electrical box to keep our EcoFlow battery topped up at all times. The battery kept our cooktop going, our ice chest refrigerated, and our ambient lights on.

Beverly Beach is right on the Pacific Ocean, so it was great to take a clichéd long walk on the beach at sunset to enjoy the waves, the driftwood, the rock formations, and the fossils found all over.

After a bunch of card games and tea, we called it a night and settled into the van.

The Exped Luxemat Auto is a fantastic bit of gear. It inflates into a 4" thick air mattress with foam inside and is perfectly sized to take up almost the entire back-end of the VW Buzz. It is crazy expensive but I can honestly say it rivaled our mattress at home. With their powered inflator, we could set it up firm and as a side sleeper I had no trouble sleeping on the lie-flat seats in the back, with a warm comforter on top and a good pillow from home.

I didn't think it would be so comfortable, but the VW Buzz really could be one hell of a road trip vehicle with the sleep mat in the back. We cracked the front windows very slightly and didn't have any condensation problems inside the van. The next day, the state of charge on the battery was the same it was when we went to bed (the VW doesn't yet have a "camp mode" that lets you run the HVAC at night while parked, hopefully they add this with software updates someday).

The next morning, we woke up to tons of rain and after a long slow waking up we took some showers in the campground then drove into Newport to enjoy the Oregon Coast Aquarium (packed with people also avoiding the rain) and had some fresh seafood on the waterfront.

The rain never let up, and flooded out much of the campgrounds when we returned in the afternoon. We took some long lazy naps for a few hours while the rain lulled us to sleep.

That evening, we decided to call it early and head home (we originally had a reservation for four days) and it seemed like most of the campers made the same choice we did. The trip was less than 200 miles in total so we didn't have to charge the VW Buzz though we did get a couple hours of slow charging at the aquarium parking lot that added about 10% battery back.

Even though we had to cut our trip short due to pummeling rain in June, the trip overall was a success. The VW Buzz can camp like a champ, and we found sleeping on the Exped mat super comfortable. As long as you're within range of major cities with fast chargers (we had multiple options in Newport if we needed them), the VW Buzz is a great vacation vehicle for lazy summer trips in the mountains, forests, or at the beach.

“You don't wanna get mixed up with a guy like me. I'm a loner, Dottie. A rebel.”
— Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985)

I like to live on the edge so whenever WWDC takes place and Apple releases new OS software to developers, I grab a copy immediately, because yolo.

I haven't noticed too many big changes on either my phone or my Mac with the new software but I did notice a few things while driving for a couple hours using CarPlay today and figured I'd write them down.

Apple typically rolls out new CarPlay features slowly over a series of months and I suspect more is on the way. There's also the high likelihood that app developers will update their apps to support some of the new features.

Audio playback changes

The biggest change I've noticed is the little pill on the playbar above, which wasn't on previous versions of Apple's OS. Do you see the white blob at around the middle of the track? The good news is that I discovered today by accident that you can grab it with your finger and slide a track to any time on the timeline.

You've never been able to do this in CarPlay before! I remember trying to share a section of a podcast with someone where it got really interesting around the 31 minute mark but in the past, you had to grab your phone and to change the time in a track, but now you can do it from the dashboard.

The "Now Playing" button in the top right used to just be a giant play button but now it shows album/cover art, a play/pause control and a fast forward button. It even shows up on podcast players already. You used to have to click through to a dedicated player to adjust the track.

The new playhead you can grab is already supported by Apple Podcasts, but isn't yet in Overcast, so I assume Marco will have to update it.

I also noticed that if you play a YouTube video in the YouTube app on your phone, the audio playhead in the Now Playing screen can still be adjusted in CarPlay, which is nice.

New Wallpapers

I love to check out the Settings screens to see what new features are popping up but on this first release the only new thing I spotted was this bunch of "wavy" wallpapers that look pretty nice. The rest of the settings appear to have all the same options as before.

Maps

The Apple Maps app looks like it got a bit of polish as buttons look a bit nicer but I haven't noticed any big new features just yet.

In Fall of 2024, I figured it was time to finally get into 3D printing since the hobby had been around for a good ten years, and the things I was hearing about the latest printers were really sounding good.

Bambu Labs threw a Black Friday sale online that year and I bought my first stripped down A1 printer for $199. I spent about $100 more on filaments, and started dipping my toes into the hobby soon after.

My year and a half of 3D printing adventures

My first month was spent riding a steep learning curve, but I began to understand why 3D printers are a good thing and I had a lot of fun doing it. As I gained experience and spent hundreds of hours printing all sorts of items, I started to notice flaws and spent the next year chasing them down one by one.

This reminds me of my off-roading hobby, where if you get newer, bigger tires to gain ground clearance and traction for your vehicle, you also need to upgrade your axles to handle the extra weight, but then you need more robust gears and driveshafts and better suspension, and the upgrading continues until you've replaced almost everything in the entire drivetrain with more substantial versions, because if you don't, you tend to break everything one by one up the chain.

3D printers can be a lot like that.

Color

At first, doing a single color spool at a time was fun but there were so many great utility builds that needed labels in a second contrasting color, and changing filaments was a whole 5-10min process to do by hand. So I got a AMS for it that could auto-switch between four different colors of filament and that opened up a whole new world of possibilities and kept me having fun for months.

Filaments

Over time, I realized the simple PLA plastics I used often warped or cracked out in the real world so I got into higher strength, higher temperature filaments like PETG with carbon fiber additions. But that meant I also had to change out the print heads to more robust models in different sizes, and some of the best ones were over $100 each!

Environment

I put my printer in the garage so I wouldn't have to worry about dangerous fumes inside my house, but without any sort of climate control in a garage, that meant temps and humidity fluctuated wildly from print to print, and print quality varied. I spent a month learning about desiccants and proper storage of filaments into temperature controlled, air-tight boxes and those slightly improved my prints.

Double the fun

I found another used A1 cheap on Craigslist and got it, intending to set it up for high strength PETG models, while my other A1 could continue creating easy parts with four colors of PLA.

But like I've heard from friends with twins, it's not just double the work, it's much more as I was dealing with multiple issues on two different printers with different settings and different print heads and different filaments in a varying environment.

Print heads started clogging regularly and I had to learn how to painstakingly fix them. To date, about one in every 20 prints would end up in a giant spaghetti plastic mess in my garage, then then it started happening about twice as often.

The times that both printers were fully operational and working flawlessly started to become so rare that I had to take a step back and wonder if there was a better way than constantly chasing down problems with incremental (and expensive) upgrades that never fully solved my problems.

I began to realize I might have pushed the limits of the A1's open air design and I should probably start looking for Bambu Labs' enclosed, higher end models to prevent a lot of the variability I was experiencing. I started with a $199 printer on sale, but now I was well over a thousand bucks into it with various upgrades and experiments, and not having as much fun as the start of it.

Time for a reset

Just as I was weighing my options for a higher end printer, Bambu Labs released their new X2D model. This has almost every option you'd find in their older $1200-1500 printers, but the X2D starts at $649 and was only $899 with the full AMS 2 Pro setup (always get the AMS setup). I ordered one immediately while I came up with an exit plan to unload my other printers.

The X2D arrived and I set it up and it did all the test prints flawlessly. I wired up the second print head to a fifth, extra spool of contrasting color but I'm still learning how to have it print all support material with the extra spool.

I've already spent a couple hundred hours printing with the X2D with various filaments and I have to say almost all my problems with 3D printing are gone. The device controls temps and humidity automatically. It can handle PLA and PETG and TPU and ABS filaments by changing settings and temperatures on the fly. It uses a camera to show you in the Bambu apps how much of each filament you have left, which is incredible compared to the A1 printer, where I just sort of looked at the spools myself once every few days and estimated in my head.

It has a camera on the print head that can spot flaws and pause prints the moment they get out of whack, preventing a ton of spaghetti waste. It's successfully printing more objects then my previous two printers combined, and it's doing it flawlessly.

In the couple months I've had it, I've never had a clog, I've gotten to try out lots of new filaments I couldn't use previously, and the print output is better. The X2D took 3D printing from being a niche hobby that required lots of tinkering to something more akin to a toaster oven on your countertop that almost always does a great job when you toss anything into it.

If I were getting into 3D printing today, I would strongly suggest the $899 X2D model with the AMS module. It's a bit expensive, but it's a "buy once, cry once" kind of thing, because it solves every problem I faced over the last 18 months and brought back all the fun to 3D printing thanks to its reliable output and smart features.

What do you even print with all this capability?

The most common question I get from friends is why they should even have a 3D printer? What can you do once you figure out all this pesky stuff?

It's an easy thing to answer for me personally.

I started printing out common toys and objects that ended up around the house, but quickly learned you can fix pretty much anything that annoys you in your home, car, or office. Chances are someone, somewhere on earth has figured out a better way to add a better cupholder to your car, a phone charger that will fit and match your desk, or even a better way to organize your file cabinet drawers. For woodworking, I use a ton of 3D printed things to draw, calculate, and clamp various things together. You can grab precision calipers to take a few measurements, then find pre-made models that hold your plywood perfectly into 90º boxes as you assemble flawless drawers.

You can search for what you need on your phone and tap a couple buttons and it'll be printing what you need in your garage. You'll get a notification and a photo of the completed object when you're done. These days I'm also creating things from scratch to solve problems in my house (like our leaky shower) and learning the ins and outs of apps like Fusion360 to build what I need.

3D printing is a great hobby that comes in clutch time and time again, so much so that I'm pretty much printing at least one thing a day that fills some need in my life. After 18 months of tinkering, I can't imagine not having a 3D printer around and would strongly suggest the X2D is the one to get started with that will cover your needs for a good long while.

Bourbon and Whiskey distilling is big in Kentucky and always has been. But it saw a surge in the early 2000s, as customer demand outstripped how much Kentucky distilleries could even produce. There were several reasons for this, but personally I feel like everyone was getting into "brown liquors" in the cocktail and bar scene as bourbon and whiskey were pushed at every restaurant I went to and in every lifestyle magazine I opened back then.

The thing about Kentucky Bourbon is you take corn/grain mash and cook it and then distill that and take the liquid that comes off and you put that into barrels. But then it has to sit for at least one full year before it can be sold, while anything called Kentucky Straight Bourbon requires at least two years. Most distilleries focus on their highest margin varieties, which are premium versions aged 5 to 10 years.

Aging barrels takes up a lot of space that can't be used for anything else for years on end. The last time I was back in Kentucky, a friend who works in the government told me about how the state's department of transportation spent the last few years renting out every square foot of spare warehouse space they had to dozens of distilleries, who were hungry for ever increasing storage needs to house their barrels for aging. Pretty much any building you saw near a freeway off-ramp was likely filled with bourbon barrels.

But there's a big lag between a market saying it wants more bourbon, and when a distillery can actually sell more bourbon, a gap of at least several years. That requires distilleries to leverage themselves heavily for a payday that might only come far off in the future, if market conditions and trends continue (or grow from) as they are today.

Alcohol production is a business sector that's subject to wild fluctuations in demand, thanks mostly to buyer's whims, as young people are drinking way less alcohol than their predecessors, but we've also seen the immediate effects of new tariffs that cut sales from their biggest customers by 70% almost overnight.

Imagine being in a specialized, localized, highly-leveraged business that loses a quarter billion dollars in sales over the course of just a few months. How can it ever recover from that?

I've toured Kentucky distilleries and loved seeing the old world process of how a corn & grain mash is cooked, processed, and stored into something that I can appreciate but not enjoy personally (it all tastes like rocket fuel/poison to me).

I don't know how they're going to correct for the market crash they've seen in the past couple of years. The bourbon bubble seems like it has completely burst and it will be interesting to watch the effects on Kentucky's economy as millions of barrels of bourbon no one wants can't be sold to make up for all the energy and capital that went into them.

This post is actually about A.I. Data Centers.

I was browsing YouTube today when I noticed SNL was posting season-ending wrap-up videos, and I figured I might as well scroll through the most recent season and pick my favorites like I did a couple years back.

The absolute best

If you've been around any young people lately, you've probably heard all sorts of their new language they've created to describe the world. This snack boys podcast perfectly nails the things I overhear whenever I walk past a bunch of 10 year olds who might describe me as an unc who is low-key chopped.

Bad Bunny's episode had a lot of good ones, like a person who wants to turn any conversation into how much they love K-pop Demon Hunters, but this one on Inventing Spanish had the same vibes as the legendary George Washington sketch.

The Bachelorette Party Strippers nails the modern world of men who have to be respectful, supportive, but also somehow sexy simultaneously, and goes to hilarious places.

Ariana Grande is a force and this was one of many great ones from her night.

Teyana Taylor was a great host and this cut for time sketch was a perfect parody of the weird things moms do.

Ashley Padilla is the 51st season MVP

Ashley Padilla was the breakout star of the entire season, no contest. She's like an early SNL career Will Ferrell who takes some bonkers character and pushes everything to eleven. She might break a bit too often, but otherwise every sketch she appears in is epic and this one was the best of the best.

SNL loves to feature a character that is excessively weird and this one was pretty great.

Jack Black was born to host SNL but his night was just so-so, but this was a highlight, again, thanks mostly to Ashley Padilla.

Melissa McCarthy might be one of the top all-time hosts for SNL, but like Jack Black, I felt like this season's appearance underutilized her talents. The UPS sketch was my favorite of hers this time out.

These two sketches are great examples of interesting set design, one acting like everyone is weightless, the other, of people being thrown down stairs in a hilarious way.

Matt Damon doing several minutes of pure cringe was... pure cringe but I commend him for doing it.

This perfectly describes almost every interaction I have with mechanics even when I know what is going on. Too real.

Another one of my favorite bangers came late in the season, which was Rasta Man:

This was hilarious and like a commenter on YouTube said, I hope this becomes a recurring character with mundane jobs that also reluctantly bursts into surprisingly well-done dancehall songs.

Season 51 was the one where we lost Bowen Yang to greener pastures, but Ashley Padilla has quickly become a load-bearing player like Bowen was, and hopefully they make her a full featured star next season.

I just finished a 3,500 mile road trip, driving my jeep from Oregon to Salt Lake City, then to Moab, back to SLC, then to Denver, back to SLC, then home over the course of seven days.

The Moab part of the trip was spent with my daughter who flew into SLC so she could skip my 12hr drive there. I finally got to show her the most beautiful rock formations on earth while enjoying some off-road trails in my Jeep.

We stuck to mostly easy trails, and hit up some of my favorites including Shafer Road (the crazy curves that lead down from a cliff), Onion Creek with all its water crossings, and Eye of the Whale Arch. It's still wild to me that you can walk up to dinosaur tracks captured in mudstone from over 65 million years ago and then put your hand over the track.

Then we hit a few more easy ones like Hurrah Pass and Chicken Corners as the sun went down before tackling Metal Masher on our last day to enjoy the views from the top of the plateau looking down on Moab.

After dropping Fiona off at the airport, I figured since I was so far from home, I might as well take a side trip to Denver so I could review the new NWSL expansion team's stadium for the book site. It was Pride night with a sold-out crowd and it was great to see Denver win their first game at home.

The next day I headed back to SLC and caught a Utah Royals game, revisiting a stadium I hadn't been back to for two years.

I left SLC at 9pm after the game and got home around 11am the next day after sleeping off and on in a few rest areas.

It was good to get out on the road, zone out and think for thousands of miles. I got to see tons of nature while also experiencing new stadiums with old friends.

Overall, five out of five stars, even though no matter how much I pre-planned to avoid any setbacks, my Jeep did a couple jeep things like belching out all the gear oil in the front differential one day, and running out of gas on my way home (roadside assistance helped in both cases).

In December of 2025, I found a used 2025 VW ID Buzz in Texas that was selling for a great price, so I flew down, bought it, and drove it back.

The long road trip was a great introduction to the vehicle and now that it's been in our garage for six months, we've put another 8,000 miles on it. It's driven daily by my spouse to and from her work, which is about five miles away, but I still get the chance to drive it several times a week when we go anywhere together.

A lot of friends have asked us if we still like it several months later, so I wanted to share a longer term review now that we've lived with it for half a year.

What's still great

The visibility is amazing in it, and it feels like you're driving around in a giant phone booth, but in a good way. Normally in other vans I've driven, sometimes a very large windshield makes it feel like the world is going by too slowly even when you're pushing 75mph but the Buzz doesn't have that giant windshield effect. It feels like a car with a high seating position, surrounded by windows everywhere. It's really easy to drive because of this.

The white interior looks incredible and somehow lifts my spirits any time I'm behind the wheel. I have never driven a car with a light-colored interior but the white leather and fun orange accents combine to make it feel fun and fresh, even months later. I don't think I'll ever get tired of how cool the interior looks and feels when you first get into it.

The car emits joy wherever it goes. People smile at you, wave, and give a tiny honk when they see you. EVERYONE wants to ask what it drives like and what you think of it whenever they see you in a parking lot. I've given dozens of little five minute tours of the car to strangers who wanted to see inside.

There's also an interaction I've become familiar with, and it's when you're inside a store and an older person locks eyes with you across the aisle, breaks into a big smile, then walks directly towards you to ask Do you love your VW Buzz? And did you know their very first car was a 1964 VW bus in red and black? It happens almost weekly, as boomers come out of the woodwork to chat you up about the car.

It's been a great car so far, and it's really huge inside. It's probably bigger than we need, but it's good to have the extra space. I have picked up six people at the airport and successfully and comfortably gotten them home.

Everyone, myself included, was worried about the smaller EV range on the VW Buzz, but after six months of driving it daily all over Oregon, we've only used a public charger once when we had a 250+ mile round trip to an event. While it's on the shorter side of drivable range compared to most EVs its size, almost every trip we've ever taken where we spent a day running errands ended up being about 100 miles total, so it's been totally fine and easy to live with.

Also remember that from the very first trip I learned it was possible to trek across America for several thousand miles without any plans, and it all worked out. After living with it for six months, I think the range anxiety in this vehicle is overblown. Like other EVs, it's perfectly fine for 99% of anyone's regular driving, and even if you want to take a longer road trip, it's doable.

Another thing I was worried about was the center screen/entertainment system because I'd heard horror stories about the VW ID.4 EV car this was based on. I'd even met an ID.4 owner who hated her car because the screen was always crashing while driving it. But I can say after six months, whatever updates VW did to the hardware and software have made the center dash screen totally reliable.

The MyVW mobile app doesn't offer a ton of options but you can start the AC or heater before you get to the car and it does a reasonable job locating where you last parked it.

What's still confusing

There are very few downsides to the Buzz after living with it for half a year.

I still hate the capacitive touch buttons on the steering wheel and in the center display. About once a week, I'll hear a thump sound that tells me one of the buttons was pushed, but it's while I'm driving and I have no idea what got accidentally tapped. Thankfully, it's rare but real switches and buttons that don't accidentally click when you merely hover over them would solve this forever, and I've heard rumors the next version of this car will remove capacitive buttons, which is great to hear.

Relatedly, I dislike how the window controls toggle between the front and back windows via a capacitive button that I accidentally touch almost every time I go to roll down the front windows (and once pressed, it rolls down the rear windows). I don't understand why VW decided to try weird new features on this car when they'd already been making doors with four window switches for half a century.

I set up wireless CarPlay on my phone in this car, but I usually use a USB-c cable to charge my phone from its main port. When connected via a cable, I can never tell when the Buzz will join CarPlay using that cable or instead go wirelessly which is a bit weird (when you're wireless connected, hitting pause or forward has a noticeable delay of a second but wired connections are instant).

I bought a $200 generic EV charger on Amazon for our garage and we've found that its charger head gets stuck in the charge port sometimes and is tough to remove unless you angle the handle just so while hitting the release button. I don't think this has anything to do with VW's plug design and is likely our cheap charger cable being a little wonky.

I briefly tested out VW's in-car WiFi feature where it uses a Verizon 5G connection to provide WiFi for everyone inside. But since our phones are already on Verizon, it doesn't give you any upside for $20/mo as the network speeds match that of our existing phone connections.

What I hope changes in the future

A slightly longer EV range would have been nice, but on the flip side, I also wish the US market got the shorter wheelbase version they sell in Europe as an option because it just looks a bit more sleek and you don't always need six or seven seats inside.

The capacitive touch buttons really are not great and if there's ever a community-driven way to swap steering wheels to non-capacitive versions with clicky buttons, I'd be first in line to buy one.

VW released news that there won't be a 2026 model of the Buzz, but it may come back as a 2027 model next year. If it does return, I hope they revisit their pricing for the entire line. The fully outfitted, all-the-options VW Buzz feels great if you can buy it for $50,000 but the First Edition launched at $72k+ which was a ridiculously high number. I know inflation sucks now and tariffs are a pain, but no version of the VW ID Buzz should cost over $60k.

The verdict

The VW Buzz has surprised me in that besides its annoying buttons, everything else about it is close to perfect. It's fun to drive and has the peppy torque that every EV has, making it feels fast for its size. The interior design, seating position, and view out of the windows is superb and makes it easy to drive anywhere. While longer trips might take a bit of planning on your phone, our public charging needs are so rare that it hasn't been a problem at all.

One of the biggest indicators that this is a well-designed car is that I haven't modified it yet, nor do I see the need. This is almost never happens with me, because I'm the type of person that upgrades speakers or changes wheels and tires the moment I get a car home from a dealer. Almost everything I drive is highly modified in a few ways, but I have almost zero desire to change anything about the Buzz.

To date, I've only 3D printed myself a better cup holder for the center console and a wireless charging mount that clicks into the dash. Everything else is untouched.

So that's the story. It's a super fun car, hasn't gotten old, strikes up conversations with strangers wherever we go, and is a joy to drive. If it was cheaper, I bet VW would have sold a ton of them. Even though they "canceled" the next model year of this car, you can still find plenty of First Edition VW ID.Buzz models right around $50k, some still even brand new. If you're curious, give one a test drive, then seek out the best deal you can.

We don't regret anything about this purchase and I bet we'll have this car for the next ten years (my spouse typically drives the same car for 15-20 years at a time), and I strongly suspect it'll be just as fun to get in and drive it then as it is now.

If you’re ever out on a bike ride with me and you ask an innocent question like “hey, what’s with all the red plants on farms?” I must warn you that because of my masters degree in soil chemistry (that has laid fallow for over 30 years), I will go full Cliff Clavin on you whenever I’m given the chance.

So here's the answer off the top of my head: Those plants are red clover, a cover crop grown typically in the spring on farms that normally grow food crops. They’re red because they’re loaded with cobalt (typically blue in pigments, but bright red when combined with oxygen), a rare metal. The thing about cobalt is that it has an extremely high affinity for nitrogen, so much so that a cobalt-laden clover plant can pull nitrogen out of the air to store in its roots.

Remember that the air we breathe is around 78% nitrogen gas that is inert, and we survive on the remainder being mostly oxygen with some carbon dioxide.

How it works is that there are bacteria located in nodules in the roots of a clover plant, and they're loaded with cobalt and that bacteria takes the air coming into the plant through regular respiration, and pulls out nitrogen from the N₂ gas, concentrating it, before storing it in the roots.

The bacteria in those nodules are so good at this process that farmers can plant red clover in the spring, then plow the plants with their nitrogen rich roots back into the soil a few months later and see gains in nitrogen levels close to what you’d get after applying a commercial grade fertilizer.

So basically, it’s free fertilizer that comes from the air that loads your field up with nutrients that are ready for the next crop you grow. Planting clover is relatively easy and a good way to improve soil health within normal cycles of growing and leaving a field fallow.

I swear I’m fun at parties.

A couple months ago, my spouse and I sat down on a weekend to binge re-watch the whole debut season of Murderbot and it was really enjoyable. I think we got through 7 or 8 episodes before finishing the rest the next night. But fast-forwarding through all the recaps and title/credits screens for just 20min/episode got old, and I wondered if it'd be possible to cut all ten episodes into one continuous movie.

The total runtime of all ten episodes (without weekly recaps but with everything else included) combined is 4 hours, 17 minutes.

Today I imported all episodes into Final Cut Pro, then used the blade tool to cut out all the credit and title sequences, and ended up with a single film that was 3 hours, 52 minutes in total. That's a tad much for an action-packed film, but it's the type of thing that makes for a perfect two-night rewatch. Tackle the first half one night, then come back to it the next night.

And yes, I did it fast so there are a few jarring cuts, but I now have an entertaining-as-hell movie with zero interruptions. I even used a local version of whisper to create accurate subtitles that I baked back into the file.

This is going to be the perfect thing to watch on future cross-country flights once I get it onto my iPad.

Unfortunately, I can't really share the movie file here but any friends who already are connected to me on Plex can stream it from my server.

Most people on the internet hear the term "blog comments" and think ugh (derogatory) so much so that there are t-shirts and pins about how everyone should ignore them outright.

As someone that was around in the early days of blogging, I watched and helped develop how weblog comments were first deployed in various systems (I even created a whole community around them!), so I always felt comments had real value.

Then the problem became: how do you surface the gems from any drive-by noise? In the past, I'd require members to login or even pay a $5 cover fee before anyone could comment, but that really adds friction (back then, it was by design).

Traditional blog comments

In the very first versions of weblog comments, we'd throw a blank form at the end of every post and people could fill it out with their name and comment, but they could impersonate literally anybody and say anything (derogatory). Then we moved to logins and memberships in various systems like blog engines and comment-specific apps, but that adds a ton of friction while also reducing anonymity. There were so many times I wouldn't leave a quick helpful comment if I had to jump through five hoops first.

A problem with the required-logins approach was that social media came along and gobbled up all of the internet's water-cooler talking energy, and quickly felt like the best place to shoot the breeze with others. Whenever I'd see a tweet/toot/skeet that said "hey everyone, go read this thing I wrote on this other site" I'd wish I could interact where I was already reading about it on social media, instead of having to go through the motions to leave a comment somewhere else. It's so much easier to hit reply in whatever app you're already in and tell someone that you liked their piece and wanted to mention some additional info, all without having to mess with logins or other systems.

Personal blogs feel really personal

On a single-author blog like this one, I love to hear feedback from everyone, but having open comments was always a bad choice. Even when I required member signups before comments, someone determined to say shitty things could jump through the hoops and to post their nonsense instantly.

I've tried Wordpress comments, Disqus comments, and eventually Ghost comments but nothing quite worked right or balanced an ease of use for commenters with control for the person hosting them.

When you run a small site like this, it also adds a touch of anxiety to your life. A personal blog is like hosting a dinner party in your living room and the thought of someone leaving a bad comment feels like someone took a dump in the punch bowl in your own home. Thanks to the design of comment systems, unless you block every new comment for review before it's posted, an awful comment can happen at any time and that small worry sucks to live with constantly.

So what's the ideal solution?

Here's what I want out of a dream comment system:

• Let me be selective about feedback and publish helpful things that people say, anything that helps fill out a story, that brings additional context or information or shares some personal experience with a topic
• Let people be as anonymous as they want
• Don't make people sign up for anything to share the comments on your site
• Figure out a way to harness the power of social media, where people are already talking about your stuff, with no extra effort on their part
• Reviewing and choosing the best comments by hand isn't that hard and is worth the effort to make the posts better here

My first stab at Social Comments for Ghost

A few weeks ago I implemented it here and it's been great so far. I tend to announce every new post on my Mastodon feed (and that gets mirrored to Bluesky). I check my replies on both sites a couple times a day to see if anyone has any feedback. Whenever people make great points or share something better that worked for them, those kinds of replies are the perfect type of thing I want to pull into my posts, so someone reading it on my site later on gets a fuller picture with the best information.

Prior art

The first place I saw this done well was Kottke.org, where Jason not only gates his comments to just supporting members, but also adds selective mentions from Bluesky and Mastodon into his comment threads and I love how they came out. So this is inspired heavily by seeing that for the first time.

How does it work?

In plain English, it's pretty straightforward.

• I add links to selected outside mentions in a custom field in each post at Ghost
• Some code pulls down those mentions and styles them to match the blog, displaying them much like regular comments on a blog

I add the comments using a simple HTML form stored locally, or in my case, I host it on a server in my house that I can reach from anywhere. It only takes a quick second to copy/paste URLs of mentions I want to share, and I'll eventually try and figure out easier ways to do this (honestly, I wish I could click some magical "super-favorite" button on a social media site that my blog could interpret and import right into a thread on my blog).

Some nitty gritty technical details

For implementation, I use the Code injection feature in a post to toss a list of outside mentions as a JSON blob in the Post footer field. Here's what that looks like in action in my admin view on a recent post.

Writing JSON isn't something I do off the top of my head, so I use a custom webpage to add and manage replies, and mine was coded in PHP and runs on my home NAS, where I connect securely to it through Tailscale.

This page stores my custom Ghost app API key and the Ghost URL endpoint, and also lets me pick which post I want to attribute new mentions to. I paste replies as URLs to mastodon or bluesky posts, hit Save to Ghost, and they're on my site. It even works great on my phone when I'm out and about.

Here's what that looks on my end.

Here's the code anyone can use at Ghost

I vibe-coded this with Claude for my own site over the course of a week, but since then I've created a more generic version for any Ghost blog, with the default templates meant to match their free themes. It also includes the self-hosting option for your JSON helper page, you just need a computer running PHP and a quick addition of your API key and URL. You can also run a version locally from a file that creates the JSON blob for you that you'll just paste into Ghost by hand.

GitHub - mathowie/social-comments-ghost: A social comments system for Ghost blogs

A social comments system for Ghost blogs. Contribute to mathowie/social-comments-ghost development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHubmathowie

Feel free to download it, give it a try on your own ghost blog, and let me know if it worked (or fork it for your own theme and add new features).

I made a test sandbox blog running the Source default theme and it works well. To incorporate the code, I asked Claude Cowork to incorporate the social-comments-ghost Github project into the existing theme and it created new updated theme files that were easy to upload and update instantly.

I tend not to be a tech absolutist about most things. I like to play in the tech space and test new tools out to see what they can do, see if they can help me and my work, but if they can't, I move on and avoid them.

I want to know what's possible (both bad and good) so I've been playing with AI through Claude for the past couple months in a casual manner, usually spending an hour or two trying things out or leaning on it to fix something for me.

So far, I've come up with a few things after this experience:

1. AI is ridiculously good about building single-user, single-purpose software that is fairly brittle (and works just enough), but is also the kind of software with no market because there's only one person on earth that would use/pay for/love it.
   
   People are calling this "disposable software" and that's a good description. Most of positive experiences I've had with AI coding are making things only I need for a specific use case.
2. If you're a maker and a DIYer and a jack of all trades, you're completely used to doing everything by hand from soup to nuts to ensure it's exactly what you want.
   
   But in any project, there are tons of things that take time though not much mental effort, even though your project might rely on it, and that's where AI really shines. "Go look up every mention of things I wrote and add hyperlinks to my original pieces in this giant pile of text and give me the result back as HTML I can paste into the project" is something I normally do myself, but it's mindless work that sucks up hours of time and effort, and when you can ask Claude to do it and it's completed in 20 seconds, you can continue working on your project knowing you saved some serious time. This is not nothing.
3. If you are full of ideas, AI is great at making prototypes.
4. If you can code, you can fix things a lot faster when AI inevitably writes janky software.
5. If you've ever worked on a software team, AI feels like pair programming. AI feels like working with an intern, loaded with energy but frequently wrong because without deep personal experience, they're guessing a lot of the time.
6. So far, the "killer app" aspects of AI is helping me create/iterate/finish things I've wanted for many years, but couldn't find time or energy enough to do completely on my own.

Here are a couple projects that I'd say AI did a very good job with. They are both things I've wanted to do for years, but didn't have time for, and when I proposed the idea in Claude and eventually got a result, it surprised me at how well it went.

Project 1: Tagpocalypse

I've had this blog for 26 years and up until about 2010, I stuck to broad categories, but later I started tagging my posts and ignoring categories. Each time I'd post, I'd try to put in a little extra effort and pick descriptive tags. But years later, out of nearly 3700 posts, only about 1500 had proper tags on them that described what each post was about.

The other day I was going through my archives, making small updates and edits, then adding tags to posts that didn't have them. I quickly realized doing this for every post was an impossible project to ever see the end of (especially when I'm the only one that cares about having things well-tagged and described). So I asked Claude to help me complete this project.

I had it produce tags for a few random untagged posts, checked the suggestions, refined its approach, then asked it to tag all 2,200 posts. It also wrote a python script to let me update all 2,200 posts on this site. It finished the job in a few minutes, which was incredible. I asked it to make a sortable, usable tags page as well and got that in a few more minutes of iterations.

Then it surprised me by asking if I wanted a summary of how my archives look and I said sure. Here's that result:

These are great insights I wouldn't have picked up on otherwise. You can see in the early days most posts were only a sentence or two, then Twitter launched in 2006 and I basically stopped blogging. Eventually I tended to blog longer essays so much so that now my posts average over 1,000 words each.

AI is also great at inadvertent comedy and this just slayed me:

internet + peeves is the most frequent pair (53 times) — a tidy summary of about 60% of your output.

Cold hearted, AI, calling me out for my Andy Rooney tendencies.

I'm happy this project is done. It means it's easier to look up and search old posts, the related posts blob at the bottom of posts is more accurate, and I'm glad I didn't have to do things 2,200 times by hand.

Project 2: a gym workout app

When COVID lockdown started, my gym closed for nearly a year and I bought a cheap Bowflex unit from Amazon in the spring of 2020. This was before Amazon increased the price of the same device by almost 3x when everyone wanted one later in the summer of 2000.

For years, I'd been working with a trainer on a whole body workout that focused on keeping my core strength up, and through trial and error, I found this video uploaded by Bowflex to be the closest thing to feeling like my real workout with a trainer, as it hit all my muscle groups and worked great for me.

Whenever I wanted to work out, I'd walk down to my barn, pull out my phone and look up this old video. I'd watch it in ten second chunks to remember what was next and to check my form, then I'd put on music instead and do my reps. After, I'd jump back into the YouTube app, unpause for ten more seconds, and repeat.

From one workout to the next, I might bump up my resistance through the weighted bands the unit comes with, and I always wanted to track where I was with that. For years, I did these workouts occasionally, with my clunky phone app switching, wishing I had a whiteboard nearby to jot down how much weight I was doing each time.

Fast forward to last week when I asked Claude to take a crack at it. At first, it couldn't load a YouTube video, so I ripped it to a downloadable copy from an online utility. Claude went to work and with almost zero input, gave me a list of all nine exercises, a short looping animated GIF clip for each exercise to check my form, then added a input where I can type in how much weight I used (and the form input defaults to the previous workout's numbers). It even produces graphs of weight over time after you do a few workouts.

This is something I've wanted for six years and in an hour, it created a perfect single-user web app that I host on my home network and use to track workouts.

The harsh realities of AI

I have no doubt that AI is killing the tech job market. I know I have lost at least a couple gigs because a higher up figured paying for AI tokens was easier than paying a real writer to do documentation. And I have friends all up and down the content industry and it's clear everyone is hurting looking for rare roles these days because whole jobs are being eliminated in the rush to AI.

I've come up with my own guardrails for AI and I think everyone should figure out what they're comfortable using it for and what they won't use it for before getting in too deep.

I tend to use AI for the beginnings of general research on something I don't know a lot about (instead of basic Google searches, because those have gone to shit over the past decade), but I use it as a cursory step to figure out where I should research on my own next. It's dangerous to trust AI completely on things you don't know deeply because it's just guessing what most people think is correct about a subject, in a ten-mile-up sense.

AI is at its best when you have a good deal of knowledge about a subject that you're seeking help with, because you'll quickly spot where it is making mistakes, and what assumptions it is making that are misguided. It allows you to quickly course-correct and do things like I've described here that save me oodles of time versus doing them myself.

AI is going to kill the junior job market in every industry and that sucks. Working on a coding project in Claude feels a lot like when Slack had tons of interns eager to chip in on projects and they'd fill our teams. Now, if I'm using $20 worth of AI to automate rudimentary tasks in my own life, I know the Fortune 500 are doing it at a much larger scale and that makes me wonder who is going to hire people and let them become junior software developers who eventually become senior developers if we've completely offloaded their introductory work to bots?

An obvious guardrail for me is I don't use generative AI to write things for me or make ugly images or produce videos. I have seen almost zero upside and nothing but downsides to almost all of it. AI-produced images and video build distrust among everyone, as we all tend to fall for doctored images on a daily basis now, making everyone question everything.

The downsides of AI are serious and problematic. There is an environmental cost to all the electricity needed by data centers. Companies and cities are ramming through data center construction projects that are propping up another tech bubble that will inevitably burst, wrecking our economy. AI seems to bring out the worst in everyone involved in business, much like crypto did.

I don't think dozens of agents doing your bidding is a good approach to building things with AI. I feel like a weird Portland "artisanal AI" user because I still interact with Claude inside of chat sessions. I break tasks into small parts so I can review the output and see the approaches being taken. I debug stuff at every chance and come up with solutions to bugs myself more often than Claude does. Contrasting this with the idea of OpenClaw, or having dozens of agents building stuff for you, who check things for bugs, and fix it without any of your interaction or input, and that approach seems wild to me. I want to know what's going on under the hood and I make sure I keep tabs on what AI is doing.

I don't know what the future holds for the software industry, but it feels like every job role in tech is changing a bit to accommodate what is newly possible thanks to AI models, and there are plenty of downsides to its adoption.

I still think there's something worthwhile that AI can be safely used for, whether that's building utilities and prototypes for a small audience, or LLMs based on your own writing that help you analyze your own work, or the hours of IT help I get by asking Claude which linux commands I would type to fix the things that are broken in my tech stack.

I've always had half a dozen iPhone app ideas, a couple dozen website ideas, and a bunch of things I'd call art projects, but it was hard to carve out the space to work on them while I was doing other things. Now, I can knock things off a mental todo list in a day or two, when they might have been brewing in my mind for nearly a decade. When I sit down each night and take a crack at an idea I've had and the results are better than I ever expected, that's pretty incredible.

It wasn't until the second day I was in LA last weekend when I realized oh shit! They have Waymo here! I've should give one a try.

I've been obsessed with the idea of self-driving cars for decades, having grown up reading WIRED and OMNI magazines. I assumed up until about ten years ago we'd have more robot drivers than regular cars on the road any day now.

It wasn't until I taught my kid how to drive over the course of 2020-2021 that I figured out self-driving cars actually had an insurmountable challenge before they could ever happen in the real world. Going through the whole process of teaching her what I was doing, I suddenly realized I'm always monitoring a hundred different things whenever I drive and it's hard to impart this on a teen with zero experience.

I've worked around the software industry for years and I can't imagine a 100% reliable self-driving program that can take into account not just the dozens of vehicles surrounding you and what each car might do next, but also the incredible variability in every street and curb and intersection since we have pretty flimsy road building standards in the US. Every time you drive a car today, there's a good chance you'll experience a situation you've never encountered exactly before, but it's similar enough to something you've done, so you figure it out on the fly, and it works out.

Can software ever do that?

The first ride: total insanity

I was in Los Angeles, doing a blasphemous thing on a Sunday morning, which was going for a two-mile walk across town. I ended up at a cool coffee shop to grab some breakfast, but I wanted to get back to my hotel for a big day ahead, so I called my first Waymo in the app.

It said it'd be there in 5 minutes to pick me up at a nearby intersection, then I got a few messages saying I wasn't standing in the right place, so I moved to another, safer, street corner, but was told to move back to the spot I originally launched the app. I don't think it's smart to pick up a rider at a four way stop being actively used by others, so I backtracked up the street a bit while ignoring the app's protests, and the approaching Waymo stopped for me where I wanted before the intersection and I got in.

It whisked me away quickly and I started freaking out in my head.

Holy shit, it's working.

Holy crap, there really is no driver!

Holy shit, we're really in the road with regular people that could be killed by this (and me too in the process)!

I imagine my first thoughts could have been published a hundred years ago in a newspaper.

Oh my god, where is the horse?!

How is this thing moving without my buggy whip?!

What will the city will look like when these new fangled things show up everywhere!

Overall, the ride was whisper quiet, the car drove cautiously, but being an EV, it was accelerating a bit quicker than I expected.

It didn't take long to witness the software do something in an unusual situation as we approached an intersection where a kid was riding a bike. I happened to be filming a quick video to show a friend when it happened.

Personally, I would have slowed down as I approached, given the cyclist there, but the car jammed the brakes and jerked the wheel to avoid the kid at the last moment, then proceeded to make its planned left turn, but the driver coming from the opposite direction was approaching slowly so we awkwardly turned behind the other car.

Not exactly elegant.

But my hotel was just a block up and it was a fast, cheap ride that saved me time, so maybe it had some promise?

Rides number 2 and 3: from nervousness to mundanity

I met up with friends who were also in from out of town and had never tried a Waymo and they were looking forward to it. Since it was three of us in total, I took the front passenger seat and for some reason this felt even more dangerous on our trip to LA's BMO stadium about 3 miles away.

For this trip, we watched as the car dodged and weaved through small city side streets, usually driving cautiously but sometimes passing double-parked cars in narrow avenues. It was obvious the car was limited to specific areas by the City of Los Angeles as our route became hella circuitous.

But we got to experience something really interesting when a distant siren sound started to approach us. The car came to a stop before we could see an emergency vehicle, and it waited as we watched the center screens show a car with flashing lights on it go past.

When the fire truck was gone, we resumed our trip and got to the stadium uneventfully.

The ride back was much the same, though given we walked out of a stadium with 16,000 other people looking to head home, traffic was gridlocked in all directions for blocks and after waiting 10 minutes for a Waymo we walked several blocks away from the stadium and told the Waymo where it could find us and we quickly got a ride back to our hotel.

On this third trip, my friends called the Waymo themselves because they wanted to control the aux cable as we got so used to how you could pair your phone's music to the car and control the temperature inside.

The trip home included another emergency vehicle and the car responded well, then resumed after an ambulance passed. It made a few major road crossings that would have made me nervous, but looking at the screens I could tell its own LIDAR sensors could see further and around parked cars in ways I couldn't. I was starting to get impressed.

My last ride home to LAX: I forgot it was autonomous entirely

I had to grab my stuff and head to the airport in the evening so I called my last Waymo from the hotel and it showed up promptly. I noticed it would only send me to LAX's new transit center where the bus and rail systems meet a couple miles from the main terminals, but free buses eventually whisk you away so you can catch your flight. I still can't imagine a self driving car navigating the most extreme circumstances of an airport departures area, where people are constantly stopping, blocking, and getting out of cars all over the place.

I spent my last Waymo trip looking up my flight and terminal info, as well as how to catch one of the LAX terminal buses and barely looked up from my phone during the whole trip. I already completely forgot what I was sitting in. I rode an LAX bus to my final terminal and it was fine.

Final thoughts

• I couldn't believe how quickly I went from nervous apprehension to forgetting I was in a moving car with no driver, all in the course of a half a day.
• Waymo is headed to Portland soon and people are freaking out about it locally, but I honestly can't wait as I think it'll be less chaotic than Los Angeles or San Francisco in terms of road layouts.
• Waymo cars are generally a lot safer than human drivers and are doing a way better job than I ever imagined after having experienced a few rides myself. I have to eat my words a bit on where I thought this technology was at.
• I know Waymo employs human watcher/drivers and at one point in the four trips I saw a message on the screen saying Waymo was "taking over" for a short while but we were driving down a street normally and I don't know why they sent the message or what they did since the driving characteristics didn't change at all.
• After experiencing a few fire trucks and ambulances interacting with a Waymo while I was inside, I don't think even an army of humans would be enough to take over as quickly and as often as it would seem. I suspect the amount of actual human oversight is surprisingly low.
• That said, last year while I was in San Francisco driving my own car, surrounded by Waymos, I noticed at one point traffic was illegally going around some double-parked cars and eventually each Waymo car followed regular people doing it, so I kind of knew not all of this was software, and probably humans that kicked in after cars were stuck for a couple minutes without movement.
• I've watched tons of videos of people inside a Waymo getting in weird situations and the software does a good job of being especially cautious around cyclists and pedestrians, so much so that I would prefer to ride my bike in a city filled with Waymos over one filled with normal cars.
• While driving around a narrow street with bad visibility, I did think if we hit something, do I as the rider need to stick around? Am I at all liable for what the car does?
• The pricing on it I would guess is about 25-50% less than a Uber or Lyft ride, and maybe that's artificially low due to investment money, but it seems like it should be cheaper than human options.
• There are ample warnings everywhere that you are constantly being video recorded while you're inside a Waymo and since humans can do the worst possible things, I bet there's a supercut of people having sex inside Waymos somewhere on a hard drive under a desk at Waymo.
• I generally don't like the whole "robots taking jobs" aspects of tech "progress", but even though I love to drive cars personally, I don't think being an uber driver is a fulfilling, lucrative job that treats their drivers well. I know uber twists the knobs so drivers barely make enough money to keep doing it. I honestly don't know if gig driving is a job worth saving.
• No driver means no creepy guy hassling riders for their phone number and I think that's really an underreported upside to Waymo for many folks.
• I thought of my old friend Jerry Michalski and how maybe 15 years ago he wrote about how self-driving cars would someday be so mundane that they'd offer services while you're in them to differentiate which one you use, like a haircut from a barber in the car, or a mixed drink from a bartender, or even a dental cleaning while you head to work.
• My favorite joke about Waymos is that the windshield wipers automatically operate when it rains, even though that's completely for us, and not them.
• It sucks that we even needed to invent a Waymo. Public transit is useless to nonexistent in most US cities, a city like LA feels backwards and like it’s in the dark ages since you need a car to get almost everywhere. After the soccer game I was embarrassed when looking around at four solid blocks of stopped cars all honking at each other, headed nowhere. FIFA World Cup and the Olympics are coming here and we clearly don’t look like a serious society since we still rely on millions of stupid cars.

In conclusion:

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

it's better at driving than I thought

Earlier this week, the Department of Justice announced it secured an indictment by a federal grand jury against the Southern Poverty Law Center, a firm that’s spent over 50 years researching, tracking, and fighting violent hate groups nationwide.

The SPLC is best known for bringing lawsuits that have bankrupted white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Nation, as well as publishing annual Hate and Extremism reports that track organizations like the Proud Boys.

The charges seem baseless, accusing the SPLC of “misleading their donors” by paying informants to infiltrate groups to collect intelligence, the same thing the FBI does commonly in their investigations. Legal experts say it’s based on a flimsy premise that abuses the power of the DOJ to go after who it sees as its “enemies”, which is the Trump admin’s entire playbook.

But what I wasn’t aware of (until today) was it this isn’t just an attempt to derail the SPLC’s important work temporarily, but it’s a direct attack that attempts to remove their funding sources entirely.

Let’s talk about donor advised funds (DAFs) for a minute

Several years ago when I left Salesforce, a friend who had experienced an IPO suggested that before I cash out my final shares of employee stock, I should siphon some of them into a DAF, or a donor advised fund. I hadn’t heard of a DAF before but quickly learned they’re one way people donate to causes that also allows the money to grow over time (tax-free) so the money can almost perpetually be donated to causes (I’ll explain the mechanics in a bit). On top of that, you also get a tax break when you set one up that can offset taxes you’d pay on regular stock sales.

So here’s how a DAF works: you give away some shares of stock to a charitable account (mine is at Fidelity). And those shares are immediately sold to provide funds for the account. Whatever the stock sells at on that day is completely tax-free, so the new DAF gets 100% of the value of the sold stock.

Once the money is in a DAF, it’s out of your hands and something you can‘t touch for personal gain, as it can only be given away to approved non-profits by the holding company. While the money sits in the account, it can grow with the markets like any other investment.

For my own DAF, I gave a couple hundred shares of Salesforce into a new account back in 2021, when the shares sold for about $50k. In the years since, I’ve given away about $5k in donations on average each year to organizations like food banks, planned parenthood, and groups fighting for LGBTQA+ rights.

The funny thing is, since the ultra rich wrote the rules for these, it gives your money way more power than normal people donating to charities get.

I just looked at the transaction history of my own DAF, and I’ve given out $29k to nonprofits since I started my DAF. And my account balance currently has over $33k in it. So my initial donation has turned into at least $62k of spending power in just a few short years.

Fidelity says no

When the charges against the SPLC were announced this week, the group said they would fight them in court and I saw online calls for donations to support the SPLC. This was an easy choice for me, so I logged into my DAF account and did a search, found the SPLC, then started a grant request to send them $1k. Usually a day later you get a response saying the money went out to the organization like you asked.

A day later, I got the following email saying my request was denied, due to pending investigations. I’ll reach out to Fidelity for clarification, but I noticed that if I search for the SPLC now at Fidelity’s DAF grant finder, it is no longer listed as an organization you can direct money to.

Keep in mind the nonprofits you can fund aren’t all innocuous ones as The Heritage Foundation (authors of Project 2025) and Turning Point USA are still listed as possible recipients.

I guess I learned what “advised” means

I started a DAF because I’d read about how it really stretches out your philanthropy dollars. As your money grows over time, it lets you donate more to causes you support. But it’s not a fund I own completely or can ever take money out of personally, I can just advise the holders of where the funds should go.

It looks like the Trump administration is doing everything it can to dry up the SPLC’s funding and prevent them from continuing their work on tracking hate groups and publishing their findings.

As to why this administration would do such a thing is an exercise left up to the reader.

I didn't intend to spend most of this week like I was doing a personal hackathon, but I've been updating a bunch of projects at once and it was a ton of work in a short time, so it's time to show them off.

Statham Punch gets a refresh

Years ago, I was joking with a friend in a theater as we sat down to watch a new Expendables movie starring Jason Statham. I said "I wonder how long it'll take before he punches someone in the face?" and to continue that joke I started the timer on my watch and showed him my wrist. Later, I posted a screenshot of my watch to Twitter with the caption that it only takes 14 minutes to enjoy a punch in that flick, and people seemed to love it, so I kept doing it. Then I took all my tweets over the years and posted them to a single page website.

Time to Statham Punch

How long into each Jason Statham film before he throws his first punch? The definitive TTSP dataset.

I recently added his latest movies and redesigned so it's easier to update in the future.

Haughey.com gets a revamp

The first .com domain I ever bought was my last name, in 1997. I initially ran a blog there in 1999 but moved my blog here in 2001 to its own home. Ever since, my Haughey.com site has languished as a weird portfolio or resume or wiki and eventually it just became a one page way for anyone looking to contact me.

I decided to scrap the old one and make it a one-page portfolio that showcases my job experience, writing, and photography. It's still not the most useful site but it feels like a better representation of me.

Matthew Haughey

Our NWSL book is now completely online and free to read

My wife and I have followed women's pro soccer closely for over a decade and when the league was adding new teams several years ago, I thought about how I'd personally been to almost half the stadiums, and with a few flights I could see the other half and write it all up for anyone else traveling to see pro soccer games in unfamiliar stadiums.

Over the course of three months of 2024, I visited every stadium in the country and started writing a detailed guide on the best places to sit and best things to eat in every stadium, along with what stadiums do right and what they get wrong. I didn't finish the project until the end of 2024 when I put it out as an ebook, but I never liked the slowness and lack of control even self-publishing gives you. I always wanted to make it public and web-native, where edits and updates could be instant and regular (and the whole thing could be a living project that lasts for years instead of being frozen in amber on paper).

So it's now all online here, and I'll be updating it throughout the year with two new teams and one new stadium for an older team left to review. I'm in LA this weekend for a game and will revamp the BMO stadium review after my third revisit when I get back.

Chapters

A fan’s guide to all National Women’s Soccer League stadiums — written after visiting every one starting in 2024. Find food tips, seating guides, neighborhood picks, and honest takes for every venue.

Unofficial NWSL Stadium GuideMatthew Haughey

More projects and updates

I redesigned this blog and added a bunch of features to the Ghost CMS that I always wanted. I built a personal gym app that tracks my specific workouts and lets me record weights and view those as graphs over time. I'm knee-deep in three different woodworking projects with a couple more on the horizon. It's also Spring in Oregon and that means I mowed a few acres of lawn, weedwhacked another acre of overgrown grasses, and I've rewired an electric mower and had to jump start my tractor, all this week.

This has been my most productive week in months, so I'll be taking a long nap today to celebrate.

I love traveling to new places and getting to enjoy new experiences. And as much as I love travel, it can be chaotic.

A friend once said that if you’ve ever tried to meditate and failed to quiet your jumbled mind, you should take a trip instead. 

Because when you travel, your entire world distills down to finishing a single task to keep yourself safe and alive, letting everything else fall away (just like meditation!).

First, you have to find your plane. Then you have to find your luggage. Next, you have to find your hotel. Then—surprise!—you need to find dinner at 9pm in a city you’ve never set foot in. Good luck!

So here's a bunch of tips I use to keep the chaos at bay, to feel more at home when I'm traveling, and bring some semblance of control back into my time in new places.

Have a dedicated electronics travel bag

I put this off for years and it wasn't until last summer when I finally bought a dedicated bag to hold all my electronics that is ONLY used for travel. I've stuck to my promise to never touch anything inside my bag when I'm at home, so it's always fully stocked and ready for a trip. This has been such a game changer.

Here's what's always in the bag:

• A wall charger with 4 high-speed usb-c charge ports
• Two usb-c to usb-c cables
• A couple usb-a to usb-c cables because you never know what a rental car or hotel room might have for extra charge ports
• A usb-c to lightning cable for my headphones
• A usb-c to Apple Watch charger in a 3D printed case to keep things tidy

For each trip I add these things from home:

• A Bivo water bottle that fits in the bottle slot in the bag
• My iPad Pro with Magic keyboard (I only bring a laptop when I must for work, otherwise this is enough)
• AirPod Max headphones for noise canceling on the plane, AirPods 4 headphones for walking around

I also recently added two new things to the permanently-in-the-bag pile.

Take an old AppleTV and HDMI cord with you

The AppleTV is my absolute favorite set-top box and I have two of them at home. I tend to upgrade them whenever a new version comes out, so I have a few older AppleTVs laying around and I recently started bringing one with a power cord and a short HDMI cable with me on trips.

Every hotel I stay in has a modern flat screen TV but it's rare for them to support any screencasting technology (maybe 1 in 10 hotels have this feature in my experience?). But every hotel TV has a HDMI port and I've yet to have any issues plugging in my own AppleTV while using my phone as the remote for controlling it.

If you use profiles on your AppleTV, you can even make your travel AppleTV mirror exactly the same apps you have at home. This means after a long day, you'll get a little slice of home wherever you are, and you can keep up with shows before you drift off to sleep.

But how do you connect it to the hotel's wifi?

Use a travel router

I've heard about the benefits of a travel router for years but it wasn't until last month that I finally picked up a Beryl 7 travel router and after a couple trips, I wish I bought it sooner.

First, they're great for sharing a connection with all your devices, which means gadgets like an AppleTV or Apple Watch that can't connect to a hotel's WiFi now get can get online. It also means you can buy WiFi on a plane for $8 and share it with everyone in your party if you want.

A travel router has a couple ethernet ports but also a couple wifi points inside it. It's got flexibility so it can take any outside internet connection and funnel it into its own WiFi point that all your devices connect to normally with a simple password.

Here's how it works:

• Plug it into usb-c power and give it a few seconds to boot up
• Connect to the router's WiFi and pull up its own internal website (the default is at http://192.168.8.1)
• Use the website's wizard to log into whatever system you're trying to connect to, including hotels, planes, trains, or cruise ship wifi
• Once you're logged in, anything connecting to your travel router shares a single outside connection

You can do more things with a travel router like share files and tunnel all your connections through a VPN but at its core, getting to share one connection with all your devices is really handy.

Install Tailscale at home and setup an exit node

I've said it many times before but Tailscale is the glue that holds my tech stack together, and you can level up your travel experience by installing it at home onto an always-on device like a desktop Mac, Raspberry Pi, or an AppleTV (in my case it's on a Synology NAS server).

Next, set up an Exit Node so you can pipe all your traffic through your house connection, no matter where you are.

I bring this up because whenever I travel, I like to unwind before bed by watching an hour or so of TV and movies. 

But I remember one trip to Vancouver where I popped open my laptop to finish a show I was watching at home, and instead I got an error that I couldn't view it because it’s wasn't available on Canadian Netflix.

The worst experience was when I was flying into SFO and I spent most of the flight watching a Golden State Warriors game using my $17/mo NBA League Pass, but we landed with ten minutes left in the game. I pulled it up on my phone once I got into the terminal but all I saw was a blackout screen blocking playback and I missed the end of the game I'd watched for the past 90 minutes.

I get that companies have complex broadcast rules governed by your geo-location but I pay streaming services hundreds of dollars a year to use them and last week when I got a cutesy error on the Peacock app while trying to watch a baseball game, I felt like I, as a customer, was being treated like a child. It's patronizing and annoying as hell.

The good news is that if you use an app like Tailscale, you can avoid this when you travel, because you’ll be able to do everything you can at home, as you'll actually be sharing your home's IP address when you connect your phone or AppleTV to your Exit Node. Everything you use will be exactly as if you were at home, no matter where you are on earth.

Bonus tip: If you run a network-level adblocker at home like Pi-hole or Adguard, you can set Tailscale to use that as your DNS server. So that means the setup I have to keep ads off for anyone using my home network works outside of my house too, since my phone is always connected to Tailscale.

Now, when I read the New York Times (that I also pay for!) on my phone while I'm out and about, all the movie ads and junk in the middle of articles is gone, just like when I'm on home WiFi.

The old internet classic: use the pants hanger hack to sleep in

I don't remember where I first heard about this but it was probably around 2008 or so. You've probably have seen this tip, but if it's new to you, you're in luck because it'll change your life while traveling.

Most hotel chains have blackout curtains but they always seem to not quite meet in the middle correctly. So you get a searing beam of light piercing your eyes at 7am when you really wanted to sleep in and feel well-rested after a long flight.

The next time you travel, look for a hanger in the hotel closet with spring-loaded clasps for hanging pants, and use those to clamp the blackout curtains tightly together the night you get into your room. Then put the do not disturb sign on your door.

The next morning, you'll sleep like a baby.

Two classic apps I never travel without

Speaking of internet classics, there are two apps I've been using every time I travel, one for over 10 years and the other for 20.

The oldest one is TripIt, which I joined when it launched in the 2000s and all it does is check your email for travel-related confirmation emails, then adds them to your calendar along with all the confirmation numbers and addresses and proper flight times. It's worked flawlessly for years doing that one function very well.

The other app is FlightAware. I run the iOS app and any time you fly, you put in your airline and flight number and it'll show you the flight history over the past few days, how often the plane was late, etc, but there's a button marked "Where is my plane?" that you can hit on the day of your flight and see in realtime exactly where your plane is located, and quickly determine if your flight will leave on time, or if it's backed up from three late arrivals earlier today. Honestly, this little app gives me more information than the airline ever would, and I love it to death.

Last one: every hotel has room service thanks to food delivery apps

I've never been a big user of DoorDash, Uber Eats, Toast, or any of the local restaurant delivery apps because most of the time adding delivery doubles the order cost and I can drive myself to pickup my food just as quickly.

But when I'm in a strange town and I'm exhausted and it's late and I don't know anything good to eat at nearby, I pull up a food delivery app, search for something that would hit the spot, and treat myself by getting something delivered. It's been great on trips, as I often fly to cities and skip renting a car, using public transit or walking as much as possible.

After a long day on a plane, nothing hits the spot like getting to eat my favorite Indian dish that was brought to my lobby at the same time I was settling in and unpacking my clothes.