I've long been a big fan of over-the-ear, old-school big headphones for comfort and sound quality reasons. It's also because I generally don't like to stick things inside my ears. Apple's ear buds are mostly ok but I dislike in-ear models that you push deeply into your canals to seal out noise, like AirPods Pro or high end in-ear things that musicians and singers use. I'm not a fan of those at all.

I've had a pair of AirPods Max headphones since they came out and I've loved them, though you do sweat quite a bit since they keep your ears pretty warm no matter what time of year it is. One thing I will say though is they are wildly overpriced at $599. They would still be a very high-end device at $299 or $399, which is where I think they should be priced. Years ago, I used home office funds provided by my job to get my first pair.

And while they are a bit heavier than most over-the-ear headphones, I can wear them comfortably for 4-5 hours at a stretch and whenever I'm writing in a strange place, the noise cancellation is a killer feature that lets me shut out the world and concentrate on work. They also come in clutch any time I fly, and I know I travel to new cities feeling fresher because I didn't have to listen to 90dB of jet noise for several hours.

Headphones vs. Sunglasses

Before I ever thought to depend on noise-cancelling headphones for anything safety-related, I did a bunch of research, asking questions on Ask MetaFilter and Twitter a few years back.

The question I always had about these was if they really work or if they trick your brain into thinking they work. Do they merely "mask" the noise energy going into your ears and make you think it is quieter than it really is, or do they literally cancel out actual noise waves so that less decibels of energy hit your ear drums?

In the world of sunglasses, there's a bit of a paradox where if you pay $100-300 for a pair of sunglasses they will certainly have special coatings that block several different types of UV rays from entering your eyes, ultimately protecting you and your eyesight. But extremely cheap sunglasses (think, $10 at the beach) mostly lack any sort of UV filters while still being dark, which means they can cause more damage to your eyes because your pupils are dilated due to the darkness, but having no filters means you're subjected to more UV energy entering your eyes than not wearing sunglasses at all.

Thankfully, the consensus online from audio engineer types was that Active Noise Canceling (ANC) headphones work by creating real opposite sound energy that truly "cancels" out the incoming sound waves and ultimately the energy that hits your ears is greatly lessened. It's not just a trick and it really works how you hope.

Noise canceling on the first version of AirPods Max wasn't too shabby

The AirPod Maxes are great at noise canceling. My favorite trick is to put them on in "transparency" mode where you can hear normally through them with nothing playing on them. Walk over to your kitchen sink, turn the water on full blast, then hit the noise cancellation button and become genuinely amazed at how well they can shut out most sound.

I also love these features when I'm doing loud, dangerous work. Whenever I run my mower, or tractor, weed whacker, or leaf blower, I've always got Max headphones on protecting my hearing. The noise reduction is even so good I can listen to quiet talking podcasts while doing otherwise loud things.

As I've done more woodworking over the past six months I've really come to rely on active noise-cancelling headphones for basic safety reasons. I have multiple power tools that absolutely scream while simultaneously I'm running dust collection vacuums, and being around those noise levels for more than a few seconds is really uncomfortable. I basically never go into my woodshop without my AirPod Max headphones these days.

A version 2 appears

Back in March of this year, Apple announced AirPods Max 2 headphones and most tech websites I read and YouTube reviews said it was a long overdue, but "mild" upgrade that changed the charge port to usb-c instead of lightning, along with the same H2 audio chipset used in the smaller, cheaper AirPods and AirPod pro models that came out a year earlier.

Last month, during the Amazon Prime day sales, for a few brief days you could buy a pair of the new version 2 models for only $399, and I took advantage of that offer and upgraded the Maxes I'd had since they launched. It looks like the $399 deals are gone now, but as of this writing you can find new ones in Orange for only $429, which is still $170 off the full price.

One thing I want to make clear that pretty much every tech review site missed is that the noise cancellation features on the AirPods Max 2 headphones are noticeably better. And not just a little bit! When I'm working around noisy machinery these days, I can hear a night and day difference with the version 2 headphones versus the first ones, and I'm really glad I upgraded.

I think the explanation is that sound levels are measured on a logarithmic scale, so if you can lower a sound by ten decibels it will feel like half as much noise to you, and I think that's what's happening the in AirPods Max 1 to 2 updates. The sound cancelling probably did get better by a few dB, but just a few dB is a big reduction in overall energy and wearing them in the real world they sound significantly quieter around the same loud sounds.

If you do any sort of work in places with dangerously high noise levels, or have always been curious about using headphones for shutting out the world and letting you get work done, I can't recommend the AirPod Maxes highly enough. They're easily the best headphones I've ever used, even though I still wish they cost half as much as they do.

It's kind of incredible that these days, barely a day goes by that I don't think about AOL Instant Messenger (or AIM, as I'll call it throughout) at some point.

That statement doesn't make sense on the face of it even to me, since I only used AOL in the 1990s for a short time before I found cheaper ways to get online at home. And I scoffed at all the chat functionality within AOL and didn't understand how a friend was ride or die for their chat room buddies from AOL and kept an AOL account going for years after they needed it, just to talk to their AOL friends.

My first usage of instant messaging was downright jurassic. Back in grad school in the mid-1990s, every grad student had an account on an old 1970s VAX/VMS system, and you could use a command-line function to see who else was at the terminal just like you were, then you could start a >TALK session that was truly instant (you could even watch people type out their messages to you and see them fix their typos in real-time).

Since the pool of colleagues I could connect with was so small and time-sensitive on TALK, most grad students tended to use ICQ, with its cute sounds that evoke instant nostalgia whenever I hear them today (uh-oh!). That meant any time you were sitting at a computer, ICQ would let you know who else was and let them know you were around too, way easier than TALK.

AIM came out around the same time but I avoided it at first because it was AOL and AOL was already a dinosaur by the late 1990s. But ICQ was more niche, as you had to memorize your userID (and judge others based on theirs) just to login while AIM just kind of worked everywhere and was easier overall to use. Once enough of my friends moved to AIM, I held my nose and moved along with them and never looked back.

What it was like in the heyday

I want to say between the years of 2000 and about 2010, I always had an AIM client running on any computer I was using while I was sitting at it. It was kind of like using Slack at a workplace today, but you'd glance over at your list to see who was online currently and catch up with people constantly throughout the day, or even just read their away messages.

Back in the early days of blogging, people who read blogs used to joke that everyone with a blog seemed to know everyone else with a blog and they linked to one another and talked on their blogs like some sort of "secret cabal" or "cult". And yeah, we had annual gatherings like SXSW where bloggers met up in person but the simple fact was we also had AIM running on our desktops.

Maybe it was 9am and I was procrastinating before starting work, and I'd see my friend Dan in Wisconsin that also ran a blog was online and I could tell him how much I enjoyed a recent post of his, or ask him what he was doing for the upcoming holiday weekend and hear weird stuff like how everyone in the midwest somehow owns a boat.

Every blogger knew every other blogger because we talked on AIM constantly throughout the day. I probably read 200-300 daily-updated blogs back in this era and I probably had 50-60 blog authors in my AIM list each day that I could connect with.

Apple even integrated it into the OS

In early versions of Mac OS X, Apple added iChat, which was basically AIM plus local network Bonjour/Jabber messaging, and eventually it supported other IM clients like Yahoo and MSN.

Once it was integrated into the operating system, it became a vital work tool. Everyone I worked with remotely at Creative Commons was using Macs and on AIM. All my non-work internet friends were also on AIM. When you were at a conference, you could even pop open a iChat window to find anyone else using the same WiFi network also using iChat, and drag their name into your buddies list (which is how I accidentally knew when Tim O'Reilly was online for the next 4-5 years).

Online status became a vital feature

I posted this image to Flickr in 2004, showing all my away messages/status settings over the previous year, which included presidential election night 2004 and the World Series, and where I traveled to each month while working at Creative Commons, along with the offline messages I used for my coworkers whenever I popped out for lunch or had to go to the doctor.

The ones about travel were interesting. I'd put "NYC" as my status as I flew into New York for a conference or a visit for a few days and inevitably 2-3 people would message me at some point in the trip and say "hey, you're here? let's get lunch!" and we'd get food together.

Biz Stone mentioned in his book about the formation of Twitter that my away statuses image posted to Flickr drove early ideas around Twitter, because people wanted to share their online status with each other in a subtle way. The first time I used early "Twttr" it was basically a way over SMS to tell your friends what your current status was ("at the store" was a complete message on early twitter).

One-on-one social connections were key

It's funny, but as I look up old images and screenshots of iChat and AIM in Google, I see a lot of promotional stuff from Apple and AOL touting group chat features or the iSight camera's video conferencing that came out a decade before Zoom meetings were even an idea.

But I rarely talked to more than one person at a time over iChat or AIM. It was almost always one-on-one, and I still miss being able to keep track of dozens of friends easily and instantly over so many years. Granted, this was during a transitional period where you still had your offline life and your online life and AIM worked to tell you when your online friends were also briefly online, which added to this feeling of temporary kinship.

Today, I have several hundred contacts in my phone and I could conceivably text them instantly to try and recreate the feeling I had using AIM, but it's not at all the same and so many of those loose connections have withered over the years. These days, if I decide to text someone for the first time in two years, I usually have to explain why because it seems so out of the blue.

Why didn't early internet apps make the transition to mobile?

Something I think about constantly is why didn't AIM become another killer communication app like WhatsApp or Telegram, just a thing everyone uses to communicate no matter where they are or what devices they are using. The same question could be asked about Flickr. Why didn't Flickr go from an online photo sharing app to becoming the way all mobile phone users to share photos with each other and with the public?

In AIM's case, I think AOL was in the dark ages about mobile app development and as we moved off desktop computers and when being "online" meant when you were at your desk with a keyboard, compared to just always being reachable by your mobile phone as the idea of "online" faded to just being on 24/7. AIM was slow to adapt and I remember downloading an official AIM client on my iPhone around 2010 but barely anyone used it and I rarely did as well. The Apple iChat app moved away from being a pipeline for other protocols like AIM messages as it embraced texting and iPhones instead.

There wasn't a way to transition how someone might use iChat at their desk with work colleagues, when compared to the iMessage app on your phone that was focused almost completely on just texting other iPhones (and Apple wanted to sell more iPhones so they pushed that way).

I think Flickr didn't become a great mobile app because Yahoo flubbed the same brief opportunity in ways that AOL did, by waiting too long and not having enough features or surfacing why someone would use an app different from the built-in tools already on their phones.

A transitional period we can't recreate

I miss keeping up with 50 other bloggers and talking to people all over the planet each day. We're all so dispersed now but online all the time that the thing I miss most doesn't really exist.

Back in 2005, I would be at my desk using a computer for maybe 8hrs a day and that would overlap in the mornings with my British blogger friends who were finishing their workday at the BBC. For most of the day I chatted with coworkers and occasionally other bloggers but in the late afternoon I might hear from friends in Sydney, Australia or my Japanese pals as they got to their desks before my day was ending.

These days, I am happy to say I usually use my desktop Mac for only an hour or two a day tops, and frequently go days without touching it. Apple tells me I use my phone about 4-6 hours per day, so it's not like I'm "offline" all that much compared to 2005.

I still miss AIM even though it shuttered forever in 2017. It connected so many people to me, kept us all in touch and updated on what we were all up to. The ephemeral nature of connecting with friends when they were at their desks just like you were (and everyone had a full keyboard to write full sentences quickly) captured a magic moment that nothing today can compare to, and I still miss it to this day.

I enjoy social media, and one thing I love seeing is when people play in the space and do things the tools weren't necessarily designed for. Back in good old days of Twitter (~2012-2014), people used to do things like change their display names to a "spooky" one for halloween or they'd add a Santa hat to their avatar for just December.

But I disliked how any changes you made to your avatar/bio/profile were destructive, in that new images or settings completely wiped out your old ones. Changing things back to how they were meant you had to dig around for the old selfie or a previous copy of your about text, and that was always annoying.

I built what I always wanted

Last weekend, I decided it was time to complete a project I've been thinking about for the past 10-15 years. I used OpenAI's Codex to help walk me through it.

I started with a prototype in HTML running on my local machine, and soon it was wired up and successfully archiving and editing my live social media accounts at Mastodon and Bluesky remotely. I could pull down my profile and images and text, edit any part of them, make those changes live using the app, and I had saved copies of profiles with custom naming.

Let's get Swift

After a day of chatting in Codex and testing in a browser, the prototype had every feature I wanted in a basic phone app, so it was time to move into an iOS app. Codex walked me through the setup in Xcode and wrangled all the necessary files. Then we had to rebuild each feature one by one into an iOS project. After another couple of days, I had it running on a custom app on my own phone, and the first version of this was complete.

Here are some screenshots of the app running on my phone, showing the front page, account switching, archive history, settings screen, and what a live profile looks like.

My favorite part was building custom image cropping tools for making a square avatar out of any of your photos and then a 1500x500px profile header image cropper, which I've never had an easy way of doing before.

Small, free, and easy

I know this is a very specific, niche utility, so I intend to keep it free on the App Store once my developer account is fully working. I'll announce on my social media accounts when the app is ready for testers in TestFlight, which should be a few more days. I suspect it'll take another couple weeks before it's available on the App Store widely, once it gets approved.

UPDATE: Good news, this is now on TestFlight, so feel free to try it out here.

I'm happy I finally got this built, and I've been using it every couple of days since. I now have a backup of all my bluesky and mastodon profiles and images, and it'll be fun to play around on those networks again, with the knowledge that I can always set things back to how they were. I'm also going to work on integrating iCloud, so backups are automatic, always in sync, and something you can move easily from one phone to another without losing any of your history.

I wish this app could save EVERY kind of social media profile you might have, including Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and others, but most have locked down their APIs and currently only Bluesky, Mastodon, and Slack offer any profile editing from a remote API.

It's unfortunate the other networks behave as they do, since we, the users, bring all the value to those networks and things like our profiles and our following lists are something we created and get value from and we should get to control, import, export, and use them however we like.

My woodworking shop is coming together nicely and one benefit of having everything in the right place is that it makes completing new projects faster and easier.

Last week, I decided to tackle I project I've been thinking about since January, which was when I first watched a YouTube build video and immediately ordered a set of cushions from Wayfair. It's a riff on a high-end outdoor sofa from West Elm that goes for over $5,000, the kind you might see in a fancy hotel's pool area. The real sofas look fairly simple and easy to build and since it's easy to find good cushions elsewhere, I followed the Modern Builds plans to replicate it.

A lot of prep

I thought about building this sofa in a nicer wood than builder grade pine, but good cedar boards at this size were going to run me about $300-400 and I wanted to try building it first with the cheap stuff. If I loved the project, I could always redo it later on with different woods.

I went to my local lumberyard and picked out eight 2x10 pine boards that were straight and free of defects, along with a 2x8 and 2x6. The one page PDF of free plans is pretty low on detail and undercounts the amount of lumber you need (it says you only need two long boards, you need four). Luckily, I bought a bunch of extra boards so I was covered.

In total, the cost of all the wood I got was just about $100. The cushions were about $250, so it was a pretty affordable project considering the size of this overall beast.

I ended up changing the sofa to one less set of cushions, so 26" narrower than the plans describe. The hardest part of the process was taking builder-grade pine and milling it down on a planer from 1 1/2" thick to 1 1/8" thick. Doing that for so many boards took several hours and produced a crap-ton of chunky sawdust.

Assembly time

But once milled down, the wood looked great. If built this again, I'd likely also cut the sides perfectly square on my table saw, taking the roughly 9 1/2" wide boards down to 9" total width.

My new miter station made it easy to make perfectly repeatable cuts so I cut everything I needed in a few minutes and started building. One key change I made was how I didn't like the butt-joint where the fronts of the arms meet the top of the arms. Even the expensive West Elm models join their wood this way.

So instead, I tweaked the build plans slightly so I could make them meet on a 45º miter with Festool Dominos hidden inside for the glue-up. I even grain-matched the "waterfall" joint to make it look extra-fancy. This looks better than two pieces of wood slamming together at 90º but also shows off that it all came from a single long piece of lumber.

I started this build on a Friday, and by Monday the sofa was fully built and I spent a day sanding it up to 220 so it was ready for finish. Tuesday morning, I put two coats of oil-based spar urethane varnish on it, then got a friend to help me move it from the barn to our front porch area. It weighed over 100lbs, so it was no easy task.

Before/After

When we moved into our house, we had this weird patio area off to the side of the front door and it was oddly large and not easy to know what to put there. During early COVID times, I found a cheap plastic rattan outdoor sectional from AliExpress and it sat there for the last six years looking like this, but I knew it was never quite the right fit (and the cushions were thin and abysmal for comfort).

I knew a modern, chunky sofa with bright fabric would really pop there and here it is once we put it in place.

This sofa all came together quickly and I love how it looks and feels. The 5" thick cushions are crazy comfortable to sit on. The only thing missing now is a coffee table and my next project is building a Nelson Bench out of birch hardwood this week to put out there.

If I were to build this again, I'd probably spring for the more expensive but outdoor-friendly cedar wood and I'd do a better job on the sanding and finishing (I see flaws everywhere, but no one else does). I also think the "floating" look of it would be better if I set the riser boards on the bottom to be 1 1/2" away from the frame instead of the 3/4" the plans suggest. The sofa would look better with more of a shadow reveal, and I might reattach the feet to make that happen soon.

Overall, I'd say this is a great beginner-friendly build that almost anyone could do if you approach each step carefully and measure twice before you cut once. The hardest part would be learning to use a planer, but the one I got on sale at Harbor Freight last year was under $400 and did a good, albeit messy, job. I learned how to use planers in my intro to woodworking class over the winter.

Watch the video yourself and if this is something you want to tackle for your own house, I bet you can actually do it.

One of the things 3D printing is good at is helping you organize things. You can print all kinds of custom bins and one of the universal systems is called Gridfinity, which is a system of baseplates with a 42mm x 42mm grid that you print, then you print boxes in any shape you need (and they can be stacked on each other too).

Gridfinity has been around for a few years and if you go on reddit.com/r/gridfinity you'll see loads of visually pleasing, fully organized tool chests, kitchen drawers, and crafting desks.

Who wouldn't want that kind of organized space like those on reddit? So how does one accomplish it?

It's custom tedious work when done by hand

Last year, I saw a video of how The Swedish Maker could take a photo of an oddly-shaped object, then import it into a Fusion360 to carefully trace the object, then export out something they could print to hold it. Other people saw this and ran with it.

But even the most streamlined versions of this process requires spending about 15-20 minutes of work tracing and tweaking each model. It also means you need to be well-versed in 3D CAD software packages like Fusion360 in order to even tackle the job.

Tooltrace enters the chat

Tooltrace.ai is pretty amazing, as it uses your phone's camera along with image tools (perhaps AI, but I bet not really) to figure out the sizes of everything based on a known scale of a piece of US letter paper. Then it uses light/dark object recognition to figure out the edges of your tools and creates usable 3D printer files within seconds. Even for someone that has never touched 3D CAD software.

That's kind of incredible.

Honestly, it takes longer to take a good photo of a tool on a piece of paper than it does to create your first model. After using the web app for a few days, I love it. It takes all the guesswork out and automates the process to create something you need just for your specific item in seconds.

I just finished revamping my workshop, and increased storage was one of my key goals with the build. Once my workbenches were in place, I started printing out gridfinity bases so I could set up my topmost drawer with the objects I use constantly as I work.

Tools come in all sorts of weird sizes and shapes so I decided to give Tooltrace an ambitious first try. I have an impact bit set I use with my drill for all sorts of things, many times a day. So I took a photo against a piece of letter-sized paper on my entryway carpet, uploaded it to Tooltrace, then printed the model it produced.

It took a long time to print but what came out fit really well, with big enough gaps that it's easy to lift it out if I need (usually I just grab one bit, use it, and put it back in place).

So I continued, printing more bins for things I use daily. I’m about halfway done organizing my top drawer of my workbench and here’s what it looks like so far.

I'm really stoked with how this is turning out. I've been working in my shop for a few days with this and it's much easier to always have things in the exact place they need to be. Before, I would try to remember where I left something and now I always know where to get the tape measure in the tape measure spot.

Lessons learned

This was my first time trying to make a drawer hyper-organized and I have learned some things that I'd like to pass along to anyone else who wants to give this a try.

Prints take a good long while

I suspect these Tooltrace prints aren't efficient on the use of filaments, but each small box takes at least 3-4 hours and larger ones go up to 8 hours per print. It requires you to really think about the models before you print them, which is probably a good thing in the long run. You gotta make them count.

The paid version is actually better

Tooltrace advertises itself as a free tool, but has an optional $8/mo membership. That's oddly expensive for what it is if you kept a membership long-term, but for the short term it's a pretty good idea, so I opted to pay for one month after testing out the free version on a few objects.

Turns out, uploaded photos rendered much closer to reality and my prints fit better when I got onto their paid plan. Now I just need to set a reminder to turn it off when I'm done organizing the drawers.

Don’t forget to add finger holes to pick things up

After you get a generated model in Tooltrace, it lets you add objects to it and I would suggest if you have something long and straight to store inside a box, add two small "thumb holes" in the form of rounded/ovalized cut outs on each side of your item. This gives you space to lift it out of the box and only takes a few seconds to add to your generated print.

It works best for small things

This is pretty obvious, but most 3D printers max out around 10 inches wide/deep/tall so making a storage spot for a hammer isn't exactly easy (Tooltrace does offer to split prints into multiple prints you can glue together later). But remember that larger objects are probably not the best use of gridfinity space.

Don't make one thing for each thing, save space by fitting many small things together

Remember you can group 2-3 things on a single piece of paper to get one model print that fits them all in a tighter space. Printing a separate container for everything can be really wasteful. A boxcutter knife in its own box next to a pencil in its own box takes up too much space, so put your pencil next to your boxcutter and you'll find they probably fit perfectly together in half the space.

Having things you use constantly in the right place is transformative

I've tried to organize my tool chests in the past, and they always start out well intentioned, but as I'm working on a project, I will often leave a screwdriver on a table or my pencil on a shelf. That means I'm constantly looking for things I need that should be at my fingertips.

Setting up a spot where something will always be has made working in a shop much easier and faster to boot.

Tooltrace is really niche, but it's a great bit of software and I would urge anyone with a 3D printer to give it a whirl for your own workspace.

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.

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.