• Interesting Things #1 — The Adjacent Possible

    23 Apr 2021
    Interesting Things #1 — The Adjacent Possible

    Welcome to the very first edition of Interesting Things, a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, indie business, science, and adjacents.

    These are things I came across during my Internet wanderings. I find them interesting, and I hope you do too. Enjoy!

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  • Status update (2021-04-14)

    14 Apr 2021
    Sorry, I stopped blogging for a while. Astute readers will have noticed that I haven’t posted any original blog posts for a few weeks. I’ve been irregularly posting Reading Lists instead. Reason? I’m tinkering with setting up an email newsletter of curated links. I do a lot of reading every week and I …
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  • email-untracker: Get rid of tracking links and spy pixels (self-hosted)

    23 Mar 2021
    Following up on my previous post, I’d like to announce that email-untracker (or Untracker for short) is now available. You can now run Untracker (on your own self-hosted mail server) for yourself and your friends. Get rid of tracking links and pixels in email newsletters without compromising your own privacy. Or …
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  • Using a proportional font for markdown

    20 Mar 2021
    Two weeks ago, I switched to using a proportional font for editing markdown text. I’ve been using vscode’s inbuilt markdown previewer a lot. Continually staring at it’s proportionally spaced output probably triggered a flash of inspiration. I figured markdown in a more readable font would be a nicer …
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  • A tour of sponsorware

    16 Mar 2021

    Been reading into sponsorware to see how it could be used to fund open source. Here’s a bunch of links arranged in a semi-timeline.

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  • Untracker: Uncloak tracking links and remove spy pixels from email newsletters

    12 Mar 2021
    Previously A few weeks ago, I wrote Email Cleaner and started using it to clean tracking links and pixels from my email newsletters. It works well. I can hover over links (or long press for touch devices) and see the URL. I can click on them without being tracked. I can protect myself from phishing. When I announced …
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  • Twitter's Super Follows could be transformative

    9 Mar 2021
    Twitter's Super Follows could be transformative

    Twitter’s newly announced Super Follows feature could be transformative for the company. I don’t just mean ‘It is a good idea’. I mean that, in 5+ years time, Twitter could be a completely different company.

    Why? Because Super Follows aligns the incentives for all three parties into a virtuous …

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  • Notes on: The Web’s Missing Interoperability

    4 Mar 2021

    I was reading The Web’s Missing Interoperability from Stratechery (I’m an occasional reader) and, for some reason, it really resonated with me.

    I took some notes (and made comments) for my own future reference.

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  • Email Cleaner: Clean tracking links and pixels from email newsletters

    28 Feb 2021
    (UPDATE @2021-03-12: There is a follow-up post) I’m supposed to be blogging instead of doing “app startup” things but I got sidetracked and built another side project (again). I’ve been getting into email newsletters. Over the last month, I’ve gone from zero newsletters to eleven of them. …
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  • Positioning isn't marketing. It's strategy

    26 Feb 2021
    I was reading April Dunford’s book Obviously Awesome about product positioning and something struck me. I thought I was reading a marketing book. Somehow I ended up reading a business strategy book instead. (And a very good one too.) We engineers/developers/hackers/nerds tend to think of product positioning as …
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