{ "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1", "title": "The Art Of Not Asking Why", "icon": "https://avatars.micro.blog/avatars/2024/18/1315067.jpg", "home_page_url": "https://taonaw.com/", "feed_url": "https://taonaw.com/feed.json", "items": [ { "id": "http://jtr.micro.blog/2026/04/11/more-signs-of-spring-i.html", "content_html": "

More signs of spring πŸ“·

\n\"Auto-generated\n\"Auto-generated\n\"Auto-generated\n

I took a walk and listened to the birds for a moment. It’s always nice to get chances like this in Manhattan:

\n
\n

\"Auto-generated

\n", "date_published": "2026-04-11T12:06:50-04:00", "url": "https://taonaw.com/2026/04/11/more-signs-of-spring-i.html", "tags": ["Photos"] }, { "id": "http://jtr.micro.blog/2026/04/10/fighting-with-im-not-provided.html", "content_html": "

Fighting with bots. I’m not provided the option I need (work/enterprise-related shipment, and the only option on the website or on the phone is for home service.) The bot doesn’t route me to a human, no matter what I try. Some service.

\n", "date_published": "2026-04-10T12:26:05-04:00", "url": "https://taonaw.com/2026/04/10/fighting-with-im-not-provided.html" }, { "id": "http://jtr.micro.blog/2026/04/09/one-of-my-automatic-tasks.html", "content_html": "

One of my automatic tasks for my Mac is to delete my downloads folder every weekend. At the start, I was worried this would cause me to lose important files, but I have backups and it actually made me more purposeful with how I save them.

\n

What are some of yours?

\n", "date_published": "2026-04-09T07:26:04-04:00", "url": "https://taonaw.com/2026/04/09/one-of-my-automatic-tasks.html" }, { "id": "http://jtr.micro.blog/2026/04/07/so-i-fixed-my-blog.html", "title": "So I fixed my blog again", "content_html": "

I’ve mentioned that some pages of my blog haven’t been working. I’ve since fixed those pages and reinforced two pre-existing notions of mine: first, AI (LLMs specifically) can be a great tool if you use it to learn and enhance your existing skills; second, my blog writing is more important than I realized.

\n

What went wrong

\n

As you may know, if you visit my blog (though I realize most of you probably read this via RSS readers), I have several pages on my blog (which effectively make it a website, right? Are all blogs websites? πŸ€”). Some of those correspond to categories (such as my Emacs org-mode page or my movie reviews), while others are informative, like my about page and archive, which also include a search option for the site. You know, the basic blog-owner stuff.

\n

My website is hosted by Micro.blog, which utilizes Hugo to build its sites. I switched to Tiny Theme, which is made especially for Micro.blog and comes with a few extra features, two years ago. These features, called Microhooks, can further customize the theme if you’re willing to make a few technical adjustments.

\n

In my case, I use Microhooks on some of the pages. The archive page, which displays categories and all posts by day by default, was modified to include the search plugin and additional information I added before the default page starts. Then, for the Emacs org-mode category, there’s an introductory text with an image I created a while back, and then the rest of the post that fits into that category.

\n

About a week ago, those Microhooks stopped working. The pages I mentioned displayed the default theme, as if I never customized them with Microhooks.

\n

The fix

\n

I struggled for a couple of days trying to figure out what went wrong. I thought a recent update to the theme and the plugins broke something, but I didn’t know what. I looked into the Microhooks instructions, but as far as I could tell, everything was set up correctly. I have a test blog, and when I ran the same code on it, the issue with the archive page repeated, while the Emacs Org-mode page was fixed. I went back and forth a couple of times, but I couldn’t see anything that would cause the problem.

\n

Over the weekend, I had more time, so I took a deeper look into the theme. I am far from a Hugo expert (in fact, I one of the main reasons I oppted for Micro.blog was to stop working with on my static blog directly) but I understand the general idea of how things are built: there’s one main page which calls other parts, and these parts call other parts in turn, each one is defined in a separate HTML file. I scanned the different HTML files of the theme and found where the Microhooks I used were activated.

\n

For the archive and search page, there is layouts/_default/list.archivehtml.html, which includes the following lines:

\n
{{ if templates.Exists "partials/microhook-archive-lead.html" }}\n{{ partial "microhook-archive-lead.html" . }}\n{{ end }\n
\n

That partial (which is Hugo’s sort of “functions” or quick plug-ins for the theme), microhook-archive-lead.html, is the microhook HTML I created to include the search plugin and the intro to the archive and search page. This looked OK to me at the time, until I saw that another page, layouts/list.archivehtml.html, contained no reference to this Microhook. This looked odd to me: both pages have the same name (and thus the same function, I guessed). One is called default, and the default one is the one that was modified with my changes? That didn’t make sense.

\n

This is where I fired up Qwen3-Coder (through Kagi) to help me understand how these pages work in Hugo. I asked it which page Hugo uses first, and sure enough, it replied that layouts/_default/list.archivehtml.html page is the default, sometimes used as a fallback option when layouts/list.archivehtml.html is not present1. So, as it turned out, my files were flipped: the default file showed the changes, while the file meant for customizations showed the default. I copied the code condition above from the layouts/_default/list.archivehtml.html to layouts/list.archivehtml.html, and things started to work as they should.

\n

Why this happened, I have no idea. I made no changes to the pages. My only theory is that a recent update flipped the code in the files somehow for whatever reason.

\n

My other issue was a stupid user error, as most of these issues go. The Microhook layouts/partials/microhook-category-header.html is the one responsible for pointing out which category page should have a special introduction. What the LLM told me that I didn’t know (or maybe forgot) is that it does that by utilizing the page’s .title variable. This is where I made a mistake: I used the file’s name, using the URL, not the title of the page, which happened to be different. Since this was a conditional statement looking for a specific page title that wasn’t found, it was ignored. Once I changed the value in the HTML to reflect that page’s proper title, it was fixed. Of course, it was a damn dash I omitted by mistake.

\n

The fun of blogging

\n

While this was a technical issue, it affected my desire to blog. As long as my pages didn’t work correctly and I couldn’t fix them, I didn’t want to blog. It didn’t feel right, even though these issues were not critical, at least from the readers' point of view, but they were important to me. I enjoy my blog. I had to fix it. Once I did, that feeling reversed completely, and my desire returned in force. The post you’re reading now was itching to be written, and it’s only now, half an hour before midnight, that I have the time and some reserve energy to draft it. It feels good.

\n

Footnotes

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1: I can’t emphasize how useful AI has been in scanning Hugo (or other technical documentation in general) and explaining things to me in plain English. I could spend hours looking at Hugo’s documentation and indexes, rereading the same sentences over and over, and not understand what something does or how it works with something else. Even now, as I write this post and check for links, the AI links me to the relevant section in the documentation, which I would otherwise just glaze over. It’s like having a teacher holding a pencil to a word or a phrase in a huge textbook.

\n", "summary": "Spent days debugging my blog\u0026rsquo;s broken microhooks, only to find Hugo was using the \u0026ldquo;default\u0026rdquo; file instead of my custom one. Turns out, a flipped template and a missing dash in a title were the culprits. Shoutout to Qwen3-Coder for the assist. AI can be a great tutor. My blog matters more than I thought.", "date_published": "2026-04-07T09:06:07-04:00", "url": "https://taonaw.com/2026/04/07/so-i-fixed-my-blog.html" }, { "id": "http://jtr.micro.blog/2026/04/06/a-minecraft-movie.html", "title": "A Minecraft Movie, 2025 - β˜…β˜…Β½", "content_html": "

Solid fun, a nice plot for a movie based on a video game. Highly expected, nothing too special, but a somewhat confusing plot - the one that is based on the real world feels almost as fantastical as the Minecraft one.

\n", "date_published": "2026-04-06T07:47:50-04:00", "url": "https://taonaw.com/2026/04/06/a-minecraft-movie.html", "tags": ["Movies"] }, { "id": "http://jtr.micro.blog/2026/04/04/i-seem-to-have-fixed.html", "content_html": "

I seem to have fixed the issues on my blog. This required a deeper dive into my template and understanding how Hugo prioritizes pages. Qwen3 helped by answering my clarifying questions from the documentation and gave me a bit of confidence, which did the trick.

\n", "date_published": "2026-04-04T23:58:21-04:00", "url": "https://taonaw.com/2026/04/04/i-seem-to-have-fixed.html" }, { "id": "http://jtr.micro.blog/2026/04/01/some-of-the-pages-on.html", "content_html": "

Some of the pages on my site are not working properly. I’m trying to figure out the problem and get it sorted out, but so far it’s a lot of head scratching. I’m replicating the same structure to a new, similar theme, with a newer Hugo build, so we will see how that works out.

\n", "date_published": "2026-04-01T18:00:28-04:00", "url": "https://taonaw.com/2026/04/01/some-of-the-pages-on.html" }, { "id": "http://jtr.micro.blog/2026/03/31/mushroom-soup.html", "title": "Mushroom Soup 🍜", "content_html": "

This was my first attempt at making mushroom soup from scratch - well, with vegetable broth. All from vegetables I got from the farmer’s market (I usually go on weekends). Up until now, I only made Butternut squash soup, and these are pretty good, so I decided to expand a bit.

\n

To make it, I used:

\n\n

I wanted to create a creamy-like soup, and I thought the potatoes would work. They did, and it made a good thick soup.

\n

To prepare any soup, I usually work from the “hard” veggies that need more cooking toward the soft ones. In this case, the diced potatoes (big chunks, each potato cut three to four times) went in first with the garlic and onion, and let it stay on medium-high heat (not boiling) for about 10 minutes. It’s important to remember that for this kind of thick soup, the liquid (water+oil+broth) should not cover the vegetables completely. I’d say about up to 2/3 or so, maybe a little more. Less liquid = more thickness, naturally.

\n

The potatoes got soft fast. I added the chopped parsley and mushrooms next for another 5 minutes or so, adding salt and some black pepper - I wanted the most basic ingredients, since I wanted to taste the basic soup first, building on that and thinking what to add later.

\n

After everything was ready (give or take the 15-18 minute zone), I poured it into my blender in two batches (too much for one batch). The Vitamix makes quick work of everything in seconds, but I let it run for about 20 seconds, then poured the thick, yellowish-cream mixture into a bowl.

\n

The soup was hearty and good, very easy to make. For next time, I took a couple of notes:

\n\n", "summary": "A first attempt at homemade mushroom soup. This came out pretty well, and I have a couple of ideas for next time.", "date_published": "2026-03-31T18:05:40-04:00", "url": "https://taonaw.com/2026/03/31/mushroom-soup.html" }, { "id": "http://jtr.micro.blog/2026/03/31/tis-the-season-gesundheit.html", "content_html": "

‘Tis the season…

\n

Gesundheit!

\n\"A\n", "date_published": "2026-03-31T09:01:44-04:00", "url": "https://taonaw.com/2026/03/31/tis-the-season-gesundheit.html" }, { "id": "http://jtr.micro.blog/2026/03/29/seems-like-some-of-the.html", "content_html": "

Seems like some of the pages on my blog are now working as they should. There’s supposed to be an introduction for the Archive page and the Emacs page. I’m using Tiny Theme, and the HTML for those micro-hooks is in place, which makes me think something went wrong with the update I did about a month ago.

\n

I guess rebuilding the blog is the next step - which usually breaks the movies page… stand by….

\n", "date_published": "2026-03-29T09:23:00-04:00", "url": "https://taonaw.com/2026/03/29/seems-like-some-of-the.html" }, { "id": "http://jtr.micro.blog/2026/03/29/hank-green-on-why-ai.html", "content_html": "

Hank Green on why AI scares him:

\n

“People tend to prefer their choices to be taken away.”

\n

(The link below will take you directly to that part)

\n
\n

It’s an hour and a half long video with a long introduction and a video thrown in the middle, probably one of the longer rants by Hank Green, with an interview in the middle by Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown University.

\n

I’m still watching this conversation. It’s a lot to take in, but I think it keeps going back to the sentence I quoted above. It has been true for a while (forever?), on different platforms (not just AI), and one of the most apparent examples for me is dating apps. Tinder started the trend of “swiping people” left and right, emphasizing how people look and present, and not who they are.

\n

It’s easy to blame the app, but we who use them are not much better. Going through profiles on a dating app (even those that allow more detailed ones), the person usually sums up their being into a single sentence, with a “bumper sticker” style emojis presenting whatever ideology is popular this time around.

\n

The very concept of a dating app today is a joke when you think about how impossible it is to summarize who the person behind the profile is. Yet, this is what we prefer and what we use. We all have decision fatigue, and it only gets worse as we get bombarded by even more information, so we rely on technologies like AI to summarize that for us as we grow lazier and our capacity to retain information and make knowledge decisions based on that information is diminishing every day.

\n", "summary": "Hank Green explains why AI is so scary to him: \u0026ldquo;People tend to prefer their choices to be taken away.\u0026rdquo; I agree.", "date_published": "2026-03-29T09:03:24-04:00", "url": "https://taonaw.com/2026/03/29/hank-green-on-why-ai.html" }, { "id": "http://jtr.micro.blog/2026/03/28/i-find-myself-highlight-gems.html", "content_html": "\n

I find myself highlight gems like these every 2 pages or so. The Cunning Man

\n

Of Frued:

\n
\n

mankind, as always through history, has half-heard the call of the prophet, half-understood what he says, and vulgarized and cheapened whatever of his teaching may come its way.

\n
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-28T11:52:18-04:00", "url": "https://taonaw.com/2026/03/28/i-find-myself-highlight-gems.html" }, { "id": "http://jtr.micro.blog/2026/03/27/oddly-satisfying.html", "content_html": "\"Three\n

Oddly Satisfying. πŸ“·

\n", "date_published": "2026-03-27T06:59:06-04:00", "url": "https://taonaw.com/2026/03/27/oddly-satisfying.html", "tags": ["Photos"] }, { "id": "http://jtr.micro.blog/2026/03/26/yesterday-morning-i-imported-an.html", "content_html": "

Yesterday morning, I imported an old-blog post of mine, which discusses org-id and UUIDs in org-mode. It’s a bit of a deep dive into how org-mode works. I find that I don’t do those as much anymore - probably because I mostly use Emacs “as is” with a few packages I use day to day, and my workflow has been pretty much the same (capture templates not included) for the last two years or so.

\n", "date_published": "2026-03-26T07:22:10-04:00", "url": "https://taonaw.com/2026/03/26/yesterday-morning-i-imported-an.html", "tags": ["Emacs org-mode"] }, { "id": "http://jtr.micro.blog/2026/03/26/i-was-a-paid-subscriber.html", "content_html": "

I was a paid subscriber to 404 media, but I decided to let my subscription run out this year around. They started to feel too one sided and tend to focus only on AI. Still excellent reporting though, for those things.

\n", "date_published": "2026-03-26T06:40:28-04:00", "url": "https://taonaw.com/2026/03/26/i-was-a-paid-subscriber.html" }, { "id": "http://jtr.micro.blog/2026/03/23/i-found-a-post-on.html", "content_html": "

I found a post on my old blog that I wanted to bring over, but I ran out of time today. I could copy it as is, but I want to read it again and probably update it.

\n

It was a jolt to get back to work today. Feels like my job is to poke different people to do different things, and they poke others. if you have one or two projects like that, that’s one thing. If your entire agenda revolves around email chains like this, nothing gets done.

\n

At least I managed to exercise today, after a nap. Made some tofu and beans after. Nothing special, but nutritious and filling. Tomorrow is an office day.

\n", "date_published": "2026-03-23T20:59:43-04:00", "url": "https://taonaw.com/2026/03/23/i-found-a-post-on.html" }, { "id": "http://jtr.micro.blog/2026/03/22/using-ai-to-edit-and.html", "title": "Using AI to edit and polish posts", "content_html": "

I use Grammarly to correct typos, grammar mistakes, and sometimes some style issues. I’ve been using Grammarly for years, as I have a paid account through work.

\n

Since Grammarly doesn’t work on Zen on my Linux desktop for some reason (it refuses to sign into my account, and I suspect it’s my VPN I have there, which I’m not going to turn off), I was looking for a solution. There is the pretty good LanguageTool, but I got curious about using AI to do more than just a quick grammar check.

\n

With folks around me using AI for creating more sophisticated tools, especially after reviewing Doctorow’s usage of AI and his viewpoint on using such tools, I thought of using it to help me with some of the editing itself. Since I use Kagi, I could utilize its custom assistant feature, which allows me to choose an LLM from an available list and then build and save a specific prompt to use each time I want to work on a post.

\n

There’s a lot that goes into long-form1 blog posts. I believe I went into that in detail before, but here is my process again, especially since I started to be more “hands on” in different social media platforms:

\n
    \n
  1. Write the draft in Emacs org-mode
    2. \n
  2. Export to markdown inside Emacs, copy-paste into the Micro.blog macOS app
    3. \n
  3. Correct grammar and style in Grammarly inside the Micro.blog app
    4. \n
  4. Select a category, add a summary, and decide which platforms I’m going to cross-post the post to automatically (these are usually Mastodon and Tumblr, which allow me to edit posts; Blue Sky doesn’t allow that, which means I need to create another post there manually)
    5. \n
  5. Go into the different social media platforms and polish those up (character limit issue, adding hashtags, etc.)
    6. \n
\n

I was blown away by how well this worked from the get-go.

\n

Here’s what I’m asking Kimi, the AI model I chose for that task, to do

\n
    \n
  1. \n

    Explain who I am (the author of this blog, what pronouns to use, how to call me)

    \n
    2. \n
  2. \n

    Scan this blog, and look for posts that “greatly overlap” the draft I just submitted. Kimi has been smart enough so far to figure out when I’m basically rambling about something I already did, or if it’s close but I have something new to add (or if it’s new content altogether)

    \n
    3. \n
  3. \n

    If it finds an identical post, it stops and asks me if I want to proceed anyway.

    \n
    4. \n
  4. \n

    If I say I want to continue, it starts looking for spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. It corrects me automatically, but in a separate section under the draft, it tells me what it corrected. This is useful because it’s not always correct, and I want to make sure it doesn’t kill my awesome grumpy style.

    \n
    5. \n
  5. \n

    It goes over the links of my post to check if any of them are problematic. I was delighted to see it caught a mistake where I pointed two different links to the same URL, a simple copy-paste error, and brought it to my attention.

    \n
    6. \n
  6. \n

    It recommends terms I should expand on, while offering references. I asked it to prioritize official links and Wikipedia links, and it works well. Additionally, it will scan this blog and let me know if any of my other posts already explain the terms in my current draft, summarize them, and provide links to those posts.

    \n
    7. \n
  7. \n

    Finally, it gives me a list of hashtags that it thinks I should use for Mastodon, Blue Sky, and Tumblr. This part is the weakest, as these trends change frequently and don’t always align with what my post is about, but it’s a good starting point. I edit those manually as needed.

    \n
    8. \n
\n

The key to using AI, in my opinion, is to always see what it finds and inspect its reasoning if something feels off. Because I’m using a reasoning model, I can see what it was “thinking” and where something went wrong; this is how I’ve been able to polish it over the last few days.

\n

I’d love it if I could get Kimi to also scan my old blog at https://master--taonaw-blog.netlify.app, but netlify.app isn’t indexed by AI bots or Google (which Kagi is built on mostly), so it doesn’t work. I could probably work around this if I upload a text of my old blog or post it somewhere else, if I get to it.

\n

Here’s a glimpse at how it looks like when I let it work through this very post:

\n

\n

Footnotes

\n

1: In general, I split my blog posts into quick “bursts,” sort of “tweets” or “toots” which are quick and easy, and then there are the longer posts which take more time. These tend to get edited more deeply, as I like to use different sources and include visual aids, among other things. Those longer posts are the kind of posts I’m discussing here.

\n", "summary": "Tired of Grammarly ghosting me on Linux and inspired by Doctorow, I hired an AI editor (Kimi via Kagi). It edits my posts, checks for repeat rants, fixes links, and suggests hashtags. Here’s what it looks like.", "date_published": "2026-03-22T13:47:54-04:00", "url": "https://taonaw.com/2026/03/22/using-ai-to-edit-and.html" }, { "id": "http://jtr.micro.blog/2026/03/20/a-good-day-to-have.html", "title": "A good day to have a blog", "content_html": "

Since waking up early in the morning (sleep? What sleep?) I’ve been active around my blog and enjoyed dedicating time to this personal work that doesn’t get much attention during my day-to-day.

\n

Here are a few things I got into:

\n\n

Then, thinking about all the stuff I’ve done around my blog today, I thought about expanding my “blog check list”, adding the few items I’ve learn. It is now divided into maintenance and inspiration parts:

\n
    * Blog Stuff to do\n    \n    ** Maintenance \n    \n    - [ ] check taonaw email\n    - [ ] tinylytics:\n      - [ ] most popular posts in the last month (3 places)\n      - [ ] Insights can be interesting\n    - [ ] new webmentions (under *Account* on the Micro.blog site)?\n    - [ ] "On this day" if exists:\n      - [ ] check for typos\n      - [ ] check for bad links/broken images/missing emojis\n    - [ ] check plugins (updates?)\n    - [ ] delete used bookmarks (Micro.blog) \n    - [ ] photo page (add πŸ“· to posts)\n    \n    ** Inspiration \n    \n    - [ ] Check old blog for posts to import\n    - [ ] Journal\n    - [ ] Bookmarks (in Micro.blog)\n    - [ ] RSS feeds!\n    - [ ] Kagi small web (in browser) for sites\n    - [ ] Take a random picture\n

I feel like a very efficient blogger today πŸ˜„

\n", "summary": "Since waking up early in the morning (sleep? What sleep?) I\u0026rsquo;ve been active around my blog and enjoyed dedicating time to this personal work that doesn\u0026rsquo;t get much attention during my day-to-day.\nHere are a few things I got into:", "date_published": "2026-03-20T13:45:13-04:00", "url": "https://taonaw.com/2026/03/20/a-good-day-to-have.html", "tags": ["Photos"] }, { "id": "http://jtr.micro.blog/2026/03/20/about-stable-products.html", "title": "About Stable Products", "content_html": "

Pete doesn’t think companies can make Stable products that just work. I mostly agree with him, but not fully.

\n
\n

The problem is that, no matter how much you and I say we would want that sort of thing, there is no incentive for companies to actually do it. Any CEO who suggested doing this sort of thing would be immediately sacked by their board and replaced with someone committed to an ever-expanding user base and perpetually growing recurring revenue, because that is what the investors want.

\n
\n

Very much agree here. Any company that has investors would “move fast and break things”, as Zuckerberg’s saying goes. And if they can’t come up with new “innovations,” they’d copy them. And if they can’t copy them, they’d buy them or the company1.

\n

I’ve been thinking about this endless cycle recently, when I read about Bluesky and their association with crypto-related investments2. If we go that route, it’s pretty much how Enshittification works. Doctorow coined the term, but not the concept, which I think is as old as society and money.

\n

But then there’s this:

\n
\n

I am unconvinced that most of the mass public actually would want this sort of thing and even if they did, we would have to contend with a commercial and financial economy that has figured out a way to keep profits rolling in utterly disconnected from what buyers of their goods and services actually want.

\n
\n

I think this is too US-centric and tech-centric. My counterargument? Bread πŸ₯–.

\n

People love the concept of good old-fashioned bread that comes from bakeries that have been doing the same thing for generations, along with some pastries πŸ₯ and good coffee β˜•οΈ or tea.

\n

The emojis I used above to emphasize my point? Yeah, those will keep changing, along with the tech companies that keep rolling out their own versions.

\n

Even traditional bakeries adjust and move with what the customers want; that’s true. What was only bread then would be bread and cake tomorrow, and after that they would offer coffee too, etc. But I think the old-fashioned bread would stay.

\n

The US economy is built against this, more or less, with big capital coming from the stock market and investors that always want more more more. Even if a business is profitable and has shown stable growth for decades, they’d still want more. This is human nature on steroids under what we know as capitalism. But travel in Europe, in small villages (or even in the US in small towns that want nothing to do with the hustle of opening a chain), and you’d find these gems.

\n

Stable products that just work could just work, if they weren’t about money and profit - but most of the products we see around us are. You could make a living and stick to something that pays the bills, or even allows you to enjoy your money and save it, without selling out. There are plenty of examples. But then it’s about passion, not about money.

\n

Footnotes

\n

1 : This brings to mind how InvokeAI is now owned by Adobe, something else I was checking on recently (for now, it seems the free product is still around and kicking, but I doubt it will remain this way). There are plenty of such examples.

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2 : I’m not sure what this is about. Most of what I see is the fallout in Mastodon. As far as I can tell this is part B or some funding strategy that started with part A, which was pretty much common knowledge back then too, so people being upset now is more of the “well, duh” to me.

\n", "summary": "I wanted to write a comment to Pete about his Stable Products post, but it turned into a whole rant, then a post with footnotes. Stable products can and do exist, but the US economy is not meant to support those (I told you it’s a rant).", "date_published": "2026-03-20T08:28:45-04:00", "url": "https://taonaw.com/2026/03/20/about-stable-products.html" }, { "id": "http://jtr.micro.blog/2026/03/20/kagki-just-included-a-screenshot.html", "content_html": "

Kagki just included a screenshot of my blog in their Kagi Small Web news! 🀯

\n", "date_published": "2026-03-20T08:01:31-04:00", "url": "https://taonaw.com/2026/03/20/kagki-just-included-a-screenshot.html" }, { "id": "http://jtr.micro.blog/2026/03/18/this-is-a-better-video.html", "content_html": "

This is a better video than I expected.\nThe main idea is nothing new, but the video games he mentions are perfect examples: I’m also looking for my next game after Hades 2, and I think thanks for this video, I found it. It’s about cats, how can you go wrong?

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\n", "date_published": "2026-03-18T23:02:32-04:00", "url": "https://taonaw.com/2026/03/18/this-is-a-better-video.html", "tags": ["Games"] }, { "id": "http://jtr.micro.blog/2026/03/18/staycation-and-im-still-connected.html", "content_html": "

Staycation. And I’m still connected to my work computer, organizing my tasks and projects, because they are out of control and having a vacation means I can finally organize them…

\n", "date_published": "2026-03-18T08:28:15-04:00", "url": "https://taonaw.com/2026/03/18/staycation-and-im-still-connected.html" }, { "id": "http://jtr.micro.blog/2026/03/14/we-were-sitting-at-their.html", "content_html": "\"A\n

We were sitting at their bar, but we also had a mocha and a cappuccino toward the end. Something about the flag and the security camera above it makes things feel relevant and eerie. πŸ“·

\n", "date_published": "2026-03-14T15:38:39-04:00", "url": "https://taonaw.com/2026/03/14/we-were-sitting-at-their.html", "tags": ["Photos"] }, { "id": "http://jtr.micro.blog/2026/03/13/diablo-iv.html", "title": "Diablo IV (2023) - β˜…", "content_html": "\"A\n

Nope. Nah ah. I tried this game twice, and it failed twice.\nThe first time I didn’t enjoy it. It was too much clicking with little to show for it. No strategy, no method to the madness. I looked for light entertainment, and I thought I found it in this game, just to put it aside after an hour or so of playing.

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The second time, about a week ago, I decided ot dust it off and try again.\nIt was the same disappointing lack of wits, only topped with annoying additional in-game purchase requests for all kinds of nonsense, and a complete lack of any challenge. At all. None.

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As I was watching the second boss in the game getting destroyed by an army of skeletons that I’m not even sure why I was able to resurrect so easily, looking at messages on my phone, I got pissed. A game should be interactive. What I saw in front of me was a flashy animation that didn’t need me to move a finger. No challenge. No brains. No fun.

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At least I can thank Diablo for getting me back into reviewing games just to express my frustration.

\n", "date_published": "2026-03-13T23:31:20-04:00", "url": "https://taonaw.com/2026/03/13/diablo-iv.html", "tags": ["Games"] }, { "id": "http://jtr.micro.blog/2026/03/13/a-couple-of-days-ago.html", "content_html": "

A couple of days ago I wrote about my morning checklist, which is a list of reminders and guide of what to do in order. There are a couple of advantages I’m learning to really appreciate about it:

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  1. It keeps me in line by showing me what else I need to do
    2. \n
  2. When I finish it, I feel my job is slightly less of a chaos than it really is. This is mostly a mental perk, but it helps.
    3. \n
  3. It nudges me toward writing a journal entry, which in turn allows some creative thoughts out, and those are precious.
    4. \n
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Point three above is what got me thinking I should also have a midday list.

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I try to break my day into two parts and take a break around 15:00. This break usually includes a nap and some exercise before I tackle my other bigger, more time-consuming projects. Of course, meetings drag on, urgent matters need to be attended to, and the river of emails never stops.

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A checklist to help me shift gears would be helpful. In a way, it would be like saving a game before moving on to the next level; it would serve as a soft reset, letting me relax enough to take that nap and exercise, which I need to stay productive and healthy.

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I wonder if anyone else uses these sorts of checklists, even if they are only in their heads.

\n", "date_published": "2026-03-13T08:41:39-04:00", "url": "https://taonaw.com/2026/03/13/a-couple-of-days-ago.html" } ] }