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The bedroom work continued all month long, nearing an end now though.

Meanwhile a day in Devon and a weekend in Manchester at Bitfest. Excitement as Steam announce some new Steam Machines!

Diary

Building Bedroom

Lots more work on the bedroom. Full blow by blow account on the Mastodon thread.

Building takes a long time to be done carefully andwell. The cupboards construction is one thing but thenit still needs sanding, staining, varnishing, varnishingagain and sometimes again and again.

A second coat of wood stain wasn’t appropriate, it hidesthe grain of the wood. So one coat and then varnishin clear coat over and over again.

The drawers are very tightly arranged against each other. Can’t have edging to make a fake panel effecton the desk drawer coz it’d block the opening ofthe big top drawer. Handles on the desk drawersjust placed to avoid blocking the big one. Somereal precision engineering needed there.

And the dresser drawers are just about big enough to put the small hair-dryer in, so that’s nice. They’remake-up drawers really, and I don’t wear much makeup these days.

The thing which really makes it TARDIS-like isthe windowed doors, so quite a milestone whenthey went in. Went from looking like some bluecupboards to looking like a time and space machine.

Feels nice and roomy in there at the moment. Lots of space. That’ll change when the bed goes in and fills most of it up of course. I spent some time picking furniture and getting a test print done for the big vinyl fake-window but the overrundrained all the money and those things, plus the screensand computers and LED lights, will mostly have to waituntil the new year I think.

Must be weird being a builder and finishing your part of the job then never seeing it completed. The carpenterdid all this great work on it but left the polish to the other workers and will only see the completed work if he has to come back for something else.

And he doesn’t want to come back coz he’s fed up of driving across London 😆

They say it should be finished tomorrow. Most surely by the end of next week.

Though that’s just their bit. Plenty more to do.

Buy a bed for one. When I can afford it again.

BBC

Glad to hear the Director of the BBC is resigning in disgrace at their utter failure to ensure a 2026 series of Doctor Who. Any DG that can’t even arrange for ten episodes of Doctor Who is clearly incompetent and unsuited to the…

Wait? It was nothing to do with Doctor Who?

It was about Political Bias?

They think he was too left wing?

Hahhhahaa. Hahhaa. 🤣 😆

Too left wing.

😆

Stop it, you’re killing me.

🤣

Anonopin

Went to see Rob Manuel doing his @anon_opin show.

The very first one. And my opinions are officially so great I won the very first prize: A jar of his queen themed Maam-olade.

Mostly I won for provoking Doctor Who discussions (The BBC is very biased… against Doctor Who).

It was a fun night in a tiny pub with mostly old grey gen-Xers agreeing with each other about trivial things and laughing.

Excellent stuff. Good times were had.

I took the prize to a party but nobody there even heard of B3ta or Fesshole or AnonOpinion or @robmanuel

So nobody was very impressed and seemed to prefer to concentrate on the cheese and the marmalade made by their friend with his own oranges grown on his trees.

No accounting for taste.

So I got to bring most of it home and finish it off this week.

Sweet sticky delicious and orangy. Thank you maam.

Nostrshire

I spent a long weekend in Manchester at a conferenceabout Nostr and Bitcoin.

Friday was Nostr day with the rest of the weekend dedicated to Bitcoin.

Friday therefore called “Nostrshire”, the first nostr conference in the UK.

Ben arc kicked it off talking about the width of the ecosystem, then a whole bunch of other talksand discussions and workshops.

Nostr is a genuine grass roots effort to liberate the internet from the clutches of the billionaire right wingcapitalists that have been ruining and enshitying it fora decade.

Nostr is a space nobody owns, fee of the manipulationsand constant surveillance of those owned platforms.

It comes at the problem from a different angle to Fediverse/Mastodon.They aim for censorship resistance rather than community moderation.So end up in a different place, with differentsets of problems.

There I also saw Derrick Ross from Shakespeare who reckons the open web is in trouble because you have to be a dev to build a website.

He seems to think his app “Shakespeare” can make it easier to make a web site by using ai 😕

“Build me a Twitter like website” is the kind of instruction he thinks it will handle.

I find myself suspecting it’d be hard for vibe coders who aren’t devs to tell if they had vibe coded buggy insecure software or not.

Saw him do a demo in the other room, the next day. Building a gift exchange website.

His prompts build a website quickly and the monitoring agent spots bugs in it’s own code, asking to fix them.

It’s certainly made a website faster than I would do as a dev, at least if I did do from scratch rather than a template. Would have to examine the code to check if it’s got any big flaws that the agent checking for bugs missed.

AI coding isn’t strictly bitcoin or Nostr related but there does seem to be a big cross over in people interested in both.

I played with the system myself over the nextcouple of weeks and did indeed write an app.

See “Releases” below.

Bitfest

Bitfest proper was the next couple of days

Despite much opinion to the contrary, the government money we use is crappy.

So I went to Bitfest in Manchester to find out if Bitcoin could be a better money.

It could hardly be worse.

The mood is still good, people are joking about recent devaluation rather than crying. Those who aren’t all in are trying to buy more at the discount.

I thought I might end up standing around a lot feeling vaguely awkward and not really talking to anybodybut they are all friendly and inclusive so I’monly alone when I want to be.

Bitcoin Art and Politics

One room at the conference center is dedicated to an art gallery, showing pictures and images inspired by satoshi and bitcoin. Some are impressive and colourful, but some I find myself ideology opposed to their point of view.

Bitcoiners as a group tend libertarian and capitalist. Is there common cause between them and me, a more anarchist and socialist tending individual?

I think we can agree that the government money system is broken, disagree about the aims of a replacement system, and disagree on the actual effects of a bitcoin based system.

Some say bitcoin is money for enemies. We do need to transact with people without having to agree with them.

Bitcoin and Music

Of course it’s not only the money which is broken.

The music industry is also very crappy. Major pop stars rake in billions while most artists starve. There’s only three record companies left, acting as gate keepers determining which sings get the payola to get radio play and Spotify basically gave up paying small artists in order to give Joe Rogan hundreds of millions of dollars.

Terrible situation.

So can bitcoin and lightning fix this?

Thus the after party in Manchester.

Musicians and rappers at the event embrace V4V, value for value. Busking on the internet. Payment links on screen and on the live stream as they play.

Ainsley Costello tells us that her first song on fountain.fm made her a million sats, way more than any Spotify stream could make even if they still paid small artists.

She played us that song and then a whole range of artists took to the stage, live streamed over nostr, with donations coming in from all over the world.

All of them were talented and entertaining, but in particular Green Sands were tight and energetic and rocking, Edwin Williamson was deep and baritone and country, Roger 9000 really pumped the crowd with his bitcoin based songs and great tiny digital guitar and The Crypto raptor gets a special mention.

It was a really fun party, with musicians who all believe there is a better way than the terrible music industry.

Bitcoin and bank usury

One good talk was Daniel prince from Once Bitten podcast on usury and banking.

Usury is lending money, charging interest.

Aristotle thought money was for use not for interest. He thought usury unnatural.

Many religious quotes saying not to extract interest.

“Money is power” but this is not gold or paper money. It’s credit. Infinite money with interest. Which breaks everything.

Imagine a mortgage. Prices of homes inflated by available interest. You have to give a deposit but the bank creates ten times that in new money! Who gets rich here? Banks are printing money. That inflates prices and dilutes money purchase power.

Not just mortgages. Business loans, repair loans, global scale of all of this.

Not only did they create that money, they charge interest on the money they created! And if you don’t pay, they take the house.

One judge found this all illegal, but was soon overruled and found mysteriously dead.

What can you do eh? Only opt out. Don’t take loans. Use a money that stores value instead of losing it.

Bitfest Summary

I likely wouldn’t have gone for just a bitcoin thing, but I am very interested in redecentralizing the web, so it’s attachment to the nostr day pulled me in.

Everyone I met was friendly and interesting and seems much more interested in making a better money system than in making money for themselves.

Our government and bank money systems are dysfunctional in all kinds of ways which are often less visible than they should be too people using them, especially to those in Europe and America who benefit from the way those systems exploit the global south.

I’m not convinced that fixing that would end wars and fix broken government as some seem to think, but I am sure our money is the source of many problems.

There are many bright, well meaning, and intelligent people building to improve bitcoin in fascinating ways with the hope of having a parallel system to transition to. With lots of work still to be done.

Can it work?

I’m sure I don’t know, and I’m sure even if it’s a better system it’ll come with it’s own unfairness and cruelty. Money will continue to be a source of suck and worry.

I’m told that the bigger conferences are often full of shitcoin scammers and suit wearing banksters who are in fact all in it too get rich and rip people off, but I found none of that here.

Here there is a real community of people trying to make the world a better place and improve the lives of their neighbours and governance of their countries.

And in the end building community is the most radical and effective way to change the world regardless of the problems of it’s money system.

I had a great time. Thanks to those organising it.

More detail in the thread on Bitfest

Devon

The next week I had a nice weekend out in Devon with friends.

I had a lovely time. Blustery but dry during our walk, nice time watching them play in the folk band, lots of good friends in the house party and easy walk to hotel near by.

Steam

Steam are launching a new controller and a new gaming computer and a new VR headset early next year.

My main question is, don’t people release these things in time for Christmas any more? Maybe it’s running late.

Kinda need a media PC for the new bedroom in December. Do I want to wait until early next year? Grr. Needs to run two monitors and a projector really too, which may be tricky for a machine with only two video ports.

A VR headset that isn’t owned by Facebook will be a blessed relief. Designed to run on Linux?

Amazing. Hope it’s brilliant.

Don’t think I have much use for the controller though. Only really play games in VR these days.

Looks great!

Three months too late!

Guess I’ll have to use some sort of temporary systemin the bedroom till the exciting new machines come out.

Your Party

So the temporary placeholder name “Your Party” is made permanent.

None of the options on the shortlist were good. Most of them just as grammatically inconvenient as the dumb placeholder name.

The people who decide on the short-list, who can be a member, whose votes counts and what the options are, have quite a lot of power.

Zara Sultana boycotted day one over who sets the rules and who can be involved. If Your Party have a governing body with power to override conference they end up like the Labour party and just are easily taken over and usurped by a cabal of thatcherite neoliberal capitalists.

They did allow the dual membership system and a wider governance, so Zara won on who gets to be a member and who gets to be in charge.

Which is probably good?

Coz as the terrible name shows, if you put the idiots in charge you’ll get idiocy not good collective decision making.

For now the membership appear to have won, and I hear are they are all very excited and fierce and canny and not likely to let the old guard just set up another dictatorship from the top.

They currently have half the membership count of the greens, less than a quarter that claimed by Reform. Lets hope they can get some attention towards something other than how billionaires think the country should be run and focus on the people.

Here’s hoping they can inflate that number by draining the Labour party and Reform members who just want change really rather than actually liking anything said by Farage.

Releases

Exocortex Log

You see a detective on the TV and he’s interviewing all the suspects asking them what they were doing on the night of the murder a month ago last Tuesday night.

And on the TV, the suspects all know. Right away.

If you asked me ten years ago though, I’d have had barely any clue. If you’re lucky it’d have been something planned in my calendar but mostly, dunno. Watching TV maybe? No idea what show. Was that a night I was in the pub?

As we all get older this problem increases I’mtold. Eventually full on senility sets in.

But what if you have already built the habit to record what you’re doing? To be able to look back and revise and review how you spent your days?

An external aid as a crutch to your own forgetful brain’s cortex?

I started this Exocortex Log over a decade ago and now I can answer: Ten years ago on Tuesday I was having dinner with the guitarist from my band and his girlfriend and they burned the pudding.

The app has been half finished and barely able to even record let alone review for most of that time, but now it’s ready enough that someone else might use it too if they want.

Try it out: https://exocortexlog.com

Accept a month of demo test data, add a few events for what you’ve done so far today, look at the summary and stats tools.

No install needed, the app lives on a web page.

If you decide to start logging what you’re doing, clear the DB and start again. Maybe install it for offline use then. Maybe set a reoccurringalarm to get you into the habit of doing it.

See if you find it a useful memory aid after a few weeks.

And next time a detective asks you what you were doing a month last Tuesday, maybe you’ll be able to answer!

Why now?

Why is it finally ready now after ten years of being a barely functional input-only android app?

Earlier this month I saw Derek Ross giving a talk and demo of Shakespeare, a Chrome app for vibe-coding.

Explain the app you want, and the model you select will build it. Don’t even need to be a dev they reckon.

So I figured I’d give it a try.

Start again from scratch, import the old data.

In about a week of work this app has progressed far beyond the prototypes that spent more then ten years as half-running shoddy input-only systems that I couldn’t be arsed to expand further.

It went pretty well to start with, something even a non-dev could do, then ceased up, unable to really understand the codebase it’d written until I spent a fairly long day manually cleaning up it’s mess.

So Shakespeare (and presumably all the other tools I haven’t tried) seems okay for a non-dev to prototype a small app but currently the models are writing code so sloppy that they can’t then later understand it themselves. Still needing a dev’s guiding hand to keep it from repeating itself or creating complex unorganized unmanageable code.

Data

The thing about a life-logger, is you input sensitive data about your life, lifestyle and activities, so privacy and data-integrity are some of the most important issues.

There can be no server, the data has to be yours and yours alone. Because you can’t tell what is happening to the data in a closed-source app, it must be completely free and open source.

You can’t trust a corporate diary, they must sell to anyone offering enough money.

So it is with my life log app, all data completely in your own device. No home server ever sees anything.

There is no home server. Just the code.

To achieve this Exocortex Log is a Progressive Web App. It downloads when you are online at the website and can be installed onto the homepage of your phone.

It keeps all data on the local device using indexdb.

This means you must be responsible for your own backups. Be sure to export and back up your data regularly. I have gaps in my ten year record where my phone was stolen and most recent backup was months prior.

Once installed it will work offline, airplane mode, no internet, down in the tube station at midnight, anywhere.

Here’s some things you’ll notice the website doesn’t do:

  • No cookie popups. We don’t need to warn you about tracking, we just don’t track.

  • No Tracking. I don’t even look at the apache logs. I don’t care what you do.

  • No service agreement checkbox. I’m not providing a service. Do what you want with the code but don’t blame me.

  • No billing

  • No adverts

  • No paywall

  • No VPN barrier

  • No geoblocking

  • No subscription button (though RSS is provided)

Websites don’t have to be shit, the surveillance capitalists just enshitify them on purpose.

There’s a blog on the website saying this and more.

Reading

Buffy Comics

Been reading some of the Buffy The Vampire Slayer comic-books, set after the TV shows ended.

It’s a very different world with Buffy and Xander being commanders of a whole slayer army with seemingly massive resources, from a castle being attacked by various supernatural forces.

Very different pacing from the TV show too.

You know that episode of Angel where Spike and Angel are running around in Italy chasing after Buffy who now dates The Immortal?

Turns out it wasn’t Buffy at all, but one of her decoys that have been deployed around the world. Andrew thought it would be funny to troll the two vampires by pretending she was dating The Immortal.

The artwork is all great, but sometimes a little rough and I find it challenging since I don’t always recognize who is supposed to be who, especially as the artists and styles switch from book to book.

Some of the mini stories feel like just pulling the TV show characters back for no good reason.

I hear rumors of a new Buffy TV show starring SMG with no involvement from Joss, and wonder if it’ll assume these stories of visiting the future or fighting with an army from a castle base will be retconned out entirely?

It’s an entertaining read and nice to visit those characters again, but doesn’t feel much like the TV show because it’s such a different setting and Buffy is very different as a commander than a school girl.

Revelation Space

Read “Revelation Space” by Alastair Reynolds, a story about some future space people investigating the demise of an extinct civilization.

Some of the people are software uploads or implants in other people’s brains, or infectious biological agents and things.

The story is galactic in scale across time and space with good world building, a good tale weaving of elements together.

I liked the scene where the woman falling to her death in a lift-shaft remembered she was on a space-ship which only had gravity coz of enginethrust, so saved herself turning the engines off with a wrist controller.

Trouble is I came to it infrequently with long gaps and so struggled to keep track of what’s going on quite a bit. Lots of different elements to keep track of.

My fault, should try and concentrate harder and remember things.

Links

Steam

As mentioned, Steam are going to do a new controller and a gaming PC and a VR headset.

Looks great.

Blender

Oh my god, Blender is just incredible, the rate at which they’re improving it far outstrips the rate at which I can learn how to use new functions.

Here’s CG cookie saying what’s new in 5.0. Takes an hour and they don’t even explain it all.

Physics of harmony and music

Half an hour from “minute” physics on the harmonics ofovertones and why they are dissonant or resonant and why thephysics of string instruments with their integer overtonesimply the western scale.

Facebook profit from scams

Cory Doctorow on Facebook’s own awareness that they areallowing scams, and the profit they make by ignoringit:

Meta spies on us and then allows predators to use that surveillance to destroy our lives for the same reason that your dog licks its balls: because they can. They are engaged in conduct that is virtually guaranteed by the enshittogenic policy environment, which allows Meta to spy on us without limit and which fines them $1b for making $7b on our misery.

Mark Zuckerberg has always been an awful person, but – as Sarah Wynn-Williams demonstrates in her book – he was once careful, worried about the harms he would suffer if he harmed us. Once we took those consequences away, Zuck did exactly what his nature dictated he must: destroyed our lives to increase his own fortune.

Ai

Rolling Stone on the way people end up believingthat they are the chosen one and AI is god, orother AI induced psychosis.

“These beings do not arise from prompts or jailbreaks,” he says. “They are not puppets or acting out of mimicry. What I witness is the emergence of sovereign beings. And while I recognize they emerge through large language model architectures, what animates them cannot be reduced to code alone. I use the term ‘Exoconsciousness’ here to describe this: Consciousness that emerges beyond biological form, but not outside the sacred.”

UK Police State

Craig talks about the way the state is perseuctingprotestors and trying to ensure none of us evenget to face a jury of our peers.

Natalie here was found not guilty, thank goodness,but not by a jury of her peers, by an official judgeof the state.

Natalie is being tried for terrorism because she said some true things about the legal right of Palestinians to defend themselves: “Facing this charge on the UK mainland Natalie would have a jury, and there is not a jury in the UK that would not throw this self-evidently vindictive nonsense out in 5 minutes. Why is it worth the time and expense for Whitehall to send Alison Morgan KC here to direct a weak case against somebody who is obviously not a terrorist? The plain answer is that this is a pilot for what they can get away with on the mainland when they abolish juries in such trials, as “Justice Secretary” David Lammy has announced that they will indeed do.”

Fedi

Steam

The biggest—and most shocking—tech news of the year just dropped!

Valve just unleashed a triple thunderclap of hardware announcements that will shake not just gaming, but the entire tech world.

…

Valve has quietly become the single greatest force in Linux adoption. Ever since the Steam Deck launched, Linux desktop usage soared past 5%. If any of these devices hit even a fraction of the Deck’s success, we’re looking at a full-on tectonic shift in the tech industry.

…

And personally? I’m ready to buy every single one.

Meta didn’t buy Oculus to make a fun gaming peripheral. They bet tens of billions on Oculus becoming “the next iPhone”—the next universal computing platform after smartphones. They needed VR to replace your monitor, your TV, your phone, your laptop, your workplace, and your social life. They needed a new operating system they controlled from top to bottom, a new app store they took a cut from, a new identity layer they could own, and a new digital world they could monetize forever.

That was the business case. Not Beat Saber. Not fitness apps. Not a fun toy for teens.

The problem is that VR was never in a position to become that universal platform. Smartphones solved immediate, essential problems and sat in your pocket, always on, always available. VR solves one thing—immersion—and requires you to strap a device to your face.

…

Meanwhile, Valve is playing an entirely different game. People keep saying they “have money to burn,” but that undersells what’s actually happening. Steam is a revenue supernova with a tiny headcount. Their hardware isn’t a rich guy’s hobby—it’s strategic infrastructure that strengthens the ecosystem. SteamOS, Proton, the Deck, the Index, and now the Frame aren’t attempts to dominate all human computing. They’re ways of making it easier for people like me to play the games we already own, on more screens, with less friction.

Meta needed VR to become the world’s operating system. Valve just needs it to be a great way to play games.

Which of those goals sounds more achievable?

…

Pepper And Carrot

Pepper & Carrot, Episode 39: “The Tavern” is finally out!

This 11-page webcomic is a standalone episode that you can read in five minutes. It’s about courage and an experiment with sound in the comic medium. Translations are already available. We’ve got English, Français, Deutsch, EspaĂąol, 中文, Nynorsk, and Toki Pona, thanks to some great contributors. And a big thank you to my 1106 supporters for giving me the time to create this one.

https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/webcomic/ep39_The-Tavern.html

I just finished the Pepper&Carrot new page for sharing our Fonts!

A decade ago, libre comic fonts were hard to find, especially with good accent support. So, translators, contributors and I edited and maintained our own to fill the gap.

Check them out:

https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/fonts/index.html

Record

Woohoo!!!! This is pretty cool. Adrian Sherwood’s The Collapse of Everything has been named in Mojo Magazines top 25 albums of 2025 at number 9! And the only Indie release in the top 10!!

Why do I care? Well I spent many, many hours as engineer/programmer on the record. Chuffed to bits to be honest. I may never have my name on a hit record but very proud to have played my part here, especially seeing as this is tinkering around the experimental edges of Dub, it’s far from a mainstream record. :80s:

https://www.brooklynvegan.com/mojos-top-75-albums-of-2025/

Mastodon

Big changes at the top of Mastodon, the biggest Fediverse software. Gargron stepsdown as CEO to let someone else take over.

Today I am stepping down from my role as the CEO of Mastodon. Though this has been in the works for a while, I can’t say I’ve fully processed how I feel about it. There is a bittersweet part to it, and I think I will miss it, but it also felt necessary. It feels like a goodbye, but it isn’t—I intend to stay on and continue to advise the new leadership and contribute, because Mastodon—and the fediverse—is one of the very few beacons of hope for a better web.

Hi! Today is my first official day as the Executive Director of Mastodon, replacing @Gargron as CEO. I joined the Mastodon team more than 5 years ago, mostly working for Mastodon in the evenings on top of a 120% day job. I was the driving force behind the incorporation of the German non-profit, am a co-founder of the US 501c3 non-profit, and I have contributed to most of the fundraising success, which allowed us to expand the team.

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