Interesting Project: I Built a writerdeck

A writerdeck is one of those ideas that sounds almost too simple. Take a computer. Strip away almost everything that normally happens on a computer. Keep the tools you need to write. And then use it for exactly that: writing. No browser. No email. No social media. Preferably no notifications. Maybe not even a graphical desktop.

That is roughly the idea behind writerdeck.org (https://www.writerdeck.org/), a site dedicated to devices and setups designed specifically for writing. Some are commercial products. Others are built around Raspberry Pis, old laptops or custom keyboards and displays. Quite a few are wonderfully homemade. What they all have in common is that they try to create a computer that is primarily a writing machine.

Why build a writerdeck?

Most computers are general-purpose machines. That is obviously useful. The same laptop can be used for writing, browsing, email, video calls, research, watching videos, messaging and hundreds of other things. But that is also exactly what can make writing difficult. While working on an article, there is always something else available. Another website. Another message. Another email. Another notification. A writerdeck changes that. Instead of constantly asking yourself not to be distracted, you simply remove many of the distractions.

There is also another reason why I like the idea. It is fun to build one.

Starting with Debian

I came across this very useful article by Veronica Explained (https://veronicaexplains.net/my-first-writerdeck/) about building a writerDeck using Debian and Neovim. Her setup gave me a good starting point.

So I downloaded the latest Debian installer and installed it on an older HP EliteBook I had lying around. Debian’s installation process is very straightforward, and Veronica’s article provides some useful additional guidance if you’ve never installed a bare-bones Linux system before.

After installation and rebooting, you end up with something that feels wonderfully different from a normal computer. All you see is a terminal prompt. That is basically it. No desktop environment. No icons. No dock. No notifications. Just a prompt waiting for you. There is something quite satisfying about that.

Neovim

I want to write, so I need a text editor. My first editor was Neovim (https://neovim.io/). Installing it is easy. Learning to use it takes a bit more time. Well … a lot more time. Neovim works differently from editors such as Sublime Text, Notepad or TextEdit. It uses different modes, and some of its commands initially look rather cryptic. :w, for example, saves a file. At the same time, other commands are surprisingly readable (you guess what :saveas does).

Once you start understanding how Neovim works, though, it becomes clear why so many people like it. It is fast, powerful and very well suited to a keyboard-driven setup. There is definitely a learning curve. But that is not necessarily a disadvantage. For me, learning how Neovim works was part of the fun of building the writerdeck in the first place. I wasn’t only building a writing machine. I was learning a different way of interacting with a computer.

There are easier editors

You don’t have to use Neovim. If you like the idea of a terminal-based writerdeck but don’t want to spend quite as much time learning your editor, Micro (https://github.com/micro-editor/micro) is an interesting alternative. Micro will probably feel much more familiar to people coming from conventional text editors. It supports standard shortcuts such as Ctrl-S, Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V, and even supports mouse input.

Nano is another option and is often already available on Linux installations. It is simpler and more limited, but for writing plain text that may be all you need. You could also try Emacs (https://emacsdocs.org/docs/emacs/The-Emacs-Editor). Or Joe (https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io/), which has something of a WordStar feel. Yes, WordStar. Some people reading this may even remember it.

The important thing is that there is no single correct editor for a writerdeck. The whole point is to create something that works for you.

Getting your writing off the machine

Once I had the writerdeck working, another interesting question appeared: How do I get my text off it?

My first solution was a good old memory card. Insert it into a normal desktop computer and something usually pops up automatically. On a bare Debian/Linux system, nothing happens. You have to mount it yourself. That sounds more complicated than it actually is. It does mean using a few Linux commands that many people may never have encountered before, but after doing it a few times the logic quickly becomes clear.

The same applies to transferring files over a network. Yes, you need either a Wi-Fi or wired network connection. You can make sure one is configured during the Debian installation, or set it up afterwards using a tool such as nmtui. SSH can be used to move individual files or complete directories from your writedeck to another Linux system or a Macs. If you want to work with Windows computers, Samba is another option. You can even permanently mount a network drive and make it part of your normal directory structure.

A little help from AI

Again, none of this is particularly difficult. It is simply a little different from what most desktop users are used to. And that is exactly why I enjoyed it. You start discovering how things actually work underneath the graphical interface we normally take for granted.

There is a slightly amusing part to all this. Your writerdeck itself may not have AI. But another machine certainly can. If you don’t know how to mount a drive, use SSH or connect to a network share, an AI tool such as Claude or Mistral can explain the steps very quickly. That makes experimenting with this kind of setup much easier than it would have been a few years ago. The writerdeck remains simple. But learning how to build and configure it has become much easier.

Tiny text on modern screens

One small thing surprised me. Modern laptops (even my older Elitebook) have relatively high-resolution displays. That looks great in a graphical desktop environment. On a bare Linux console, however, the default text can suddenly look very small. Fortunately, that is easy to fix. With tools such as console-setup, you can change the console font and, more importantly, the font size. It is a small adjustment, but an important one if you plan to spend a lot of time writing.

After that, my basic writerdeck was essentially finished: Debian plus Neovim plus a keyboard plus a screen. Very little else. And it worked as intended: no distractions, just writing.

The limitations are part of the idea

There are, of course, things a writerdeck cannot do. That is not really a surprise. It is largely the point. If you don’t have a browser, you cannot quickly check a website while writing. If the machine is offline, you cannot search for a number, check a report or look up a quote. You also cannot use cloud-based AI tools for proofreading, rewriting or research.

For some writers, those limitations will be inconvenient. For others, they are exactly what makes the writerdeck useful. Because they create a very clear separation between writing and everything else. If you need research, you use another machine. If you need to check something online, you do that elsewhere. Then you return to the writerdeck and continue writing. That creates a very different working rhythm.

You can also compromise

A writerdeck does not have to be completely disconnected. You could install Syncthing (https://syncthing.net/) and automatically synchronise your writing with another computer. You could use a network share. You could connect the machine to the network only when you need to transfer files.

There are plenty of possibilities. You can decide for yourself where you want to draw the line. That flexibility is one of the things I like about the concept.

Or build a graphical writerdeck

There is also nothing stopping you from taking a completely different approach. Install Debian with GNOME, KDE, Cinnamon or XFCE. Install LibreOffice. Then switch Wi-Fi off. You still have a perfectly capable computer, but without the constant stream of online distractions. When you need to do some research, switch Wi-Fi back on. Find what you need. Then switch it off again.

That may sound less pure than running a bare Debian console, but purity is hardly the point. The point is focus. And if LibreOffice on a disconnected laptop gives you that focus, then that is a perfectly good writerdeck.

What exactly causes the distraction?

Building my writerdeck also made me think more carefully about what actually distracts me when I write. It isn’t necessarily the internet itself. Often it is notifications. An email arriving is not much of a problem if I don’t know it arrived. The same applies to Signal or WhatsApp.

The real interruption is the popup appearing in the corner of the screen while I’m halfway through a paragraph. Websites do the same thing. Calendars do it. Apps do it. Modern computers are very good at constantly asking for our attention. A writerdeck solves that problem in a very direct way. Those things simply aren’t there.

My virtual writerdeck

Interestingly, my experiment also changed the way I use my normal work laptop. That machine is obviously connected to the internet. But I now keep notifications switched off.

I also use several desktops, or workspaces. One is my normal working environment. It has email, browser windows and all the usual tools. Another workspace contains almost nothing. Just Sublime Text (https://www.sublimetext.com/). When I switch to that workspace, it feels different. The browser still exists, but somewhere else. Email still exists. The internet is still connected. But none of it is directly in front of me.

That separate environment (it is actually workspace #4 on my laptop) has effectively become a kind of virtual writerdeck. And it works surprisingly well. I can move between two very different environments on the same physical laptop. One is connected and full of tools. The other is deliberately simple and focused almost entirely on writing. For now, that combination works extremely well for me.

I am still glad I built the real one

That does not make the physical writerdeck pointless. Quite the opposite. I am very glad I built it. It works. It gives me a very focused writing environment.

And perhaps even more importantly, I learned a lot while building it. I learned more about Debian. I learned how terminal-only systems behave. I learned more about mounting drives, networking and moving files between machines. I learned enough Neovim to understand why people enjoy using it. And I started thinking much more carefully about what kind of working environment actually helps me write. That alone made the experiment valuable.

There is no single writerdeck

The more I think about writerdecks, the more I like the fact that there is no one correct implementation. Maybe yours is Debian and Neovim. Maybe it is Debian and Micro. Maybe it is an old ThinkPad running LibreOffice with Wi-Fi switched off. If you have a really old 486 desktop machine lying around somewhere, why not build a writerdeck based on FreeDOS (an open-source version of MS-DOS, https://freedos.org/) and a text editor? Or maybe it is a Raspberry Pi attached to a mechanical keyboard. It could even be a dedicated commercial device. All of those approaches can work. The interesting part is figuring out which one works for you.

As usual, my experiment is n=1 research. My setup works for me. Yours may be completely different. And that is exactly what I like about this kind of thing. I see experimenting with apps, operating systems, hardware and workflows as a hobby in itself. You can keep changing your working environment until it fits the way you work. And when your requirements change? You simply change it again.

The Exit Door Still Works

Something interesting seems to be happening. Not something huge. Not a movement, as far as I can tell. There are no conferences about it, probably no consultants writing whitepapers about it, and I haven’t seen anyone invent a clever acronym for it yet. But here and there I am beginning to notice people who are simply saying: enough.

They are leaving social media. Or they stop using AI. Some replace their smartphone with something considerably less smart. Others dramatically reduce the amount of time they spend online. And occasionally someone seems to disappear from the online world almost completely.

I find this interesting. Not because I am planning to follow them. I like technology far too much. I like tinkering with computers, the internet, websites, strange protocols, Linux, AI, small apps, obscure tools and all the other digital stuff I keep writing about here. I also happen to think smartphones are incredibly useful devices, even if we have probably allowed them to occupy a somewhat ridiculous amount of our lives. And AI? I use it. Quite a lot, actually. I am interested in what it can do, where it goes wrong and what it might turn into.

So this isn’t going to be one of those I deleted everything and suddenly heard the birds singing again posts. Still, I admire people who make a different choice.

There is something wonderfully stubborn about it

What makes these decisions particularly interesting is that the people making them are often not in a position where technology is irrelevant to their lives. Quite the opposite actually. Some are developers, consultants, designers and writers. And almost always freelancers. People whose professional lives have been closely connected to the internet for years. Sometimes their online presence isn’t merely something they do after work. It is (or was) part of how they find work.

Deleting a social media account is easy enough when it is mainly where you post holiday photographs and argue about football. It becomes a rather different decision when that same network is where potential customers know you from.

Stopping with AI is also one thing if you rarely use a computer professionally. It is another when you work in software development and seemingly every company on the planet is currently trying to work out how much AI it can squeeze into its products and processes.

Choosing not to participate may therefore have a price.

Or perhaps not. Maybe these people will discover that very little changes. Perhaps customers will continue to find them – via email or by calling them. Maybe their work becomes better because they have fewer distractions. Perhaps being the developer who doesn’t use AI will eventually become an interesting professional position in itself.

But you don’t know that beforehand. And that is exactly why I think it is rather brave.

We are usually very good at adding things

Technology has a peculiar direction. We always add stuff. We get email, and keep email. Then we get instant messaging. Then social media. Then Slack and Teams. Then smartphones so all of those things can follow us into the supermarket. Then smartwatches so we don’t even have to take the smartphone out of our pocket. And now AI is being added to practically everything as well.

What we are much less good at is saying: actually, I don’t want this anymore. Or perhaps even more radically: I know this could be useful, but I still don’t want it. That is an interesting distinction.

You don’t have to believe that smartphones are evil to decide you don’t want one. You don’t have to believe AI will destroy civilisation to decide that you prefer to write code, text or anything else without it. And you don’t have to believe social media is fundamentally broken to decide that you would rather spend your time somewhere else. Technology doesn’t always have to be rejected because it failed. Sometimes you can reject it simply because you don’t like what it does to your life.

The financial part intrigues me

There is another aspect of these stories that I find particularly interesting: how do you make it work financially? That question is probably especially obvious to me because I see quite a few of these choices being made by people who work independently or whose professional reputation is closely tied to their online presence.

If you are employed by a company with a comfortable salary and decide to delete LinkedIn, that is one thing. If you are a freelancer whose next assignment might come from someone who has been reading your posts for three years, it is something else entirely.

The same applies to AI. Imagine being an independent software developer today and deliberately deciding not to use the technology that clients are constantly hearing will make developers dramatically more productive. Maybe you can explain why. Maybe your clients agree. But it is still a bet.

I like the fact that some people are apparently willing to make that bet. Not because I necessarily think they are right. But because they have thought about the role technology plays in their lives and concluded that not using it is an available option. We tend to forget that.

When Europe Starts Backing Up America’s Climate Data

There is something both reassuring and deeply depressing about scientists building an ark for data (see here: https://e360.yale.edu/features/germany-us-climate-data). That is more or less what is happening in Germany at the moment. Apparently the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) in Hamburg is preparing additional storage capacity for copies of important climate data from the United States. The project even has an appropriate name: CMIP7-ark. CMIP is a project of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP).

The idea is relatively simple. Climate research produces enormous amounts of data, much of which is stored at research institutions and government organizations. Scientists around the world depend on that information. Historical measurements, climate simulations and long-running datasets are especially valuable because you cannot simply recreate decades of observations if they disappear.

Normally, you would probably assume that data stored by major American scientific institutions is reasonably safe. But that assumption is apparently no longer considered sufficient.

According to an interesting article in Yale Environment 360, German researchers and research organizations are increasingly concerned about the long-term availability of American climate data. The German Research Foundation has therefore established a program to create safe copies of publicly available U.S. scientific datasets. The program has a budget of $35 million.

In Hamburg alone, DKRZ plans to add around five petabytes of storage capacity for backups of climate simulations. For comparison: DKRZ already stores around 254 petabytes of data. It looks like CMIP7-ark is not the only project. Other initiatives with names such as SHIELD and SEND — Secure Endangered Earth Data — apparently are doing similar things. The objective is essentially to make sure that important scientific information remains available, regardless of what happens to the original repositories.

There is actually a broader lesson here that goes well beyond climate science. We have become accustomed to thinking of digital information as something almost abstract. Data is “online”, therefore it exists. But of course that isn’t how it works. Somewhere there is a server. Or a storage system. Or magnetic tape. Someone maintains it. Someone pays for it. Someone decides whether it remains accessible. And sometimes there is only one really important copy.

That suddenly makes scientific data surprisingly vulnerable. Not just to political decisions, but also to cyberattacks, war, natural disasters, technical failures or simply a lack of money and maintenance. The Yale article mentions examples ranging from datasets in the United States to scientific information threatened by the war in Ukraine.

So perhaps this German initiative points towards a much more resilient model for scientific information in general. Instead of assuming that one institution or one country will preserve important datasets forever, make multiple copies and distribute them across organizations and countries.

That is basically the same principle we use for important personal files. One copy is not a backup. And one backup sitting next to the original isn’t a particularly good backup either. For information that may be important to researchers for decades — perhaps centuries — geographically distributed copies suddenly sound remarkably sensible.

So yes, I think this is a good development. Important scientific data should probably never depend on a single institution, storage facility or even country. If projects such as CMIP7-ark eventually lead to a more distributed international infrastructure for preserving scientific data, that would be valuable. But at the same time, it is of course rather sad that we apparently need projects like this in the first place.

My Downloads Folder Now Resizes Photos for Me (Automatically)

I spend quite a lot of time working with websites and CMSs. That is true for my day job, but also for Just Me. I think about topics, look for illustrations, receive press releases, download images and occasionally have illustrations made. And then there are the photos people send me. Marketing departments and PR agencies have a remarkable talent for sending images that are far too large for use on a website. A perfectly ordinary press photo can easily be several megabytes. The same is true for many photos I find myself, and for illustrations generated or created specifically for an article. That means I have to resize most of these photos. So how do you do that in a smart and, preferably, automated way?

Manually resizing photos is not exactly the most complicated job in the world. But if you have to do it ten or fifteen times a day, every day, it becomes one of those tiny jobs that slowly starts to annoy you. And tiny annoying jobs are exactly the kind of things I like trying to automate.

My first attempt was a small image resizer I built using Valtown, an online vibe coding tool. It was also my first real experiment with vibe coding, and when the thing actually worked, I was rather pleased with myself.

As you can see, it was very basic. But it worked.

After a while, though, I wanted something better. So I asked Claude to build me a more complete photo tool. That resulted in a surprisingly polished browser-based application. It is fast, the interface looks good, and it allows me to resize and crop images exactly the way I want.

There was only one problem.

I still had to use it manually. For every photo, the workflow looked something like this: save the image somewhere, open the Photo Toolkit, load the image, choose the correct crop, resize it, download the result and then upload that version to the CMS. Again, none of this is difficult. But repeat it ten or fifteen times a day and suddenly it feels like an awful lot of clicking.

So I started wondering whether I could remove the clicking altogether. Could “the computer” simply notice that I had downloaded a large image and resize it for me? According to Claude: yes.

Which is how my Photo Toolkit slowly turned into something slightly different. I now have a small service running permanently in the background on my Linux laptop. It watches my Downloads directory. Whenever a new photo or illustration appears there, the service notices it and automatically creates a much smaller version of roughly 300 kB. The original file stays exactly where it is. Next to it appears the resized version. That is important, because sometimes I still want the original image for something else. Perhaps I want to crop it differently later, use it in print, or simply keep the highest-quality version available. So nothing is overwritten. The service just adds a website-friendly copy.

There are obviously a few practical details to solve. My Downloads directory does not only contain images. There may also be PDFs, ZIP files, documents and all sorts of other things in there. A 21 MB PDF does not suddenly need to become a 300 kB JPEG. The watcher therefore only pays attention to a small number of image formats, such as JPEG and PNG. It also needs to know which files it has already processed. Otherwise it could discover its own resized image and resize that one again. And again. And again. That has been solved by marking processed images so the service knows to leave them alone.

The nicest part is that I now barely notice any of this. The watcher runs quietly in the background. When I restart my laptop, the service starts automatically. I do not have to open an application. I do not have to remember anything. I download an image. A few seconds later, the smaller version is simply there.

This is probably not going to change the world. But it does remove a repetitive little task from my working day, and I rather like tools that do that. Especially when, after a while, you almost forget that the tool even exists.

If this sounds useful to you as well, have a look at the Just Me Toolkit page. You can find the link to it on the left-hand side of the main text on this blog.

When People Start Fighting Back Against the Cameras

A few years ago I was driving along a provincial road somewhere in central France. France has installed an impressive number of speed cameras over the years, partly to catch speeding drivers and partly, of course, to persuade everybody else not to speed in the first place. Many French drivers are not particularly enthusiastic about them (who is?). Most seem to deal with that by complaining a bit and then sticking more or less to the speed limit.

But on that particular road I came across a slightly more physical form of citizen protest. We passed a speed camera that had clearly had a difficult night. The camera itself had more or less been broken off its pole. And apparently somebody had decided that this was not quite enough, because a fire had also been lit around the bottom of the structure. What remained was a rather sad-looking, blackened pole with what was left of the camera on top.

I thought about that camera again when I read a fascinating report by 404 Media about Flock Safety cameras in the United States (https://www.404media.co/hackers-stole-flocks-camera-software-revealing-how-the-company-tracks-cars-and-people-2/).

Flock operates automated license plate reader cameras that photograph passing vehicles and send images and related information to the company’s servers. Police agencies can then search those records. But hackers from a group called stegan0gram did something rather more ambitious than simply knocking one of the cameras over: they removed a camera, copied much of the software inside it and started reverse-engineering.

What they found makes the story particularly interesting. The camera runs Android and contains roughly twenty Flock-developed applications handling functions such as motion detection, photography, object classification, uploading data and receiving updates. When something moves into view, the camera does not simply take one neat photograph of a number plate. It shoots a rapid series of images using different exposures. A normal passing vehicle generated around 28 images in the analysed data, while some produced more than 100. Over about 21 days of recovered activity, one camera had photographed roughly 50,200 vehicles and generated around 1.6 million images.

Even more interestingly, the software explicitly detects more than cars and number plates. It can also recognise people and bicycles and records where a person appears in an image together with the software’s confidence in that detection. Tests performed with models extracted from the camera confirmed that they could detect people. There was no evidence that Flock’s software was actively performing facial recognition, but the distinction is still worth noting: these are not simply electronic number-plate readers. They are cameras running computer-vision software that analyses what passes in front of them.

The analysis also showed how imperfect that software can be. The system occasionally interpreted bumper stickers, dealer frames and other graphics as number plates. In one case it even isolated an American flag patch on a motorcycle saddlebag as though it were a licence plate. Much of the actual identification work — reading plates and identifying vehicle make, model and colour — appears to happen later on Flock’s servers.

And that is where the discussion becomes bigger than one damaged camera. Citizens are generally prepared to accept rules, laws and a certain amount of enforcement. Most French drivers may dislike speed cameras, but by and large, they still slow down when they approach one. Most people probably also understand why police would like tools that help them find stolen cars or vehicles connected to serious crimes.

The difficulty starts when people become convinced that the technology has moved beyond what they consider reasonable. Flock’s wider system can make camera records searchable across large networks of law-enforcement agencies, and reporting has shown that the technology has also been used to search for people and patterns of movement rather than simply individual vehicles.

Then protest sometimes changes form. In France, somebody apparently decided that writing an angry letter about speed cameras was no longer enough and set fire to one. In the United States, somebody decided that simply destroying a Flock camera was not enough either. They took the software with them so that people could find out what the camera was actually doing.

Are either of those actions a good idea? Probably not. But can I understand why people sometimes feel the need to protest in ways that go beyond submitting a letter to the editor or politely speaking for three minutes during a local council meeting? Yes, maybe I can. That does not remove personal responsibility. If you decide to break, remove or tamper with somebody else’s equipment, you also have to accept that there may be legal consequences.

But governments and technology companies might want to pay attention to something else as well. When perfectly ordinary citizens start attacking surveillance equipment or taking it apart to discover how it works, perhaps the most interesting question is not only who damaged the camera? It might also be: why did they feel they needed to?

So Apparently Facebook Might Keep You Posting After You’re Dead?

I thought dying was a reasonably reliable way of stopping your social-media activity. Apparently, even that may eventually become optional. Because Meta has been granted a patent for technology that could allow an AI to simulate a user of a social network when that person is no longer around. The patent has the wonderfully reassuring title Simulation of a user of a social networking system using a language model.

See here for more: https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-granted-patent-for-ai-llm-bot-dead-paused-accounts-2026-2?utm_source=chatgpt.com and https://patents.justia.com/patent/12513102?utm_source=chatgpt.com.

Basically, an AI could learn from the things you have posted, liked, commented on and interacted with, and then use all that information to behave a little bit like you. Sounds like typical AI. But then it gets interesting. The patent explicitly talks about situations in which somebody is absent from a social network for a longer period. Perhaps you have simply decided that spending three hours a day scrolling through Facebook isn’t actually improving your life. Fair enough. But the patent mentions another possible reason for your absence. You might be dead. And your AI version could potentially carry on.

I find this a genuinely bizarre idea.

Now, I can imagine some situations in which technology like this could actually be useful. Someone who knows they are seriously ill might want a few messages to appear after their death. A birthday message for their children, perhaps. A final note to friends. Maybe even a couple of posts saying goodbye. We already do something similar with letters and videos.

But there is quite a big difference between:

“Here are five messages I wrote before I died. Please publish them afterwards.”

and:

“Here is an AI that has studied everything I ever posted. Just let it carry on being me.”

The first is still you. The second is somebody’s statistical approximation of you. That difference becomes even more interesting when money enters the picture. Imagine that you have built a very successful social media account. Perhaps you have thousands of followers. Every post generates hunderds of comments, likes and shares. People spend time looking at your content. The platform serves advertising around all that activity. Your account has commercial value. Then one day you stop posting. Perhaps you simply decide that social media is no longer for you. Perhaps you disappear for what the patent calls a longer period. Or perhaps you die.

Normally, that would mean the end of the content stream. No more posts and no more comments. So, no more engagement. And obviously: No more advertising around all that engagement. Unless, of course, an AI version of you could simply continue. And that is where I start to feel rather uncomfortable about this idea.

To be absolutely clear: having a patent does not mean that a social network is about to introduce this. Companies patent enormous numbers of ideas that never become actual products. At least not yet. But the patent does make the possibility technically and commercially imaginable. And once you look at it that way, some fairly strange questions appear. If the AI keeps posting after I have left a social network, are those still my posts? If it responds to somebody, have I responded? When a racist or otherwise offensive message appears on my account, how do I prove that it wasn’t posted by me, but by an AI? If it expresses an opinion I would probably have expressed, is that my opinion? And who decides when it should stop?

There’s something else I find particularly odd about all this. For years, a lot of people have been putting enormous amounts of themselves into social networks: photos, conversations, friendships, opinions, jokes, arguments, interests, political discussions, holiday pictures, and thousands upon thousands of small signals about who we are. Until now, we mostly thought of that as data about our past behaviour. AI potentially turns it into something else: training material for a future version of ourselves.

I’m not on Facebook, but I can imagine that, for many people, a Facebook profile used to be something of a digital archive. You could scroll back and see what someone actually said ten years ago. An AI-generated account would be fundamentally different. It could start producing things that the original person never said at all. Perhaps they would have said them. Perhaps not. We will never know, will we?

I suspect there will eventually be useful applications for this kind of ideas. Used deliberately and under the control of the person involved, it might even become a fascinating new way of leaving something behind. But an automated social-media ghost that continues generating engagement because its owner is “absent for a longer period”? That sounds considerably less appealing. Especially when the platform running the ghost also happens to make money from keeping people scrolling, commenting and watching.

How About We Stop Organising Everything Like It’s 1984?

For decades, we have been organising digital information in roughly the same way. There are folders, folders inside folders, and files inside those folders. Save some bookmarks and, before you know it, you have another list. A very long list, usually.

I have always been fascinated by people who try something different. Tags are one obvious alternative. Instead of forcing something into one particular folder, you can describe it from several different angles. That is one of the things I like about the way I currently use Capacities.io (https://capacities.io/): pages, objects and tags allow information to be connected rather than simply stored somewhere in a hierarchy. Word clouds are another simple example. They don’t necessarily organise information better, but they do allow you to look at it differently.

And then I came across Pixel Area (https://pxlarea.com/). Pixel Area — or pxlarea — takes yet another approach. It is basically a 100 × 100 grid containing room for 10,000 links to websites. Instead of browsing through a directory or looking at a ranked list of recommended sites, you wander around a field of pixels. Each claimed square represents someone’s blog, digital garden, photo journal or other personal corner of the web. Move around, discover a pixel and see where it takes you.

There are deliberately no rankings and no “top blogs”. Sites can have tags, so you can make pixels matching particular subjects appear like a little constellation. There is also a random option if you simply want to see where you end up. If a site has been updated recently, Pixel Area can show that too. It turns discovering websites into something much more spatial and slightly more accidental than scrolling through yet another list.

Kobala (https://kobala.nl/startpagina-functies/?utm_source=chatgpt.com) is another example of a different way to organise links. Instead of relying on a traditional bookmark list hidden somewhere in your browser, it lets you create a visual start page made up of blocks for websites and other online resources. It is a simple idea, but that is exactly what makes it interesting: the information is still basically a collection of links, yet changing the way those links are presented can make them much easier to scan and use.

And let’s not forget Start.me (https://start.me). Start.me is yet another take on the browser start page, turning bookmarks, feeds, notes and widgets into a visual dashboard of blocks. Instead of digging through folders or long bookmark lists, you can arrange the information you use most often in one clear, customisable overview.

I like all these ideas. Perhaps one of the most fascinating is Surf by Berlin-based Deta (https://deta.surf/). Surf describes itself as an intelligent notebook that brings your files and the web into your stream of thought. The interesting part for me was the way it blurred the distinction between my own information and information somewhere else. You could put your own files, notes, PDFs, websites and other material together inside one notebook and then use AI on top of that collection. Instead of constantly jumping between a file manager, browser, notes app and AI tool, the notebook became the place where all those different kinds of information met. Unfortunately I had to stop using Surf when I moved from macOS to Linux.

And while writing this post I discovered something rather nice: that is no longer true. Surf is now available for Linux and Windows as well, and Deta has made its core open source. It is also local-first, with notes and resources stored on your own device (https://github.com/deta/surf/blob/main/docs/INSTALL.md). Hmm. I may have to have another look.

Is this an exhaustive overview of alternative ways of organising and presenting information? No absolutely not. I haven’t even mentioned things I wrote about earlier, such as TabFS (https://justme.website/content-creation/maybe-screenshots-are-the-simplest-personal-knowledge-management-tool-we-already-have/) or Screenshot Conf (https://justme.website/content-creation/i-went-looking-at-a-conference-about-screenshots-about-what-and-found-a-filesystem-for-browser-tabs/). And there must be hundreds of other experiments I have never heard of.

That is actually the part I find most interesting. We have had folders, files and lists for such a long time that they can start to feel like the natural shape of information. But they aren’t. They are simply conventions we became used to. Every now and then someone comes along and asks: what if we did this differently?

At the moment, Capacities, and their pages and tags work well for me. Pixel Area probably isn’t going to replace that. Nor do I think Pixel Area is the ideal way of navigating information or discovering websites. But that isn’t really the point. Someone builds Pixel Area. Other people try it. Someone sees an interesting idea in it, combines it with something completely different and builds something new. Then someone else improves on that. And step by step we discover, hopefully, slightly better ways of dealing with all the information we keep creating.

The Best Platform Is the One You Own

A few days ago I came across this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kZY7eLm264) by investigative journalist Scott Carney and it reminded me of one of the most important lessons of the independent web: Build your own website. That doesn’t mean you should stop using other platforms. Far from it. Platforms can be useful. They can help you find people, join conversations and get your work in front of an audience. And some of them are genuinely nice places. They may be small. They may be run by people whose ideas about the internet you completely agree with. They may feel like communities rather than companies. But they are still somebody else’s place. That distinction matters.

Friendly platforms are still platforms

In the video Carney discusses his relationship with Substack. And I think it is a particularly interesting one because Substack originally seemed like an alternative to the big social platforms. The basic idea was attractive: writers could publish directly for readers, readers could pay them directly and journalists would no longer have to depend entirely on publishers, advertising or algorithms.

But Carney argues that Substack itself is changing (https://sgcarney.substack.com/p/the-real-reason-that-substack-is). It added Notes, which looks much more like a traditional social-media feed. It introduced the distinction between subscribers and followers, and added video, livestreaming and short clips. In other words, a service built around newsletters and subscriptions gradually started looking more like the platforms it once seemed to offer an alternative to.

That matters because, according to Carney, all that free content and endless scrolling may be good for growing Substack, but not necessarily for the people publishing there. His own follower numbers increased dramatically, while the number of people actually paying for his work did not grow in anything like the same way. He describes the broader problem as subscription fatigue: there are only so many newsletters people have the time and money to pay for.

What I find particularly interesting is his response. He doesn’t dramatically announce that he is leaving the internet or refusing to use platforms ever again. He adapts. He uses YouTube. He works with sponsors, although he says he is very selective about the companies he accepts money from. And he no longer assumes that one particular platform or one particular business model will provide a permanent solution.

You give up control

To me, that is exactly the point. The problem with building your online presence on a platform is not necessarily that the people running it are evil, greedy or waiting for an opportunity to lock you in. They may be wonderful people. The problem is simply that you don’t control what happens next. Because someone else controls the software. Someone else decides how it develops. Someone else can change the rules, the business model or the priorities. The organisation behind it can run out of money, change direction, be acquired or simply disappear.

Your website should be the center

This is why I increasingly think of platforms as satellites. My website is the center. I can post links somewhere else. I can participate in discussions. I can experiment with new communities and services. If one of them disappears tomorrow, that would be annoying. But Just Me would still be here. My articles would still be here. My links would still work. My no doubt bizar collection of posts about Linux, space, music, open source, digital autonomy, industrial technology, old websites and whatever else happens to interest me would still have a home.

To me that is important. Especially now that so much of the internet seems to consist of publishing things inside systems controlled by somebody else.

And there is another reason

There is also a much less serious reason to build your own website: It is fun.

You can change the design because you feel like it. Add a page nobody asked for. Build a ridiculous little web tool. Change your fonts. Break something. Repair it again. Discover that WordPress is doing something mysterious. Spend far too much time solving a problem that nobody visiting your site will ever notice.

That is part of the pleasure. A personal website isn’t just a publishing platform. It is also a project. And unlike almost every other platform on the internet, it can become exactly as boring, complicated, colourful, minimal, experimental or peculiar as you want it to be. Because it is yours. Maybe that is the best reason of all.

Journalism Has Plenty of Ideas. So Why Do We Keep Throwing Them Away?

For the past five or six years, I have been involved in something resembling a Dragon’s Den at a Dutch journalism school. Groups of students have to come up with an idea for a new journalistic product. They develop the concept, think about the audience, work out a business model and eventually present the whole thing to a jury.

I enjoy doing this. Some of the ideas are not particularly interesting. Others are reasonable, but turn out to be variations on things that already exist. That does not bother me too much. These students are young. They are inexperienced. They are learning. I don’t expect a group of journalism students to have the market knowledge of someone who has worked in media for twenty years.

And every now and then, there is an idea where you think: yes, there is something here. Perhaps it is not quite ready. Perhaps the business model is shaky (it always is at least that…) . Perhaps the technology is too ambitious. But you can see a potentially interesting journalistic product emerging.

And then something rather strange happens.

Nothing.

Six years of ideas disappearing

As far as I know, not one of the projects I have seen during all those years has actually been developed into a real product. Not one. I find that seriously disappointing. Not because I expect students to start companies immediately after presenting their project. Most of them have exams to finish, internships to do and careers to start. But there is something odd about a journalism programme generating dozens and dozens of new product ideas and apparently treating almost all of them as disposable.

Present -> Get a grade -> Move on

Next year, a new group of students arrives and everybody starts from zero again. Why?

I have discussed this with people at the school before. Why does every team have to invent something completely new? What if a previous group had a genuinely good idea but took it in the wrong direction? A new team might see something the first team missed. What if a new group improved the prototype? What if group three tested it with a real audience? What if the group in the next year finally launched it?

That starts to look a lot more like actual product development. And, frankly, journalism could use some of that.

Build a library

There is an even simpler option: put all those ideas online. Create a website where the school publishes the concepts developed by its students. Explain the problem each project tried to solve, the proposed product and the intended audience. Forget the business model, that will come later. Don’t hide the unsuccessful ideas either. They may be the most interesting ones.

After a few years, you would have an enormous collection of experiments in journalism. Future students could browse through it. Journalists could browse through it. Independent publishers and content creators looking for ideas could browse through it. Existing media companies suffering from the familiar shortage of internal product innovation could browse through it. Someone might look at a five-year-old student project and think: that was actually a pretty good idea. It just needs this.

That would be useful, both for developing new journalistic products and, importantly, for journalists looking for work. At the moment, many of these projects seem to disappear shortly after the presentation. That feels like an extraordinary waste.

Maybe the ideas should be smaller

There is another assumption worth questioning. Why does a student team have to invent an entire journalistic product? A publication. A platform. An app. A new media brand. Those are huge projects. Perhaps journalism students should sometimes also be encouraged to solve one irritating little problem instead.

I thought about this after coming across Normal Headlines (https://normalheadlines.jamesreeves.co/?ref=jamesreeves.co). The idea is wonderfully small. Its creator became frustrated with the increasingly clickbait-like headlines used by The New York Times. The reporting itself might still be perfectly good, but the headline sometimes seems deliberately constructed to conceal the most important piece of information.

You know the format. Something like: This Will Ruin the US Auto Industry. Which tells me almost nothing. Normal Headlines replaces headlines like that with something much more informative. Something closer to: The US Auto Industry Can’t Compete With China’s Automakers on Innovation.

Now I know what the story is really about.

That is not a revolutionary new media company. It isn’t a new social network for journalists. There is no enormous newsroom behind it. It is basically one person saying: this thing annoys me, so I built something that fixes it. I love that approach.

Yes, you might lose a click or two

Of course there is a reason media companies write curiosity-driven headlines. Clicks. If the headline already tells you what happened, perhaps fewer people will click through to the article. That may very well be true.

But I increasingly wonder whether media organisations are measuring the wrong thing. Suppose a vague headline generates a few percent more clicks. Wonderful. Now ask another question. How many readers eventually become so irritated by this constant manipulation that they stop visiting altogether? And more importantly: how many paying readers conclude that a publication apparently no longer respects their time? Those numbers are much harder to put into a dashboard. But they matter. A serious newspaper or whatever news outlet should not have to trick me into reading serious journalism. Simply tell me what happened. If the story is interesting, I will read it.

Journalism has a product problem

This brings me back to those journalism students. I sometimes worry about how little product thinking there seems to be around journalism. A surprisingly large number of students I meet want to become sports journalists or fashion journalists. There is absolutely nothing wrong with either profession. But look around. Climate change. Defence. Artificial intelligence. Industrial policy. Cybersecurity. Energy. Space. Supply chains. European technology. China. Digital sovereignty. Healthcare. Democracy itself.

There is an extraordinary amount happening in the world that desperately needs journalists who understand difficult subjects and can invent new ways of explaining them. And we don’t just need new stories. We need new journalistic products. New formats. New interfaces. New ways of finding information. Small tools. Databases. Newsletters. Visualisations. Archives. Filters. Browser extensions. Things you and I haven’t even thought of yet. And yes, maybe even something as tiny as replacing an annoying headline with a better one.

Journalism cannot afford to become lazy

Western democracy is under considerable pressure. That makes journalism more important, not less. But repeatedly saying that journalism is important is not enough. Journalism also has to earn people’s attention. That requires good reporting, obviously. But it also requires curiosity about technology, willingness to experiment and an understanding that the way people consume information keeps changing.

Journalists expect their readers to keep up with the world. Journalism has to keep up with its readers as well. That is why I would love to see journalism schools treat these student projects differently. Don’t just ask: what new thing can you invent this semester?

Ask: What problem can you solve? What previous idea can you improve? What can you actually build? What can the next group build on top of it?

And perhaps most importantly: Can we make something that still exists after you have received your grade? Because after sitting through five or six years of student Dragon’s Dens, I have seen plenty of ideas. What I would really like to see now is one of them survive and flourish.

Printed Link Rot: The Internet Problem That Escaped the Internet

A few days ago I came across an article about a rather unusual book. It is a big yellow book full of websites. A kind of printed directory of the internet. The author describes it as an “Internet Phone Book” — a physical snapshot of a digital world that changes every second. They are working on version 2 now as well. (https://internetphonebook.net/).

A book full of website links? I have to admit: I like the idea. But I am not entirely sure why. Maybe it is the same reason I still like vinyl records, printed books and old computer magazines. There is something satisfying about information that exists as a physical object. Something you can put on a shelf, pick up years later and browse without needing an account, an app or a subscription.

But then I read a term that surprised me: printed link rot. I had never heard that expression before. And it immediately connected with something I wrote about recently: digital link rot (https://justme.website/content-creation/the-web-has-a-memory-problem/). In other words: the slow decay of the web. Websites disappear. Companies shut down. Platforms change their rules. Domains expire. Articles move. The links that once connected the internet together slowly stop working.

In that previous post, I looked at some strategies to reduce the problem. Using permanent URLs. Keeping your own archives. Avoiding unnecessary dependence on platforms that may disappear. But printed link rot? That is a completely different challenge.

A printed book full of website addresses is already frozen the moment it is published. The links do not change inside the book, but the internet behind those links does. A website that works today may lead to nothing five years from now. And unlike a digital page, you cannot simply update a printed book with a new URL. That makes printed link rot a strangely sad idea. A book that tries to preserve the internet could eventually become a record of things that no longer exist.

But maybe that is also part of the charm. After all, old books, magazines and newspapers are full of references to companies, people and places that disappeared long ago. We accept that as part of – well – history. Maybe an internet book will work the same way. Not only as a practical guide, but as a time capsule.

Still, I wonder: How do we prevent printed link rot? Can we create better ways to connect physical publications with a changing digital world? Should books like this include archives, QR codes, alternative references or some kind of long-term preservation system? I don’t have the answer. But maybe that is exactly why this idea is interesting. The internet was built to connect information forever. Yet keeping those connections alive turns out to be much harder than we expected.

Perhaps the real question is not only how we preserve websites. It is also how we preserve the paths that lead to them.