Tech
Recreated Atari 800XL
I saw this ad this morning for a re-creation of the Atari 800XL. The Atari 800XL is the first computer that I bought for myself and used while I was in college. Back when I was getting my computer science degree at Michigan Tech most of the programming I had to do was done on mainframes, so all I needed was a VT100 terminal emulator running on the 800XL to do a great deal of my school work from home.
I can’t remember how much I paid for the 800XL back then in 1986, so I don’t know whether this $219 pre-order price is higher or lower then what I paid then. I see the recreated model supports HDMI to connect to modern monitors and TVs.
I use Feedland to manage my RSS subscriptions and it’s where I start to review my feeds in the morning. I have feeds categorized and I like the visual format for how I see the feeds. One thing I have noticed, however, is that Feedland groups the updates by site rather than presenting all the updates in a true reverse chronological order, so keep up during the day I have been using River5.
Recently I learned about a new RSS sync service called Birchfeed. It’s intended to be an RSS sync host for apps like NetNewsWire that you might run on multiple devices, but there is also a web app for reviewing feeds. I have found that I really like the web app because of its keyboard shortcuts, so I find I am using it instead of River5. I go to the site and press “r” to refresh and “t” to triage through the updated feeds, pressing “j” to move to the next feed. Any article that I am interested in I press “o” to open and then press Opt+R to send to Readwise Reader. If I want to mark all feeds read I press Shift-a. The keyboard shortcuts make it fast and easy to review updates during the day.
Wired thinks the Alexa tablets could be a prelude to Amazon trying again to sell a phone. Given that Panos Panay led Microsoft’s efforts with the Microsoft Duo, I wonder whether Amazon would be willing for their phone to be a foldable at a price that seriously undercut the competition. What if Amazon called it a foldable tablet rather than a phone? Either way if foldables are really the future for smartphones their price needs to come down and more big competitors are needed to make that happen. An Amazon foldable priced at $799 would make a splash.
Andy Sylvester has developed a tool that provides a way to generate oldSchool blogs to a local file system and thus host them on any web server. Its a niche tool that provides a way to host blogs rendered using Dave Winer’s blog template apart from his hosting.
I use Drummer, which is Dave’s web-based outlining tool, to write my Daynotes and I was using his blog hosting to serve it, but I switched to different hosting. My Daynotes are now served via my own server running an instance of pagePark, which is Dave’s web server app. The upside is an entire year of notes are in one outline file served by a server I control.
I have written more specific observations about the results of Andy’s work, which I have not yet tried for myself, in my notes for today, September 28, 2026 that in the future you may need to expand to find.
Fall 2026 Technology Releases
Know When To Hold Them
Apple held their annual iPhone event/broadcast today during which they finally announced their long anticipated foldable phone, the iPhone Duo. When I saw the name leaked yesterday I thought to myself, surely Apple will not mimic Microsoft’s name for their first foldable, but that is the name so hopefully it will sell better than the Surface Duo.
Honestly, while I watch the Apple announcement broadcasts it’s hard for me to get excited by them as nearly all of Apple’s products now cost more than I will ever want to spend. Apple will get kudos for keeping the “base” model Duo to $1,999, which is still more than you pay now for either a Samsung ZFold8 at $1,899 or the Google Pixel 11 Pro Fold at $1,269. I will never spend more than $1,000 for a phone, let alone $2,000 even though it’s true that $1 to $2k purchase can replace the iPad Mini and phone.
Beside the price, I am put off by how the iPhone Duo looks. While it appears the “passport” sized foldable that Samsung and now Apple are using might be “the” winner, the rounded edges of the Duo when folded just look odd. The other problem I have with these foldables is how wide they are, which I think will feel bulky in a front pant pocket, not to mention the 8.96 ounce weight of the Duo is much more than the 7.2 ounces of my Pixel 10.
Given that I use my iPad Mini a lot, I am the type of person that fits the foldable use case. I personally think these devices should be marketed as foldable tablets rather than phones. The problem is, I can’t imagine a way for a foldable to never be bulkier than a smartphone, and I do want to be able to carry my phone without a bag.
My installation of Feedland is one of the services I currently do not have access to due to the Proxmox host failure. Fortunately my installation of River5 is on another host, but this circumstance gives me the opportunity to try out FreshRSS. Learning a new RSS aggregator takes some time, but I am working my way through.
A Fool With A Tool Is Still A Fool
AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
Nikhil Suresh https://hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decisionmaking
“Unfortunately, we live in a dark timeline. All of the AI projects we have observed as a team are failing. Every single one – we have seen 0% success in a year and a half, not only amongst projects we have been asked to participate in22 We have rejected all AI implementation work. It is absolutely a gigantic bubble and we have minimized our exposure to it – every single one of our current contracts would be totally unaffected by OpenAI collapsing, save for perhaps some second-order effects such a recession causing a client to become unable to pay us. And there’s nothing we can do to insulate ourselves from that anyway., but even within projects that we have observed in passing while doing totally unrelated work. Even if you grant that AI tooling accelerates specific workloads, the method and scale of the current investments is senseless. Frequently the failure is not related to AI itself, but rather that companies are terminally bad at running software projects effectively, and as I have remarked previously, AI projects are subject to all the failure modes of normal projects plus you can get everything right and then still fail because of the method’s novelty. Very few companies are so good at shipping software that they can afford the extra risk profile.”
Sounds to me like at least for the moment RSS chat is like old school Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) before things like Fido net. I imagine people will quickly want some form of federation because most people aren’t old enough to have been experienced BBSes and the idea of small, sandboxed, online communities.
A Method For Quoteblogs
Among the many RSS feeds that I subscribe to there are a few that contain posts that share other people’s writing. I find the posts valuable because they provide me links to articles to read that I may not otherwise find and tend to be thoughtfully curated.
I want to provide my own “quoteblog” posts and landed on a method for creating them using the knowledge management app I’ve been developing for myself with Claude.
My reading flow starts by reviewing articles collected and presented by Feedland and River5 using RSS. I click articles with interesting titles and then send them to Readwise Reader using an extension, later I read them and highlight portions of the article that I like. Copies of the article highlights are downloaded to Obsidian and accessible to Readwise, which sends me random highlights of articles I read in daily emails.
The dashboard of my PKM app has a widget that is a list of the recent articles with highlights. Claude wrote the code to use the Readwise API to access the recent articles and display them in the widget. The article titles in the widget are links to the article highlights in Readwise. The articles roll off the widget over time but I can pin them to access them later via a Pinned Highlights page.
My quoteblog posts originate from the highlights I store in Readwise. Readwise provides the ability to tag articles, or what it calls documents, and tag individual highlights. I give the source article of the quotes a “blog-post” tag and the highlights to share a “quote” tag in Readwise. Claude then wrote the code that reviews the articles that I pinned looking for ones with a “blog-post” document tag and when it finds one, it puts thee article title, author, and source URL in a markdown file. Highlights that have a “quote” tag are then added to the markdown file.
For now I am not automating the publishing of the quoteblog post to this site. For now I am going to manually create my blog post in Obsidian, copy and paste the source of the quoteblog created from my highlights, and then do some light editing before publishing. The first of my quoteblog posts is Independent Food For Thought.