Tech
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.
The ACM’s proposition to redefine the software engineering profession sounds a bit like the Systems Engineer Development (SED) program of Electronic Data Systems (EDS) that I hired in to in 1989. Unfortunately I don’t think such a long term vision is compatible with the U.S. short term culture, so I doubt many companies nor the industry will take this approach.
Android 17
Google has released Android 17, and I just initiated the process to download and install it on my Pixel 10. 9to5Google has a video overview of all the changes, which are mostly cosmetic. For the last several years the Android version upgrades have not included significant functionality additions, rather they include UI and general performance improvements. Functional additions to Android come in the Quarterly Point Releases (QPR) and we expect QPR1 to Android 17 in the fall, timed with the release of the Pixel 11.
Also included in the Android 17 download is the June 2026 Pixel Drop that adds features to Pixel phones. Most useful to me is App Bubbles, which provide users the ability to add applications to the floating “bubble” that appears on top of all screens and apps running on the phone. We previously had this ability for text messaging conversations and I think of it as a multitasking feature that enables me to quickly switch to a task that I have pinned to the display.
One use that I have for app bubbles is for quick access to RadarScope while there are storms in my area to quickly see the current weather radar. To “pin” an app to the bubble tap and hold the app’s icon and tap Bubble at the bottom of the context menu. Note that this feature does not appear to work for all apps, particularly ones that have custom context menus. For example, tap and hold the Gmail icon and you do not see a Bubble option instead you see options to compose new email or open an Gmail account.
Wear OS 7 is also coming for the Pixel Watch and as I am less enthused about that release I am not go to force it to be installed on my watch.
Using Google AI Plus
I replaced the standard, original, Google One subscription with Google AI Plus, which provides more AI features for $4.99 per month. I now have access to the Daily Brief produced by Gemini using Gmail, Calendar, and Text Messaging that I find useful but surprised I am not receiving notifications about them each day, instead I have to go in to the Gemini app to read them, which makes no sense. I found where I control whether I see notifications for Daily Brief and toggled that on/off.
Another problem I have with Gemini on the phone is that it is too verbose. When I ask it for information it produces several paragraphs and seems to insist on reading all of it when I prefer to read what was produced in silence. Perhaps Google could enable user to set a preference such as enabling users to tell Gemini to summarize long responses verbally and provide the remainder on screen to be read.
One more complaint… I like NotebookLM but I wish Google would do one of two things, either enable NotebookLM to access Google Keep or provide users the ability to create and edit notebook sources from a phone. Here is my use case. I religiously track the oil level in our 2013 GMC Terrain in a note in Google Keep. I found it useful to provide that odometer and oil level log to NotebookLM so that I can query it, but to get the log into a notebook I have to send a copy to Google Docs because NotebookLM only knows about Google Docs stored in Drive. Keep does not use Drive for storage, and I suspect Google stores notes in a backend database.
If Google will allow users to create notebooks in NotebookLM and create sources for them on a phone then that notebook could be an alternate to Keep. So far Google has not added any Gemini features to Keep, which is a bit surprising, but in another way suggests that maybe someday NotebookLM could replace Keep. I personally think it would be smart of Keep stayed as it and provided NotebookLM as the “AI equivalent” of Keep.
Ideally, NotebookLM would automatically sync/update Google Drive sources, but right now I have to manually sync to get updates which is fine except that if I simply send a Keep note to a Google Doc it doesn’t overwrite previously shared documents instead it creates another doc with the exact same name and the new “version” of the doc needs to be added as a source. In short, I don’t have an easy way to get updates to my oil log in to NotebookLM.