fyr.io Scraps (full)

Scraps #13

2026-01-09

Scraps #13

A bunch of scrappy notes from 2025-12-19 to 2026-01-09, posted on Friday 9th of January 2026 at 10:55

A bakers dozen!

Spotlight

Several in the spotlight this time around as I've had a few weeks of good stuff finding my eyeballs

Check this video out on what propoganda is, really.
Cory Doctorow on the post-american (de-enshittified) internet that we may have in front of us if we can just make a move on it
I know this is typically a technology/indieweb/infosec/etc oriented scrappy list, and yes, I'm not an educator, however this page about facilitating learning in the classroom is just too good to not share
Accessibility is critical - Innovation that excludes people isn't innovation; it's just shiny exclusion.

Things from the tubez

I'm not supposed to link to Luke's website, because it's too small.
James considers the indieweb in 2030
maren is as smart-phone free as they can be in the USA without being locked out of everything
'Living off the land' in infosec terms means using existing resources (built-in commands, drivers, applications, etc) to aid your attack. lolol.farm is a catalogue of the different living off the land types
Aaron is advocating for less js when html/css will do the same thing
Here's a beautifully woven telling of a writing club for both non-LLM writers and recovering LLM prompters by one of my favourite bloggers
Chuck is... self reliant! Chuck dives into the reasons for owning your own domain name
Dan has built an 88x31 button generator and it's pretty slick!

Scraps #12

2025-12-19

Scraps #12

A bunch of scrappy notes from 2025-12-01 to 2025-12-19, posted on Friday 19th of December 2025 at 22:34

Oh, December. The Seasonal Affective Disorder kicks into it's fullest of swings, things get colder and darker and greyer... But hey, I get to keep the fireplace on. Ahh, cozy!

what are the haps?

Hey! I haven't kept on top of the indieweb+infosec goings on as much as I like to this month, hence the delay in posting Scraps #12. As we reach the end of the calendar year in my part of the world, (most) people at work tend to... slow down a little. Which is good for me, because it means fewer distractions in the workplace, so I end up being more productive. The pattern held true again this year! However due to that productivity, I did uncover several... let's call them "issues"... which required much attention.

First off, identifying and fixing several (minor!) data breaches at work is always fun (despite being frustrating that they exist in the first place) and an opportunity to both learn something new as well as prevent future damage by applying lessons elsewhere.

Secondly, I identified a disgustingly simple but very severe breach in a third party platform... a platform whose sole purpose is to securely record data breaches! Eek. Thankfully the company was very receptive to my report, and rolled a fix out after about an hour. Pretty good for a fairly niche product!

Thirdly, and most importantly for me, the 'merger' of the organisation I work with into another org is still planned for next year. I've referenced it here and there but haven't written anything up about it as yet, so here's a stream of consciousness about it! There's a good chance I'll lose my job through this merger, however the work to get from merging to merged will be pretty intense. I'm not one to be sour about this - in fact, I think the merger is a good thing. I am looking forward to this work, because it'll be super interesting. And hard, I'm sure, but as someone who takes pride in their work I aim to make this a very smooth technological transition regardless of if I am dropped at the end of it. I want to point at this event as say "I made that slick." Maybe even use the new Org management for a reference or two if I do need to find another job.

The financial anxiety surrounding this uncertainty sure is kicking my butt though. I am preparing for the worst. We run pretty frugal at home anyway, but I'm already starting to put feelers out for roles elsewhere (not a great job market right now though!) and I am also considering other ways to generate a little side income to take the edge off a little. Something I've never really done before. I am considering having a ko-fi and/or LiberaPay link on this site on a /support page or something, but I haven't done that as yet purely because I really don't want to be holding my hat out to the crowd, as it were. But I might. We'll see.

The best way for me to deal with this anxiety is, according to my brain, stare at my budget spreadsheet for ages. This doesn't often work though, so instead I've been reading some cool stuff on the internet when I've had a bit of time to catch up! Here's some of that cool stuff:

Lyra has a new take on clickjacking with a very interesting svg technique
Robert writes about discovering the indieweb in a calmer way
If you want to learn both the intricacies of HTML/CSS as well as how forgiving it can be, there's no better method than reading a bunch of website source. This is exactly what Alex has done. Back in May, she wrote about what she learned building an archive of over 2000 pages
Icons are in menus everywhere now - Jim has posted about this trend and I am in agreement! It's something I had (perhaps subconciously) noticed. This post brought it straight into my awareness and now I can't help but sigh every time I see yet another menu stacked with icons
And speaking of things you don't know you know (or don't conciously acknowledge you know...) did you know that Google Maps algorithmically shows you restaraunts? I mena, yes. Probably, you did. This is obvious if you think about it - of course it does, same as everything else Google fires into your eyeballs! But honestly... I hadn't considered it when using Maps. What impact does that have? What does, say... the london food map look like de-Googled? Lauren did the heavy lifting and figured it out. The result? Way better results, if you're looking for more fair results looking for a restaraunt in London anyway!
The legendary Soatok has built out a reference implementation for the public key directory server: This software implements the Key Transparency specification I've been working on since last year, and is an important stepping stone towards secure end-to-end encryption for the Fediverse
Being a solo self-hosted-platform-maintainer-plus-developer isn't easy, as Kayla wrote about following an outage. Love the openness of this writeup, and it's interesting to see some of the problems solo folk face given the resource limitations (time, energy, money) plus the restrictions on their environment (solar powered server in a closet) (note: despite what the website says, this is a thing used by one person, it's not a company with paying customers)
Jyn is just havin' fun and findin' out
Our personal sites can be abused in interesting ways to generate profits for malicious folk. Ibrahim experienced this recently with their search page!
Taggart has taken the idea of webrings and wants to evolve it to the next step by adding reasonable trust. The concept is called Ringspace, and it's a mighty interesting idea!
A new (old) web browser to test your websites on - A load of Sega Genesis DLC (yep) have been recovered, including a web browser (yep again!) called the Sega Channel Genesis Web Blaster
Jake got hit with a crypto miner thanks to the recent next.js exploit, except they weren't running next.js! ...or were they...? Be aware of the dependencies used by the stuff you run, folks!

Bonus

I have a long list of stuff to consume - videogames, books, tv shows, movies, blog posts, web serials... the list goes on. One list I fail to maintain anywhere sensible and instead keep in my brainspace (that eroded, pitted, leaking mass of nuerons that somehow keep me conscious) is a list of Tools I Wanna Try Out. Some I remember, most I forget. Maybe I should start putting them here?

I love kanban, it changed the way I manage my work and I will wax lyrical about it to anyone who can't get away fast enough - Kanban MD is a neat little application that builds a kanban board from a simple markdown file. Looks super slick!

Scraps #11

2025-12-01

Scraps #11

A bunch of scrappy notes from 2025-11-24 to 2025-12-01, posted on Monday 1st of December 2025 at 22:04

People always come up to me and ask me: "Who are you and what are you doing here?" and to them I say: "Aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

In other news, I've had an idea for a long-running REALLY SIMPLE web ..."game", and you know what it's probably been done dozens of times already. But I'm sort of trying to not care about that? I find that the knowledge that someone else has already done that (better than I ever could) is putting me off writing and building things. Alternatives are good! Why can't I listen to my own advice. So anyway I'm gonna build out a really simple fun time (and energy, eek) waster. Because why not?

Anyway! On to actual things that exist on the internet:

Spotlight

Julius has been posting one kick-ass homepage from the depths of the 'net - it's absolutely worth digging through the 50+ posts and keeping an eye out for future ones as there's some wild diversity (in 'website' terms, primarily!) in there and I don't know about you but I am here for it

Stuff? Things? Sure why not

This is a great blog post about maintaining an open source project - I'm a big fan of kanban and currently use the self-hosted open source version of LeanTime, however... Kaneo looks interesting. I will have to check it out!
Nick has a new site, and it has a /why page which explains, well, why nick has a new site. This is a great idea, exploring the why of things. I should add a /why page, just like Nick, Miriam, Mike and many others
A good take on the cloudflare incident a few weeks back, encouraging this kind of detail in the future will only make the experiences of one team propagate to other teams more easily, a net benefit to all
Regularly visiting web wanderers may know that I love reading post mortems. Generally these are of a technical "oh snap that thing broke in a special way" type documents BUT I also like reading gaming related stuff too! I saw Nishchal post to Mastodon about their design post mortem for their Catnap Chaos game. It's a good read, covering what goes into designing the mechanics of a relatively simple game (in a good way!)
Email, the ultimate weapon in this modern age. Declan writes eloquently about those angry emails you sometimes find yourself sending. Loved this.
Oh, whoops. It looks like it's time to shut our websites down. Personal websites are dead! ...obviously they're not, as described by both rina and fLaMEd.
Recently, Joel has written about finding it hard to do, whatever it is in that moment, and Elena feels similarly! I totally get this. Sometimes starting is the hardest thing. I get that way with this site, even putting these scraps together can be a trial. Not the doing. The starting. Which reminds me about that game-thing I mentioned at the top of this page... hmm

Bonus

You probably have those places on the 'net that you visit regularly. A space that, when you load in, you know what you're getting, even if the content changes there's a tone or a feel to the site that keeps you returning. For many people, it's the big social media places.

I have a few of these 'check several times a week' spaces. One of them is a web comic you've probably heard of, XKCD. I wanted to make special mention of a recent comic here that's powerful because of the overall webcomics consistency, the diversion from its typical topics, and the years-long wait for a followup to a few prior editions.

XKCD: Fifteen Years

Who's cutting ogres? Tell 'em to quit.

Scraps #10

2025-11-24

Scraps #10

A bunch of scrappy notes from 2025-11-15 to 2025-11-24, posted on Monday 24th of November 2025 at 14:40

Ten whole scraps?! That sure is... a number! I expected to fully give up by now tbh but let's keep this cheese-wheel rolling down the hill(?)

When life gives you lemons, ask life "Oh hey, life is a person now. Where have you been? Why lemons? Why not money? Can I get some money? No? Oh, well... Can I get more lemons? Is this a one time thing or are you like on a schedule or something? Can you even talk?" and then make lemon meringue because we've got lemonade at home in the fridge already.

Spotlight

I love reading deep dives, post mortems and incident reports, so here's a treat if you too are that way inclined!

elite.bbcelite.com is a site dedicated to Elite, the 1980s space trading sim game, containing not only its source code, but also over 130 deep dives on the How's and Why's of the game!

Stuff and things!

A mix of ups and downs this week for the internet. Emphasis on the downs. The dead internet is still alive! For now, at least...

Rodrigo writes that AI/LLMs in Firefox appear to be something that nobody wants, but Anil disagrees - The important thing is using LLMs safely, and having safe LLMs to use. Can Mozilla fill that need with its integration into Firefox? Who knows...
Bruce has another javascript-free method to frustrate immoral web scrapers - the more the merrier!
Uggla is also getting up in the immoral web scraper fight with their own JS-free method and I love to see it
This GitHub repo will let owners of (some) apple air pods fully enjoy their earphones on non-apple devices. I don't own these but it warms me to see people unlocking the capabilities of a device that are unfairly locked down!
Cloudflare outages are always interesting, I really enjoy reading their writeups. Here's the most recent (at the time of writing lolol) writeup of the 2025-11-18 outage
On that cloudfront outage above, you know, the one that took down a huge percentage of websites and apps? Yeah, well rina points out that you're just introducing a single point of failure and you probably don't need it at all
No cloudfront outage will ever take fyr.io down (i hope?) because I self host! Laura is also a proponent of self hosting, I'm happy to see more people writing about it!
Careful when building things though, whether through bugs or intent you may find yourself abandoning resources that can not only be claimed by third parties, but are in fact still relevant and potentially trying to be utilised out in the world. This happened to Microsoft recently!
There's value in fixing bugs, whether you're removing old unused code, resources (see above) or just making the UX a bit friendlier or accessible. Consider a 'FixIt' - Bug-fixing for a week per quarter helps refine the product/service, feels good for the devs, and makes the users happier!

Bonus

Half Life 2 is my favourite game, and I love learning new things about it, such as how a bug meant an NPC toe broke the game, even time travelling to break older versions that weren't originally broken

Scraps #9

2025-11-15

Scraps #9

A bunch of scrappy notes from 2025-11-07 to 2025-11-15, posted on Saturday 15th of November 2025 at 22:02

I had an email from a web wanderer the other day who mentioned that they enjoyed these Scraps. That was super nice, I appreciated it more than they will know. If you read through my scraps, I thank you. You are awesome.

If you have a thing that you like to read, listen to or watch that a human put together, send them a little message. They'll thank you for it, and you'll make the human web that little bit nicer!

Spotlight

Proposal for a .meow tld? All profits funding the lgbt community? Great idea! Hope this works out: dotmeow.org

Bonus

Gaming - I enjoy it, but I'm limited due to my weak hardware. That may change soon though if this is as cheap as I hope...

Valve announces 3 (I guess they can use that number now) new bits of hardware - a PC, controller and VR headset. I run off an old donated laptop so this will be great for me if it's cheap. Also, so many hints about a new half life game in the announcement trailer and I haven't even been able to play Alyx yet *sob* regardless I'm excited for a potential reveal. 16/18th November? I hope so!

Scraps #8

2025-11-07

Scraps #8

No scraps since 2025-08-01 but hopefully I can start regaining some momentum, posted on Friday 7th of November 2025 at 22:25

I have a dedicated /scraps RSS feed, a dedicated posts feed, and an everything feed. If any of those tickle your pickle, peruse this very link!

A long period of busyness has kept me away from pushing out some /scraps - I haven't been keeping on top of the goings on as well as I'd like to. Life just gets in the way sometimes! It's not like I've done nothing - I've had some opportunity to do this and that. Besides, a scrappy schedule seems fitting.

A short one this time around - a good start to the week gave me some opportunity to play catch-up, but that positive start quickly devolved into chaos. However, at least I've got something to put forward into the 'net!

Spotlight

Sometimes you come across something that resonates. That's what we've got this time around, something a bit hard hitting, a pill to swallow if you will. But it's also enlightening and freeing! Perhaps it might be good for you?

You are insignificant. And that's not only okay. It's a good thing. This post speaks to something I've been trying to come to terms with for a while.

Links

We're keeping it contained in one small block today - some recent blog posts, articles and sites I've seen that I wanted to share.

Joan Westenberg (who crafted the post in the spotlight above) wrote up why they chose Discourse over discord, something I'm considering myself (see "Ideas for Life" section)
Related to that, Taggart-tech compiled and rated some discord-alternative-slash-community-building tools
Get yourself a tor mirror of your site, like the flower.codes site has done. A good idea!
Your software should identify when it's being run on corporate machines according to LGUG2Z. Obtaining funding from corporations whilst remaining open to individuals is an interesting concept that could be good for developers who would otherwise release stuff for free.
By adding complexity to streamline stuff in the homelab, Jana has built a prison for themselves. There's too much going on to quickly whip something together in a moment. This feels very indieweb (indiesysadmin?) - getting closer to the roots. There's a pleasure in doing things by hand. There's also pain of course, but that's part of the charm. Honestly, it is! Please believe me!
Related to the above, you should ask yourself: What the hell have you built? Keep it simple, kids!
Maintain web state via the URL where appropriate and useful - more sites should adopt this. I'm considering ways to nicely present this as an option on this site, for example for the post filter or theme, plus the RSS feed
It looks like XSLT will probably be removed from chromium
A tape (hopefully) containing a full copy of Unix v4 has been found - that's pretty cool!
The year of the linux desktop is finally nigh, for 3% of gamers are now using Linux! Huzzah!

That's all for now, folks! Catch ya'll on the flip side.

Scraps #7

2025-08-01

Scraps #7

A bunch of scrappy notes from 2025-07-25 to 2025-08-01, posted on Friday 1st of August 2025 at 15:00

Pinch, punch, first of the month.

This week I've had a bit of time off work and am still not up to date on my reading list. I'm starting to think that maybe there's too much cool stuff on the indieweb?

Unfortunately, thanks to some utterly stupid laws that are finding their way in to society, for this edition you are going to have to verify your age. Please submit a 3d face scan to verify that you're between 5-155 years of age. If you fall outside of this age range, would you kindly close your eyes until you've closed this website. If however you're within this age range, or a sentient being of any species other than human, welcome. Enjoy.

Spotlight

It's the 1st of August today, which means it's Blaugust!
It's also HTML Day TOMORROW (Tuesday 2nd August)

Indieweb, Fediverse & Social Media - people stuff

The enshittification of governance continues - laws are being set to serve the government instead of the people. It has been coming for a long time.

Now the internet is reacting to the age verification laws that are being passed with dismay, resignation, and new VPN subscriptions. It's the resignation that will allow these things to pass - things like it have been tried again and again and this time it's not been shot down. That's the secret. Keep trying and eventually you will succeed, whether you're an entrepreneur trying to start a business, or a government trying to implement a privacy-invading slippery-slope law.

Soatok outlines the issues with the age verification and explains that, no, it doesn't need to be a privacy concern... unlike the current state of things in some countries
If you're fed up with online marketplaces (ebay, amazon, etsy, etc) you could try selling the epic stuff from your attic on your own website perhaps?
Sometimes you have some old tech laying around but don't want to sell it or chuck it in the recycling just yet. Annie has repurposed an old ipad for consuming blog and small web stuff
If you're wanting to participate in the small web, you'll probably need to learn HTML! HTMLHobbyist has been shared around this week. If you're interested, check it out!
Manuel has now interviewed 100 bloggers as part of the People and Blogs series, and writes about this experience
LibreOffice developer Mike has had his Microsoft account banned - I'm sure there's two sides to this tale but it sure looks bad on the MS side
David has drawn three panels that reflect the web as it was, the web as it is, and the web as it will (hopefully) be. Let's work to get there!

Infosec, sysadmin & code - tech stuff

This week I had to remotely upgrade a 12r2 hypervisor running a domain controller straight to server 2025 (do not pass go, do not collect $200), running on a single generator (no redundancy). There is a failed disk in the array to boot. Talk about risk! It worked out though. Now I just need the replacement drive to arrive to the site...

Hacking used to be done just because - it was for fun, for curiosity. Make something do something it wasn't intended to do. It is of course still like this - case in point, how about hacking a washing machine?
In the spirit of making something do something it isn't supposed to do, here's a twist on that. Taking software designed to be as fast as feasible, and making it as slow as possible? Why? Why not! Here's Jacob keeping themselves occupied by making Postgres reeeeaaaal slow - love it
Dating app Tea was breached recently. They stored info such as scans of ID and selfies, which has been plucked from the internet and shared around. So many fails here, *facepalm*
Pwn2Own has a $1,000,000 reward for WhatsApp exploits, and have detailed more info about the categories and rewards on the ZDI post
Google's Project Zero team are changing how they announce discoveries - they're adding in a 10 day annoucement that something has been found to their 90+30 days publication delay. Interesting idea!
An attempted bank heist was going to play out like an episode of Mr Robot with their use of a Raspberry Pi and interesting evasion technique

Bonus

The Virtual Moose - gaming related links and blog posts
CopyParty is a new-to-me file server which looks pretty cool actually. I haven't tried it yet as it was just shared on the 32bit.cafe discord earlier today, but going from this new youtube video alone it looks... pretty darn good.

Scraps #6

2025-07-25

Scraps #6

A bunch of scrappy notes from 2025-07-18 to 2025-07-25, posted on Friday 25th of July 2025 at 15:00

What are the haps?

We're rushing through July and things aren't slowing down. The weather here is... variable, shall we say. Gone are the days of consistency, we're getting high winds, blazing sun, heavy rain, calm overcast skies and lightning in a single day.

It's unreliable! But hey, at least I've got the consistently high quality of the human web to keep me feeling positive, and the consistently poor state of information security to keep me feeling negative. They balance out, right?

Spotlight

I have had the legendary Pierre Carrier's website bookmarked for many moons, and keep coming across his awesome stuff. He just posted that he has, via xmit.dev, launched Let It Be Known, which is a service that offers free subdomains for anyone that wants 'em, and it's super easy to manage to boot. There's another thing from him down in the Tech section but I wanted to spotlight libk.org and encourage you to check out his website and writing because he is top tier
Luke emailed me about his new /blank page, a delightfully blank page (except for the wonderful addition of some flowers) which I have added to my Intentionally Left Blank post!

Indieweb, Fediverse & Social Media - people stuff

My list of posts to read and websites to browse grows faster than I can consume them. At this rate I'm going to need to employ a content curator!

Will has a chop - a personal seal - that is used to stamp art he creates. But he had a thought... Why can't this apply to digital stuff, too?
Moderating a community hard work, as highlighted by Mark. Support your mastodon instance team if you can!
The privacy of Firefox has been a given for a long time, perhaps you shouldn't trust it though? Evan doesn't think so
David thinks people should surf the web again! You know, instead of living inside the corporate web. And he has three quick guidelines to make it a more enjoyable and meaningful experience
@hyde has a great series of interviews called Over/Under, where he seeks out the opinions of a specific web denizen regarding particular things. This time around he's asked Elizabeth Tai about digital gardens, social media, rss, books and tea
Alan Levine gets nostalgic for one of the earliest html tutorials on the web, something he himself put together back in 1994!
And on internet nostalgia, who still uses text based (ascii) smileys o.O ? I do :D and so does Adële!

Infosec, sysadmin & code - tech stuff

It's been a busy week on the tech front, with some pretty significant infosec-related events.

MDN (Mozilla development network) celebrates 20 years with cake, a tradition from browser vendors during the nostalgic early Firefox days
Pierre (that brainbox from today's spotlight) has been digging into mouse latency recently. He then dug into it some more, which included building a tool to get even better data, and has gotten deep into USB land.
Some SharePoint admins struggled to sleep over the weekend as ToolShell was used to compromise on prem instances across the internet
An outsourced, third party tech support org allowed credential resets without verifying identity. Yikes.
I was playing around with some HTML & CSS stuff, trying to prevent LLMs from scraping website content for an upcoming post the other day. I discussed some of the experiments on the 32bit.cafe discord server and Lera took an idea that emerged and built an online obfuscator tool which automates this for you!
When it comes to pissing off LLM scrapers, @ache has written up how to build and serve a HTML zip bomb
Google launches OSS Rebuild, a project that builds open source packages and compares the resulting resource with the published one, enabling automated confidence that a package is what it says it is
Using OSINT, researchers have put together the structure of a Russian SIGINT unit, using their commemorative badges
Of course we can't go a week without hardcoded creds in a widely used product, can we? This week it's HPE Access Points
I love peeking behind the curtain of a big organisations technical infrastructure. Netflix has just posted part 1 of how they got live TV to work
Yorick is dealing with the frustratingly loose HTTP spec

That's Scraps #6 concluded for this week. Keep posting awesome stuff, peeps!

Scraps #5

2025-07-18

Scraps #5

A bunch of scrappy notes from 2025-07-11 to 2025-07-18, posted on Friday 18th of July 2025 at 15:20

Scrap number five, alive! Happy Friyay to all, but especially for those of us with a work or school week that ends on a Friday.

It's been a busy week. I honestly thought this would be the week I didn't get Scraps out, but here it is, and it's a big one!

Thank you to my subscribers, patrons, ko-fi donators, the mafia, and to the venture capital funders that I've sold out to for allowing me to automate all this with the AGI of the week. The previous sentence is entirely false.

Oh, whilst I'm here, are you aware of any indieweb/smallweb/humanweb podcasts? If so, please tell me about them! I would like to know what's out there already ^{<span class="hide-me">before I seriously consider publishing my own scrappy podcast</span>}!

Let's get on with an entirely human (if I can be called that?) curated list of just SOME of the cool stuff I've read over the last week:

Spotlight

That's right, TWO in the spotlight! Shush, I make the rules here.

Blaugust is coming!
Michael emailed me to share their linkshare posts and I enjoyed them so much I'm sharing it on with anyone who doesn't yet have the site bookmarked or added to their feed reader! Thank you for your email :)

Indieweb, Fediverse & Social Media - people stuff

The indieweb has been alight with stuff and the quality never disappoints. To be honest, I could have filled this section with so much more but I have loads of posts and articles still on my reading list to get through! People have been busy typing stuff and I'm here for it.

Check out this CSS blur image technique (thx to @slightlyoff for posting about this!)
What's that? You want more awesome CSS stuff? How about this game of Tic Tac Toe, built in CSS? Yes, that's right, there's no HTML involved at all! (Only works on desktop browsers!)
John has redesigned their site and written a post detailing it and some of the decisions behind it - If I may, it's lookin' good!
Evan has written a post about how they write software quickly - I'm not a programmer *at all* but it's great to read stuff like this, how the pro's do it. Inevitably there are lessons to be learned from people experienced in or masters of their craft
Mozilla is trying something new, asking the community directly what it wants from the browser in the future so if you are so inclined, this may be your opportunity to encourage Mozilla to not destroy firefox and encourage them to work on useful stuff instead of the, let's say... less useful stuff we've seen over the years. This asking the community thing... is a new idea? Hmm. (This should perhaps go in the tech section below but I'm putting it here because it's asking humans about what humans want from the browser)
I love that there are publications about this web we enjoy and weave - Here's another magazine about it!
The accelerated use of LLMs in every nook of technology is changing society akin to how the power loom in the hands of those with power caused instability
Tom writes about LLM inevitabilism which is helping to pave over individualism and human creativity on the way to the future that capitalists want
Saint has written a post about a peeve they have regarding the indieweb - I'm guilty of this but also have the same peeve! I must do better.

Infosec, sysadmin & code - tech stuff

Special thanks this week go to energy drinks for keeping my brain switched on during another infosec-heavy week.

haetae on the 32bit.cafe discord server shared graphite, a free online graphics editor which is already pretty cool yet still only in alpha! Oh and it's open source!
mcdonalds kept 64 million job applications locked securely behind the password '123456'
Back in 2023 Derin found a bypass to Chrome's MV3 "oh you can't use an adblocker anymore because $$$" feature which would have allowed for adblockers to continue working (for a few days, probably) - whilst not worthy of a reward nor is it highly technical, it just goes to show that yes, there is often a way around a limitation. Especially when old legacy code is involved
Keeping track of software End of Life dates can be painful - Easy, Cheap, Good - pick two. However one neat site that I reference pretty frequently is endoflife.date
In yet another example of incompetence from the current admin of the USA, a DOGE (read: *dodgy*) employee "published a private key that allowed anyone to interact directly with more than four dozen large language models (LLMs) developed by [..] xAI"
AI bug bounty slop is overwhelming open source projects, including curl. What's the solution here? I've seen suggestions including requiring video evidence, a token payment that is refunded upon valid submission, and more, but each has tradeoffs. Are those worth it?
Crawling 1 billion pages in just over 24 hours is possible to do cheaply in 2025, but it has some interesting considerations to take into account

Bonus

I am pondering whether to have a dedicated section for games and other categories, or keep a bonus section for stuff that doesn't fit into the Tech or Human categories (which already overlap a bunch!)

This week we're feeling inspired, I strongly encourage you to check out each of these links, if you are so inclined!

The ever inspirational and genius Ben Akrin reflects on 10 years being off grid
Dan Hollick is building a reference manual that describes how computers work, in an incredibly detailed and beautiful way. The first part is out, How does a screen work? It's a thing of beauty!
I love reading incident reports of technical outages and exploits. I've just learned that wikimedia publishes their own incident reports at wikitech.wikimedia.org
When it comes to FIRE (Financial Independance, Retire Early), I'm all about the spreadsheets (and clearly the daydreaming about it is addictive as it's super unlikely I'll ever get there :'). It's probably a little unhealthy, how closely I monitor our finances at home. Kyle did the same, but wanted better. From humble beginnings to success - Kyle had an idea, a financial independence planning app that was better than the rest. So he built it. He's just hit $1m yearly recurring revenue and has written a bit about it. I enjoy reading success stories like this, being able to create something and get an income from it is a dream of mine which feels out of reach. He has this advice: Whether you’re building a business, just getting started with investing, or working toward financial independence, it’s often the small, consistent actions that compound over time. Just like dollar-cost averaging into index funds, showing up consistently to improve your craft can produce surprisingly powerful results on your path toward a better future. ^{(Note: this is not a sponsorship or advert! I hadn't actually heard of Projection Lab until I saw this blog post linked by someone. I just liked the success story!)}
Although a different industry, this is similar in nature to that finance app blog post above. Here's a long youtube video that goes through how Expedition 33 came to be, and it's a bit of a tale to be sure! We've got a small team creating a game bigger in scope that teams of thousands can produce, we've got coincidence, luck, skill and passion, culminating it what will probably be game of the year! Though I don't know that, because I haven't played it yet... One day I'll save enough to buy a modern gaming machine :D

That's it for Scrap #5! The fifth edition? Volume? Zine? Whatever, it's Scraps. It is supposed to be scrappy and inconsistent. The only consistent is the quality of content that you lot keep putting out into the world! So thanks for that!

Do you have a website or blog? share it with me!

Scraps #4

2025-07-11

Scraps #4

A bunch of scrappy notes from 2025-07-04 to 2025-07-11, posted on Friday 11th of July 2025 at 21:40

We're four Scraps in! Momentum!

To celebrate this audacious occasion, I've created a dedicated /scraps slashpage AND a dedicated scraps RSS feed, which you can find listed on the new /feeds page!

I've also changed the scrap title be an incrementing number instead of the date it's posted. Yay or nay? Or perhaps doing something like 25-28 ([year]-[week number])? Hrm...

Whilst I ponder this, let's get right into it.

Spotlight

Call for content! @xandra is looking for content for the next issue of good internet magazine - do you want to contribute?

Indieweb, Fediverse & Social Media - people stuff

Hey, have you seen those, uh, what are they called? You know, down on that small h2o ocean planet with the plastic pollution and melting ice caps? Come on you know, the ones going through an extinction level event with massively reduced biological diversity, who move metal with explosions and think it's a good idea...? Yes! Humans, that's it! Have you seen what a small subset of one very particular niche of them has been up to this week? No? Check it out:

Louie thinks the web is so cool. I agree, and I'm not alone, Kai thinks so too! The secret is to find the people, not the products or robots :)
On that note, The indieweb has got ReadBeanIceCream down. Down for more, that is!
It seems that for ReadBeanIceCream, "more" involves detailing what RSS feeds are all about. Check out this great guide on RSS
RSS feeds have a long history, relative to most internet-based tech. It's not the only thing with history though - A few folks have been looking back through time at the evolution of their websites:

John travels back in time and looks through the websites he's had since starting back in the 90s(!)
10 years is a long time too, Murray has looked back over the decade and explored the evolution of theAdhocracy.co.uk
Ruben has been posting for 1 year now. That's not as long as the others above, but it is a grander achievement in isolation in my opinion. The first post to your site is often the hardest, but keeping that momentum for a year? That takes dedication, passion, care and effort. Ruben has celebrated this milestone with a thank you post, aimed at the human web, filled with links to fantastic sites you should check out! I am honoured to be included in the post. Ruben, thank you for making the human web what it is today! I look forward to the next year and beyond!

If you're all kinds of inspired by those people and what they've created, perhaps you want to make your own site? well you're in luck, because Joe has been reminded of a fantastic resource for learning html!
Ah, HTML, what a delight. Did you know that August 2nd is HTML day? And did you know that there are events that happen around the world to celebrate it and spread the hypertext-based joy? HTML events?! Well, now you know!
And here's another important day: The Electronic Frontier Foundation has celebrated its 35th birthday this week

Infosec, sysadmin & code - tech stuff

Beep you say? Well to you I say, boop.

WatchTowr throws another great post detailing the latest Citrix vuln. Déjà vu?
Staying with WatchTowr, they've published another post detailing a pre-auth SQLi which leads to RCE on the FortiWeb Fabric Connector. Y'know, the thing that ties Fortinet security things together and consolidates them. That thing. Sigh.
Adrian has taken an LLMs hallucinations about a feature that SoundSlice's music sheet scanner doesn't have and created that feature to fulfill a demand in the market - pretty neat idea
A bunch of browser extensions have been identified which started out seemingly legit, but once popular got infected by malware via an update

Bonus

Whatever you do, do not tease the sheep.

Ben is living a dream, and just the other day had another magical moment where he saw a deer and its fawn
Check out these sweet Pokémon card effects made with CSS! They're not recent, but I've only just seen them. They look so great, and just with CSS?! Awesome.
If you enjoy reading Scraps, have you considered ...reading Scraps? Yes, I am of course not original, as Alex has been posting Sunday Scraps for nearly 100 editions! I love finding scrappy little linkdumps. If you have one you post yourself, share it with me!

Scraps from 2025-06-27 to 2025-07-04

2025-07-04

Scraps from 2025-06-27 to 2025-07-04

Posted on Friday 4th of July 2025 at 22:15

The third scrap! Whoda ever thunk it'd reach the lofty heights of three editions? Not me, that's for sure.

This week, I'm happy to tell you that Scraps is fully sponsored by absolutely nobody and contains no product placement or adverts! Ain't that great?!

Once is once, twice is a coincidence, but thrice? Well now, that's a pattern. I guess I'm going to have to carve some time out this week to sort out a dedicated Scraps RSS feed, as well as /scraps slashpage. I mean, the header already links there and it 404's so I guess it needs to happen? I'll add it to my todo list!

As for your own todo list, perhaps peruse the presently provided posts post-haste? I don't know, you do you. BUT we do have some cool stuff to read this week!

Spotlight

small_cypress has started Small Web July - cutting out walled garden social media, the 'big web', and scrolling forever in the month of July

Indieweb, Fediverse & Social Media - people stuff

Because people are people too, y'know!?

With large language models still churning out a lot of slop, their integration into everything continues. What does this mean for the future of the web?
when the tech giants cut their connection to the web - with AI summaries and walled gardens - they freed us. There's little point farming backlinks or bowing to their demands now. And in their wake of destruction I see space to grow. So lets establish a small, human, sustainable web of independent sites. For ourselves and any friends that will join us. - Homestead the Web by @caolan
@elazar misses the internet
The old internet is still here - we've wrapped up June, and that means we get to take a look at the take two posts that have been written for June's Indieweb Carnival!
It's now July! New month means new Indieweb Carnival theme, and this time around it's totems hosted by Maxwell
The lack of self awareness of the wider web never ceases to amaze, Aram spotted this beautiful and disappointing piece of irony on The Verge
@Nina raised a good point... what happened to my Status option on IM applications? Sure there are some current implementations, but there are too few!

Infosec, sysadmin & code - tech stuff

By welcoming our robot overlords, you're actually just welcoming the billionaire who owns them. And that, to me, seems like a pretty shitty deal! Tech is still cool though - like all tools, they can be used or abused.

Speaking of cool tech, Tech Greatness The Internet Archive is expecting to archive their 1 trillionth page in October. To celebrate, they're holding a party and a live stream! Be there, or be square! ...or watch an archived copy afterwards I guess that's cool too.
689 Brother printers were in the news recently for having easily guessable passwords - Terence Eden speculates that they may therefore be illegal in the UK. Interesting thought!
Let's encrypt has now stopped email notifications - less infrastructure for them to manage, which is a good thing!
Staying with Let's Encrypt, they have now issued a cert for an IP address and will begin rolling this out to prod sometime this year
There's a new method to extract different content from the same .zip file, depending on the tool used to extract the files
Every public commit to GitHub is archived in GitHub Archive, including ones developers try to delete (because they contain secrets, for example) and you can easily extract them with this writeup and tool

Bonus

It's a good idea to bring ourselves out of technology and websites occasionally.

That hasn't happened this week, as I've been busy reading about game development! For no reason I tell you, no reason at all.

Two similar Dev logs from two different games were posted online recently, going over efficiency gains related to multi threading. Whilst I don't have the nuerons to fully understand each detail, they're nonetheless fascinating and I certainly appreciate a good, deep technical analysis of a problem. Here's the Arma 3 OpRep, and the Dyson Sphere Program post

Scraps from 2025-06-18 to 2025-06-27

2025-06-27

Scraps from 2025-06-18 to 2025-06-27

Posted on Friday 27th of June 2025 at 23:20

Last week was a poor week to start these scrappy little notes, because I've spent this week on vacation! Most of my infosec- and tech-related reading happens at work these days, so this edition is a little short on that front.

You'll be very glad to hear, if you haven't already, that Mike has returned to the throne with not one, not two, but three scrolls! What a relief, welcome back Mike! I can, after a single issue of Scraps, finally stop posting these :)

Wait, hold up. What's this? In the latest Scroll, Mike made a special mention of these scraps?! And LIKES it?! Well, dang.

Mike, thank you for the shout out and kind words. You've inspired a lot of what I do here on this site, and I share your opinion about human curated lists and the intentional decline/enshittification of search. The human touch is increasing in value and rarity on our ever-more LLM-driven web, so continue to publish I shall!

So, dear reader, if you're here for a scrappy collection of tangentially related and poorly organised links to stuff I found cool or interesting or worth sharing, read on. If you want something way better, check out Shellsharks' Scrolls (after ;)

Let's get the second Scrap going!

Spotlight

Xandra is at it again - she has reached version 1 on Riverton, a free browser based virtual pet and ranch simulation game - go check it out!

Indieweb, Fediverse & Social Media - people stuff

The human side of the web - some say the best side and I agree with them darn it.

If you're a fan of the fediverse, Jeff Sikes has your merchandise options covered with this awesome list
Jelloeater has consuming loadsa blog content down to an art, they write about the process here. Some management around this process would be useful for me since starting these scraps, and there's plenty of ideas for me in this post
One of the blogs I check every day, rachelbythebay, has been quiet of late. However, Rachel just posted a neat little tool, a rollover calculator which lets you determine the source of some of those magic numbers which seem to appear everywhere in tech for some niche reason
There are three things a man must do before he dies: plant a tree, father a child, and write a book. -- ReadBeanIceCream posts about hearing this quote and the realisation it unlocked within. It's a great read. Now, where's that book draft I wrote a decade ago...?
That reminds me, June's indieweb carnival prompt is "take two" by Nick. I hope you post! (And I hope I do, too!)
Speaking of indieweb events, this month is Junited - Ruben has shown his appreciation by listing some blog posts that interest him
There should be more events that encourage humans to do stuff, fight off the AI/LLM slop that is invading the web. But remember, you don't need an event to create something, whether it's written or drawn. And who cares if it's bad?! Bad art is GOOD now.
Publishing something is hard though, whether it's a book, a post, or artwork. Many of us find it difficult to post things online. SenFlyer writes about the fear of being seen.
Humans, we persist despite it all, and are still the best way to connect people, like this Mastodon thread by Andy Bell which connects freelancers, contractors and clients. Just like in the before-times! Ah, sweet nostalgia...
Nostalgia for the before-times is a powerful thing. I just learned about this project to make a youtube front end which looks like it came staright from 2009! Thanks to Jake for sharing this!
Time, and UI design, marches on, though. You may recall about 84 years ago (wait, it was only three weeks ago!?) Apple unveiled their new Liquid Glass UI. Well, it didn't take long before someone made it in CSS - only working in Chrome right now, mind.
Speaking of Liquid ~~Vista~~ Glass, Louie Mantia isn't sold on it, and I don't think many others are either... we'll see how it develops, I guess.

Infosec, sysadmin & code - tech stuff

When sysadmin is your job, you tend to switch off when you're on vacation. Which is where I've been for over a week! So we're a little short in this section this time around.

Cool tool: Nuclei - A free, open source, easily customisable, high performance vulnerability scanner. I've only just heard of this but I had a little play with it today and it looks pretty sweet.

Bonus

Some extra stuff. Why? I'll tell you why! Because, that's why!

Nexus Mods has been sold to a Venture Capital firm and let's be honest, that rarely goes well. Mod creator Leilukin doesn't hold out much hope for Nexus Mods to get better thanks to this.
If you question why you recycle when a hundred private jets attend bezos wedding, Thomas has the answer
.PNG is back - not that it went anywhere really! A spec update has arrived and... it looks pretty good actually.
And finally, here are a few more blogrolls for your consumption:

Light on the tech and infosec side this week. What, you wanted consistency in these scrappy little roundups? Oh.. you did... okay, I'll do better. Next time :) Until then, if you have any suggestions, feedback, wishes, dreams, homemade cola recipies, or bad jokes, please do let me know.

Scraps from mid May-ish to 2025-06-18

2025-06-18

Scraps from mid May-ish to 2025-06-18

Posted on Wednesday 18th of June 2025 at 23:00

As many of you will know, Mike Sass (shellsharks) runs an amazing "weekly newsletter / link roundup / information digest at the intersection of the IndieWeb and the Fediverse, with a splash of Cybersecurity stuff" called Scrolls.

Unfortunately for whatever reason, this hasn't been published for a month now. Hope you're doing alright, Mike!

In the spirit of "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery", I've decided over the last few days to have a little go at doing my own version. It's not anywhere near as fancy or comprehensive as Mike's esteemed Scrolls. It's more like a patchwork collection of links and notes. Little... Scraps...?

I don't know how often I'll post these, whether they'll change format, and I'll probably stop if and when Scrolls returns to the throne (I'm just keeping the seat warm after all.) With any luck I'll get something out somewhat frequently in the meantime. What's that? What's my schedule? Schedule Schmedule! (but fr it'll probably be on a Friday I guess? What do you think?)

If you have any suggestions, criticisms, cool links or anything else, feel free to say /hello.

Anyway, onwards and downwards!

Spotlight

mononoir has been posting loads of their awesome mspaint art, check it out. It's blowing my mind!

Indieweb, Fediverse & Social Media - people stuff

A collection about the humans that use the technology - cool things they've done, opinions, studies, etc.

Xandra of 32bit.cafe fame has launched the Good Internet Magazine and it looks amazing! I really need to order one of these!
The Internet Phone Book also launched! It is a collection of personal websites, each of which has been assigned a 'phone number' allowing you to discover, peruse and explore them by dialing on the site. The physical book looks so great!
Matrix is suffering from capitalism and Alexia believes its future might not look so bright. However, there are some open alternatives. They could each use donations though, including Matrix
Robert Kingett respects his beta readers, but not when they disrespect his work and feed his content into an LLM
Communicating securely is more important than ever, and this is especially true in some parts of the world. Cory has got your secure chat needs sorted, with, of course, the Signal app
If you're one of the many individuals who live in the space in the venn diagram where 3D printing enthusiasts and fediverse enthusiasts overlap, then rejoice! For 3dprint.social is now live - a 3d print hosting fediverse instance, built on manyfold (which you can use if you wish to self host instead!)
In a totally expected yet still sigh-worthy development, Social Media is now the main source of news for people, according to the Reuters Institute, with watching video content being preferred to reading text. Traditional news outlets are generally biased of course, and undoubtedly influence was exerted on communities decades ago ('propaganda') but The Algorithm ramps this up to the extreme, and the big personalities will have their own influences and agendas without any journalistic standards or oversight to keep a lid on extreme corruption and falsehoods. This can't go wrong... right?
But not all social media is bad - mastodon has been recognised as a 'Digital Public Good'
LMM tools produce code, but for Miguel it's not worth it. At least, not right now anyway. David goes on to share his opinion that LMMs are replacing human interns' work in a way that's a bigger resource drain than simply training a human intern
In related news, a small study shows that brain work less when LMM used four riting fings. Which makes sense, the brain is like a muscle and LLMs ease the burden in some cases where the human outsources learning to it
Benjamin has readers, even though that wasn't what he set out to do originally. If you write, someone will read it, but writing for yourself first is a great tactic for building momentum

Infosec, sysadmin & code - tech stuff

Technology itself is also interesting to me! Here's some neat stuff I've come across.

If you're looking for a way to steal data from a company, why not just send an email and ask for it? With any luck, the email will be parsed by Copilot, which will follow your instructions and ye shall receive!
Google Cloud IAM went down and took a whole load of other stuff with it - Yes, the internet is still a precarious stack of duct tape, glue and hopes & prayers

Google's Incident Report on the above

Programmers write or encounter bugs all the time - Henrik logs them all and has reviewed the last 9 years worth to see what lessons can be learned
LibreOffice joins the "End of 10" conversation and heartily recommends any Windows users to consider switching to Linux + LibreOffice instead of potentially needing to dispose of a perfectly fine device just to use Windows 11. And I must say, I agree!
Europe-wide takedown hits longest-standing dark web drug market, Archetyp Market, which stood the test of time operating for over 5 years. Crime doesn't pay! For more than 5 years anyway.
Neat infosec tool: Subdomain takeover with second-order
If you're looking for a PoC for cve-2025-33073, here you go!
Long before the internet, some phone networks were hackable by playing a single tone at 2600Hz. Whistled (by a human!) into a phone, it could grant you unrestricted access. Do you have the vocal chops to be an old-school phone phreak?

Bonus stuff

APOD is 30 years old! Here's to 30 more years of awesome daily pictures!
First images of the south pole of the Sun, which is pretty cool if you ask me
The SNES Development Game Jam is now running, until the 9th September!

That's all for now. I've missed countless awesome things but this has been a bit of a test to see if it's something I could put together once let alone regularly. The next scrap (if any?) will contain things from this point in time onwards and should be easier to keep up to date!

As mentioned earlier, if you have any suggestions, feedback, wishes, dreams, homemade cola recipies, or bad jokes, please do let me know!