Scraps #5
A bunch of scrappy notes from 2025-07-11 to 2025-07-18, posted on
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!