cmart's Bleats

Compact walking-oriented streetscapes, with no setbacks and block buildings that share walls with each other, can feel inviting and humane. But in the US it became illegal to build new places like this, so our supply of century-old stuff is all we have for the foreseeable future. It’s silly to imagine time-traveling back to the 1920s and exhorting property developers to make more of this while you can. But what could we do more of today that will be scarce and appreciated in the far future? (First answer that comes to mind: collecting good writing that we are 100% certain was authored by a human, and keeping it in way that carries this assurance forward.)

Dumb startup idea: rent an old shipping store with many cubby holes or lock boxes. The product you sell is Tech Vacations. Customer brings in all their devices, leaves them in a box, and receives a loaner ’emergency phone’ that can only call 911 (and perhaps a few pre-programmed emergency contacts). No browser, no texting, no apps. The vacationer gets to enjoy a day or a weekend free from notifications and temptations to scroll. Biggest cost is probably 24/7 security for the store full of customers’ phones.

How much time do dogs spend uncomfortably needing to poop? I expect many humans would agree with this statement: “If I need to wait more than a few minutes for a place where I can poop, it’s often uncomfortable and sometimes painful.” It seems reasonable that other mammals would have a similar experience. Given that many/most dogs spend at least part of the day alone, with the sanctioned poop spot behind a door they cannot open without help from a presently-absent human, are these dogs having a good time? (Corollary, why don’t we give dogs litter boxes?)

When computering outside the home, instead of a cafe, consider a counter-service restaurant with booths. You get a larger table surface, a more comfy seat, generally better food options, and later open hours than a typical cafe. Counter service means the staff don’t bother you every few minutes and aren’t likely to care how long you stay.

After noticing that browsers don’t have a ‘make this tab dumb and static’ button, I found SingleFile: a Mozilla-recommended extension that gets very close. It builds a single HTML file capturing a tab’s complete rendered DOM (including images) and writes it to the downloads folder. If you enable the “open saved pages in a new tab” option, you see the static page as soon as it’s saved. At first I didn’t like the idea of many HTML files cluttering my downloads folder, but then I realized this “exhaust” doubles as a simple, zero-infra web archive and search engine! Just search your downloads folder.

Firefox all major browsers don’t seem to have a mechanism to stop execution of scripts in a tab while allowing continued scrolling of already-rendered content. You can pause execution in the debugger, but this fades content under an un-scrollable “Debugger paused” modal. The feature I want is: make this tab dumb and static. Similar use case as Reader View but more reliable (no fragile heuristics trying to identify the main content). Does the attention economy want this feature to not exist? I grant it would break lazy loading and infinite scrolling. Still worth having IMO.

Baaa! This is a bleat. Sometimes I want to put a few sentences on the internet without crowding out my longer, higher-effort posts, or having to think of a title. So, I made a new section for them. Bleats have a separate RSS feed from the main blog.