Les Orchard <me@lmorchard.com>

At its core, What.CD was much more than a torrent tracker—it was a community of dedicated music fans volunteering their time, effort, and knowledge to create a labor of love. While the internet has opened up new doors for musicians, the increasing corporatization and algorithmic takeover of online spaces has done irreparable damage to organic music discovery and independent communities. Rather than bringing about the financial stability that was supposedly impeded by piracy, the recording industry has offered meager artist payouts and a product with a sterilized user interface. Nearly ten years since their unexpected goodbye, the magical feeling of logging in to What.CD has yet to be replicated by any streaming service. Though my days of stealing music are well in the past, it’s clear that musicians are still being stolen from.

We are entering the era of Personal Software. This is software written for an audience of one. It’s an application or a script built to solve a specific problem for a specific person, with no immediate intention of scaling, monetizing, or even sharing.

I love that this might be the last crosscut sled I may ever need to build, because I can replace all the parts that get chewed up over time by saw blades. And I love that this guy from YouTube or other woodworkers might dream up any number of entirely new jigs that I could also plop into the sled someday.

That, I’ve come to think, is the sharpest frame available for what AI is doing to software. Anyone can build now. That is not the same as everyone building something that lasts. The distance between those two sentences is the subject of this essay.

"Hardcore" and "easy" IndieWeb aren't two camps you have to pick a side of. No, there are rungs on the ladder, and most people need to climb it, rather than getting dropped on whichever rung feels most ideologically pure and getting told to figure out the rest.

A docker job scheduler (aka. crontab for docker)

I found the upload of the xbox one controller side panels (side rails?) and faceplate so I decided to put them here for others to find as well. Enjoy!

So, how does somebody work on themself in a safe, supportive environment with some level of external guidance and supervision? Yup. That sounds a lot like therapy. And agents know what it means to go to therapy and work on themselves. They know what to expect and how to engage. The Therapist is implemented as a standalone subagent inside Sen.

This core reconstructs the original machine from Atari's schematics. It pairs that hardware with an ultra high performance vector renderer and a complete CRT-effects pipeline for high-resolution MiSTer output.

Today, we’re excited to announce the open-source release of Microsoft Comic Chat, the chat client that automatically turned conversations within Internet Relay Chat (IRC) into comic panels featuring illustrated characters, speech bubbles, and expressions, and helped introduce the world to a little font called Comic Sans.