Well, I officially have 2 users on Teddy Diary – myself and my wife 😂. She excitedly asked if she could also use the app after I shared the weekly summaries and entry suggestion/prompt.
Artist,
Linux user,
programmer,
lifelong learner.
/notes
Notes. Random thoughts, ideas, links, musings, short and unstructured.
We may be going home this year )‘(
I was inspired by the consistent habit of Theodore Roosevelt to log his daily events in a pocket diary and so I have built, for myself, a simple Rails app to do just that. To offset the slight inconvenience a digital version has over simply carrying a notebook around (as I already often do), this version will gently nag me when I do not enter anything for the daily entry. Additionally I get a weekly summary outlining key events, missed opportunities, and some more gentle nudging around goals and actions, which are generated by a locally hosted LLM running on Ollama. I am calling it “Teddy Diary”.
The intention is not to reflect, or to vent. It is write facts only, to focus on the verbs (met, walked, wrote, read), and to track effort, not outcomes, just as Mr. Roosevelt himself did.
Currently I exist in a strange place where I know a thing, but cannot explain said thing deeply and technically. Frustrating. Perhaps too much embodied cognition, not enough dialogue, not enough discourse.
The good news is that this a learnable skill. Something to practice.
I am reading too much about 19th century men who had a gift for speech. They were built different. I am built from passive consumption of soundbites and infotainment.
Anyway. Lots of thinking about, thinking, and a lot of thinking about speaking.
Personal computers have become too good and that is why there is a powerful effort by big tech to take that away.
Why own when you can rent? Why freedom when you can “walled garden”?
The Internet is awesome. It’s the web that sucks.
The Firekeeper doing a little spin when you use certain emotes is the most adorable shit I have ever seen in any fromsoftware game. 10/10 darksouls 3 is the best game.
The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own.
~ Epictetus, Discourses, 2.5.4-5
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition
Cory Doctorow delivered a speech entitled “A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet” for 39C3, the 39th Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg, Germany.
The door is open a crack, the wind is blowing, the post-American internet is upon us: a new, good internet that delivers all the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the ease of use of Web 2.0 so that our normie friends can use it, too.
Fuck yeah let’s go!