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Marcus Obst
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Every day:

(the to switch) is making people lonely. Convince anyone who isn't already a nerd to use signal doesn't work. And most people are not interesting enough for people to follow them. I know I'm not :D - not even the Kängeruh fans are switching.

Non-Reciprocal Content Dumping: A friend of mine sends me funny or weird videos without any context. No reaction when I respond, maybe another video without context a few hours later.

Interestingly, some people have already installed and use it with a few friends, but they turn off notifications. At least that's what I think is happening, because I get a reply only on the weekend, when they check their other apps. Who knows.

When I deleted my account to be available only via iMessage, Messenger, , Telegram, Instagram, etc., I exchanged even fewer messages with my friends than before when I was using WhatsApp. I'm not sure what that's supposed to tell me.

is a solid email client, but as much as I was anticipating the new version and especially the cards view for the email listing, it's just a UI/UX nightmare. Why not copy an existing UI? Anyway, now I'm looking at Spark Mail and Canary Mail and shudder at the thought of subscribing to an email client. (My web host's webmail client is an abomination!!!)

Been using forever — tons of test scripts and API setups, even worked in a team once. While tidying up, I removed my old teammate and then tried to remove myself from the team too.
Well, looks like I left postman completely and deleted everything on my way out.
I’ll blame the confusing UI (not myself reading the notices) and the creep of new features I never read up on since I was just using the basic functions.

Two of the most annoying podcasts on 1.75 x speed are Hard Fork and Syntax.fm. sorry. But I still listen, at least to Syntax.

I gave up on that. I accept that I like to waste time with trying our obsidian plugins, I accept that I don't find most of my notes inspiring or useful, I accept that if I thought I've written something down that I won't find it again. And I accept that these notes and documentation won't help me or anybody else to survive this stupid life. It's just a way to distract myself and I lack the urge of telling more than 3 people about it (3 is about the number of people who will see this stupid post)

Every Second Brain setup tutorial strikes me as just that, configuring a piece of software, hoping it will unlock some hidden meaning in oneself thought- and note-taking process.

> The person using Claude to analyze their weekly logs for “productivity leaks” has found a sophisticated new way to avoid doing the thing in favor of doing the things about the thing.

mastodon.social/@Daojoan/11592

Trying out Beeper chat app again and according to the task manager it's much leaner than the Ferdium Electron app that I used so far.
Works on the phone as well as on the desktop (I think it's the same base... is it a Tauri app?)
blog.beeper.com/2025/07/16/the

🎬 Caught Stealing

I used MS Power Automate to build some SharePoint intranet app with an external API ( related ;-)). And I understand the use cases of PA and who it was made for, but it's such a drag to use it, to run into all these limitations, these half-assed functions and formatting options. It's crazy.
I haven't tried n8n yet, but here is a good comparison: techpoint.africa/guide/n8n-vs-

I use that extension to summarize Perplexety.ai's discovery news summarizations. - It's pure insanity, I know...

abogen - an unbelievable piece of software to turn text ( ) into audio. I tried elevenreader to listen to a book that's only available as text, but it's a subscription service yaddayadda (it works well though). But abogen let's me create an audiobook in hours, locally. Given, even the most natural-sounding AI voices still sound sterile if you listen for hours.

github.com/denizsafak/abogen

Why isn't all audio encoded as ? At least offer an opus-only feed. There are 120 MB 320 kbps voice only audio files out there that could be a 30 MB opus file. Save space and bandwidth!

5. let AI script my own extension that uses OpenRouter models
6. find out Chrome and Firefox Manifest v3 extensions are not necessarily compatible? (background worker something something not in Firefox)
7. let AI write the prompt for summarize a page
8. Now I've got my first quick and dirty, configurable, OpenRouter-driven sidebar extension for Chrome.

1. find a version of the firefox extension on @internetarchive (web.archive.org/web/2025061210) - the xpi is archived and you can download it!

2. unzip and make sense of the minified source code. This in-depth review helped a lot: matduggan.com/review-of-orbit-

3. burn through a bunch of tokens to let AI make sense of how to replace the  `https:// orbitbymozilla .com` calls with calls.

4. there was too much going on and I scrapped that thing

Mozilla's Orbit Summarizer was a short lived service for to summarize websites. It was quite helpful in my option. Unfortunately they shut it down and I couldn't find anything to replace it with (2 click summarizer, ideally Bring-Your-Own-OpenRouter-Key - the extensions I found were useless). Here is what I attempted to revive it for myself:

The other day I revived my Cleo app. It's a PWA (add to homescreen in ios) that lets you scroll through a stream of cat pictures and ♥️ them. Those are saved in the browser and has import and export functionality. It's a sweet distraction from the daily doom scroll. And everything is local ()! Check it out if you like: cleo.mfru.it/

I googled the error, found out about recent incompatibilities of mutagen and newer docker versions as well as the merger of mutagen with docker desktop which is now only available via subscriptions.
Then I checked out the ddev website that offers a windows installer of ddev in wsl with a promise to set it up in under 10 minutes (and it really works!)

Conclusion:
1. confirmation of this study (sort of) metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early
2. know your stuff and
3. yet I learned a lot in the process...

I let cursor.ai agent mode install ddev for me, here is how it went down:
- created a script with rules and where to install what
- let the agent do its thing (in the beginning I approved everything, then hands off)
- after 1 hour I had a working dev environment in wsl and a snappy laravel app thanks to mutagen.
- next day I installed Docker Desktop as recommended and nothing worked.
- burnt some tokens, agent only came up with the solution to disable mutagen (I need the speed and convenience).

Horseflies don’t bother with anesthesia, they just fuck you up.

An incredible dark week at the best time of the year.

For a fun project, I thought I look how is doing things. It was intriguing at first, but the docs weren't complete and I got stuck and lost interest. Today I picked up where I left, saw that leafphp 4.x is out, and I completely failed to get that thing updated and running. Partially it's my fault, my dev environment is still stuck at PHP 8.0. But the docs are still not clear on how to do certain things.
I gave up and moved back to the familiar and much more resilient .

Some good advice. Keep producing and publishing, even if there's no initial response, as your work may gain recognition in the future. (im still stumbling over old geocities website[1] with interesting and original content)

jeetmehta.com/posts/thrive-in-

[1] via archive.org

When Google Reader went away aeons ago, I bought a lifetime license of to keep consuming my feeds. But yesterday I pulled the plug and moved to a (and lire on iOS) and holy moly - this is so much more advanced than feedly. Just the fact that I can have a newsfeed of pages that don't have a rss feed (as long as the website delivers server-rendered html) is awesome! Same for full feed content, all the filters and so on. byeeeeeee feedly.

freshrss.org/

providers tell you "you might be legally on the hook with this $gshrjjajakkakkllds session cookie, but fear not here is our all in one solution, free for 15 pages and 100 sessions, if you need more it's 50 EUR per Domain incl. 3500 pages" - a fucking subscription for something that adds no - non - zero value. Just to pretend you care about cookies/privacy while the regular visitor doesn't give a shit. Tracking cookies have to be disabled by default anyway. Why bother?

I'm about to lose my mind with this consent banner bullshit. Is there a legitimate user who ever read, understood and requested their consent data later? Who is this for?
I understand third-party-tracking is/was a problem. I just want to offer a functional website without trying to figure out if is allowed or not because the data privacy officers' bullshit cookie scanner got presented with some obscure Cloudflare load balancer cookie.

It’s funny cause it’s true.

Happy nu yeah from the internet

Also got installed and it's very impressive. Also a good way to get a sense how works. Mapping paths and all the jazz.

Marcus Obst
GĂźterweg 89b
09474 Crottendorf
Germany

+49 37344 133407
info@marcus-obst.de