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Marcus Obst
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Micro.blog

Everyone criticizes big-tech social media for their addictive algorithmic feeds, which is fair. But being a nobody in a fragmented, decentralized space like Mastodon with 0–15 followers is its own void. I check in, scroll until I see posts from days ago, and move on. These days I mainly use it as an interface for posting to my microblog/bookmark feed on my website. That’s good enough. It’s the PESOS (Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site) principle. indieweb.org/PESOS

's Comet browser slowly became my window into the world of AI productivity hallucinations. I just found out that Perplexity also has something like Artifacts in Claude (or Canvas in ChatGPT or Pages in CoPilot). I think that's really cool. I don't know where this all leads us, but I'm oscillating between skepticism and the delusional euphoria of creating something in 3 hours instead of 3 days.

Had to rework a long report into an article that paralyzed me, so I turned to AI with a transcript that included a few possible options for how to structure it.
: Here is what you do, then do this and that and change this to that, and if you need a short report card, just let me know blablbls
: I split the report in three separate documents based on your conversation in the transcript.

While ChatGPT overwhelmed me with more text and options, Claude just did the thing.

The Generalist Dev Pivot: Breadth Over Depth

Developers focus will need to shift upwards, onto software architecture, business analysis and the AI tools themselves ... this shift comes the need for a breadth of knowledge rather than a depth of knowledge. Specialist developers who continue to focus narrowly on just one framework / platform will slowly lose their knowledge monopoly to a machine that never sleeps, doesn't take coffee breaks and doesn't charge for overtime.

dodgycoder.net/2026/03/the-gre

Filtering out stuff from popular social media sites is erste BĂźrgerpflicht!
This is quite good and better than the outdated UserScripts that are floating around.

socialfocus.app/

It occurred to me why I don't like traditional MS Office apps. I've never worked in an office!
Now that I have to work more with M365 I can see the criticism, and I can see that MS is moving away from the office/print-on-paper paradigms as well. With MS Loop, they built a usable Notion/block editor clone that is not too bad. I'm not sure if plain text/markdown is the answer, but what else can a markdown editor argue for?

ia.net/topics/trapped-in-ms-of

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/

Marcus Obst
GĂźterweg 89b
09474 Crottendorf
Germany

+49 37344 133407
info@marcus-obst.de