Henry Catalini Smith

Democracy Kicks Ass

Contrasting the sense of helplessness about Microsoft's agenda for GitHub with the community-led democracy of Codeberg.

Notes from three months without carrying a smartphone

Got a Nokia 2660 for my birthday a few months back. Looks like this.

Nine Nine Six

Life after streaming

Been a lot of buzz about getting off Spotify due to the military industrial profiteering. It’s fair enough, but I’d like to encourage people to treat it as an opportunity to upgrade their relationship with music rather than just installing a competing app and trying to carry on as before. I uninstalled that app myself a while ago for other reasons and tried a bunch of the competitors for a while before coming to this conclusion. Maybe I can save you wasting a bunch of time pissing around with importing and exporting playlists over and over.

Voting on Codeberg's new privacy policy

Nobody cares about privacy policies. Except when they do.

Is metadata streaming really SEO armageddon?

I don't like some of these silly Rube Goldberg additions to Next.js either but I do think this one at least works as described.

Ubuntu 25.04 on a 2014 Macbook Air

The old MacBook Air I’d been running k8s on had become a bit problematic. The battery’s gone very bad, and newer versions of macOS have begun to run very poorly on it. After macOS Tahoe, Apple’s ending support for these old Intel Macs completely too. Time to make a change!

A GDPR bundled consent success story

A few weeks ago the Swedish government announced a new AI initiative called the Swedish AI Reform. It’s about providing free access to AI tools to Sweden’s non-profit and public sector workers. A decent idea, I thought, and my curiosity led me to click through and scope out the onboarding flow.

The Swan

Every summer in Malmö a family of swans nests on the canal. Watching the parent swans chase boats full of drunk tourists is a bit of a local pastime. Recently went for a pedal boat ride on that same canal and was handed this wonderful bit of accidental poetry by the operators of the pedal boat hire company.

IAAP EU Interview

Archive copy of an interview with IAAP EU