It’s spruce tip ale season!
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Justin Pot
@jhpot@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06I am a freelance journalist and a person. I believe that tech is a tool, not a way of life, and that we should use it to connect with each other. I currently write for Lifehacker, WIRED, The Atlantic, PopSci, PCMag, and The Wall Street Journal.
I also enjoy brewing beer and being outside.
1181 Followers
231 Following
50 Posts
Joined August 18, 2018
JustinPot.com:
Connectivity, my newsletter:
Pronouns:
he/him
Location:
Hillsboro, Oregon, USA
Chills watching this. A better world is possible. Good things can and do happen. Keep believing. Keep doing the work. https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1sjs5gn/hungarians_singing_we_are_the_champions_after/
Possibly the most important article I’ve ever written. Possibly. https://www.popsci.com/environment/why-cats-like-to-watch-tv-best-youtube-channels-for-cats/
There’s a real "right before the collapse of the empire" feeling in the air right now. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/15/allbirds-bird-stock-shoes-ai.html
Myths about keeping ants out of your house: https://www.popsci.com/environment/how-to-keep-ants-out-of-your-house/
Need to open a document you think might have malware? Here’s a good tool for the job: https://www.wired.com/story/dangerzone-app-for-safe-pdfs-word-docs/
In the short term, being confidently wrong about something feels just as good as actually being correct.
https://justinpot.com/pips-and-the-art-of-feeling-good-about-being-wrong/
LLMs are really not great at life advice
If I ran CBS the only celebrity on this season of Survivor would be Alex Horne, who would run every immunity challenge instead of Probst.
What’s a piece of software that makes your life better, every day?
Digging into Wikipedia data is fun. https://theintelligence.com/42920/a-whole-new-way-to-see-wikipedia/
Science suggests only fully completely charing your laptop when necessary—here’s how you can do that with a Mac. https://www.wired.com/story/only-charge-your-macbook-to-80-percent/
Anyone else feel like they've been trying to re-find themselves lately? What's helped you?
I've not updated my blog for a bit, granted, but the ActivityPub integration is working differently now. It used to be that the entire post would show up, but now it's just the headline, excerpt, and a link. Is the old functionality gone now? https://justinpot.com/pips-and-the-art-of-feeling-good-about-being-wrong/
If you miss Twitter’s ancient Mac app as much as I do, here’s a beautiful application for Bluesky: https://www.wired.com/story/aeronaut-mac-app-for-bluesky/
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@pabloniusmonk Yep! I got this specific Kobo in 2015 as a company-provided replacement for a device that broke as part of a firmware update. I have to say I’m very happy with how long its held up.
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@kevin@theforkiverse.com @Casey@theforkiverse.com @pj@theforkiverse.com the people responding to this earnestly explaining what open source is are cracking me up
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@JustAnotherJay Man I wish I could include everything in one guide but that would quickly become a book. I hope I can do various follow-up articles with tips like this.
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@mykd That is precisely the kind of guide I wanted to write! Something that gets across what makes this difference but in a way that just about anyone would be able to follow.
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@andrewnorthrocks@mstdn.party that spirit is the best part of this place and i hope it can stay
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@JustAnotherJay Some people aren't looking for reach! They want to keep the conversation to their own circle. This is particularly true of people who have been followed by trolls or generally obnoxious people on other platforms (which, as a journalist, I can tell you really sucks.)
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As a Canadian who lives stateside this is fascinating
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@kam08 I'm glad you found that funny! I always try to lighten the mood. I sincerely hope the piece is useful for people.
@matthewcassinelli@mastodon.social large companies have many different teams with different priorities and objectives
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Things like this are sincerely useful, but they also use a staggering amount of computing power. I ran out of free cloud credits, then couldn't get it working with Ollama (it's possible it was working but is just slow).
Do any of you use OpenClaw? Do you find it actually useful? I’m really curious about how people are using these tools. I've been messing around a little bit it's a fascinating mess.
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@RyanHyde I've tried that many times over the years and it never stuck for me, but I think I understand why people love it. Has it changed a lot recently?
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@decadecity I've been using Resilo Sync for this since it was called Bittorrent Sync, and keep meaning to switch to SyncThing