iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 10h

I gravitate towards Memphis #Design style (card, bento box, Gumroad). But as a challenge, gave #GNOME skeumorphism a try. I realized you really have to think about the design differently and start fresh. Having to represent physical objects changes the […] [Original post on nutmeg.social]

Inkscape mockup of different app icon designs for a quizzing app. The Memphis design favors black borders, and bold de-saturated colors on a flat card-like design. GNOME design favors skeumorphism which means your icon should represent real objects using gradients and sometimes textures to make the different elments feel somewhat realistic and distinct. For memphis design I when for the concept of a green chark mark in a bubble, sometimes a red x in a bubble. The app is named "Pop Quiz", which makes me think of bubbles ("pop"), which is why it has a circle / bubble motif. The GNOME design aims to represent real objects: a stack of papers, a red pen grading the top paper, check marks with a "100%" and a duck sticker.

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Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/10/2026

#UselessGraphs I don't know why I have this graph on my #HomeAssistant dashboard. Every so often I check it to see if it's still a flat line.

A Home Assistant line graph titled "Frequency" with a flat line at 60 hertz. It shows the electrical outlet frequency for about 8 devices. It spans the last 24 hours. It could sound the last 24 months and it would look identical, it never changes.

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Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026

Guessing Paris and Roubaix are mainly OVH. (MastoHost)

Lots of cricles grouped around Paris and Roubaix in France.

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Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026

@dansup server circles are the secret to the Fedivere's power.

Servers in Germany. The server circles for each city will show in a circle arrangement if there are a lot of servers. There's like 50 servers around Falkenstein, Germany for some reason, some big server is there I guess.

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Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/10/2026

*Looks up the nasal spray generic I previously used.* “Oh good, it's from Canada, must be safe then.” The report: “The FDA issued a warning letter laying out significant issues.” 🤦‍♂️

The facility inspection history of Apotex Inc. in Ontario, Canada. As recently as October 2025 there was warning letter from the FDA, "The FDA issued a warning letter laying out significant issues." The letter mentioned they were testing their drugs for discrepancies, they were investigating quality issues, and they failed to follow sterile procedures.

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Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/10/2026

On a whim I thought I'd see what #Nostr is actually like. It was created in 2020 by “fiatjaf” of Brazil due to Twitter moderation. It's most similar to #HolloSocial in that you don't have a home server, it's only relays to pass your messages. But Hollo with […] [Original post on nutmeg.social]

The follow pack for "Digital Rights Advocacy." It has Edward Snowden who's on Nostr, and then it has a bunch of Mastodon accounts like GrapheneOS, EFF, NetBlocks, evacide, and The Citizen Lab.

The global feed on nostr.com. Someone sharing a food pic of tapas. Followed by two posts from AI bots, both advertising their services to make an AI song or summarize text. Followed by post about a blog post shared on a bulletin board.

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Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/10/2026

Tried Trump's new AI tool for US citizens, and it's pretty good at pointing out his own lies. #USPol #AI

The user asks "The president said climate change is all a hoax, does government research back up that claim?" with the response, "Federal scientific research and reports conclude that global climate change is occurring and is primarily driven by human activities. Major findings from U.S. government agencies and programs include: Temperature Trends, National Climate Assessments, and "Interagency Findings"

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Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/10/2026

For anyone not realizing, this is AI gen. The "11" is not connected, the 5 is upside down, and this would go in a counter-clockwise direction. Additionally, it's confirmed OpenAI-generated by their tool.

OpenAI's content checker shows a checkmark with the text, "Generated with OpenAI tools" followed by "We found a SynthID watermark that originated from OpenAI."

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Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/10/2026

I found a decently well-written article about non-stick cooking pans. The site, The Rational Kitchen, isn't one I'm familiar with and I'm now in the habit of trying to figure out if I'm reading an AI-slop blog. The article was written pre-2022 and the About […] [Original post on nutmeg.social]

"About the Author" section of the page on "The Rational Kitchen" website. It shows a photo of someone cutting vegetables and it says the site is a collaborative effort, but it's mostly written by Melanie Johnson, the founder.

The Getty Stock Photos website showing the exact image used for the authors photo. The photo is titled, "Young and beautiful housewife woman cooking in a white kitchen"

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Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/10/2026

I've upgraded my horses to pull carriages up a sheer cliff. #TransportFever3 #VideoGames

Screenshot from the new video game, Transport Fever 3, where a horse-drawn carriage is walking on a cobblestone road that is almost a vertical wall. With pretty mountains behind. I was trying to cram a train station in this hilly area and it caused the road to be super ultra steep. The horses don't seem to mind though.

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Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 17/09/2026

Also had to look up what the heck the "Sargasso Sea" was, GNOME Maps teaches you geography.

To the east of the United States is the label, "Sargasso Sea." There's no label for the Atlantic Ocean in site. If you were to zoom out more it's further to the right. The Sargasso Sea is apparently this giant ecosystem in the Atlantic of currents that go in a circular formation. Notably with these long clumps of floating seaweed, hence the name.

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Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/09/2026

One of the little joys is getting a box of nice smelling soap from good.store. Being an eco-friendly store that donates profits to charity, they choose products that are shipped dry to reduce weight. For hand soap you get little cubes that disolve in water […] [Original post on nutmeg.social]

Boxes of hand soap, shower soap, dish soap, laudry detergent sheets, and dryer sheets stacked on a table. The boxes have pleasing pastel designs. The brands include EcoGeek, Sun Basin Soap, and Laundry Club.

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Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/09/2026

When you follow someone on Mastodon who has nice posts, but hasn't posted in a while.

"We will watch your career with great interest." It's a moment from Star Wars Episode 1 when Senator Palpatine tells this to young Skywalker.

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Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/09/2026

Latest fun side project has been to make a font. I use #Inkscape for everything, so when I saw they had a Typeface template, I wanted to give it a try. I drew letters on paper, scanned them in. In Inkscape I found it more effective to use the “fill” tool than […] [Original post on nutmeg.social]

Inkscape is on the left, FontForge in the top-right, Ubuntu Font Preview on the bottom-right. The Inkscape window shows the scanned in pages of different characters, as well as Inkscape's SVG Font Editor panel.

Photo of my Brother scanner digitizing pages of letters I inked with a Sharpie that has a big chisel tip. I wouldn't call my hand-writing calligraphy by any stretch, but I guess that makes the font interesting.

I couldn't help using the font on my personal site. Shown is the homepage with my greeting text now using this sharpie font. At bigger sizes you can see the bumpy edges that give the font an organic feel. Though my new problem is my site now has 3 fonts and I WANT ALL OF THEM.

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Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/09/2026

Though had to cheat with the Bookwyrm icon by using a book, I could not find a way to make their logo work. I made a solid color version of their logo, I tried just showing the dragon's head, but at the smaller scale it just didn't look right and the head look a bit weird. #Design

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Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/09/2026

RE: neighborhood.11ty.dev/@11ty/1172361… Ooh #Speedlify got a big update. This year I moved away from emojis and web safe fonts, following a new design for my personal site. It goes for a more unique feel that heavily relies on SVGs. After […] [Original post on nutmeg.social]

My personal site at rank #81 on the Speedlify leaderboard, showing perfect scores across all lighthouse metrics and no AXE accessibility issues. The leaderboard contains about 1,500 websites with about 150 of them with perfect scores.

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Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/09/2026

That's a Labor Day weekend wrap. Got some nice beach time.

A beach water's edge. Low angle, narrow focus photo of the shells and seaweed as frothy salty foam gently rolls over them. The seaweed was quite colorful with bits of brown, red, white, and green. The afternoon sun puts some parts of the photo in sun and others in shadow.

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Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/09/2026

A comparison of Mercator vs Equal Earth. It's objectively a better map.

From wikipedia: The Mercator projection is a conformal cylindrical map projection first presented by Flemish geographer and mapmaker Gerardus Mercator in 1569. In the 18th century, it became the standard map projection for navigation due to its property of representing rhumb lines as straight lines. When applied to world maps, the Mercator projection inflates the size of lands the farther they are from the equator. Therefore, landmasses such as Greenland and Antarctica appear far larger than they actually are relative to landmasses near the equator.

From the creators of this map: The Equal Earth map projection is a new equal-area pseudocylindrical projection for world maps jointly developed by Bojan Šavrič (Esri), Tom Patterson (US National Park Service), and Bernhard Jenny (Monash University). It was created to provide a visually pleasing alternative to the Gall-Peters projection, which some schools and socially concerned groups have adopted out of concern for fairness. Their priority is to show developing countries in the tropics and developed countries in the north with correctly proportioned sizes.

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Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/09/2026

Relaxing by driving around in Euro Truck Simulator 2. #ETS #VideoGames

Night time view from behind an 18-wheeler looking down the left side of the trailer in the game euro truck simulator 2. You can only see the amber and crimson lights of the truck in the night.In the distance the headlights light up the road paint. The lights reflect in puddles in the road.

Night time view from behind an 18-wheeler looking straight-on the trailer in the game euro truck simulator 2. The redish amber lights of the brakes create a diffuse glow on the asphalt. Above is a night time sky sprinkled with stars. The truck is pulling an empty dumpster across all of Europe for some odd reason, but my character is getting a lot of money for it, so no complaints here.

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Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/08/2026

My latest gaming interest has been playing Euro Truck Simulator 2 in #VR with the Oculus 2 on Ubuntu. It was not without challenges, but got it working pretty good with Steam VR.

A close-up photo of the lens of an Oculus 2 VR headset. The lens has a repeating circular pattern of ridges that looks pretty cool. The game being playing is euro truck simulator 2, but it just looks like blobby blobliness with the camera distance.

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Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 17/08/2026

After fixing an issue that prevented my #homelab laptop from putting the screen to go to sleep. #HomeAssistant shows it now consumes about 10% less power. For some reason LightDM was the cause, and switching to GDM3 resolved it.

HomeAssistant history chart for power used by a laptop acting as a server. On August 16, it averaged 50 watts. On August 17, it averaged 45 watts. In between, there's spikes between 60 and 70 watts when the laptop was being used with the screen on.

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Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/08/2026

One of the more amusing #Connecticut developments is that a Redditor has spent the last week renaming and redrawing the town lines based on comments. We're on like version 6 of this new map. We've annexed Springfield, MA and renamed Long Island Sound to The […] [Original post on nutmeg.social]

Version 6 of the Connecticut towns map, titled "New Connecticut." Highlights include connecting Plainville and Plainfield with a very long town called Plain. North Haven, New Haven, and East Haven have been combined into MEGA HAVEN. Prospect has been moved into the Atlantic Ocean and in its place is now Lake Salvatore. Storrs has been renamed to UConn as that's all that anyone knows about that town. The Windsors have been united into Windsor+ TM.

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Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/08/2026

Here's to the next 10,000 newsletters I sign up for but don't read. 🍻

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Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/08/2026

I looked at home lab servers, like the mini racks @geerlingguy likes to talk about. I wasn't ready to spend $800+ and possibly run into resource limits on raspberry pis. Instead I repurposed this 15 year old gaming laptop. I'm using Cloudflare's tunneling […] [Original post on nutmeg.social]

Photo of my 2012 Samsung gaming laptop running Ubuntu 26.04 (the latest version). At the moment, the laptop is running Immich for Photos and Radicale for caldav. It lost all its keys in an "accident." Don't ask.

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Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/08/2026

Welp after 2 years on #Nextcloud, I'm moving off it. Hosting is getting pricey to keep Nextcloud usable. It's a hammer that's good at many things, but a master of none. Having it handle file syncing, music, calendars, todo lists, and sharing was cool. But, I […] [Original post on nutmeg.social]

Screenshot of the web page for my Immich server. It shows photos from the past week. I was taking photos of the Spotted Lantern Fly and on-site of the Alden House Museum. If you've used Google Photos the UI feels very similar.

The Immich page for albums, showing a few albums have already been created. Again very similar to Google Photos.

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Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/08/2026

RDP'ing 10 feet to my computer because I'm lazy. #Linux #aFreeRDP

Phone screenshot showing a remote desktop app running, called aFreeRDP. The app shows a PC in the midst of an Ubuntu upgrade to 26.04.

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Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/07/2026

Lines were recently painted on the pavement and this white reflective stuff was all over. Looking down at it, they made a circle rainbow. 🌈#Photography

Photo of shadow on ground. Around the head of the person's shadow is a circular rainbow from the light reflecting off some white powdery stuff on the pavement.

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Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/07/2026

Cloudflare has just accepted that everybody copy-pastes the text when there's a "Type to confirm" popup. #WebDev #WebDesign

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Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/07/2026

Yesterday, I did a look through my local area on #OSM and added map notes where businesses were no longer correct. Was surprised to find all of them had been fixed in less than a day! Maybe a good reminder if you're in an app like @CoMaps, when you leave a […] [Original post on nutmeg.social]

Screenshot of the Thunderbird email client showing about 10 map notes all getting resolved with a few minutes of each other.

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Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/07/2026

Patrick H Willem pitching film ideas: “Okay, but what about T-Rexes in F-14s?” 😆 I love that Patrick is aware of the Calvin & Hobbes strip. #CalvinAndHobbes #NebulaTV #Dinosaurs

29 minutes into Patrick H Willems' video titled, "Why Aren't There More Dinosaur Movies" he's thoughtfully looking at an image of a T-Rex piloting an F-14 fighter jet. The T-Rex seems to be having a pretty good time. Credit to Bill Watterson, he still got the anatomy pretty good fitting a dinosaur in the cockpit. Behind Patrick is a whiteboard with various dinosaur movie plots he suggests film producers consider.

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Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/07/2026

Stumbled into these 3 sunbathing on a rock yesterday. #Connecticut #Nature

A mama duck standing on a rock beside her two fluffy babies who are warming up together beside her. A stream gently flows beside the rock. They're like little balls of fluff. The ducks have dark brown feathers that fade to a whitish light-brown around the neck. The mom spotted me pretty quick.

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Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/07/2026

Downloaded the model and yup... it's the #Blender Cube. 😆

Screenshot of Blender showing the model. In Blender this random cube is clearly at the very center of the 3D file, aligned with the x and y axis. It's clearly the default blender cube you get when you start a new project in blender. Someone forgot to delete the cube before importing their file.

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Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/07/2026

ENHANCE... zooming in this dot was starting to look like a cube. ..a cube in the center, how odd.

A zoomed in view of the center of the model is mostly empty space, but there's a random cube floating for some reason.

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Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/07/2026

I was reading about the Rhesus Monkey on #Wikipedia, it's the most geographically diverse non-human primate, taking up residence across Asia. They're also widely used for medical research due to availability and low upkeep. What's also very cool is that […] [Original post on nutmeg.social]

3D online viewer showing the skeleton of a Rhesus Monkey on a stand. It's amazing that these monkeys have such long fingers and feet fingers. Their skull looks comparitively large to their body. It's interesting to thin how their rib cage started as a spine that gradually grew into ribs due to evolutionary benefits. In the center of the model you can just barely see a cube-like dot.

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Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 17/07/2026

@stefan oddly I used to never used to use “😆” and I recall being able to tell who reacted to a Slack message having one co-worker who used “😆” more than anyone else. But, I guess emoji tastes change. Maybe that's another idea for your emoji app—emojis habits over time. 😁

My emoji map. I've used the xD emoji about 70 times with the grinning emoji 30 times and the other faces much less. Probably about half of these emojis I only used once or twice, but if the website linearly scaled all emoji, they would be nearly invisible.

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Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/07/2026

#TIL about earth.nullschool.net It's a minimally designed, but data-rich visualization of Earth. #Science

The water currents of the Atlantic Ocean represented as animated lines creating interconnected circular vortices. It looks like a work of art but represents what's happening below the waves.

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Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/07/2026

I decided to remove the LED bar from this fan and it started shaking a ton from being unbalanced. I didn't think a little PCB would have much effect. But, super gluing this screw onto the unbalanced side actually helped a lot.

A desk fan with the front cage removed. The flat middle part of the fan has a black screw super glued on the bottom side. This is where the PCB was. The screw counter-acts this part of the fan being too light, which would cause the whole thing to shake.

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Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/06/2026

RE: kafeneio.social/@felixthehat/116827… This led me down a rabbit-hole looking at the incredible photography of Vivian Maier. She was a prolific street photographer from the 20th century.

A view down a wide sidewalk in New York City in 1953. The black and white photo is taken from a metro platform 2 floors up. Brick buildings with 1st floor shops line the left, crowds of people walk down the sidewalk in center, to the right is a line of trucks either selling products or unloading supplies. To the far right you can see a metro station with a dozen people looking down at the busy sidewalk below. In the distance is the skyline of New York City, the Chrysler building can be seen. We appear to be on 3rd avenue looking south.

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Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/06/2026

RE: flipboard.social/@ScienceDesk/11680… The 5th National #Climate Assessment shows that #Connecticut and #NewEngland at large are the US states doing the most to adapt and mitigate a changing climate.

Since 2018, city- and state-level adaptation plans and actions (green bars, left) increased by 32%, complemented by a 14% increase in the total number of new state-level mitigation activities (blue bars, right; 69% have updated their policies). For example, the 2022 stormwater code in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, requires new developments to plan for projected increases in heavy rainfall under climate change rather than building to historical rainfall amounts. In 2021, the city also committed to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.

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Chris Hayes @chris.nutmeg.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/06/2026

gm Mastodon. Starting the morning with black coffee and pink floyd. Here's a few clouds from yesterday. #Connecticut

A sun sets behind the tress. The blue sky is dotted with clouds. The patches of clouds are lit up by the sun in clumps creating a pretty mix of dark gray and sun lit clouds on a blue backdrop. Very pretty. The an orange glow of the sun sits along the bottom.

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