Welcome to my txt only website! Search for "How to use this website" (⌘-F on Mac and Ctrl+F on Windows) for tips and tricks as well as explanation on how this website works. HAVING A BIKE, RATHER THE LACK OF ONE 25-08-2025 #life #transport I would love to have a bike, to be precise, a cargo-bike. I live in a flat city and having a fast and easy way to do my groceries and move around would be nice. But here's the thing, I live in a flat, on the fourth floor of a somewhat old building that doesn't have an elevator. The corridor is already taken by neighbours' bikes or stuff from the restaurant at the bottom floor and I don't have access to a basement. Because of that, I do everything by foot. And that is slow. Well to be fair I walk fast, but a bike would be much faster. And I think that's also what's good about walking. Since it is slow, you have the time to enjoy your surroundings. I'm often stopping to watch dogs play, or bees going from flower to flower. Sometimes people stop you to ask their way around or so you can take a picture of them and their girlfriend. It allows for situations you hadn't planned, like grabbing a coffee on your way because your favourite coffee shop is open late today, or finding a random street and ending up exploring a neighbourhood you didn't know about. I also often get ideas of stuff to write or sites to code when walking. Unlike on a bike, you don't have to pay as much attention at where you are going and your mind can wander more freely. Now that I think about it, even if I had a bike, I might not use it. I like walking too much, I'm too used to it. I would find excuses, exactly like I do currently with the tram, "ah 2 minutes to wait, might as well walk there" or "mhh there will be too many people at this time of the day, it's sunny outside". So maybe I don't want a bike after all. GETTING YOUR HAIR CUT, CROSSING THE ROAD AND MANY OTHER RECKLESS THINGS 16-08-2025 #thoughts I went to the hairdresser today, I always go to a random one. I found that it's often faster to go around until you find one that can take you right away rather than wait at one where there is a queue. She did a great job, my hair is now short and dries up in seconds when I'm out of the shower. But while there, I couldn't help but think that, if she decided, she could slit my throat at any moment, and I couldn't do shit. [^1] When you really think about it, the only reason we are alive is because other humans act according to rules. Same goes for things like crossing the road when the light is green. The only reason you don't get run over is because the other person agrees to say that red means stop. Here's a list of things that I think are reckless but since everybody agrees on the rules, it's mostly fine: boxing, gun/bow ranges, going in any means of transport, roller coasters, anything involving electricity or fire/heat, eating food prepared by other humans,... - [^1] Note that there was nothing weird about the lady cutting my hair. She was nice and even offered some fizzy water. THE CITY IS A NOISY PLACE 16-08-2025 #life #society I am presently waiting in a sandwich shop, radio going in the background, noises of knives against cutting boards, the whooshing of the coffee machine, someone on the phone and cars roaring outside the window. The city is a noisy place, and for a long time, I hadn't noticed. This is because I've always lived either in or near a city, so my soundscape has always been filled with noise. And since city noise isn't the most enjoyable, I've compensated by adding more noise to cover it up. It may have been songs, videos, podcasts and even white noise, I always had something playing in my ears. But recently, that changed. Manuel Moreale[^1] was doing a challenge back in June where he was trying to consume less digital stuff, this meant cutting off a lot of time on the phone. And after reading his weekly updates, I decided to tag along. For me the biggest time sink was Youtube, so I cut that off entierly, but I pushed the concept a tiny bit further and drastically reduced my usage of Spotify for music and podcasts. The hard part about this to me was walking outside with nothing in my ears, being forced to listen to cars vroom by, to people shouting at each other, to kids screaming, dogs barking and my own footsteps. I was scared of going outside and having this overwhelming feeling of city noises, but I had to do it anyway. And it went fine, I quickly got used to it, the sounds weren't nice, but I could deal with them. Eventually, a weird thing started to happen, I would try to put music on when walking and it would feel weird. A bit like if I was less aware of what was going on since I couldn't hear much anymore. Scared that people would ask me something and I'd ignore them. My brain had done a 180. I found that it is actually quite nice actually walking outside and earing the sounds of nature, ear the birds chirp, the trees move in the wind, the ducks honking, and my own footsteps, the problem is that a city doesn't have much of that. By cutting off from my phone, I realised that the city, this environment I was so accustomed to, that I had liked and worshiped for my whole life, was actually crap. That I didn't want to live there anymore. I don't want to wake up to the sounds of motorbikes going by, or people coming back from a night of partying, I want to hear the crickets, the rustling of the grass, the cows from the nearby farmer mooing. I don't want to breathe car exhaust gases, I want to breathe fresh air. I realized that by modifying the soundscape, I was actually protecting myself from an environement I didn't feel comfortable in. These next years might be weird, because I know that I'm not moving out the city any time soon, I'm way too comfortable here. But at the same time, there is this thing in me that only wants to go away. Maybe I'll get used to it again, maybe I'll even start enjoying the true sounds of the city, who knows. I'll try to make an update on this in a while. - [^1] A very cool blogger. https://manuelmoreale.com WRITING ON THE PHONE 16-08-2025 #writing #blog Lately, I've been trying to write more, and it has been going alright. At first, it was really hard, I was second guessing myself a lot and it all felt very messy. But slowly, my brain started to change. Now, as I go about my day, I have ideas that pop up into my mind, a sentence that fits very well with what I want to say or an example to explain some concept. In the beginning, I was trying to remember stuff, then I started writing it down in my notes app, but I feel like it's time I go one step further and start writing posts on my phone. So I went on a little bit of a hunt to find a perfect setup. What I do is I sync the text file in iCloud Drive, symlink it to this website's public folder and edit it in an app called "Subtext"[^1]. If you also write things, I would be pleased to chat with you about methods for writing at hello@theoo.dev - [^1] It's a free app that allows you to open and edit .txt files from any folder on your phone. It is really similar to textedit. NOT WANTING TO DO ANYTHING 15-08-2025 #blog #life I'm on holiday, it's hot, too hot[^1] and I don't want to do anything. So I'm forcing myself to write a little something on this blog while I wait for the time to go get dinner, Vegan Chineese takeout for those who like details. I don't know where this is gonna go, the rule for this page was that there is no minimum length per post, but so far I've been pretty generous on my word counts, so I might just talk about stuff for a while and see where this takes us. Maybe a good subject would be this website. I'm starting to like it more and more, it has been freeing in a creative way to have a place to write down whatever I want without having to polish anything[^2], I just sit at my computer and write whatever goes through my mind. This is also a great website for many other reasons, it is tiny[^3] so that means people don't have to download a lot of stuff to read what I have to say, it looks great, at least to me. I like the plain text vibe, I just wish there was some more line height and maybe a tiny bit more padding, but I can deal with this. It also is super low maintenance, plaintext is probably not gonna stop working any time soon, and I don't really have to update anything else appart from the content. But the problem of this website is that it isn't accessible. All the content is inside a pre tag, this makes it so that screen readers have no clue what's going on, they will just read everything in the same way. No infos about lists, or dates, no quick skip link, no links for footnotes, no metadata to give context,... The plaintext, monospaced cramped aesthetic, which I find so cool, can also be a challenge to people with cognitive difficulties, the lack of visual queues and the monotony of it all can make it impossible for them to read comfortably. And I'm sure there are so many other things I'm not thinking about that make this website not accessible. And I don't want it to be this way, especially since there is a simple and obvious solution, write the website using markdown and parse it as HTML before uploading it. That would require some refactoring and make the code even simpler (no more PHP, simply a HTML file being served directly). But that would loose all the charm that using .txt files gives... There is something great about visiting a website and it simply being a text file, no tags, no style, that feels amazing to me. Even writing isn't the same. Because sure, I could write in markdown files and restrict myself to only write text, but that would just be frustrating. When I write in a .txt file, I can't make the choice to add images or links, they just don't exist. In a markdown file, they would be right there, looking at me like sirens, there would be so little reasons not to use them that it would be hard to avoid. I'm afraid that transforming this website into a more accessible version would void it of it's soul, and of my willingness to write on it. Which in turn would mean that the website would not be accessible at all anymore since it would cease to exist. Maybe I'm overthinking all this, I started this post not knowing what I was going to talk about and now I'm here. Maybe this is just a thing for me that other people can enjoy as a side effect, many great places exist that aren't accessible to everyone. Many cool art pieces can't work for everyone, and that's ok. But as much as it's ok, it is also sad, I wish everything was accessible to everyone, and I'm not sure I want my thing to be part of the not accessible ones. I know I couldn't ever please everyone, and as far as I know, I'm the only one reading these words, so I might be worrying for nothing. Anyway, time to go get food, I'll come back here later to rant on some other thing. - [^1] My heat tolerence is awful, above 27°C and I feel like crap. - [^2] Not that I'm doing much of that on my main website, but still a little more than here. - [^3] At least right now. ED AND TAKING THE TIME 11-08-2025 #code #editor #thoughts My favourite code editor is ed. For those who don't know, ed is one of the first editors to have been made, it's part of a class of editors called "line editors", which means that you are only editing complete lines of text. You can append after a line, insert before it or change a specific part using regexes, but you cannot put your cusor on a word and edit there. Ed doesn't even have a cursor. Ed is naturally limiting, it can only do one thing, edit a file. No file searching, no scrolling, no infinite undo/redo, no diagnostics or code actions. If you want things like these, you have to do them in your terminal[^1]. If you make a typo while typing a line of code? You can't go back with your arrow keys to fix it, you need to validate the line with the typo and then correct it using a regex. (Or you could rewrite the whole line if that's what you fancy). And these limitations happen because ed assumes you know what you are doing. You don't need to search for files if you know what you want to edit, you don't need ed to tell you you've misspelled a variable name, because you haven't misspelled it. And if you really aren't confident with yourself, you can use external programs to check after you, ed doesn't kow better than you, it can only edit text. And for many reasons, I love these limitations. For one, ed is fast, it doesn't have a graphical interface, so of course it is quick to load a file. Also I love that ed forces me to be very sure of what I'm about to do, this forces me to think before I act and often produces cleaner code that I don't have to refactor later. Often using external cli programs to do things is faster than whatever implementation my regular editor would have. A great example is for finding a file, instead of using my editor's fuzzy finder, I can simply do a little `ed $(fzf)`, instead of waiting for diagnostics to refresh, I can run `php -l my-file.php` and find out exactly where that goddamn missing dollar sign is. Ed forces you to learn your basic unix tools, and eventually you figure out how powerful they are, you become pro at man pages and old stack overflow threads. It also makes you learn a ton about regexes, which in my opinion are one of the most essential and the funniest parts of software development. And ed's regex engine isn't even featurefull, it lacks a ton of modern features like using `\U` to uppercase a group, but it forces you to get creative with your regexes. Which remember, you can't fail at writing, or you will have to rewrite them fully again and can only undo once. But despite my love for this mighty editor, I can't really use it, at least not in my day to day work. Because for all it's beautiful quirks and complex simplicity, ed can never beat the speed of modern editors. Because, obviously it is faster to use a search input to find a function name project wide rather than manually use grep, obviously it is faster to fix a typo by clicking next to it and erasing it rather than writing a regex to fix it, obviously it's faster to use a code action to rename something rather than grep for all the places where it's used and manualy navigate to each one[^2]. And in our world, speed is the second thing that matters the most after money. I think that this is pretty sad, I wish our priorities weren't set on economic growth all the time but rather on human happiness growth. I wish it would be alright for me to go slower and use ed, that I wouldn't have to think about rentability and only think about doing good work that is also fun. I'm afraid that us all as humans are heading in the wrong general direction, and none of us seem to know how to stop it. A lot of us don't want to stop what we are doing at all, it gave them a better life than most humans have had throughout history, and many other people are just not aware or their life is too complex to take the time to think about these things. Time is our most valuable asset, and we are giving it away without the slightest thought. Giving it away to a job that allows us to eat and have a roof[^3], to social medias, television and other fun but unfulfilling activities, to going places in highly inneficient modes of public transport or in polluting and isolating cars. We should stop doing this[^4], try to live a more sensible life, a life where time and money aren't the two dominating forces. [^1] - Which you can call inside of ed using the "!" operator. [^2] - To be fair to ed there, if the occurences are in the same file, you can edit them all at once. [^3] - It is crazy to me that things like these which are in the UDHR aren't being enforced on governments somehow. [^4] - Though I admittedly don't have any clue how. ADULT SKILLS 10-08-2025 #life #thoughts #society I have been considered an adult for a few years now, that's to say I've had my own place away from my mother's for a while. And I've noticed something, there is a certain amount of things you aren't taught in pre-adult life, well maybe you were but I wasn't and I know many other people who weren't. Then at some point you become an adult to the world, and you eventually have to face these things. Generally, they aren't hard things, it's stuff like cleaning the shower drain, fixing a tripped circuit breaker, how long you can store food in the fridge, how to pay your taxes, should you drill in this wall or will you hit an electrical cable, how to get rid of stuff that doesn't fit in the trash,... And for some reason, you have to figure these out on your own. Sure, you can maybe call your family or a friend, you have access to the internet and these days, you can even ask AI. But still, why was I never taught these things? Why aren't we taught, be it by our parents (at least mine) or by school, the stuff that will be useful in our actual life? And I can't even say it's only something about nowadays society, when talking about it to older persons, the general concensus is that they also had to figure it out on their own. Maybe it's something inherently human, we have always relied on other humans for help, therefore there was never really a need to teach such things, you could always ask someone. Which would also explain why the stuff we are taught in school isn't the useful one but the rest. I couldn't have asked my Mom or my neighbour to explain some weird Chemistry concept, they probably wouldn't have had a clue or just a rough idea. Because I don't really need a teacher to tell me how to clean my toilets in the correct way. Yet I can't help but shake the feeling that in a more and more isolated world[^1] we might not be able to rely on other people as much. Having to ask a neighbour for something is a hell of an effort, because I hardly know them, only from crossing in the hallways. Calling my family for help feels like a reach when I haven't seen them in months or barely for a couple hours [^2]. And sure there is internet and AI, and they have gotten me out of many situations before, but as useful as these tools are, it seems to me that they also are the primary cause of the lessening of human interactions. So what should we do as humans? Should we teach useful life things in school instead of the more work-life/make money stuff we are taught? Should we try to rebuild link with our family, friends and neighbourhood? Maybe live together for longer like they used to do? Take care of one another more? I'm not sure of any of these though I have a pretty positive opinion on most of them. Maybe I'm wrong as well, and figuring these things out by yourself is not as much of a big deal as I make it out to be. After all, none of these things has ever taken me more than a couple hours to figure out. I don't know what I really think of all of this, and there are many topics addressed in this text that I would like to revisit later, but I think that for now I'm gonna try to have a more sociable life and talk to other humans more and less to the computer. [^1] - At least that's how I feel in my life. More isolated than the people before me, partially by my own fault. [^2] - Mostly a me problem this one, but I feel that modern life leaves you with little time to spare for yourself, therefore even less for family. I guess this depends on your values and priorities though. BROWSERS 09-08-2025 #browsers #life Since I was born in the early 2000s, I've been around browsers most of my life. The first one was Firefox, it was the one installed on the family computer and I didn't even know there were other browsers at the time, to be fair, there was no difference between the browser, the search engine and internet in my mind. Then I discovered Internet Explorer while trying to kill the time at my grandparents'. I would play random flash games and watch let's plays of Mario Kart Wii on Youtube. At some point, Chrome replaced Firefox on the home computer which had since become a laptop, and would even replace my grandparents' trusty IE. For many years after that, all that existed was Chrome, maybe Safari for the odd times where I used a Mac at school or at some Aunt's place, but I knew no better. Somehow along the path of my life, I ended up studying web development, and that's when the problems started. Because you see, before that, a browser was just a box with tabs that allowed me to access the internet, nothing more, nothing less. But then it became a tool, and a very important one as well, I wanted it to look good since I would spend most of my days there, but also to be fast and support many features. So at first I downloaded the three main browsers, to be able to test my websites properly, Firefox, Chrome and Safari, and I started to have preferences. Safari was the sleek good looking one, but so many websites would break when they encountered it and the dev tools sucked. Chrome was the web development beast, it didn't look too bad, its dev-tools were fantastic and it supported every feature under the sun, but it was run by Google... yuck. Firefox, was the ugly one, I hate how base Firefox looks, but at least Mozilla foundation felt less bad than Google or Apple and it supported most features with good enough dev-tools. I was torn, constantly switching between the three for different tasks, never feeling at home anywhere and I wanted it to stop. So I started looking online for alternatives, and there were many. That's when my browser frenzy got started, at some point I had 22 different browsers installed on my computer. There were the minimal ones like Min, the featureful ones like Vivaldi, Opera or Orion, the plethora of privacy focused forks, LibreWolf, Mullvad Browser, Waterfox, Ungoogled chromium, Brave, Throium,... a bunch of Vim inspired ones like Vieb or Qutebrowser. I even tried to use terminal based browsers like Lynx or w3m[^1] but quickly gave up on these. I was never satisfied, always looking for a good balance between privacy, my love for the keyboard and good looks. And that's when a new name started to rise discreetly., Arc. See, Arc definitely didn't tick the privacy nor the keyboard centric box, but it had such good looks[^2] that I couldn't keep looking away. I had it laying on my computer for about a year, using it on an off, never feeling quite at ease, but then it grew on me. At some point I had accepted that what mattered most to me was the way my browser looked[^3] and the ease with which I could use it to develop websites over the privacy aspect. And so I became a happy Arc user, there was little to complain about, after so many attempts and years of searching, I finally had found a browser that I would stick with in the long run. But then "The Browser Company" decided to stop working on Arc, and that sucked. So like most I moved to Zen, and Zen is great. But a side effect of the Arc breakup is that it re-ignited my frenetic browser search. The novelty of Arc, with it's thursday updates had been able to keep my mind quiet, always having something new to try, but now I don't have this safeguard anymore. So I went back to previous browsers I had really liked, Orion, LibreWolf and even Chrome... But the Arc way had poisoned my mind, not being able to open something in glance? No folders? No nice catchy animations absolutely everywhere? These had all become necessary things in my way of interacting with the internet. Fortunately, Zen ticks most of these boxes, and it is also open source and more private. So I keep using it as my day to day browser while at the same time looking around for alternatives. The thing is, now that I'm not blinded by Arc anymore, I realized that I actually don't like the sidebar that much. It's alright, but I love the look of top tabs and the usability of them. And of course, Zen team has already said that they don't plan to support top tabs, ever. "The Browser Company"'s new browser, Dia, could have been a great replacement, but even if it ever reaches feature parity with Arc, I still don't trust "The Browser Company" anymore and I hate the AI and the monetary aspect of it. So here I am, stuck in this browser landscape, with so many choices but none that perfectly fits me. Maybe it's time for me to accept that nothing will ever be perfect, and to be at peace with using a browser that is more than good enough. To stop losing time switching and setting up different apps over and over again. I think that's a lesson for my life in general, stop wanting to always change things up, and be satisfied by whatever I have as long as it works. [^1] — On which this webpage works really well btw. [^2] — Debatable opinion, but as much as I dislike "The Browser Company", their designers do a pretty dang good job. [^3] — Again, very debatable, I don't always feel comfortable with this opinion. ALL TOPICS - #browsers - #life - #thoughts - #society - #code - #editor - #blog - #writing - #transport HOW TO USE THIS WEBSITE: - You can search for stuff by using your computers default search (⌘-F on Mac and Ctrl+F on Windows). - Each post is ordered from the most recent to the oldest. - Each post has at least one topic, you can find the list of all topics by searching for "All topics". HOW DOES THIS WORK: It is actually incrediby simple! This website is a simple `.txt` file being rendered by your browser, because browsers can do that and it doesn't look too bad. There is only a super thin layer of PHP used to serve the file at the `/` path and to tell the browser to use UTF-8 encoding to be able to render emojis and diacritics among others. ``` // index.php $$TEMP && \ mv $$TEMP $(CONTENT) ``` You can find the source code on GitHub — https://github.com/theokbokki/txt WHY DO THIS? Because I like simple stuff. It is easy to make, easy to maintain, easy to use, weighs nothing, loads fast and it looks alright. What I want is a place to share my thoughts in writing, nothing more nothing less and this can easily achieve that. I guess that not having images or links is a bit of a bummer, but I'm fine with this, I have another much more complete website for fancy stuff. LEGAL: No cookies, no tracking, do whatever you want with this as long as you don't deform what I say. If you have a problem with something on this website, you can contact me at hello@theoo.dev.