September 7, 2026 I just read Winnie Lim’s post, Running a Personal Website Is Not Fun Anymore. She writes about the constant barrage of bots, crawlers, and attacks that have made running her personal website a lot less fun. Her post prompted me to take a look at the firewall traffic for my own site. I’m hosted on...

September 2, 2026 I'm religious about keeping my OSs updated. But yesterday I got a System Settings notification that iOS 26.6.1 was available. I was confused because I was pretty sure I'd already installed it. Curious, I went back to my Things 3 Logbook, and sure enough, I'd marked as completed the task to process...

August 27, 2026 I'm thinking about how I'm using AI and whether I've allowed Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini too much access to my data through plugins, extensions, MCP, Work or Cowork. This all started after watching The A.I.s Are Already Out of Control, an episode of The Ezra Klein Show with Ezra Klein and Helen Toner....

August 23, 2026 Anyway, what I really want to remark on here is the idea of using AI to brainstorm. In the past, I may have written this off as well. But actually, with the rise of the very good AI voice technology — namely, GPT-Voice — I actually have found going back and forth with AI quite useful in helping to...

August 19, 2026 My sites have never been hugely popular and I’ve never had a large audience except for blips and spikes here and there. But that’s not why I have a website. I make blakewatson.com for myself. I do it so I can copy a link and send it to a friend. I do it as a record of my thoughts and passions. I...

August 17, 2026 Translation: No one can ever again use Claude for proofreading their own prose unless they’re willing to risk that the whole thing might be flagged as having been generated by Claude. John Gruber

August 15, 2026 Since I moved my email back to Gmail, I’m letting my Fastmail subscription expire at the end of the month. I still get a few emails trickling in from various places to my @ldstephens.com address, so I wanted a way to make sure I don’t miss anything potentially important. I decided to use Cloudflare’s...

August 12, 2026 I saw this in my RSS feed this week. It caught my attention, so I wanted to learn more about it. Embedded watermarks in text When a supported Claude model generates text, it weaves an imperceptible watermark directly into the text itself. You won’t see it, and it doesn’t change the meaning, quality,...

August 10, 2026 Brandon shared a link to "The Guy at Wawa" story yesterday. I really enjoyed it so I thought I would share it with you all. The Guy at the Wawa After reading the story, I visited the author’s blog and found a few other stories to read. I enjoyed the ones about McDonald’s, too.

August 3, 2026 I watched a video yesterday about moving from third-party productivity apps to Apple's built-in Notes and Reminders, getting ready for Siri AI. The reasoning: Siri AI is going to work best when it's pulling from Apple's own apps, not third-party ones. I'm not running any open-weight LLMs locally, so...

August 2, 2026 I spent 20 years in the equipment leasing business, so I have a lot of experience reading and interpreting lease agreements. Here are a couple of things to keep in mind before signing up. First, read the lease agreement carefully. You may even want to have an attorney review it. The most important...

July 24, 2026 Garmin announced this week that it's acquired TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic. Garmin hasn't said much else. The press release is thin on details, so I've got some thoughts about what this could mean. I started using TrainingPeaks back in 2006, after getting recruited to race on a competitive men's...