A smattering of useful things I’ve come across this month

October 2026

General

  • Today’s Record High - Nice little website listing all the record highs.

  • fediverse.info - homepage for fediverse information. A good place to start for someone new to the fediverse.

  • Anatomy - a Claude Code skill that you may or may not want to play with. I think it’s interesting to just view the website and see what’s been made with it.

  • Doory - a free, open-source design space. Make cards, posts, slides, and little logos right in your browser.

  • Umbrel App Store - if you have a home server, this looks really cool. A one-stop place for one-button installs of 300+ apps. It gives you a fast, easy way to check out an app and try it out for a while to see if you want to keep it. One-button installs and deletes. For performance and such, if you find an app you want to keep, you’re better off installing it directly on your home server rather than running it within Umbrel. You would be running a VM within a VM, which can be performance-limiting.

    Update: I have Umbrel now installed on my home server, and it’s nice. I use it to experiment with an app and make sure I want to keep it; then I delete it from Umbrel and install the app directly on the server instead of using Umbrel.

  • Fontshare - a nice collection of Google-free fonts you can use.

  • MakeMKV - Download - I’ve been converting some personal DVDs and adding them to my Plex library, and this has been working very well for me.

  • LIGHT CAPSULES - Light Capsules is a worldwide historical restoration effort using augmented installations that reanimate faded advertisements, also known as ghost signs, and engage local communities around these fading artifacts. This is very cool!

  • Soviet Bus Stops - Canadian photographer Christopher Herwig travels former Soviet Republics from Ukraine to Uzbekistan, Armenia to Far Eastern Siberia, and all points in between, in a decades-long bus stop treasure hunt across more than 50,000 kilometers. Uncovering the stories of the designers who built fascinating architectural marvels during the Soviet regime, Soviet Bus Stops is an ode to the power of individual creativity that would not be suppressed.

    Check out the website; these Soviet bus stops are incredible. I will be seeking out how I can watch this film. This link came from SimpleBits and their newsletter #108. Also worth checking out and subscribing.

Photography

Books

  • Calibre.online - if you use Calibre and don’t want to hassle with configuring a private server this looks like a very viable option to have access to your books. You can also share books, and it has a robust set of plugins. Looks like a wonderful tool.

  • Read Rare: Rare internal memos and forgotten books - The rarest docs and books you’ve probably never read. Interesting selection; worth taking the time to look around.

  • A Great Book with Barack Obama - Audible podcast with Barack Obama where he sits down with six different people and they discuss a favorite book. It’s really well done.

  • Readwise Books - (this currently is invite-only beta to current Readwise subscribers) Readwise now sells ebooks, print books, and has a very nice-looking reader app. I’ll be exploring this over the next month. There are almost too many choices out there now, which is a good problem to have. They are working with publishers right now to give ebook purchasers access to download their books, which will be essential for me before I purchase from them.

Books Added to the Queue

Stray Thoughts

Stray Thoughts used to be a separate blog post every month, but I still can’t remember to capture these fleeting thoughts well enough to keep a separate post. For now, they will live at the bottom of The Good Stuff. I don’t know if you have this issue, but at times during the day I have (at least for me) profound thoughts that I want to think about and capture, but if I don’t immediately capture them, they are gone, poof, never to be remembered again. I’ve started using voice capture with Drafts. I have a quick access button on my iPhone to activate it; we will see if that helps.

  • Nature plays music. But you gotta listen for it. I don’t understand people out in nature with earbuds in. I’ve never been able to do it. Give me the birds, the wind, a splatter of rain, your feet pressing on the earth, the buzzing of bugs, frogs croaking. Nature plays a beautiful song all her own.

  • A friend wrote a letter to us and ended it with “Remember to live your lives well”. That really struck me when I read it. Such a simple message with a powerful meaning behind it.