19.1
A reading list for 2026
The last few years have been bad for my reading. I’ve read a couple of books, but it never became the habit I wanted it to...
19.0
Montenegro - untamed peaks and coastal sun on a Balkan budget
One morning, we were eating pastries on a balcony looking out on a Mediterranean bay. Two days later, we were standing on a windswept mountain peak at 2300m, looking over the jagged alpine landscape.
18.0
A child-free internet, at what cost?
When I wrote about the Online Safety Act last summer, I warned that forcing people to hand over their passports to access online content would lead to worse things sooner than later. I argued that the vague definitions of ‘harmful’ content and the reliance on third-party age verification companies would fundamentally break the internet as...
17.0
Why is audio on Linux such a headache?
Any Linux user will tell you that audio is a nightmare. While Windows and macOS users have spent the last two decades1 benefiting from unified, vertically integrated audio (CoreAudio, WASAPI), Linux users have to deal with every distribution managing audio slightly differently, every new laptop requiring a new open-source driver to be acquired, and every...
16.3
Escaping the Google Tax with Lemon Squeezy
Building a personal finance app is inherently ironic. You are spending thousands of hours constructing a tool designed to help people save money, and then -...
16.2
How we ported CashCat from Next.js to Native Mobile
Most of my recent work on CashCat has been working on the web version, the Next.js app deployed at cashcat.app. Because we’re focusing on a web-first...
16.1
The death of Open Banking for hobbyists
Open Banking is a wonderful concept. A more transparent society, boosting competition, allowing immense analytical power of financial data, and only with user’s consent and desire!...
16.0
What if we could rate movies in 2D?
I’ve written extensively about 5-star rating systems and their flaws, so where are my alternative solutions? Right here: a 2D grid, two axes, not just one. ‘Head’: the quality of the media, how much you respect it and recognise its craftsmanship; and ‘Heart’: how much you personally enjoyed it, regardless of society’s view on it....
15.1
Damaskus: 48 hours and 3 friends
Play the game now! (damaskus.indigo.spot)
15.0
Building a gamified election simulator
TLDR: I built a tiny (very inaccurate, but fun) political simulation game. You can play it at polplay.indigo.spot.
14.0
What on earth is Kresimiria?
TLDR: I got way too into a Crusader Kings 3 game playing as Croatia, started writing in-character peace treaties with my friend, then wrote an entire religious text, and now I’m writing a full Wikipedia-style wiki (kresimiria.wiki) about the fictional country using Jekyll. It’s worldbuilding without the (sometimes) annoying parts of actual storytelling.
13.0
I use Arch, btw (yes, on the Framework)
I’ve been happily running Fedora 42 on my Framework laptop for a couple of weeks, but I recently got that itch that every Linux user gets (it’s always distro-hopping time). Somewhere on the internet I’d seen the Caelestia dotfiles, and spun up an Arch Linux VM with the config applied - I was blown away....
12.2
Designing your personal space on the internet
My website used to be a lot flashier. There was a period where I had typewriter effects on almost every textbox, I had flashy animations covering...
12.1
Participating in Netcraft's Cryptocurrency CTF
Yesterday, our team participated in Netcraft’s cryptocurrency capture-the-flag workshop, where we competed to earn as much “Netcoin” (a fictional and insecure cryptocurrency) through every possible exploitation...
12.0
2.5 stars should be the middle, but feels like a fail
What does a three-star rating really mean? Is it a positive recommendation? Is it a ‘meh’? Is it a warning? We’ve all been trapped for far too long, in my opinion, by the vague tyranny of the five-star system. It’s a system that feels objective, but is actually deeply personal, often failing to capture how...
11.0
I bought a Framework laptop and put Linux on it - should you too?
For about five years now, I’ve been using my Macbook Air 2020 with the M1 chip as my daily driver. To be honest, even though it might get me crucified in some developer communities, I do love it and would still recommend a Macbook Air to Computer Science students, especially the newer ones with the...
10.4
Burnout and impostor syndrome (take life a little slower)
Burnout sucks. We’ve all been there, developers, creatives, students, everybody. You’ve been working on a project for months, you’ve almost finished a chapter in your book,...
10.3
Why I'm building favourites.me
This is Part 1 of a 3-part post: Part 2 - Part 3.
10.2
The simple joy of tap-on tap-off
I’ve just come back from a week in Brussels, a city that gets so much right, but especially public transport. I enjoyed my time there very...
10.1
The shifting nature of a political party
It is looking increasingly likely that Zack Polanski will secure the leadership of the Green Party of England and Wales at the end of this month....
10.0
When It's Cold I'd Like To Die
Warning: sensitive themes
9.0
Children know how to use VPNs
You may have heard the outcry over the recent Online Safety Act, in particular in relation to adult content online; “I now need permission from Keir Starmer to get off” as one Reddit user succinctly put it. But along with requiring age verification to view adult sites1, this act has much worse, far-reaching and frankly...
8.0
Please, stop putting AI everywhere
I don’t need AI to summarise a news article I’m already reading. I don’t need an AI to help me switch phone plans. I don’t need AI when I’m searching up an actor’s name - I just want a list of their films! In fact, there are remarkably few situations in which I truly need...
7.1
Why Monopoly was designed to be bad
I was recently at home with my parents and siblings for a week, and after a family dinner, we came to the inevitable choice of which...
7.0
Language as a lossy compression algorithm
In digital media, lossy compression is the trade-off we make for convenience - we accept the loss of some data from a file to make it small enough to send. I think that we do the same thing to our thoughts every time we open our mouths. We send out carefully crafted sentences, only to...
6.1
What using my phone in black and white for a week taught me
You probably use your phone too much. I know I do. If I’m bored, I check Twitter (or X, if you’re like that), check my WhatsApp...
6.0
Voting has bad user experience
You’ve just downloaded a brand-new app. It asks for your preferences, you tap through setup, and you’re in. Nothing is like what you wanted. The icons are bright blue, and all the text is in Mandarin. That’s because the app ignored your preferences and ships whatever is most popular worldwide - blue, and Mandarin -...
5.0
Why we still use QWERTY
I was coding earlier today (surprise surprise), and felt myself question for a second, why my fingers were moving so much while typing. You know the feeling when somebody reminds you that you’re breathing, and then you suddenly feel like you’re manually controlling it for a minute. It was like that, except this time I...
4.0
22:45
There was not a person around, not here in the forest, not now at ten o’clock on a crisp January evening. The cold, misty air whirled around me, tugging at my hat. I pulled it down further over...
3.0
Solstice and Sulphur
Prologue
2.0
Hot Hot Coffee
He’d made my coffee too hot. I don’t like my coffee hot. I set the cup down, my tongue already stinging.
1.0
Fantasteroids - Deep Dive
Here’s a link to the game!