blake.earth

The cute app lying to you about your carbon footprint

Paying to offset your carbon footprint probably won't work very well

Trying vegan cheese as a non-vegan in Dairyland

I recorded myself trying a bunch of vegan cheeses and decided to put that on the Internet.

This—text?—really could've been an email

Why pay for SMS when email does all the things?

It won't be perfect. Do it anyway

I made a [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kp1GRdVspFo) that goes with this post! That spark is really an amazing thing to experience. When the right one hits the tinder in your mind, it swells into a little campfire. You stay up all night, huddled over it, feeding it idea after idea to keep it alive. But you never give it firewood - you don't nurture it enough to give it a life of its own. You keep ...

Oats and coffee

Hmm, another post about food. I was inspired to write this after reading [this post from Frills](https://frills.dev/blog/240325-breakfast/), who was in turn inspired by [this post from James](https://jamesg.blog/2024/03/21/eggs-and-coffee/)! I don't mind eating the same things every day. That's especially true for breakfasts — like lots of people, I don't really want to think about what to eat in the morning anyway, and I already know what's good. If I didn't run out of ingredients, I probably...

Meema's toasted cheese

I grew up with Meema next door. I could walk through the woods, past the shed and fruit trees, and enter through the screen porch (I can hear the screen door opening and closing...). She'd often offer to make toasted cheese, the best grilled cheese sandwich known to any child. I'd sit up at her counter and watch while she worked. I haven't been able to make it exactly the way she makes it (in this photo, you can see that not all the cheese is melted!), but I'm getting close! ![My attempt at ...

A digital garden and a second brain

These ideas sometimes seem at odds. A [garden suggests curation](./garden-games), but brains aren't curated (at least, mine isn't!). But by building this space as [both a digital garden and a second brain](./digital-garden), I am (hopefully) reducing overhead and eliminating some of the difficulty of adoption. The end result treats meta-notes like these (and evergreen notes) the same way it treats random thoughts about worlds I'd like to build. That kind of makes sense--it's a lot more like how...

The Kobo Glo

I bought my [Kobo Glo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobo_Glo) #eink e-reader from eBay on October 25, 2019 for $23.50 plus about $10 shipping (though it looks like costs have increased since), and I've been using it for about a year and a half. Despite a few issues, it's served me pretty well overall, and I see myself continuing to use it for at least a few more years. ![My Kobo Glo order on eBay](https://i.snap.as/nZGyyXq4.jpeg) ## Portability and Size My Glo has a bookshelf's worth of boo...

Garden games

I'd like to talk about my love of visiting state parks and playing what I'm calling "garden games". These are games that are designed to reward exploration; the core game loop is a cycle of exploration and discovery in a carefully constructed environment. (If there's already another term for these games, please let me know! They're some of my favorites, and I'd love to find a way to search for them more easily.) For now, I'm taking the word "garden" after reading the below part of a review of m...

Decentralized online communities

A rambling discussion of online communities, from Facebook and Discord to an ideal of the entire web as a community and the Fediverse as our burgeoning compromise

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

My grandma recommended this book to me after she borrowed it from a friend of hers. She told me it had lots of references to coding and technologies she didn't understand, but she said I might enjoy it. I did, thoroughly. With qualitative depictions of programming languages like Ruby, websites like Hacker News, and a web designer for a main character, the book is a testament to Sloan's knowledge of hacker culture during the recession. My own limited knowledge cannot vet all of it, but the parts...

Looking for sea glass on a tidal sandbar

In an early cloudy August afternoon, my family and I walked to the tip of Great Diamond Island, where we're staying for a few days. At high tide, Little Diamond Island is visible across a stretch of blue-green water, with just the thin ends of grass blades breaking the surface. But when we arrived at the shore, low tide was just an hour past. Between late-1800s-era houses, flowing grass and bright wildflowers, we approached the narrow, muddy sandbar connecting the two islands. Cross-island jog...

Alaskan lupine in Iceland

I visited Iceland for a week on a class trip during the summer of 2016. One of the first things I noticed upon leaving the airport was the prevalence of the Alaskan lupine, a tall plant with beautiful violet flowers. It covered the fields, the mossy shores, and the mountainsides like an indigo wildfire. Our guide explained that although the plant was [invasive](http://www.sandatlas.org/invasive-for-sure-but-beautiful-nevertheless/), most Icelanders enjoyed the appearance of it and thus did litt...

Recording is hard

A few days before I left for my vacation, I made the decision to record as much of it as possible through vlogging. I wanted to record it because I have been absolutely addicted to the videos of [Tokidoki Traveller](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAKZ2vtm_-hfqeCGTNNbZqA) lately. They're so visually and auditorily pleasing, and Emma does a masterful job with the feeling her channel creates. It feels like she's a close friend, and her viewers get to come right along on her journeys in Japan. I...

Iceland's Thingvellir National Park

> ⚠️ This post is, uh, vintage. An antique? Anyway, it originally had images, but I can't find some of them now. Looks like I'd saved them to a CMS that no longer exists, and this post wasn't captured by the Web Archive. I'm sure I could track them down, but I'm lazy right now. There were also a few broken links. I've linked to the Web Archive and other current sources where possible. Enjoy! When I visited Thingvellir (spelled Þingvellir in Icelandic) National Park, it was clear that the place...