Logbook 2026-11-11
Today the Lab got its third experiment: The Focus Reader.
Currently
On this day
The Focus Reader
A way to read the long pieces of the site a few words at a time, like subtitles, in a panel with its own pace, size and progress.
I want a way to read the long pieces of this site that takes the whole screen and nothing else: a panel over the page, and the text passing a few words at a time, like subtitles, at a pace I choose.
The idea came from wanting a reading experience a little more advanced, and less simplistic, than Safari’s Reader mode on a phone.
The reader comes in two views. The Sequence view comes from similar ideas I stumbled upon online, usually built into small e-ink devices, and from rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), a technique from reading research that Spritz turned into an app in 2014: the words come one frame at a time, always in the same place, so the eyes stay still. The Flow view comes from the way Spotify shows lyrics: the whole text stays in view and moves up a line at a time, the words being read marked as they go. It’s less brutalist, and calmer to read.
The panel has a few settings: the view, the speed in words a minute, how many words show at a time (or a whole paragraph in the Flow view) and the size of the text, then where the words line up in the Sequence view, and whether the words being read are underlined in the Flow view. Space plays and pauses, the arrows go a frame back or on, and a scroll moves through the text. Underneath, a footer of figures follows the pace and the progress: the rate, the words read out of the total, and the time left at that pace.
Later it should sit on every article and essay, behind a button. I’m keeping it apart from the rest of the site’s code, as one element that takes a text, so it can become a package of its own for other Astro sites.
Logbook 2026-11-11
The third batch I mentioned yesterday ran this morning. Until now the system only looked forward: each pass read what the feeds had published over the last couple of weeks, and…
Logbook 2026-11-10
Until now, the system moved when I asked it to. I would start a pass, it would gather what had come in, sort it, write its notes and a review, and I would read the result. Today it…
Logbook 2026-11-09
Today I read the first two reviews of my personal knowledge base, on the page I built for them.
The Scenes
A style of imagery for the essays, made from the site's own cells, able to show detailed scenes and to bring them to life.
A visual direction, one piece at a time
How this site found its look between October and November, told as a method. Collect first, read and sort on a shared canvas with AI, put words on it, then focus and build one piece at a time.
Agents, a proxy to almost anything?
Sundar Pichai says there's no going back once you get the taste of agents. What I understood in that moment, for me and for someone close to me.
Logbook 2026-11-06
Today the site got its slides: a theme for reveal.js and a set of templates to start a deck from.
Logbook 2026-11-05
Today the site published its first article, Threads since 2021.
Threads since 2021
Rereading what I wrote on cmdncmds in 2021, I found many of the threads I'm pulling today, and saw logging everything go from a dormant load to an asset.
Logbook 2026-11-04
Reading the reviews had become the weak spot. Each one is a Markdown file, and even in a good preview, a page with quotes, links to notes and sections to weigh doesn't make for…
Logbook 2026-11-03
Today I went back over everything I had saved on LinkedIn in the last six months and sent it to the knowledge base by hand, post by post, the way I send any link I want it to read.…
Logbook 2026-11-02
Today I opened another drawer: DEVONthink, where I used to clip things before this knowledge base existed. Years of saves came in at once, articles I had kept, a design-systems…
Logbook 2026-11-01
Today I sent a single link to the knowledge base: a video, nothing else in the message. It raised two questions at once.
Logbook 2026-10-31
Today I went back over the first review. The change is small, but it matters to me.
Logbook 2026-10-31
A quieter day. Email forwarding for the new domain is set up: everything turned green, and the first test message reached my personal inbox.
Logbook 2026-10-30
Today the system sorted the whole first batch, wrote its first notes and its first review.
Logbook 2026-10-29
Today the backlog actually went through. More than a hundred Safari tabs, a first handful of feeds and about sixty newsletters turned into sources the system can read, sort and…
Logbook 2026-10-27
On the second day, before the system had processed anything real, I decided to write about it.
Logbook 2026-10-26
I've wanted a knowledge base that works for me for a long time. This is the story of how that idea finally started to become real.
Logbook 2026-10-23
This morning was all about the mascot: four cells in a square.
LoopLogbook 2026-10-22
Today I came back to the canvas after a few days away. I was very much a fan of the new direction, and I left comments all over it to push it further.
LoopLogbook 2026-10-17
Past midnight, right after "Relevé", I took a different turn: no more elk. I wanted to work with rectangular shapes that can hold symbols, starting from a page of my notebook where…
LoopLogbook 2026-10-16
Today I answered the three directions, and by the evening I had asked to start over.
LoopLogbook 2026-10-10
Today I started working on the brand of my personal website. The site itself would come later: a place to publish notes and articles, show some work and experiments, and say what…
+1Nothing here yet.