Perfect day to buy a new grill. We haven’t had one since we moved. Also some frustration and hilarity as it wouldn’t fit in the car and we had to go back home to get my Honda Element. 🙂

Good story on NPR about Born in the USA:

The 1984 hit by Bruce Springsteen describes a Vietnam War veteran who returns home to desperate circumstances and few options. Listen only to its surging refrain, though, and you could mistake it for an uncomplicated celebration of patriotism.

🇺🇸

This country has a lot of problems. But think how people in 1776 would view today’s society. Now imagine 2276. What will it take to build the kind of future that everyone can be proud of? 🇺🇸

Also: screenshot of me searching for previous July 4th blog posts in Micro.blog.

Simon Willison blogged about letting Fable decide when to use cheaper models:

Jesse Vincent just gave me a related tip to help avoid burning too many of those valuable Fable tokens in the few days we have left before the prices go up. Tell Fable to use other models for smaller tasks, applying its own judgement about which model to use.

Fable pricing is nutty. I’m happy to just run GPT-5.5 with fast and xhigh for everything and not worry about it.

American flag with 28 stars, on display at the Texas State Library. Wasn’t expecting it to be so big! Texas joined in 1845 and it was only another year until the flag needed 29 stars. 🇺🇸

In Europe we use Hetzner, and I’ve always been bewildered about how it’s a fraction of the cost of Linode. But lately we’ve had a number of server crashes over there. Spreading servers across multiple providers is probably still the way to go.

Thanks Bob Wertz for the kind words in this blog post about Micro.blog’s support for Bluesky and every other open API we can get our hands on:

…Micro.Blog is the perfect solution for people who want to experiment with different platforms, but maintain a centralized web presence. Manton’s built something amazing at Micro.Blog and I’m still surprised how few people know about it.

Here’s a fun screenshot from Mastodon. Micro.blog posts that are federated to Mastodon look better than posts actually created from Mastodon. Markdown → your blog → everywhere.

I’m expanding Micro.blog’s support for Standard.site to include the content field too. It looks like this now:

"content": {
  "$type": "blog.micro.content",
  "markdown": "Hello _world_...",
  "html": "Hello <i>world</i>..."
}

Simple. I’ll publish an official lexicon later.

I did some testing with Standard.site this morning and posted a screenshot over in the help forums. Fascinating to see it in action. I signed into Leaflet and it knows about the long-form blog posts I created in Micro.blog.