J. Ryan Stinnett

no-more-cover-pages interface, showing thumbnails of annoying cover pages that no-more-cover-pages will helpfully remove for you

I don't like cover pages on my PDFs so I made a li'l program to strip them from PDFs in my Zotero library

uvx no-more-cover-pages

github.com/joshuahhh/no-more-cover-pages/

Are there any good places to find volunteering roles? I'd like to find something that makes my community / the world better, and I'm happy to volunteer my time and tech skills to do so.

Something fully / mostly remote would be best. I'm based in Glasgow, UK. Global roles okay too.

Not to get political, but America is very pretty and has a lot of nice folks making cool things, and I think if we had a president who wasn’t actively trying to murder us, we could have a pretty good time

I keep seeing posts going "when ICE comes to MY city, we'll be out in the streets even harder" and man, I get that sentiment but I need everyone to understand that the work in Minneapolis is partly confrontational but MORE IMPORTANTLY aaallll the stuff organized in the background to help neighbors

Stand With Minnesota Donation Directory Stand With Minnesota is a hub for supporting, learning, and taking action to support Minnesotans impacted by ICE and federal enforcement.

Here are some ways to help Minnesota with all the essential but less visible needs.

But also, go get involved with your own community. Make new friends. Get those networks going. Learn what orgs in your city are already doing good work that needs support. Don't wait.

www.standwithminnesota.com

Here we go...

Announcing the Visible Zorker Project and Patreon! Remember how I did Visible Zork 1 and 2? I'm going to do Zork 3, and then continue through Infocom's entire canon -- in chronological order, one per month.

blog.zarfhome.com/2026/01/the-...

TruffleRuby kicks off the year with a new website, a new release, and a blog post to go with it! 🎉
truffleruby.dev/blog/truffle...
Many changes:
* New versioning
* Thread-safe Hash
* No system dependencies anymore
* Installs in 2 seconds
* Development is now fully in the open

Since early last year, I’ve been trying to reduce my dependency on the big US tech companies, and US companies in general. Following Tim Bray, I’ve been thinking of this as de-Googling. I don’t really want to get into the reasons, except to say that I’m under no illusion that my support (or lack of it) makes any difference to those companies. For me, it’s much more about reducing risk1, and about supporting smaller companies whose interests are more aligned with mine. Anyways! I wanted write about my progress here, in case it’s useful to anyone else who’s also considering this. (For a more in-depth discussion of the various alternatives, I found European Alternatives and Getting off US tech: a guide to be quite helpful.)

New blog post:

De-Googling
→ dubroy.com/blog/de-goog...

…in which I tell you about some great services & companies that I'm very happy to have discovered.

I also noticed recently that the new “interstitial“ pages they stamp on front of the paper have an author limit…! If there are more than 5 authors, the extra names are just dropped on the floor with a small ”show all” link as your only clue. 🤪

They must have had a meeting to work out how to continue annoying people while still technically offering open access… 😓 ACM makes some bizarre choices.

Someone should write version control à la carte

Screenshot of headline from Daily Northwestern: 'Get the f-k out of our cities': Community members hold vigil to honor Minnesota woman killed by ICE Quoted copy reads: Abughazaleh told The Daily she had cried five times since learning of the shooting. "It was a mom that just dropped her kid off at school," Abughazaleh said. "Her wife saw her get shot in the head. She had stuffed animals in her glove box and a dog in her car." She then called for the abolition of ICE and DHS and for prosecuting federal immigration agents. "Get the f—k out of our cities," Abughazaleh said. "You're not wanted here. And as soon as we possibly can, we're not just abolishing ICE — we're holding all of you to account."

Headline screenshot of Evanston RoundTable: Protesters gather to condemn fatal shooting of Minneapolis woman Quoted copy reads: Candidate Kat Abughazaleh said if she were in Congress, she would be launching an investigation into the shooting and dismantle the Department of Homeland Security. "So many of us, including myself, have seen firsthand the brutality that ICE enacts in our communities," she said. "ICE has already shot people in broad daylight, killed people in broad daylight. Shooting a mother in the head ... isn't a surprise, but it still hurts. It still knocks the breath out of your chest."

This is the issue of our time. How we respond to Trump’s secret police will define our future for generations.

Our community is stronger than any masked henchmen.

ICE: Get the fuck out of Illinois.

Ah, I guess you’re right. PDF Expert does seem to do it, at least on iOS and probably macOS too.

I think both Zotero’s built-in PDF reader as well as PDF Expert can do this… Pretty sure at least one of them can.

A Dutch worker went viral after explaining to their American boss that they have a life outside work.

"They have no shame, do they? They don't even bother to lie badly anymore. I suppose that's the final humiliation." - Ghorman senator Dasi Oran, to Mon Mothma as the Empire baselessly justifies another atrocity.

Spray paint a plane and they'll detain you without trial and call you a terrorist.

Kidnap a foreign head of state - and Keir Starmer will make it clear we've played no part in it but will wait for the scheduled press conference in a few hours before potentially condemning it

@redblobgames.com year in review, on choosing projects:

"Is it that I want it done?
Is it that I want to be doing it?
Is it that I want to have done it?

There are times I want to have done something, but when I sit down to do it, I don't actually want to."

<3

www.redblobgames.com/blog/2025-12...

many organizations should be cooperatives. but especially those that are nominally nonprofit like mozilla corporation, it avoids the tendency among leadership to cosplay at american psycho

Screenshot of a paper entry: Fictional Failures and Real-World Lessons: Ethical Speculation Through Design Fiction on Emotional Support Conversational AI Authors: Faye Kollig, Jessica Pater, Fayika Farhat Nova, Casey Fiesler (There are tabs with "abstract" and "summary" and "summary" is selected.)

The ACM Digital Library, where a LOT of computing-related research is published (I'd say at least 75% of my own publications), is now not only providing (without consent of the authors and without opt-in by readers) AI-generated summaries of papers, but they appear as the *default* over abstracts.

Ah okay, I see… Can’t think of anything along that direction at the moment, but will share if it appears.

anyone know any Good Discourse on "what is programming anyway"?

random examples of Good Discourse:

- Melanie Hoff's "Always Already Programming" (gist.github.com/melaniehoff/...) & Lucy Keer's reflection on it (lucykeer.com/notebucket/a...)

- PROGRAMme (programme.hypotheses.org)

There’s also MacLean et al.’s classic 1990 paper “User-tailorable systems: pressing the issues with buttons” that works through some of these distinctions

dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers The emerging golden age of home-cooked software, barefoot developers, and why the local-first community should help build it

Maggie Appleton’s “Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers” may be of interest, as well as references it links to

maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-...

Benthic: Perceptually Congruent Structures for Accessible Charts and Diagrams | MIT Visualization Group Graphical representations—such as charts and diagrams—have a visual structure that communicates the relationship between visual elements. For instance, we might consider two elements to be connected w...

Charts and diagrams use visual structure to convey meaning. For example, spacing and alignment groups data, spatial proximity links labels to elements. But this visual structure is typically invisible to screen readers.

Introducing Benthic, new research at #ASSETS2025

vis.mit.edu/pubs/benthic/

Radical idea: The next Dem nominee should run on making bribery actually illegal. In every way.

Ink & Switch London: Building new tools for Science · Luma Ink & Switch's mission is to help computers become better tools for thought. We believe that the promise of computers as "intelligence amplifiers" or "bicycles…

Ink & Switch is hosting another Social in London on Nov. 11th at the Alan Turing Institute. I'll share some early scientific work in Patchwork, & Marcel will give a peek at the Playbook programmable ink system. Also, lightning talks about "surprises in software".

RSVP here: luma.com/71g0lhgo

Book Launch & Signing — Daniel Temkin: Forty-Four Esolangs Gray Area celebrates Artist and Author Daniel Temkin and his new monograph, "Forty-Four Esolangs."

Hey SF folks! I‘ll have a reading (more of a free association of esolang thoughts) Friday Night at Gray Area grayarea.org/event/book-l...

The automerge home page, featuring an interactive demo. Two devices synchronize their data by streaming particles back and forth.

🫠 automerge.org

The new Automerge website is live!!

The biggest (smallest) surprise? How fun it was to build the demo!

Automerge is so robust, it withstood all our weird ideas — like using physics-driven particles to literally push changes between docs — and it just worked. Perfectly. Every time.

#SPLASH folks, check out our Distinguished Paper (!) talk this afternoon at 14:15 on "Incremental Bidirectional Typing via Order Maintenance". Thomas will tell you how to efficiently update type information (including error marks) in response to local edit actions. A small step *static* semantics!?