Firefox

After years of using Google Chrome as my default browser, I’m switching to Firefox. Why? Firefox now has native vertical tabs. In other words, you can choose to list tabs in a sidebar rather than smushed together across the top of the screen. I am not a person who typically keeps dozens or hundreds of tabs open, but 10 or 15 is typical. Even with this few, the titles are far more legible in the sidebar since they aren’t truncated by the variable width of traditional tabs. I find it easier to utilize tab groups in this view, too.

To be clear, side bar tabs are not a new invention. They have been available as plugins, extensions, or features of various browsers for years. What’s new is their availability as a built-in feature of a major browser.

As a secondary benefit, Firefox better supports uBlock Origin, an ad-blocking extension that also just reduces the amount of junk data transferred with each pageload. I haven’t scrutinized its impact in detail, but anecdotally I can report it doesn’t seem to be overly aggressive: I haven’t noticed any interference with legit content, including “artisanally edited” ads and integrated sponsorships on various indie sites I visit. Mainly it just feels like combing some of the spammy cruft from the footer of corporate sites.

Like Chrome, Firefox supports syncing across devices and platforms.

Last but not least, if you’re a cranky ol’-timer like me who begrudges the disintegration of interface standards, a tip: you can re-enable the menu bar and the window title bar via checkboxen in the toolbar customization panel.

(As I write this, I see that native vertical tabs are coming to Chrome, too, but I’m content with this small move to extricate myself from Google’s grasp regardless of features.)

Posted on Friday, November 21st, 2025.

So Long and Thanks For All the Tweets

I joined Twitter on July 16, 2007. For the next seven or eight years starting in 2008, I posted pretty frequently and did enjoy the internet water cooler culture of following various authors, makers, scientists, and of course comedy accounts. I wrote my babbling commentary about bikes, science fiction, 3D printing, and art for my own amusement. My posting tapered off after 2016 and 2017, and although I continued to log in occasionally to look around, I hadn’t posted anything in over a year.

Today, I downloaded my data and finally deactivated my account.

Here’s a graph of my complete Twitter usage history, via Ian Johnson’s Twitter Archive viewer on Observable:

I have started accounts on a few of the new Twitter alternatives like Mastodon and Bluesky, but none of them have really clicked. This has more to do with how I now allocate my time and attention than it does with the design of those sites or the state of social media today. I do post art (and bask in the algorithm) on Instagram, and sometimes I post detailed project reports on Patreon. If I were to write more anywhere, I’d prefer to focus here on my own site, starting with nerdy book lists and eventually nerdy book reviews.

Posted on Wednesday, November 5th, 2025.

Breeding Bird Survey Visualization

Here is a sample plot of Breeding Bird Survey data, embedded from an Observable notebook I wrote. View the complete notebook in context at Observable for interactive species filters, more explanation, and the ability to fiddle with the code.

Posted on Sunday, June 15th, 2025.

PICO-8

I recently discovered PICO-8, a fantasy console for making and sharing simple video games. It’s a big dose of nostalgia for the days of typing BASIC code into our Tandy or Chipmunk Basic (except the PICO-8 language is Lua). The “fantasy console” concept is clever: it presents as an emulator for a vintage arcade machine or microcomputer with very limited resources — except no such machine ever existed. It’s a great example of creative constraints which even has me tempted to dabble in making silly little games again.

The full console (complete with editor modes) is a commercial download, but you can play the cartridges online, too.

Posted on Sunday, May 25th, 2025.

Observable Plot

Observable Notebooks allow code to be interspersed with documentation, data tables, and visualization in an online interface. I’ve been learning a little bit about making charts with Plot, Observable’s JavaScript graphing toolkit. The Plot Gallery is worth a look for anyone interested in data and design.

(Plot is derived from d3, a more general-purpose JavaScript visualization toolkit. See also Jupyter Notebooks for a similar computational notebook interface to other languages, like Python or R.)

Posted on Sunday, May 25th, 2025.