A minimalist workflow: My desktop setup is built around i3, and everything I do is handled by simple scripts and terminal tools. There’s no taskbar, no desktop icons, and no visual clutter. My email runs in **aerc**, my RSS feeds in **Newsboat**, and my web browsing in **Lynx**. Everything is fast, predictable, and distraction-free.
When I open Newsboat, it immediately loads my RSS subscriptions, a mix of Linux blogs, news sites, and personal journals from friends. It’s not the neatest list in the world (I really should organise it one day), but it gives me exactly what I want, information without noise.
Unlike some feed readers that throw everything into one endless list, Newsboat groups feeds cleanly by source. That matters because some sites post dozens of articles a day while others might only update once a month. Separating them lets the quieter voices, personal blogs or smaller projects, actually be seen.
Organising information: Newsboat’s tagging system is one of its best features. I’ve got tags for *friends*, *games*, *news sources*, *politics*, *podcasts*, and more. One of my favourite feeds is “TheyWorkForYou”, an RSS service that updates whenever UK MPs speak in Parliament. I highly recommend it for anyone in the UK. It’s an easy way to see what your representatives are actually doing, and I think it’s good for democracy to stay informed like that.
Some of my other feeds include *Boiling Steam*, *GamingOnLinux*, *FreeGamer*, and a handful of personal blogs like Ghosty’s and Drew’s. Newsboat makes it easy to jump between them depending on what I’m in the mood for, Linux, games, or just something thoughtful to read with coffee.
Why I browse with Lynx: When I want to read a full article from an RSS feed, I usually open it directly in **Lynx**. It’s a text-based browser that runs right inside the terminal. For most of the content I care about, blogs, reviews, essays, or news articles, Lynx is perfect. It loads instantly, displays cleanly, and keeps me focused on the text instead of ads, autoplay videos, or pop-ups.
Sure, modern websites are built like web apps now, but that’s exactly why Lynx is such a breath of fresh air. It strips the web back to what it was meant to be: information, text, and ideas. For sites that really need a full browser (say, something JavaScript-heavy), I’ve got Firefox set as an alternative, but honestly, that’s rare these days.
I experimented with **Dillo** too, another lightweight option, but Lynx fits more naturally into Newsboat. I can just press a key to open any article right where I am, no switching windows or leaving the terminal. Page Up, Page Down, and I’m reading. It’s fast, simple, and reliable.
The beauty of plain text: All of this ties into what I’ve been loving about working in the terminal again: everything is **plain text**. Config files, notes, RSS lists, scripts, it’s all just text. That makes it transparent, portable, and easy to automate.
For example, Newsboat’s feeds are stored in a single plain text file. If I want to back them up or edit them, I just open the file in Vim. If I want to tweak the configuration, it’s one small text file with a couple of commented-out lines for the browsers I’ve tried.
That’s also the philosophy behind how I manage my dotfiles and scripts. I used to use GNU Stow for symlinks, but I’ve replaced it with a few simple bash scripts of my own. Same with address books, why use a complex app when a CSV or tab-separated file does the job perfectly?
The more I build my own little tools, the more I enjoy the workflow. It’s like rediscovering the old Unix philosophy: simple tools that do one job well.
Where it’s all going: I’ve been spending more time writing lately, both on my blog and in text posts across platforms like the Fediverse and PeerTube. You can find everything at **[chriswales.wales](chriswales.wales/)**, which links to all my current projects, podcasts, and social channels.
If you’re curious about minimalist computing, or want to see what life looks like when you move away from 'apps' and back into 'tools', I’ll be writing more about this approach, from plain-text note-taking to terminal calendars and to-do lists.
And if you’re just starting to tinker with RSS, I can’t recommend **Newsboat** enough. Pair it with **Lynx**, and you’ve got a distraction-free reading environment that’s faster, cleaner, and infinitely more satisfying than the modern web.
The UK Labour government is continuing to punch itself in the face over its approach to artificial intelligence. The party has abandoned both its climate pledges and its commitment to public safety as Prime Minister Keir Starmer stupidly embraces the tech industry’s AI hype-train.
In the Senedd, Ms Hannah Blythyn MS (Welsh Labour, Delyn) raised urgent concerns about the rise of “nudification apps” that digitally strip women and girls. She warned that AI-driven abuse is already harming women in politics and could devastate schoolchildren.
Yet in Westminster, Mr Starmer is pressing ahead with plans for a flagship AI hub on Teesside, even as ministers openly admit AI is being weaponised against women and is burning through huge amounts of energy. The project came at the expense of a hydrogen energy plant championed by Ed Miliband MP, who has now been sidelined despite his role as Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero.
Starmer is happily willing to turn a blind eye to the harms of AI, both to women and the environment, in order to appease tech-bros and Silicon Valley investors, rather than taking a stand. Not great for a former human rights lawyer.
The hype around AI has already produced a 30% fall in entry-level jobs since the technology went mainstream, hitting young people and new graduates hardest. At the same time, Starmer has pressed ahead with controversial welfare reforms, trying to force thousands of disabled people off benefits and into the workplace. Mr Starmer is pushing vulnerable people into a job market that simply cannot absorb them. The contradiction is plain, Labour says it wants full employment, but is championing a technology that is hollowing out opportunities. Begging for leadership
Inside Labour, frustration is mounting. Ed Miliband and Hannah Blythyn MS need to be calling for stronger leadership on climate and women’s rights in the face of AI harms. They are joined by countless voters who watch Starmer capitulating to every passing tech trend while ignoring the voters who won him the general election.
Starmer seems more concerned with winning over the far-right, who will never vote Labour, than with holding on to those progressive voters who only reluctantly backed Starmer last time. If this continues, Labour risks not just collapsing its own vote, but tearing apart the party itself.
Labour has also hitched its AI agenda to the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA), which requires intrusive age checks to access millions of websites. Ministers claim this will protect children, but campaigners say it is a lazy, ineffective solution that shifts responsibility away from parents.
Groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) argue the OSA threatens privacy, free speech, and equal access to the internet, while doing little to actually make children safer. We’ve already seen the bill used to crush political speech on the genocide in Gaza. Obviously a genocide isn’t going to be child-friendly, despite Labour also making moves to lower the voting age to 16.
Instead of teaching parents how to talk to their children about online risks, the Act assumes government surveillance is the answer. Many see this as another sign of a political class that would rather control speech online than to actually tackle any root problems, because that would require actual work and introspection. A dangerous road ahead
The contradictions are piling up. Labour says it cares about climate change, but is replacing green energy projects with energy-hungry AI hubs. It says it wants to protect women, but is ignoring the dangers of AI-fuelled abuse. It says it wants to boost jobs, but is cheering on a technology that is erasing entry-level work.
With so many voters, and I’m sure many back-bench MPs, already questioning Labour’s direction, Starmer’s strategy risks alienating the very people who delivered his victory. If the Prime Minister continues down this path, he won’t just lose the next election, he’ll unravel the Labour Party itself.
The final ever episode of Space Virgins over on PeerTube has been released. I'll probably be writing up a full blog post about it, but until then, here's the ep: video.thepolarbear.co.uk/w/4A7Nq6ndFx2RPYMK3WGYLe
Much like Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s 2022 mini budget, something absolutely disastrous, predictable, and entirely avoidable has occurred.
In the wake of the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA), a number of Discord users have had their data stolen by an “unauthorised third party”. Whilst full credit card numbers and passwords were not impacted by the hack, data potentially accessed includes names, usernames, emails, the last four digits of credit card numbers, and ,of course, a number of images of government IDs from users who had to upload them for age verification. If the Online Safety Act is supposed to keep our children safe (it doesn’t), it’s certainly not keeping our adults safe.
As of writing, the petition to repeal the OSA has reached over half-a-million signatures and is due for a parliamentary debate in several months.
To add yet another tier to this growing layer-cake of ineptitude, current prime minister ‘Sir’ Keir Starmer wants EVERY SINGLE PERSON in the UK to have a photo ID which links us all in to government services, proves who we are, aNd WiLl DeFiNaTlY nOt GeT hAcKeD aT aLl.
So let’s get this straight: The UK Labour (lesser of two evils) government wants us to consolidate all our ID information, into a single app, and what? Hand it out like Halloween candy to any site that lets people post about politics?
Some platforms like Steam have taken a different approach, and now only allows the purchase of adult content to people who have a credit card. Sure, there’s no risk of my driving licence getting hacked, but also as someone who doesn’t have a credit card, I don’t feel like taking out a loan just so I can see a pair of tits.
So yeah, we might become victims of fraud, have to take out credit cards we don’t want, be unable to talk about things the government doesn’t want us talking about, BUT AT LEAST THE KIDS ARE SAFE!
Of course, Labour are using immigrants as a scapegoat for their encroaching authoritarianism. I really can’t see how any of this will even affect legal immigration, perhaps there will be other groups in the future that will need ‘rounding up’. This centralised store of personal data will sure make that easy.
During my time in the press, I covered a number of stories about modern slavery, whilst it is definitely a problem in the UK, I can say with certainty, this is not a problem ID cards will solve. This is probably why Labour will start making it more difficult for us to use cash in the future. The forced digitalisation of society hopes to make it easy for the government to completely remove what little is left of our privacy and dignity, and to marginalise those who won’t get on board.
But if you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear, right? It’s not like I’m an immigrant, or hold horrendous views like Palestinians are humans beings who shouldn’t be slaughtered en masse, or starved out of their country.
Chris Were
Chris Were
A minimalist workflow:
My desktop setup is built around i3, and everything I do is handled by simple scripts and terminal tools. There’s no taskbar, no desktop icons, and no visual clutter. My email runs in **aerc**, my RSS feeds in **Newsboat**, and my web browsing in **Lynx**. Everything is fast, predictable, and distraction-free.
When I open Newsboat, it immediately loads my RSS subscriptions, a mix of Linux blogs, news sites, and personal journals from friends. It’s not the neatest list in the world (I really should organise it one day), but it gives me exactly what I want, information without noise.
Unlike some feed readers that throw everything into one endless list, Newsboat groups feeds cleanly by source. That matters because some sites post dozens of articles a day while others might only update once a month. Separating them lets the quieter voices, personal blogs or smaller projects, actually be seen.
Organising information:
Newsboat’s tagging system is one of its best features. I’ve got tags for *friends*, *games*, *news sources*, *politics*, *podcasts*, and more. One of my favourite feeds is “TheyWorkForYou”, an RSS service that updates whenever UK MPs speak in Parliament. I highly recommend it for anyone in the UK. It’s an easy way to see what your representatives are actually doing, and I think it’s good for democracy to stay informed like that.
Some of my other feeds include *Boiling Steam*, *GamingOnLinux*, *FreeGamer*, and a handful of personal blogs like Ghosty’s and Drew’s. Newsboat makes it easy to jump between them depending on what I’m in the mood for, Linux, games, or just something thoughtful to read with coffee.
Why I browse with Lynx:
When I want to read a full article from an RSS feed, I usually open it directly in **Lynx**. It’s a text-based browser that runs right inside the terminal. For most of the content I care about, blogs, reviews, essays, or news articles, Lynx is perfect. It loads instantly, displays cleanly, and keeps me focused on the text instead of ads, autoplay videos, or pop-ups.
Sure, modern websites are built like web apps now, but that’s exactly why Lynx is such a breath of fresh air. It strips the web back to what it was meant to be: information, text, and ideas. For sites that really need a full browser (say, something JavaScript-heavy), I’ve got Firefox set as an alternative, but honestly, that’s rare these days.
I experimented with **Dillo** too, another lightweight option, but Lynx fits more naturally into Newsboat. I can just press a key to open any article right where I am, no switching windows or leaving the terminal. Page Up, Page Down, and I’m reading. It’s fast, simple, and reliable.
The beauty of plain text:
All of this ties into what I’ve been loving about working in the terminal again: everything is **plain text**. Config files, notes, RSS lists, scripts, it’s all just text. That makes it transparent, portable, and easy to automate.
For example, Newsboat’s feeds are stored in a single plain text file. If I want to back them up or edit them, I just open the file in Vim. If I want to tweak the configuration, it’s one small text file with a couple of commented-out lines for the browsers I’ve tried.
That’s also the philosophy behind how I manage my dotfiles and scripts. I used to use GNU Stow for symlinks, but I’ve replaced it with a few simple bash scripts of my own. Same with address books, why use a complex app when a CSV or tab-separated file does the job perfectly?
The more I build my own little tools, the more I enjoy the workflow. It’s like rediscovering the old Unix philosophy: simple tools that do one job well.
Where it’s all going:
I’ve been spending more time writing lately, both on my blog and in text posts across platforms like the Fediverse and PeerTube. You can find everything at **[chriswales.wales](chriswales.wales/)**, which links to all my current projects, podcasts, and social channels.
If you’re curious about minimalist computing, or want to see what life looks like when you move away from 'apps' and back into 'tools', I’ll be writing more about this approach, from plain-text note-taking to terminal calendars and to-do lists.
And if you’re just starting to tinker with RSS, I can’t recommend **Newsboat** enough. Pair it with **Lynx**, and you’ve got a distraction-free reading environment that’s faster, cleaner, and infinitely more satisfying than the modern web.
4 days ago | [YT] | 1
View 0 replies
Chris Were
Me, @ClassyTeaTimeJenny, and @maxamillisman have a look at the new Dunk and Egg #GameOfThrones trailer and have a chat about it.
2 weeks ago | [YT] | 0
View 0 replies
Chris Were
The UK Labour government is continuing to punch itself in the face over its approach to artificial intelligence. The party has abandoned both its climate pledges and its commitment to public safety as Prime Minister Keir Starmer stupidly embraces the tech industry’s AI hype-train.
In the Senedd, Ms Hannah Blythyn MS (Welsh Labour, Delyn) raised urgent concerns about the rise of “nudification apps” that digitally strip women and girls. She warned that AI-driven abuse is already harming women in politics and could devastate schoolchildren.
Yet in Westminster, Mr Starmer is pressing ahead with plans for a flagship AI hub on Teesside, even as ministers openly admit AI is being weaponised against women and is burning through huge amounts of energy. The project came at the expense of a hydrogen energy plant championed by Ed Miliband MP, who has now been sidelined despite his role as Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero.
Starmer is happily willing to turn a blind eye to the harms of AI, both to women and the environment, in order to appease tech-bros and Silicon Valley investors, rather than taking a stand. Not great for a former human rights lawyer.
The hype around AI has already produced a 30% fall in entry-level jobs since the technology went mainstream, hitting young people and new graduates hardest. At the same time, Starmer has pressed ahead with controversial welfare reforms, trying to force thousands of disabled people off benefits and into the workplace. Mr Starmer is pushing vulnerable people into a job market that simply cannot absorb them. The contradiction is plain, Labour says it wants full employment, but is championing a technology that is hollowing out opportunities.
Begging for leadership
Inside Labour, frustration is mounting. Ed Miliband and Hannah Blythyn MS need to be calling for stronger leadership on climate and women’s rights in the face of AI harms. They are joined by countless voters who watch Starmer capitulating to every passing tech trend while ignoring the voters who won him the general election.
Starmer seems more concerned with winning over the far-right, who will never vote Labour, than with holding on to those progressive voters who only reluctantly backed Starmer last time. If this continues, Labour risks not just collapsing its own vote, but tearing apart the party itself.
Labour has also hitched its AI agenda to the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA), which requires intrusive age checks to access millions of websites. Ministers claim this will protect children, but campaigners say it is a lazy, ineffective solution that shifts responsibility away from parents.
Groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) argue the OSA threatens privacy, free speech, and equal access to the internet, while doing little to actually make children safer. We’ve already seen the bill used to crush political speech on the genocide in Gaza. Obviously a genocide isn’t going to be child-friendly, despite Labour also making moves to lower the voting age to 16.
Instead of teaching parents how to talk to their children about online risks, the Act assumes government surveillance is the answer. Many see this as another sign of a political class that would rather control speech online than to actually tackle any root problems, because that would require actual work and introspection.
A dangerous road ahead
The contradictions are piling up. Labour says it cares about climate change, but is replacing green energy projects with energy-hungry AI hubs. It says it wants to protect women, but is ignoring the dangers of AI-fuelled abuse. It says it wants to boost jobs, but is cheering on a technology that is erasing entry-level work.
With so many voters, and I’m sure many back-bench MPs, already questioning Labour’s direction, Starmer’s strategy risks alienating the very people who delivered his victory. If the Prime Minister continues down this path, he won’t just lose the next election, he’ll unravel the Labour Party itself.
3 weeks ago | [YT] | 2
View 0 replies
Chris Were
The final ever episode of Space Virgins over on PeerTube has been released. I'll probably be writing up a full blog post about it, but until then, here's the ep: video.thepolarbear.co.uk/w/4A7Nq6ndFx2RPYMK3WGYLe
3 weeks ago | [YT] | 2
View 0 replies
Chris Were
Much like Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s 2022 mini budget, something absolutely disastrous, predictable, and entirely avoidable has occurred.
In the wake of the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA), a number of Discord users have had their data stolen by an “unauthorised third party”. Whilst full credit card numbers and passwords were not impacted by the hack, data potentially accessed includes names, usernames, emails, the last four digits of credit card numbers, and ,of course, a number of images of government IDs from users who had to upload them for age verification. If the Online Safety Act is supposed to keep our children safe (it doesn’t), it’s certainly not keeping our adults safe.
As of writing, the petition to repeal the OSA has reached over half-a-million signatures and is due for a parliamentary debate in several months.
To add yet another tier to this growing layer-cake of ineptitude, current prime minister ‘Sir’ Keir Starmer wants EVERY SINGLE PERSON in the UK to have a photo ID which links us all in to government services, proves who we are, aNd WiLl DeFiNaTlY nOt GeT hAcKeD aT aLl.
So let’s get this straight: The UK Labour (lesser of two evils) government wants us to consolidate all our ID information, into a single app, and what? Hand it out like Halloween candy to any site that lets people post about politics?
Some platforms like Steam have taken a different approach, and now only allows the purchase of adult content to people who have a credit card. Sure, there’s no risk of my driving licence getting hacked, but also as someone who doesn’t have a credit card, I don’t feel like taking out a loan just so I can see a pair of tits.
So yeah, we might become victims of fraud, have to take out credit cards we don’t want, be unable to talk about things the government doesn’t want us talking about, BUT AT LEAST THE KIDS ARE SAFE!
Of course, Labour are using immigrants as a scapegoat for their encroaching authoritarianism. I really can’t see how any of this will even affect legal immigration, perhaps there will be other groups in the future that will need ‘rounding up’. This centralised store of personal data will sure make that easy.
During my time in the press, I covered a number of stories about modern slavery, whilst it is definitely a problem in the UK, I can say with certainty, this is not a problem ID cards will solve. This is probably why Labour will start making it more difficult for us to use cash in the future. The forced digitalisation of society hopes to make it easy for the government to completely remove what little is left of our privacy and dignity, and to marginalise those who won’t get on board.
But if you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear, right? It’s not like I’m an immigrant, or hold horrendous views like Palestinians are humans beings who shouldn’t be slaughtered en masse, or starved out of their country.
4 weeks ago | [YT] | 6
View 2 replies