A living collection of notes, ideas, and reflections from Doug Belshaw.
After experimenting (again) with Obsidian I came across Forestry.md which describes itself as "Open Source Digital Garden Hosting". I thought it was cool, but then realised that it would be yet another system where I have to fit into its workflow, rather than vice-versa
…Just a quick note to say that, in addition to RSS, you can now receive an email digest of notes from this site on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
Since hitting publish on Anonymous credentials for the web (no, not those kind) I've been doing some work for Kerri Lemoie at the Digital Credentials Consortium and it's made me think that PACT (Private Access Control Tokens) might actually be useful for Verifiable Credentials (VCs), too.
…I woke up early this morning and an idea for a second zine just popped fully-formed into my head. It's weird how the subconscious works.
After a little bit of back-and-forth with my Little Robot Friend, I'm thinking of framing it as a "field guide for designing around the mind we actually have". That's in contrast to the ultra-rational one that we'll never achieve, nor would we actually want anyway.
…The zine is coming together. The text is pretty much done, and I'm playing about with a slightly different design for the front cover. Obviously the final print and paper quality will be much better as I'm sending it away to be done professionally!
…Although I still have to be careful, I'm definitely coming out the other side of my Stage 3 ('parasympathetic') Overtraining Syndrome.
The photo at the top of this note shows my Garmin Venu 3 smartwatch with the built in recovery time feature, as well as one I added last week called Training Status showing overall training load.
…Below is a formatted transcript Yann LeCun's keynote speech from a couple of days ago at the UN Open Source Week 2026.
He's saying some important things here, not least that fears around AI are overblown, probably to ensure that regulation destroys legitimate Open Source AI alternatives. I like his analogy of the printing press and use of the phrase "medieval obscurantism".
…From January 2025 to April 2026, Laura and I, through We Are Open Co-op worked on researching, planning, implementing, and evaluating a community platform for Amnesty International UK. One of the decisions we made was to host the site outside the UK.
…This is a long post from Mozilla that probably won't get the attention it deserves outside of a niche, geeky audience. I'm very pleased that people are figuring out answers to these issues.
Let's start with the problem:
…
