Feed - benjamin wil

Unicode Variation Selector-15 and some of my tears 🔗

From my phone, I noticed that my website was displaying footnote backlink glyphs as emoji in my RSS reader. It had not always been this way. I opened [...]

feed backfilling 🔗

so my website has two main feed sources: the main weblog, and this antisocial feed that came into existence via rss club. until now they’ve been fully [...]

Markdown is for humans 🔗

Developers and nerds have seemed satisfied with Markdown as a plain text format for a long time. Now, I see Markdown approaching the edges of the main [...]

I like JSON Feed 🔗

Recently, I implemented JSON Feed support for my static site generator, Lifer. My impression is that, in 2026, JSON Feed is still not widely used, whi [...]

taking the summer off work 🔗

after deliberating for a while and doing some budget-math, i decided to take the summer off of work and attempt to recover from burnout. maybe i’ll wr [...]

SSH agent–managed SSH keys 🔗

You probably already know: there’s no excuse to not be using a password manager in 2026. If you read my blog regularly, you may even be a person actua [...]

admitting defeat (re: android development environments on guix) 🔗

for over a month i’ve spent a weird amount of my free time trying to set up an android development environment (via react native, and then nativescrip [...]

new light colourscheme 🔗

it’s a bit weird: yellows and blues and reds. what do you think? [...]

my notetaking system, early 2026 🔗

the process is still evolving, but i’m going to describe my notetaking system as of right now. i started from zero in novemberish last year and am get [...]

you're allowed to be uninsightful 🔗

i’ve published two (small) non-antisocial blog posts this month, which is about one more than usual: semantic style ruby blocks portable feature flags [...]

Portable feature flags in ten-ish lines of Ruby 🔗

It may make sense to use a mature feature flag library or pay for feature flags as a service in your complex application. That said, you can build pre [...]

oscar predictions 2026 🔗

these are not the things that i necessarily would want to win, but what i think will happen. (i’ve got nothing better to do.) best picture: Hamnet bes [...]

Semantic style Ruby blocks 🔗

Here’s another blog post vouching for writing Ruby blocks using the semantic rule. Sometimes called “the Weirich rule” because of Jim Weirich’s “Brace [...]

your mime type is showing 🔗

hi. rss club showed up in my feeds today, and then i remembered that this feed is linked there and i haven’t used it in a while. and then i clicked on [...]

Victoria Film Festival 2026 🔗

This month was the 32nd occurrence of the Victoria Film Festival here in Victoria, British Columbia. It is likely the best-selling VFF in the history [...]

New website 🔗

Today I’m launching my website redesign. I hope that you like it. Comparing the new design to the old one1, my design seems to accidentally commemorat [...]

The best films I saw: 2025 edition 🔗

As always, in an unranked order, here are the thirty best movies I was able to watch in 2025. This list was also published on Letterboxd. I don’t thin [...]

Porto, Portugal 🔗

After EuRuKo in Viana do Castelo, I spent some time in Porto. In Viana do Costelo, some locals said that Porto is not as tourism-oriented as Lisbon. I [...]

Viana do Castelo, Portugal 🔗

I was at EuRuKo last month, held in a small city in the Norte Region of Portugal called Viana do Castelo. The conference was held in the Centro Cultur [...]

Catch-all routes and routing constraints in Rails applications 🔗

I’ve worked with more than one Ruby on Rails application that has a catch-all GET route at the end of its config/routes.rb file: Rails.application.rou [...]

See you at EuRuKo 2025 🔗

I’ll be at EuRuKo, the European Ruby conference, in Viana do Castelo, Portugal, this month. Maybe I’ll see you there? We could grab a coffee. [...]

Typesetting artist name–album title separation 🔗

Recently I’ve had two occasions to think about how to typeset musical artist names when next to their album release names. I couldn’t find a very auth [...]

GitHub Discussions is modelled poorly for open-ended conversations 🔗

Note that this article criticizes GitHub’s Discussions feature (originally launched in 2017) as it exists now, in July 2025. In case you don’t know, D [...]

Prefer text over screenshots 🔗

If you want me to read some text, use your computer’s text-copy commands to provide me with the data rather than taking a screenshot. There are a lot [...]

The Shrouds (2024) 🔗

In one of the first scenes, Karsh explains to a date that the GraveTech cemetery he built, where Becca, his Jewish wife, is buried, is a “non-denomina [...]

Atom vs. RSS 🔗

While working on my static site generator, Lifer, I was occasionally annoyed by how my test feeds were being read by RSS feed readers. And I was occas [...]

This website has been ported to Lifer 0.9 🔗

Since releasing Lifer 0.3 in January I’ve released six more minor versions to get the project stable enough to start using. The changelog entries don’ [...]

From developer to Rails developer 🔗

In 2023, I wrote this guide to getting familiar with Ruby and Rails for my employer, Super Good Software. In 2025, I wouldn’t change much too much abo [...]

Lifer 0.3 🔗

I recently released 0.3.0 of my static site generator project Lifer, which I intend to use to build this website in the (near) future. Right now, I bu [...]

The best films I saw: 2024 edition 🔗

In no particular order, here’s my annual list of the movies I loved that I saw for the first time in 2024. This year, I included two limited series as [...]

The best films I saw: 2023 edition 🔗

As usual: here’s my annual list of the thirty best movies I watched for the first time this year. In no particular order. I also publish it on Letterb [...]

The best films I saw: 2022 edition 🔗

In 2022 I watched some movies for the first time, as I do every year. And these are the thirty1 that were the best, most interesting, etc.: Tsai Ming- [...]

Providence, RI 🔗

I was in Providence, Rhode Island, for RubyConf Mini and had the opportunity to eat and drink at some amazing places. If you’re going to visit Provide [...]

RubyConf Mini 🔗

I attended RubyConf Mini in Providence, Rhode Island. If I met you there: it was a pleasure to have met you. This conference was a planned-last-minute [...]

777 🔗

Recently I released an EP 777. You can stream it or purchase it on Bandcamp. [...]

The best films I saw: 2021 edition 🔗

As usual: here are thirty films, that I liked or thought were good, that I watched for the first time this year. In no particular order. Éric Rohmer: [...]

Now a Gollum organization member 🔗

Earlier this year, I was invited to join the Gollum organization after making some contributions to the main Gollum repository. I’ve been participatin [...]

No longer there 🔗

I released an EP called No longer there. You can stream it or purchase it on Bandcamp. [...]

Treatise on Luck 🔗

Mark Francis Johnson’s Treatise on Luck is a book of poems that investigates luck: where it comes from, where it goes, and where it isn’t. It’s a book [...]

The best films I saw: 2020 edition 🔗

A marked improvement in my film consumption since 2019. The following list is thirty films long. All films I saw for the first time in 2020. Alejandro [...]

Assimilated 🔗

I just released a new LaunchBar 6 theme called Assimilated. I am kind of shocked that I still use LaunchBar, but as long as I use macOS for work I gue [...]

Letter for you 🔗

I released some music last week. It’s a short album called Letter for you. You can stream it or purchase it on Bandcamp. Bandcamp is also a great plac [...]

prefers-color-scheme: dark 🔗

i decided it was time to make a dark colour scheme for this website. i haven’t touched the styles on here in a while, and it was weird to go through t [...]

Film Title Poem (2016) 🔗

Please also read Jennifer West’s introduction to the film. Of the many shorts I’ve seen that appropriate and then collage movie stills or sequences, I [...]

Self-hosting a tiny git remote 🔗

There are plenty of full-featured git forges out there. If you’re a software developer, you’ve probably used GitHub, Bitbucket, and GitLab at some poi [...]

The best films I saw: 2019 edition 🔗

I watched a lot of mediocre and objectively-pretty-bad movies this year. So much so that I don’t think I can get to a list that’s thirty items’ long ( [...]

assessing my role in software freedom advocacy 🔗

over the last year i’ve become increasingly conscious of how my life and work intersects with free and proprietary software. notably: i spent the bett [...]

how to move into a new place 🔗

i’m moving this month, and so far it’s going smoothly. in the last nine years, i’ve moved ten times. most of the time, i only had to worry about my ow [...]

using jekyll collections for a secondary, rss-only feed 🔗

this post outlines how i’m generating this feed as a separate, secondary feed using jekyll collections. this is completely possible using the current [...]

intro to antisocial feed 🔗

test. i’ve been made aware of a thing called rss club and i am interested in it. not just because i’m a feed junky, but because i’m nostalgic (even wh [...]

The best films I saw: 2018 edition 🔗

For film-watching, 2018 wasn’t as good to me as 2017. But I did see a handful of movies worth remembering. The following list is thirty films long – a [...]

Bijou 🔗

I updated my LaunchBar 6 theme Bijou (previously called El Capitan Small). Now, the theme has a dark variant to match macOS Mojave’s new dark mode. It [...]

Public access Unix servers as a service 🔗

A public access Unix (or Unix-like) server is just a computer. What makes it special is that anybody can sign up for a user account and use the comput [...]

Site update 🔗

I just updated benjaminwil.info to use a new layout. It’s still built with Jekyll, and it’s still hosted on a DigitalOcean droplet—but I cut out fifty [...]

The best films I saw: 2017 edition 🔗

I am sharing with you thirty films that I saw this year, that I liked. They definitely did not all come out this year, or even recently. They are list [...]

The Republic (2017) 🔗

The Republic meets my threshold for something that is a movie, despite there being almost nothing to see. If you don’t already know: The Republic does [...]

Sleep when exhausted, revisited 🔗

Three years after first presenting Sleep when exhausted, I was invited back to the University of Victoria to give a short talk about it in David Leach [...]

El Capitan Small 🔗

I made a theme for LaunchBar 6, a Mac OS X-based launcher and automation tool. It’s inspired by Small, the default theme for LaunchBar 5. It’s called [...]

Sleep when exhausted 🔗

The technical content of Sleep when exhausted, to anyone viewing its page source, is not by any means impressive and is crudely constructed. Still, as [...]

backfilling my weblog? 🔗

how do you feel about this idea? this is something i did today: i ported all of the reviews from my letterboxd account to my main weblog, here, on ben [...]