So farewell then 2025.
In numbers:
* 11 wordcloud tarot shows
* 3 Festivals
* 2 Loopy piano gigs
* 2 Live Performance Improv Shows
* 1 observers cartoon
* 1 new microcamper/car
* 1 new bedroom
* 1 Bitcoin/Nostr conference
* 1 Life-Log App released
* 1 Broken Wrist
* 1 Mortgage paid off
Seems okay.
More in the blog: https://dalliance.net/blog/2025/
Have a happy new year's eve everyone, and an even happier new year.
Heyhey y'all. Hope you had a nice xmas.
Watched War Between The Land And The Sea with the family over Xmas so I can catch up on the Who Culture episodes about it without spoilers.
Plus the mattress on the new Tardis bedroom should have expanded over xmas to be useable without voiding guarantee.
So when I got back after Xmas I used the bed for lounging about drinking a glass of wine, watching Who Culture podcast, and mucking about on the tablet screen.
Nice.
#selfie
Builders finished in my new bedroom today. It's lovely in there. Looking very like i intended. Look forward to one day having money again so I can afford to furnish it with a bed 😆
Added a category manager and category state section to the Exocortex Log app.
Have now organized and cleaned up the categories in my ten year database and so we can get some views of the time spent in each category.
We see that through September and October I was in a routine of work and slack with a bit of social a couple of times a week, until the end of November when I went away for social at a conference all weekend. I saw a demo there of a person using Shakespeare, and then when I got back started doing some vibe-coding, shown in in Red.
A break from that to go away at the weekend to a long social party then finish it off and publish a few days ago, since when Vibe Coding has dropped off a little.
https://exocortexlog.com/news/articles/2025-12-09-addingcats/
#lifeLog #app #exocortexLog
I am quite keen to watch The War Between The Land And The Sea on iplayer.
But we need to consider tactics. Will the folks sit and watch it with me at Xmas? If they would that'd perhaps be better than whatever drivel quiz shows and police car chase stuff they normally make me watch.
If they won't I'll be be postponing it three weeks for no reason.
🤔
Might be nice to watch it in the new bedroom but that probably won't have a bed or a chair until the new year.
#watching
#doctorWho
#onlyNotDoctorWho
I added a search function to the exocortex log app.
Update with the section at the bottom of the conf screen if you can’t see it.
Search for whatever words in your log, so you can see when you noted you last saw someone or had the MOT done or whatever.
https://exocortexlog.com/news/articles/2025-12-08-search/
#app #lifeLog
This months newsletter is on it's way to email boxes all the wonderful beautiful financially sovereign anarchists who asked for it.
The rest of you fiat flops can read it here:
https://dalliance.net/blog/nov25/
Featuring updates on the bedroom build, an Anon Opin show, a walk in Devon, a bitcoin conference report, and news of the new steam machines in the links section.
Read "Revelation Space" by Alastair Reynolds, a story about some future space people investigating the demise of an extinct civilization.
Some of the people are software uploads or implants in other people's brains, or infectious biological agents and things.
The story is galactic in scale across time and space with good world building, a good tale weaving of elements together.
I liked the scene where the woman falling to her death in a lift-shaft remembered she was on a space-ship which only had gravity coz of engine thrust, so saved herself turning the engines off with a wrist controller.
Trouble is I came to it infrequently with long gaps and so struggled to keep track of what's going on quite a bit. Lots of different elements to keep track of.
My fault, should try and concentrate harder and remember things.
#reading #books #novel #alastairReynolds #revelationSpace
Here's some things you'll notice the website doesn't do:
* No cookie popups. We don't need to warn you about tracking, we just don't track.
* No Tracking. I don't even look at the apache logs. I don't care what you do.
* No service agreement checkbox. I'm not providing a service. Do what you want with the code but don't blame me.
* No billing
* No adverts
* No paywall
* No VPN barrier
* No geoblocking
* No subscription button (though RSS is provided)
Websites don't have to be shit, the surveillance capitalists just enshitify them on purpose.
Future Plans:
I have like ten years of data in my log, converted from those prior prototypes. I will be adding ways to more usefully compare and analyse data going this far back.
It could maybe use a milestone function, to track singular events which don't take actual time so don't spread on the grid. Snack tracking and the like.
It could likely use a flashcard system, with spaced repetition to review the flashcards, for better memory and recall.
Synching between devices might be nice, and lots will suggest doing that through Nostr, but Nostr is a bit public. Would need an encryption layer. Do nostr relays want to relay encrypted data from one user to themselves I suspect Veilid ( https://veilid.com/ ) would
be a better option. The "no servers" ethos probably includes nostr relays.
Mostly I plan just more and better ways to view the ten years and growing of data I already have. And to do some other things for a bit so my log isn't just full of "Vibecoding Exocortex" 😄
Some things that I'd like in Shakespeare in the first blog post there [ https://exocortexlog.com/news/articles/2025-11-25-vibecoding/ ].
Mostly better management of the chat context. Able to pull back old ones, and delete chunks from them where the robot goes astray or is too verbose and fill up the context window.
Paid in sats for your basic model for most of it. Realized I was spending too many sats and switched to the OpenAI account. GPT 4.1 really made a mess of things but 5.1 was certainly much better. 4.1 would just delete entire chunks of functions and replace them with comments saying not to change this part 😄
Ought to be possible to improve the models you'd think, but not without limit. Wonder what those limits will turn out to be.
Thanks. It's come in as GBP instead of sats too. That's weird. And not desired. Wonder if there's a setting... There is. Changed it now.
Yeah. A lot of the investment and excitement for the AI coding is based on the faith that it'll get better. Some people expect exponentially so even! Though it looks to me more like diminishing returns on exponentially growing investment really. And to assume it can improve without limits is quite a leap of faith.
Nice too though. So long as you're managing the code itself and not just the UI seems useful.
Why is it finally ready now after ten years of being a barely functional input-only android app?
A few weeks ago I saw nostr:nprofile1qqsr7acdvhf6we9fch94qwhpy0nza36e3tgrtkpku25ppuu80f69kfq9q9kky giving a talk and demo of [Shakespear](https://shakespeare.diy/), a Chrome app for vibe-coding.
Explain the app you want, and the model you select will build it. Don't even need to be a dev they reckon.
So I figured I'd give it a try.
Start again from scratch, import the old data.
In about a week of work this app has progressed far beyond the prototypes that spent more then
ten years as half-running shoddy input-only systems that I couldn't be arsed to expand further.
It went [pretty well](https://exocortexlog.com/news/articles/2025-11-25-vibecoding/) to start with,
something even a non-dev could do, then [ceased up](https://exocortexlog.com/news/articles/2025-12-01-fixingvibes/), unable to really understand the codebase it'd written until I spend a fairly long day manually cleaning up it's mess.
So Shakespeare (and presumably all the other tools I haven't tried) seems okay for a non-dev to prototype a small app but currently the models are writing code so sloppy that they can't then later understand it themselves. Still needing a dev's guiding hand to keep it from
repeating itself or creating complex unorganized unmanageable code.
#vibeCoding #shakespeare
Yeah, my node is offline. It's taking an age to redownlaod the chain for some reason. Months and months and still very far from done. Should look into it when I have time.
Meantime I just updated the profile to my strike address. Might work now?
A couple of years ago I made a version to run on my smart watch.But again kinda stalled when it came to doing much more than input data. And watch isn't really suitable without a way for text import anyway. Plus turns out I don't like wearing a watch.
Its spent ten years as a barely started android app which I could only input data into and that's it. Once I started collecting data it kinda lost urgency and stalled. Writing a stats page too much effort, especially when there wasn't much data left.
The new version is completely re-written from scratch in the last couple of weeks. For a while there it had a "legacy data import" button, but since I'm the only one with legacy data and I've imported it now that got removed.
The thing about a life-logger, is you input sensitive data about your life, lifestyle and activities, so privacy and data-integrity are some of the most important issues.
There can be no server, the data has to be yours and yours alone. Because you can’t tell what is happening to the data in a closed-source app, it must be completely free and open source.
You can’t trust a corporate diary, they must sell to anyone offering enough money.
So it is with my life log app, all data completely in your own device. No home server ever sees anything.
There is no home server. Just the code.
To achieve this Exocortex Log is a Progressive Web App. It downloads when you are online at the website and can be installed onto the homepage of your phone.
It keeps all data on the local device using indexdb.
This means you must be responsible for your own backups. Be sure to export and back up your data regularly. I have gaps in my ten year record where my phone was stolen and most recent backup was months prior.
Once installed it will work offline, airplane mode, no internet, down in the tube station at midnight, anywhere.
There's a blog on the website saying this and more: https://exocortexlog.com/news/articles/2025-12-06-release/
You see a detective on the TV and he’s interviewing all the suspects asking them what they were doing on the night of the murder a month ago last Tuesday night.
And on the TV, the suspects all know. Right away.
If you asked me ten years ago though, I’d have had barely any clue. If you’re lucky it’d have been something planned in my calendar but mostly, dunno. Watching TV maybe? No idea what show. Was that a night I was in the pub?
As we all get older this problem increases I’m told. Eventually full on senility sets in.
But what if you have already built the habit to record what you’re doing? To be able to look back and revise and review how you spent your days? An external aid as a crutch to your own forgetful brain’s cortex?
So I started this Exocortex Log over a decade ago and now I can answer: Ten years ago on Tuesday I was having dinner with the guitarist from my band and his girlfriend and they burned the pudding.
The app has been half finished and barely able to even record let alone review for most of that time, but now it’s ready enough that someone else might use it too if they want.
## Try it
Try it out: https://exocortexlog.com
Accept a month of demo test data, add a few events for what you’ve done so far today, look at the summary and stats tools.
No install needed, the app lives on a web page.
If you decide to start logging what you’re doing, clear the DB and start again. Maybe install it for offline use then. Maybe set a reoccurring alarm to get you into the habit of doing it. See if you find it a useful memory aid after a few weeks.
And next time a detective asks you what you were doing a month last Tuesday, maybe you’ll be able to answer!
#lifeLog #app #memoryAid
Working on a website for a while until you look at it in chrome and it's horrible and you remember your dark mode plugin has been messing with it to make it look sane and dark. 😆
Gotta remember to turn these things off for the sites you're developing.
So the temporary placeholder name "Your Party" is made permanent.
None of the options on the shortlist were good. Most of them just as grammatically inconvenient as the dumb placeholder name.
The people who decide on the short-list, who can be a member, whose votes counts and what the options are, have quite a lot of power.
Zara Sultana boycotted day one over who sets the rules and who can be involved. If Your Party have a governing body with power to override conference they end up like the Labour party and just are easily taken over and usurped by a cabal of thatcherite neoliberal capitalists.
They did allow the dual membership system and a wider governance, so Zara won on who gets to be a member and who gets to be in charge. Which is probably good.
Coz as the terrible name shows, if you put the idiots in charge you'll get idiocy not good collective decision making.
For now the membership appear to have won, and I hear are they are all very excited and fierce and canny and not likely to let the old guard just set up another dictatorship from the top.
They currently have half the membership count of the greens, less than a quarter that claimed by Reform. Lets hope they can get some attention towards something other than how billionaires think the country should be run and focus on the people.
Here's hoping they can inflate that number by draining the Labour party and Reform members who just want change really rather than actually liking anything said by Farage.
#yourParty #ukpol
Dunno. At least some were recording but the fest doesn't seem to have an active youtube or anything. Maybe that comes after the first conference though I guess. Not much to show on it till then.
Huh, I see that Zip Car UK is closing down, which would be a right pain if I hadn't bought a car last year.
That's a lot of parking spaces about to be freed up I suppose. And a lot of easy-rental cars lying around the city disappearing.
Guess they just weren't making enough money?
#zipCar #uk
Should have taken it with me and had an expert look at it probably. Push-button install of Start OS. Haven't really done anything non-default to it.
Well, it was faster at the start. Slower as blocks get bigger and more complicated I guess? It's at July 2024. Been doing less than one a minute while I've been away by the look of it though.
Yeah, my node is down. Hard drive failed and it's taking months to revalidate the chain for some reason. Maybe coz limited bandwidth on Tor. Maybe coz limited CPU is burning hot. Dunno. It's doing like one block a minute. Luckily, it's a problem which will fix itself if I just wait and do nothing for several more months so I'll probably do that.😆
I asked about that actually. Nothing in the protocol for it currently. Think more like Kickstarter where you're not really expecting equity, maybe a finished item in the post, probably just a free software or data release.
conference is over now. I likely wouldn't have come for just a bitcoin thing, but I am very interested in redecentralizing the web, so it's attachment to the nostr day pulled me in.
Everyone I met was friendly and interesting and seems much more interested in making a better money system than in making money for themselves.
Our government and bank money systems are dysfunctional in all kinds of ways which are often less visible than they should be too people using them, especially to those in Europe and America who benefit from the way those systems exploit the global south.
I'm not convinced that fixing that would end wars and fix broken government as some seem to think, but I am sure our money is the source of many problems.
There are many bright, well meaning, and intelligent people building to improve bitcoin in fascinating ways with the hope of having a parallel system to transition to. With lots of work still to be done.
Can it work?
I'm sure I don't know, and I'm sure even if it's a better system it'll come with it's own unfairness and cruelty. Money will continue to be a source of suck and worry.
I'm told that the bigger conferences are often full of shitcoin scammers and suit wearing banksters who are in fact all in it too get rich and rip people off, but I found none of that here.
Here there is a real community of people trying to make the world a better place and improve the lives of their neighbours and governance of their countries.
And in the end building community is the most radical and effective way to change the world regardless of the problems of it's money system.
I had a great time. Thanks to those organising it and welcome new followers. I mostly don't talk about bitcoin very much because money isn't really very interesting and I'm fast from expert on it.
#bitfest #bitcoin
