This is my distraction log for May of 2026. I outline some things that I've been distracted by during the month of May.

This post is part of the Distraction Log series.

Personal Archiving [2026-05-01 Fri]

I was reading about the idea of creating personal archives of pages on the web by carefully and methodically creating an offline version of the page you want to archive. Alex Chan wrote about their personal process of creating offline archives here. I thought this was a really interesting way to use the internet: you surf and browse until you find something that resonates with you, and then you make it accessible for yourself in perpetuity. Not just a bookmark, but something as permenent and resilient as possible.

I strated looking around Alex's website and reading about how they create tiny static sites to hold their personal archives and was. really impressed with the care and intention involved in their creation. Each one is a bespoke thing. I found myself wondering "Is there anything I encounter online that I care that much about?" and the answer was a very loud "I don't know".

Could that be because archiving or maintaining access to things is actually quite difficult? That the barrier to entry is quite high and laborious? The process Alex outlines on their site is very labor intensive.

I got distracted from reading all the articles on Alex's site and wrote a program in Go that wraps the `wget` command with several arguments that will allow me to create an offline version of a single page on a site.

Now I just need to start saving things for myself.

Electric Vehicle engine swap [2026-05-03 Sun]

Reading about gas prices I was wondering if there were electric vehicle conversions available for existing gas powered cars. This would be an insanely involved process for any model of car. Everything attached to the existing engine - including of course the engine itself - is probably going to need to get replaced or ripped out. You'd also need a car that could fit a battery [somewhere]{.underline} in the first place. You're gonna be driving a car of Theseus at the end of a conversion.

Turns out there are some kits for this but they appear to be extremely limited in terms of what cars are supported. These kinds of kits are available only for certain models of collector cars. They are also profoundly expensive. I'm sure there are other companies like EV West (linked above) that sell these kinds of kits and perhaps others that will [do the whole thing for you]{.underline} which I'm guessing would double the already huge price.

It would be cool if this kind of thing was more affordable for popular models of gas powered cars manufactured in the last ten years. Unfortunately it seems like if you don't have a museum piece collector car, it would be more practical to just buy an electric vehicle rather than attempt to convert a gas one. That's a shame!

Self Hosting [2026-05-05 Tue]

I am thinking a lot about self hosting lately. I run this website (currently) on Digital Ocean's application platform. It works fine. No issues. Totally happy with it. But I have a suspicion I'd have a little more fun if I went the DIY route even though the DIY route is often arduous.

I spent a little bit of time looking into how I could host the static site myself - either on computer hardware that I own that is just sitting around - or on a Digital Ocean VPS. A VPS in the cloud is still quite "cloud", but you get to push all the buttons and turn all the knobs yourself. I decided that might be the way to go becuase I don't really want the internet coming to my home network.

I came up with a tentative plan involving Caddy to serve static files (this is a static site!) and then using Podman's quadlet facilities for systemd-controlled orchestration.

CSS Inspo [2026-05-12 Tue]

I started redesigning my site. I was a little bored of the current layout and styles and wanted to start with a fresh design and fresh 11ty templates that I could use to better customize different kinds of pages. I've been a little bogged down trying to figure out exactly what design I want to go with for posts, regular pages, and the landing page of the blog.

I started doing a LOT of web surfing to get some design inspiration. There are a lot of neat personal websites out there with some very cool styles. I've been opening up Firefox's dev tools and reading other people's styles to see how they did some things.

I started a bookmark folder for web design inspiration and divided it into a few categories:

• Gardens Personal sites / digital gardens
• Blogs
• Projects Project pages. These are not really personal sites, but sites representing a project or product along with docs and what not.
• Interactions Pages with interesting CSS animations / interactivity
• Brands Sites of design agencies, brands, and companies. This is a very specific kind of website, usually very interaction heavy and heavy on parallax scrolling.
• Resources List of pages with resources to help me out

I'm not sure where the design will end up. I am still feeling it out. I've got a vague plan about how to restructure the 11ty templates I use for different page types and that should inform a lot of the CSS once I figure out what markup is going to be shared. For now though, I am a WEB SURFER.

The Golden Bough [2026-05-14 Thu]

An offhand remark in a YouTube video about - of all things - the creation of the movie The Wicker Man (1973) sent me searching for a book called The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion written by Sir James George Frazer. Bookshop.org says that it is "a classic study of the beliefs and institutions of mankind, and the progress through magic and religion to scientific thought". The video mentioned that this book was an influence on the film. It might be worth a hold at the library.

More RSS! MORE! [2026-05-18 Mon]

Continuing on with web surfing for design inspo today. I've been trying to fill up my RSS reader lately with cool stuff, and also pruning out sources that I don't utilize much. While I've been web surfing for design inspiration I have also been trying to keep a lookout for cool blogs I'd like to subscribe to. I've found a few!

Finding a couple new subscriptions was a nice surprise but I have gotten thoroughly distracted from my original mission of finding CSS design inspiration and have switched gears to "click all the links on this cool website's links page" looking for more things to subscribe to.

Maybe I will find both things at the same time!

Caves of Qud [2026-05-19 Tue]

I started playing the game Caves of Qud. I may never recover from this.

The developers gave a cool GDC talk a few years ago about the procedural generation the game uses here.

Postcards and Photo Printers [2026-05-20 Wed]

I just spent a couple hours making some postcards to send to folks I drew randomly on postcrossing.com. I cut out a bunch of letters from magazines, printed some QR codes to funny YouTube videos, and used some stickers of animals and cut-out photos to create mini-collages on each card. Mostly they were of speech bubbles coming from the subject of the sticker or photo I picked, and the message in the bubble was some iteration of "Hello", "Hey", or "Hi" made up of magazine letters and the QR code to a video. It was fun to make these. I hope people appreciate the effort of them.

Anyway, I ran out of stickers and photos while making these. I started looking up at-home photo printers so I could paste some more interesting things to future postcards.

Talk about a rabbit hole. Now I'm neck deep in product reviews trying to figure out if this is a worthwhile expense. I think I might need to find an application for photo printing outside the narrow use case of "postcards" to justify buying some kind of of 4x6 printer though.

More Caves of Qud [2026-05-22 Fri]

I've been playing this game and really enjoying it but now I am down a huge rabbit hole watching YouTube videos about procedural generation techniques in these kinds of games.

I think it would be really fun to build one of these. You'd get to learn a lot of fun algorithms at the very least. Probably some good software architecture practice too.

Do I have time for a project like that?????

Letterboxd Bookmarklet [2026-05-29 Fri]

I was looking on letterboxd to try and see what actors were in a movie I was watching. I knew what the character names were but not the names of the actors. When you look up a cast list on letterboxd, they show the cast of the movie as a flat list of actor names. To see the name of a character, you have to mouse over the actor name and it will show the character name. This UI is designed specifically to make me frustrated. Rude.

I wrote a bookmarklet that fixes this.

When I go to the page of a movie on letterboxd, and navigate to the cast list, I can click this bookmarklet to re-arrange all the actors into a better layout that matches the other movie tabs: a $term: $definition format displaying the character name and then the actor playing the character. The links to actor pages are preserved by the bookmarklet.

To use it, just drag the hyperlink above to your bookmark bar.