Jackson Kerr's Site

In the beginning there was nothing, and then there were websites.

And then there were better websites. You could learn almost anything online, and have everything from pet food to drop crotch pants shipped directly to your door. What a miracle.

Today, most people are still ordering their questionable fashion decisions through a web browser, be that on mobile or desktop. However, for some reason most people have been conditioned to order a taxi and use messaging/social media platforms within apps. Most people bank with an app and barely if ever log in to their bank's website.

This would have been unexpected to a person living in the world of the first mainstream internet. The idea that we all individually run software to interact with remote platforms instead of using a webpage is interesting because it adds a barrier to accessing content. You need a device which is compatible with each given app, today we have achieved a great deal of interoperability but only with great effort and and the cost of turning the major storefronts on iOS and Android into monopolies which charge outrageous fees (15-30% in both Apple's store and Google Play). Websites were already a solution to this problem but for some reason we gave them up in favour of proprietary applications. There has to be a reason for this right? Humans are hard-wired to take the path of least resistance unless there are clear reasons not to.

What makes an app different to a website? What do we gain from using them? The existence of krunker.io proves that we can do it all from the browser. It's not a matter of some tasks being more difficult to achieve on the web. There seems to be some kind of more vibes-based reasoning going on here.

This may seem like the kind of obvious question someone trying to sound deep might pose at the beginning of a Ted talk but I think it's worth investigating. The question is; what is a website?

What a website is can be quite hard to pin down. If you want to "um actshully" me you could give a technical answer, but that's no more helpful than answering the question of "What is money" with "paper that the government prints".

Being sincere, and not oversimplifying things we might say that a website is a resource which dispenses files. The fact that these files so often make up the entire content of a software product or document is somewhat arbitrary.

I believe that the main defining feature of a website is that it's an unconstrained resource of information. Or they would be if not for our overlords imposing artificial scarcity. Anyone can go to netflix.com and view the website, but without paying a subscription there's no way to get past the login page. In this sense Netflix is both an app and a website. We in the bidness would call this a web application.

Here's where I reveal that today's musing is actually about Progressive Web Applications (PWAs) and why they seem to be failing to catch on. With some luck there might even be some kind of approximation of a positive message at the end.

The old-timey justification for apps made sense. Mobile internet connections were very expensive. The simplest example is that of the calculator. A simple tool that works without an internet connection and lets you perform a specific task. Calculator.com is no use to you if you've already burned through your monthly data plan.

Basically, if the owner of Calculator.com decided to make their website work as a PWA then anyone could visit the website and save it to their device (usually on iOS or Android but also possible on desktop) which adds an icon to their home screen and allows them to access it without internet.

I can't stress enough how flexible the PWA spec is. It's possible to do almost everything that a normal app could do on the device from device vibration to accessing bluetooth.

Well, that is.. It would be able to if it weren't for one massive disappointment. Companies are actively dis-incentivised from making PWA for a very silly reason. They're too convenient for the user.

Because a PWA is by definition a website. This means that it's fully usable within the browser, whereas an app MUST be placed on the user's home screen before being used and there's a huge incentive for companies to get their logo to sit on your home screen. It means that every time you unlock your phone you get to see their icon beaconing you to tap on it.

That's before we even get into the fact that for years Apple has stubbornly refused to implement the PWA web specifications into Safari. Hell, PWA notifications didn't work correctly on iOS until 2023. Along with that there's still a lot of weird inconsistencies with how Safari handles them to this day (that I won't get into here).

Well, I guess we'll just have to keep using apps. There's just no other option.

SIKE!

These days almost everything that most of us do on our mobile devices requires internet anyway. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, all require internet to be of any use so why aren't we just accessing them from the browser? People use very few offline apps if any at all these days.

Well, there's actually nothing stopping us. Most of these apps have web versions that more or less work on mobile, and the only reason they're clunky is that the company wants to irritate you into caving and installing the app.

I promised a happy ending so here it is: use desktop site mode.

For the most part I don't use a smartphone unless I'm traveling, but when I do, this is the way I use it.

Seriously, it's that easy. I've been doing this for a long time and the only website that's succeeded in annoying me enough to install their app is Facebook's Messenger. The complete list of apps on the smartphone are a web browser, Camera/Photos, Messenger, and Maps. Everything else can be done by the browser and I'm tired of pretending it can't. I'm so much less likely to get sucked into brainrot and my home screen is so much cleaner.

Thanks for coming to my Ted talk. Cya!

Well, I made it. I’ve officially finished my early twenties. As a child, or perhaps a teenager. Certain opinions would often elicit the response of “You’ll understand when you’re older, when you’ve been out in the real world”. Well. Now I rent an apartment, work full time, and have insurance. I don’t mean to brag but I’m a big boy now. The phrase still comes out occasionally though. After the same kind of discussions. Often they point to the fact that I work in an office, worse yet in the eyes of some; for a University. “That’s not the ‘real world’”.

The opinion that most commonly bought about this response was about the nature of work. I may have wandered down a path that was paved for me, but I have yet to understand some of my peers who seek to build the most efficient vehicle in an effort to race towards an end that does not exist. As if there is something at the end which they could hold and then they would finally allow themselves a moment of leisure. I always aimed instead to taste the fruit which grew on the flanking trees.

Others hear distant music and prepare to cut their way through the thick looking hedges lining the grove. When they finally decide to push through expecting scratching thorns, it’s interesting to see their surprise when they see both how sparse the barrier really is and that the music that once enticed them was but the wind. The underbrush parting open to reveal another identical grove. No. Not identical, the voices here sound different, and the water tastes funny.

The only things we can truly own are our bodies, and that’s not even a guarantee. The only one who will be with you forever is you, and the only things that can sing and laugh with you are people. If you lost your ability to work, would you still love yourself? What if you had never been able to in the first place. Do you exist as a tool to create value, or do you want to create things that you value? Why does your mum bother making her famous apple strudel for you? She should be up at 6am cooking at least three times as much, and then down to the market to hussle. Where will she be living when you’re 80?

The Purpose of Work by Justine Haupt:

Why do we build particle accelerators? Why do we have restaurants? Why do we go to work every day? We think we go to our respective jobs all day, every day, to make money. But the point is to be happy. That's it. A restaurateur wants to make money so they can have a home and feed their family and do the things they want to do. An engineer working on a space ship goes to work to make money so they can have a home and feed their family and do the things they want to do. The fact that civilization has set up a system whereby we exchange money to make things happen and make everyone go to work in the process doesn't change that the end result of work is supposed to be happiness.

Space travel, quarterly profits, production quotas... none of it really matters. It's just a game. It's giving us all something to do while we're here on Earth. We need to fool ourselves into thinking that's not the case insofar as it's necessary to keep the game running, but we must also remind ourselves from time to time that deep down, the satisfaction, self growth, and happiness are the only really important things, and the instant a job gets to be artificially stressful (e.g. due to artifices of bureaucracy and not from challenges intrinsic to the work), the managers have steered the organization poorly.

It's hard to turn off the water. Picking out a shirt and lacing my boots. A chilly wander down to the farmers market. The homeless collect around the entrance, people here are more likely to have cash. "A $2 bond for the bottle. Please give my bottles back to me". Asking to play a song in the train station. The tiles sing back to me. Waiting to meet a friend. Tomorrow will be Sunday and I think I'll go for a swim.

I didn't make it out for the swim. Last night I was out late. In the afternoon I went to a friend's place to watch the rugby. We had freshly baked bread with cheese and more than a few beers. Finally, we ended up in the cocktail bar.

So, Sunday. I spent too much time on the internet, folded my laundry, and got an early night. I have work tomorrow.

If I could send this back, would I have found this an interesting read as a child? Will I look back on this fondly when (and if) I'm old? It's possible I'll get the answer to one of these questions. Either way, I've found it satisfying scrawling this down in my notebook while I wait for my lunch to be served. Today I chose a spot slightly further from the office.

Recently I started making things out of leather. The first thing I made was a simple card wallet. Basically just three rectangles of leather stacked and stitched together. The leather in question was from my old pair of boots that had too many holes in them to be salvaged by a resole.

I’m proud to say that in the process I managed to avoid falling victim to the affliction that affects many of us when we're starting a new hobby or just doing something for the first time. I'm of course talking about the dreaded Gear Acquisition Syndrome.

In my experience, G.A.S is most common in amatuer musicians and photographers. Unfortunately for me, I'm both. Sit down, and let me tell you a tale by the fireside of the boy who blew all his pocket money trying to sound like his favourite indie pop rockers and shoot film like a super cool hipster or something and where he is now.

Cut to semi-rural central otago, 2016. I've just entered year 12. I'm broke (I mean, obviously. I was 16 at the time).

After some pleading, I managed to convince my parents to buy me a guitar. It was an Ovation with a curved plastic back. It looked nothing like what I had seen Ragnar playing. It wasn't a "cool" guitar but I played that thing every day. I'd be dying to get home from school so I could open ultimate guitar and start jamming. I didn't know how much a good guitar could cost, I'd never set foot in a music store, and thankfully I'd never heard someone mention "tonewood". I was a terrible player and I knew it. When we're true beginners we know the tools aren't the thing keeping us from excelling.

The trouble comes a little further down the track. When we begin to have the first inkling of knowing what we're doing. Imagine how much better this would sound on a "real" guitar! Imagine the beautiful photos I could take if I had a Cannon 5d mk3!

This is the point in starting something new where I tend to start googling. Spending many late nights watching gear reviews. Once I learned what a guitar pedal was, it was all over. I went from rushing home to practice to rushing home to watch some fool talk about his favourite looper. It's not that I wasn't playing. It's just that if the time I wasted watching edutainment was instead spent enjoying creating with the tool I already had, I would be a much better player today.

You can guess what happened when I started working. I saved up and bought these things I had seen on the internet. I got an amp, and an electric guitar, eventually pedals. But none of them made me a better player. Sure, new gear is fun to tinker around with, but I'd rather go back to being home from school with nothing but time to burn and a cheap guitar in hand.

Ok, that was a bit dramatic.

The point is that at many points in my life, not having the perfect gear for the job has stopped me from creating. In some ways the same is true of this site. I've wanted to have my own website for a long time, but I didn't start this until I had already completed a bachelors degree in computer science and had been working as a Software Developer for a few years. I'm "qualified" for this now so to speak.

I'm proud to say that I'm starting to kick this habit. But, I'm a little ashamed that it's taken me this long.

Last month I again tried something new. I built a table. It was the first piece of non-kitset furniture I’d ever made. To my surprise (and the relief of the missus) I ended up with a relatively presentable, if a bit rustic final result. Armed with a friends garage, borrowed drill, tin of wood stain, and the cheapest kiln-dried timber that money can buy[1]. I got it done, and I bet if I did it again with the same tools, it wouldn't even take me an entire week of spare time. My point is. Just do the stuff you want do do. You don't need to be good at something to enjoy it, and watch out for gear heads trying to distract you from improving.

Not sure how to end this one so I'm signing out with a bababoey.

Bai

[1] Ok! So I did buy an orbital sander... But it's definately different because I didn't know anyone who owns one and I would have been afraid of breaking it if I did ok!?

It is my goal that everything on my site (except the links section but duh) should be made by me. I don't really want to respond directly to other media. I want to create new things. Recently I came to the horrible realisation that every time this page is loaded, it's using a font made by someone else. Even worse, that font can be different depending on what browser/device you use which sometimes caused things to be slightly out of alignment.

The simple solution was to make my own font. As you probably guessed, this is it. Here's all the characters:

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
0123456789
!@#$%^&*()-=_+[]{};:'"<>,./?`~

I went for a minimal, blocky look. It's fine. The file size is small, but it's no work of art.

Do you care about this? Is this interesting to anyone except for me? Should I care if it isn't?

In making this font, I thought this might be a good thing to write about until I considered; Are most of the entries on this site just going to be about making the site? And if so, is that interesting?

No, I don't think it is...

A blog about making a blog is only interesting to someone learning how to make a blog, and even then maybe just as a means to an end. Sculptors don't spend all day making statues of chisels, and the best books aren't about publishing or overcoming writer's block. These examples seem silly, but for some reason, on the internet (and especially the blog space) people seem to constantly write about writing on the internet.

I aim to avoid this from now on.

Oh, and by the way. I'm not happy enough with this font to go on using it for the whole site. I may get around to making another one.

Peace out

Update: Added the new font to this page on 2025-05-05 :)

I've been using a "dumbphone" for I think about a year now. It can only use SMS and make/receive calls. It has no internet connection. I hold this as one of the best decisions I ever made.

Although I had already taken steps to limit my social media; I had deleted Instagram and Facebook off of my smartphone a year prior. Here in New Zealand most people I know use Facebook Messenger as their main avenue for communication. I was worried about losing contact with friends and family. Ah, the dreaded FOMO. Eventually I decided to try it "just for a couple of days". I grabbed an $80 candy barphone on my way home from work and all my apprehensions melted away.

Well, what about that FOMO?

It turns out that for the most part people who care about you are willing to send you a text message instead of a Facebook DM. And I started treating the group chat more like an email chain. I could check it on my computer at work an hour before leaving work to see if there were any invites to events and that pretty much solved my problem.

What about banking? I set up my debit card so that CHQ/Paywave accesses my weekly budget and SAV accesses my short term savings. This means that if I will never be somewhere and not have access to money. Maps? I look up the directions before I leave, if it's complicated I'll write them down in a notebook I carry. Email? Why do you need to see emails at the pub??? Do it when you get home!

Ok, here's the part where I admit that I've been lying to you. It turned out that I actually couldn't live my normal life without a smartphone. My work, my bank, steam, and a lot of other things require an authenticator app for login. My gym requires an app FFS. Also, what if I want to listen to music? Well... For this I still use a smartphone and a Digital Audio Player (effectively a tiny android tablet). The smartphone stays in my drawer at work and the DAP stays at home.

So far I've only talked about the issues with using a dumbphone. If you're a full time smartphone user this whole thing probably sounds silly to you. It did to me the first time I heard about someone using a candybar phone in the 2020s. Modern smartphones are arguably the most effective tool that humanity has ever created. Why would anyone want to give that up? Put simply, there are hidden costs to owning a smartphone.

Although I was already vigilant about managing notifications and unsubscribing from bullshit emails, there are always things that slip through the cracks. Do I really need that group chat notification in middle of fixing an issue at work? Or when enjoying time with friends? The benefit of the dumbphone is that I know that when it beeps, someone is actively trying to get in contact with me specifically. Not just someone sending me a meme or sharing a post.

I've found that since switching, my time out of the house has had a completely different vibe to it. There are few objects in out lives that spend the same amount of time with us as our phones so a change affects a lot more of your life than you may think. I no longer have a 24/7 entertainment machine on me at all times. Whenever I am out of the house, I am present. The lack of a phone changes sitting in a waiting room, being on the bus, or otherwise waiting somewhere. When I'm bored I'm compelled to talk to the people around me, take in my surroundings, or just go into my own mind. When I wake up in the morning I get straight out of bed. No more wasted time scrolling. I've also noticed that I sleep much better. Something else I did not expect is how much more I notice the people around me being on their phones.

Using a dumbphone is one of those things where the drawbacks are clear, but the benefits are indirect. You really need to give it a go to know what you will gain and whether the drawbacks will actually apply to you. I implore you to give it a go, even just to try it out for a couple of days. The only piece of advice I will give to you is that there is no such thing as the perfect dumbphone. So don't get hung up on finding it. Just walk into the store and buy the cheapest one available. If you must have a specific recommendation; the TCL Onetouch 4042 is very simple to use and I have had no issues with it.

Most phones have a screen time feature, check it and see if that would convince you. Do you think you are going to look back in 5 years and wish you spent more time staring at a screen or less. The quote "The only people that will remember you worked late are your kids" has always stuck with me and I think applies here.

Go on, see if those T9 typing skills are still in the mind palace somewhere.

Assorted videos from a cheap camera I bought on TradeMe in early 2024 overlaid with me singing a cover of Like a brother by hey, nothing.

Watch the video on VidLii, YouTube or DailyMotion.

In the last year or so I have made an effort to change the type of content I have been consuming. My goal was to switch to content that was slower and focused on the real world. This was inspired by being suggested one of Evan Monsma's videos I Dropped Out and Moved Into a 100 Year Old Cellar.

The video and audio quality are not great but the vibe is relaxing and he tells a story.

I think his videos do the best job of expressing the vibe I want to capture in this website.

I want to present my hobbies here in a low-effort and casual way. In the past I have held high standards for what constitutes as being "worth sharing" and this has lead to not releasing anything I make. Perfectionism is the enemy of just getting something out there. Evan uses the end-tag "Made for the sake of making" which speaks to me.

I was inspired to create this site by The Melonking Manifesto but there's not much to see here yet...

This is a guide to making yourself a website.

This guide aims to get you set up with an extremely simple text based website as quickly as possible. There will be no CSS, no JavaScript, and only very basic HTML. If you don't know what those things are then good! This guide is for you.

Before we get going, have a quick read (~2 mins) of motherfuckingwebsite.com to get an idea of what we're making.

Yes it's basic but that's the point. Getting this set up will probably take you less than half an hour. There will be time to learn the fancy stuff later.

The 10 simple steps:

1. Go to neocities.org to fill out and submit the new account form.
2. Click continue on the $0 tier.
3. You should have recieved an email. Open it on your phone and copy the confirmation code into neocities then click the confirm email button. If you haven't recieved an email then wait a few minutes or check your spam.
4. Go to neocities.org/dashboard
5. Here you'll see the files on your newly created website. Since we're keeping this simple, delete all of the files except for index.html using the button next to each file.
6. Ok, we're going to have to keep calm for this next part. Click edit on the index.html file and try not to freak out.
7. There's a lot to look at here but thankfully it doesen't matter for our purposes so we're going to delete all of it. Highlight all the text and hit backspace.
8. Phew, now that's over we get to write a test message. Write something where all of that confusing text was then click the save button in the top right corner.
9. In the top left corner click on Dashboard
10. Under where it says "The web site of (Your name)" there's a link to your site. It will read (your name).neocities.org click it!

Congratulations! You should now see the text you entered previously. You've officially got a website. If you go to (your site name).neocities.org on another device such as your phone you should be able to see the text you wrote.

I know what you're thinking, this is even less exciting then motherfuckingwebsite.com. Well, let's add a little bit of formatting.

Go back to where you were editing your site. If you can't work out how to get there, step 4 has a link.

Let's add a title to our website. To do this we'll write some text in a heading tab and place it at the start of the file. Our file should look something like:

<h1>My Sick AF website</h1>
<h2>My Sick AF subheading</h2>
<h6>This is the smallest heading you can make</h6>
This is my new website!

Click save and then go back to your website to see the changes.

Next, we need to learn to use paragraphs with the <p> tag. Let's add a couple.

<h1>My Sick AF website</h1>
<h2>My Sick AF subheading</h2>
<h6>This is the smallest heading you can make</h6>
<p>This is my new website!</p>
<p>This is the second paragraph!</p>

Finally, let's make a link using the <a> tag. We will put the link address in the href attribute as follows.

<h1>My Sick AF website</h1>
<h2>My Sick AF subheading</h2>
<h6>This is the smallest heading you can make</h6>
<p>This is my new website!</p>
<p>
This is the second paragraph. You should check out this really cool website: <a href="https://google.com">It's Google</a> </p>

Well there we have it. You have a great base for making your own blog. All that's left is to decide what you're gonna write about.

As a parting gift. I find that this HTML Cheat Sheet comes in quite handy.

All the best.

You have reached Jackson's phone. Unfortunately, I'm not available at the moment so please leave a message after the beep.

Click the button to record your 15 second message. Your message will be played back to you before sending.

This probably won't work on apple devices.

Click the button to start the timer. Click again to reset. The timer will run for seconds.

By accessing this software, you are agreeing to provide one pint* to me, the copyright holder. Payment is to be given in the event that we are both simultaneously present at a venue which holds a legally valid on-licence AND that is currently serving alcoholic beverages. The pint in question will be of my choosing from the selection of beverages available from the mentioned venue unless: The venu is not currently serving alcohol OR I (the copyright holder) at my sole discression decide I don't feel like having a pint OR the range of beverage options available are not to my taste. In any of these cases, the payment of one pint will be defered to the next time the above conditions are met.

*One pint is defined as: An alcoholic beverage of at least 500ml and not exceding 800ml AND; of at least 3.9% or higher alcohol by volume (ABV) AND is served in a vessel made of glass or plastic with an open top that would commonly and reasonably be described as a glass or cup. For example, this excludes but is not limited to any vessel that would commonly and reasonably be described as a bottle or can. Note that the beverage may originate from a vessel that would not commonly be described as a cup or glass as long as the other above conditions are met.

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

You are not permitted to use any part of this site to make money.