In this video (Xwitter link) Todoist founder Amir Salihefendić shows that projects in Todoist can soon have their own icon.#
I currently do this manually, by just putting an emoji at the start of the name of my projects.1 For example: 🔁 Recurring. Support for icons/emojis is long overdue, so I'm glad it should be appearing soon.#
People mentioned: Amir Salihefendić
I was looking at disk usage on my Mac mini and found a folder I'd never seen before, taking up 20.1 GB:#
/private/var/folders/v4/pzblyf9j6rsbjb4ngnjc6nrm0000gn/X/com.google.Chrome.code_sign_clone
It held nine folders of about 2.2 GB each. Every one contained a single item, Google Chrome.app.bundle, also 2.2 GB. So I had nine complete copies of Chrome sitting in a temp directory.#
I looked into it.#
The v4/pzblyf… part of the path is random and will be different on your Mac. The X/com.google.Chrome.code_sign_clone part is the bit to look for.#
It's a safety mechanism Chrome has used on macOS since roughly Chrome 125 (2024).#
Chrome updates itself in the background while it's still running. macOS checks a running app's code signature against the files on disk. If an update swaps those files mid-session, the running browser can fail those checks, and helper processes, keychain access and similar things start breaking.#
To avoid that, Chrome makes a snapshot of its own app bundle every time it launches and runs from it. That gives the running copy a stable version to be checked against, whatever the updater does to /Applications/Google Chrome.app.#
Chrome is supposed to delete its clone when it quits. If Chrome crashes, gets force-quit, or is killed during a restart or shutdown, the clone gets left behind. Nine folders meant nine sessions that didn't end cleanly.#
Other people have hit this too, including one report of a 30 GB folder. It's worst for automation and testing tools that launch Chrome over and over, and some of those tools now switch the feature off.#
The clones are made with APFS clonefile, which shares disk blocks with the original. A clone of the Chrome version you're running now takes almost no real space, even though Finder and du report the full 2.2 GB. So it's technically not using 20 GB. But it's still using over 2 GB – an not ideal!#
Clones of older versions that have since been updated away do hold onto real space. So deleting them frees a real amount, but possibly less than the headline number. To see the actual figure, compare df -h / before and after.#
Quit Chrome properly with ⌘Q. Closing the window isn't enough.#
Check that nothing is still running:
pgrep -l "Google Chrome"
This should print nothing.#
Delete the folder. It belongs to your user, so you don't need sudo:
rm -rf /private/var/folders/*/*/X/com.google.Chrome.code_sign_clone
```<!--#mcvn-->
The wildcards mean you don't need to look up the random part of the path.#
Don't do this while Chrome is open. The current session's clone is in use, and deleting it can break the running browser. Chrome creates a fresh folder the next time it starts. That's expected, and one folder while Chrome is running is normal.#
I've set up a Hazel rule so I don't have to remember to do this.#
com.google.Chrome.code_sign_clone folder. To reach it in the folder picker, press ⌘⇧G and paste the path.#! pgrep -x "Google Chrome" >/dev/null
```<!--#4z14-->
The shell-script condition means Hazel only clears clones when Chrome isn't running, so it never touches one that's in use.#
You can also launch Chrome with --disable-features=MacAppCodeSignClone to switch the mechanism off. I wouldn't for everyday browsing, because it brings back the mid-update breakage the feature exists to prevent.#
# How big is it?
du -sh /private/var/folders/*/*/X/com.google.Chrome.code_sign_clone
# Quit Chrome (⌘Q), make sure it's gone…
pgrep -l "Google Chrome"
# …then clear it out
rm -rf /private/var/folders/*/*/X/com.google.Chrome.code_sign_clone
The same thing can happen with other Chromium-based apps, such as Chromium itself and some Electron apps. Look for <app id>.code_sign_clone folders in the same X directory.#
My Instagram is actually a positive place. It shows me great stuff that’s right up my street.#
However, because of the limitlessness of “the feed” and my dopamine chasing brain I barely register photos/videos. My brain just says “that’s good, but you’ve looked at it for 200 ms, time to try the next thing”.#
So I’d love a social network which slows you down – forces you to look at a photo for something like 5 seconds or so.1 Which is still a short time.#
I love blocking people. I've been on the internet long enough now to learn that it's best not to get riled up. Just ignore, block and move on.#
But it means that on most platforms I have a long list of people I've blocked. And it's not an uncommon occurrence for me to randomly visit a Xwitter profile of someone that's been linked to from a website, only to discover that I've blocked them. 95% of the time I can't remember why either.#
I've been a paying user of the RSS feed reader service NewsBlur for 11 years1 I used the free plan at first. First signing up on January 25, 2013. and it's done its job well.#
And whilst it has some nifty features I'm sure,2 I noticed quite a few new ones when I checked last week. Mainly AI-based stuff. I've always just used it for syncing the read/unread status of my feed subscriptions so NetNewsWire is in sync on my Mac and iPhone.#
Each year when it was due for renewal I'd look at its competitors and they were always similarly priced. And then I'd look at the self-hosted options, which there were always quite a few. But they were either not supported by NetNewsWire or looked like a faff to install and maintain. So I just let NewsBlur renew.#
But this year AI is a powerful tool. So when I noticed NetNewsWire supports the self-hosted FreshRSS I just asked Claude Code to install it on my Linode VPS. Forty minutes later it was up and running.3 I went overkill and used Claude Fable 5.1 on the task. Forty minutes is a long time. But it did a bunch of tests and it went away and even freed up storage on my Linode VPS.#
I'm happier self-hosting an RSS syncing service than most other things because it's so easy to backup. I just need to export the OPML file and I can easily move to another platform if FreshRSS doesn't work out.#
I feel a bit bad for leaving NewsBlur. It's just run by a guy and his dog. And for years he would try and convince you to sign up to the premium plan by saying that it would "feed his dog" Shiloh. It was cute. Sadly it looks like Shiloh has died.4 And it looks like he has a new dog now, called Lyric. But I like to think he got his money's worth out of me.5 It started at $24/yr in 2015. Now it looks like it's $36/yr. And who knows, maybe I'll be back when my Linode server blows up (I hope not – it's the same server that powers this blog).#
I saw some videos on TikTok today of people smugly saying "Xwitter/TikTok sure is quiet since a Ukrainian drone blew up a Russian data center that runs disinformation bots". And they showed this chart/tweet:#
And I thought it odd that a few drones could do such a thing. Mainly from a tech perspective. If all these bots are based in one data centre, surely it would be very easy for social media networks to block them?#
Also, enough time hadn't passed for a person to actually notice a decline in misinformation or far-right comments.#
Well, it looks like it was all nonsense. PixelEnvy has a good summary.#
Yandex – Russia's Google – has had its servers blown up by Ukrainian drones and a lot of its "bots" are offline. But these are just search engine web crawlers. They're not bots that comment on social media. And I think that's where people have got confused, or jumped on this false narrative.#
Actual Russian bot activity appears to be the same as usual according to Cloudflare1 Cloudflare was the "source" a lot of people were using to show that Russian disinformation bots were offline.:#
(Found via @antibot4navalny.bsky.social on BlueSky)#
It's ironic that we've got misinformation about disinformation.#
The word 'software' is dead.1 Or at best it’s dying. And 'app' killed it.#
'Software' is now a fusty word, associated with dial-up, the family computer, and when software came on hardware (CDs).#
It wouldn’t surprise me if the Associated Press’s style guide now tells journalists that everything is either a ‘website' or an 'app'.#
I work in tech and I can’t remember the last time I heard the word 'software'. We build 'apps' and 'tools' now.#
I could write a long post about how wonderful the note-taking software Obsidian is.1 And maybe one day I will#
For the first time ever today I launched the iPhone app and it didn’t load.2 It just displayed the app icon in the centre of the screen and my notes didn’t load. I was shocked. Obsidian always works. It’s one of the few apps I can use without signal on the Underground and it behaves just the same as when I’ve got WiFi.3 Seriously, I love that Obsidian doesn’t give a damn if you’re connected or not. It doesn’t even tell me I’m offline. It just shows all my notes, which are downloaded locally to my phone, and then when I come back online it gracefully syncs them. It’s never ever crashed. Ever.#
And it made me realise how great it is. Don’t get me wrong, I know it’s great. But I don't appreciate it enough. It’s truly a tremendous bit of software. Aside from my to-dos,4 Which are done via Todoist and notebooks. it powers my entire personal and work life. And it does it so reliably that when it doesn’t work just one time, I’m shocked.#
So thank you Obsidian.#
Walden.blog now gets a 100 PageSpeed Insights score.#
I found it interesting that Google (who runs the tool) punishes you for lazy loading images where in the past it used to punish you for not doing it. I wonder why. For A.I. crawlers perhaps?#
Last year I finally got a 4K monitor. I still have two 13-year-old 27" Apple Thunderbolt displays to the left and right. But my main monitor is a 32" Samsung 4K monitor1 SAMSUNG ViewFinity S7 LS32D700EAUXXU 4K Ultra HD 32" VA LED Monitor - Black. So when I'm building/designing things like this blog I'm looking at a 4K monitor. And the first thing I realised when I started using 4K is just how tiny things like text look. But plenty of people are still on HD monitors. So it's always a bit of a shock how big this blog looks when I view it on my office’s HD monitor. It's tough – what do you design for? The new (4K)? Or the old (HD)?#
Talking of John Gruber. I stopped following his blog (Daring Fireball) and listening to his podcast when he said he didn't like the the Lord of the Rings.1 He didn't just say he was "more of a Star Wars guy – he really said the Lord of the Rings was kinda crap."#
It's a bit of a petty reason, I know. And it's not the best trait to be done with someone just because they don't like something you like. But there's certain things that are just too sacred. The Lord of the Rings being one of them.#
After a few years I started following his blog again. Before quickly stopping as he was one of those American's who got obsessed with Donald Trump. I hate Trump and think he's the biggest threat to American democracy and world wide stability.2 I put him ahead of Putin even. Because at least Putin isn't in the house house (officially anyway – I think he has dirt on Trump). Whereas Trump is very much the fox in the hen house. And I admire Gruber for speaking out about him. But I follow his blog for tech news, not politics.#
People mentioned: John Gruber
Every year or two I go to Daring Fireball's sponsorship page to check out how much John Gruber is charging companies to sponsor his blog for a week. The figure always astounds me.#
I remember a few years ago it was around $300,000 a year.1 Assuming he sells every sponsorship slot (which he seems to).#
Now he's charging $12,000 a week – $624,000 a year!#
Fair play to him – he's been consistently posting for years.#
But with the death of the web and the rise of social media I'm suprised that he can still make so much from an independent tech blog.#
People mentioned: John Gruber
Walden.blog still isn’t beautiful, but I’m trying to focus on features and functionality over beauty right now.#
Every site I have make I fiddle endlessly with the look. I’m trying to keep Walden light and clean.#
I’ll add some niceness at some point I’m sure. But I’m actually getting used to its bareness. I’m even growing to like its serif font.#
And now that things like little side images and footnotes are supported, its starting to look like a proper blog.#
And I’m very proud to say that it’s still just two files1 If there’s no images on the page anyway. – the HTML page itself and the CSS stylesheet. I’m especially pleased I’ve managed to not add any JavaScript yet.#
Either way, I’m determined to keep this site under 100 KB (it’s currently 5-30 KB depending on page size).#
How Walden.blog looks on mobile with night mode turned on: #
I often reference the book I'm reading in posts. It's good to have a central place to see all my posts about a book, so I was adding a unique ID. For example, B204. An ID is a lot shorter than having to write out the book title and author. However, it also doesn't tell the user anything about the book, and my tags list was getting clogged up by these IDs.#
So, I got Claude Fable 5.1 to build a separate metadata system for books! They're like tags, but just separated out for books. And it means I can show the title, author, year published, and also cover art!#
It needs a bit of tweaking, but it will do for now.#
Note: please ignore the books attached to this post. I'm just testing out the ability to hopefully add multiple books to a post.#
Book mentioned: “Everyday Life in Medieval London: From the Anglo-Saxons to the Tudors” by Toni Mount
Book mentioned: “The Pen: A Human History” by Simon Garfield
I've written before on one of my old blogs about tagging and the importance of not keeping it too organised. I had a habit of not wanting to create a new tag uness I was certain I'd use it again for other things.#
I also had a bit of a habit of of nesting them, creating monstrosities like travel:england:resource:walking.#
I'm now more relax. I have 2,871 tags for my 21,229 bookmarks on Pinboard.#
Because they're created by my brain, I often suprise myself when I see a tag has already been created for something I'm bookmarking.#
Today I was bookmarking a page about a graphic for a blueprint of Sherlock Holmes' flat. The website was old looking – lots of plain HTML. So I tagged it old.web. And to my suprise, I'd already used that tag for a page about Charles Darwin and a Usenet archive.#
AI is in its Uber era. The leaked finances of Anthropic and OpenAI show both spending more than they earn, with venture capital covering the gap. You get a great deal today. The playbook is is the same as companies like Uber: lose money until rivals fold and you can't work without the service, then raise prices.#
On a Claude Pro or Max plan, Anthropic probably spends £4–5 on compute for every £1 you pay.#
I like using a Mac because it's largely beautiful (less so these days, I admit).#
But I have to use Windows for work. And my goodness every day I am shocked by its ugliness.#
Even with the rise of everything being browser based (thus things look largely the same on Mac and Windows) it's still an issue.#
Windows is a bit like religion – I don't understand how people can choose it.#
I've got so many domain names (mostly clowes.something). But sometimes I wonder if I should of just used subdomains instead – and had all my various online presences under "one roof". clowes.me, blog.clowes.me, notes.clowes.me, photos.clowes.me, thoughts.clowes.me, etc.#
However, I didn't get the clowes.me domain until... 11 years ago (geez, I didn't realise it was that long ago). But my original personal domain – elliotclowes.com – I got over 19 years ago! That one always felt a bit too long to use for subdomains (blog.elliotclowes.com seems too long).#
