Aral Balkan

I’m developing the Small Web at Small Technology Foundation.

The tools I’m building are called Kitten and Domain.

Like my work? Fund us!

2025

June

25

• Wed 15:42 Web Numbers

March

21

• Fri 09:59 Careless people

2024

October

16

• Wed 18:45 Optimal automation

August

19

• Mon 17:22 Kitten Kawaii: porting a React library and Next.js web site to Kitten

June

24

• Mon 10:50 Small Web: computer science colloquium at University of Groningen

23

• Sun 19:51 Fedora has been shipping with a broken screen reader for nine years but the real problem is me

01

• Sat 12:05 Small Technology Foundation funding application for NLnet Foundation NGI Zero Core seventh call

May

23

• Thu 19:11 New Kitten features: Interactive Shell (REPL), Multi-page Settings, and backup and restore (data portability)

March

26

• Tue 19:25 Draw Together

08

• Fri 15:20 Streaming HTML

2023

February

20

• Mon 09:59 End-to-end encrypted Kitten Chat

2022

November

14

• Mon 11:18 Installing Helix Editor Language Servers

09

• Wed 19:00 Is the fediverse about to get Fryed? (Or, “Why every toot is also a potential denial of service attack”)

October

20

• Thu 11:08 NLnet Grant Application for Domain Rejected

September

28

• Wed 09:31 Nlnet Grant Application for Domain – First Update: Questions and Answers

16

• Fri 10:49 Small Is Beautiful Episode 22 Small Web Kitten Dweb Camp Braid

August

30

• Tue 14:30 Dear Linux, Privileged Ports Must Die

17

• Wed 16:15 Lipstick on a Pig: learning the most important lesson in design

01

• Mon 18:26 Make Helix Editor follow the system colour scheme

July

29

• Fri 11:04 NLnet Grant Application for Domain

March

23

• Wed 15:47 Using bound functions to unit test EcmaScript Modules

February

16

• Wed 13:34 Decentralisation begins at decentring yourself

15

• Tue 11:03 NodeKit extension for Codium

07

• Mon 10:15 Everyone Hates Facebook (but this is more than just about Facebook)

January

26

• Wed 11:40 NodeKit Update

06

• Thu 10:55 The web0 manifesto

2021

December

20

• Mon 18:07 How to send an email

18

• Sat 13:21 The Three Laws of Personal Devices

16

• Thu 12:18 Saying goodbye to an old friend

11

• Sat 18:06 Comet

November

29

• Mon 16:34 Ireland’s two-tier health insurance system

24

• Wed 15:36 The magic one-line ImageMagick 7 AppImage installer

23

• Tue 17:03 How to apply a chroma key using ImageMagick

08

• Mon 15:20 My three-month-long elementary OS 6 upgrade adventure in three parts. (Part 1: Catts)

October

31

• Sun 21:26 How to count Unicode glyphs in Vala using Gtk

19

• Tue 18:00 How to change the colour of the underline in gspell

15

• Fri 21:11 How to disable Gtk-Message warnings in your app

August

24

• Tue 20:37 Implementing dark mode in a handful of lines of CSS with CSS filters
• Tue 19:39 Omnibus GitLab Let’s Encrypt renewal error and fix

16

• Mon 11:07 Key Mapper: a visual tool for remapping keys (and more) on Linux

08

• Sun 16:36 Apple is trying to redefine what it means to violate your privacy. We must not let it.

July

25

• Sun 13:27 Fish shell

June

25

• Fri 13:59 Remote: a little module for more elegant remoting with WebSockets

May

27

• Thu 13:05 Make anything a JavaScript module using Node.js ESM Module Loaders

26

• Wed 11:05 Archival cascades: a practical way to not break URLs

23

• Sun 20:36 How to get clean analog audio from a Blue Yeti microphone into a Sony a6400 camera using a Raspberry Pi Zero

16

• Sun 17:57 JSDB Migrations

14

• Fri 15:14 Scraping the latest EU VAT rates for e-services from the European Commission’s web site with Node.js
• Fri 13:46 Using the European Commission EU VAT Number validation API with Node.js

10

• Mon 16:20 Hell site

08

• Sat 11:03 Ethics as PR (or the ‘Some Very Good People Work There!’ Fallacy)

April

19

• Mon 12:24 Using Subresource Integrity (SRI) in Vite with @small-tech/vite-plugin-sri

16

• Fri 19:45 Clean up the web

03

• Sat 13:26 Passing data from layouts to pages in SvelteKit

01

• Thu 16:35 Site.js starter template for vite + svelte
• Thu 16:04 npm init using

March

09

• Tue 14:22 References to methods are a JavaScript minefield

07

• Sun 12:46 fs-extra to fs

February

22

• Mon 08:18 Cache busting in Node.js dynamic ESM imports

January

27

• Wed 10:30 CommonJS to ESM in Node.js

2020

December

31

• Thu 17:13 Snowpack Hot Module Replacement (HMR) from scratch with vanilla JavaScript

30

• Wed 12:48 Skypack: Backdoor as a Service?

October

24

• Sat 19:09 Why I wrote 152 extra lines of code just to do the same thing (and why I’d do it again today)

20

• Tue 16:23 Introducing JSDB

September

23

• Wed 16:05 What if data was code?

August

07

• Fri 13:03 What is the Small Web?

July

12

• Sun 16:47 Live Stream: A web site on your phone with Site.js

09

• Thu 11:18 Mentoring the Eastern Partnership Civil Society Online Hackathon

June

25

• Thu 16:34 How to use the Zoom malware safely on Linux if you absolutely have to

April

11

• Sat 12:23 How Apple and Google will cure COVID-19 and how you can opt into it if you want to keep your job

03

• Fri 20:17 Al Jazeera Live interview on corporate and government mass surveillance in the time of COVID-19

March

25

• Wed 10:28 Apple just killed Offline Web Apps while purporting to protect your privacy: why that’s A Bad Thing and why you should care

23

• Mon 20:01 Fail-fast on missing required arguments in JavaScript using default values that throw

February

18

• Tue 19:46 Flying to Antwerp tomorrow to present the opening keynote at Dig It Up on Thursday

January

20

• Mon 10:38 A happy ending to the Better Blocker saga

14

• Tue 19:13 Apple App Review: resistance is futile!
• Tue 11:48 Apple App Review says “maybe”: the whims of trillion-dollar gatekeepers

13

• Mon 11:59 “Apple Says ‘No!’” and what that means for the future of Better Blocker following our move to Ireland

02

• Thu 11:36 Dear Apple, a little help here? How hard can it be to move our developer account to our new not-for-profit?

01

• Wed 15:50 In 2020 and beyond, the battle to save personhood and democracy requires a radical overhaul of mainstream technology

2019

November

29

• Fri 10:21 The Future of Internet Regulation at the European Parliament

13

• Wed 15:06 Small Technology Foundation Personal Web Prototype-01: a mobile personal web server

08

• Fri 18:54 Introducing @small-tech/https, a batteries-included drop-in replacement for the Node.js https module

03

• Sun 11:12 Site.js: now with auto updates in production

October

30

• Wed 19:21 Site.js: now with auto server reload on source code changes

29

• Tue 18:28 Site.js: now with live reload

24

• Thu 12:34 Fixing read-only file system errors after do-release-upgrade from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to 16.04 LTS
• Thu 09:45 How to migrate from VSCode to VSCodium (the best code editor ever minus the corporate bullshit)

22

• Tue 18:08 The little Raspberry Pi that could (serve a web site)

21

• Mon 11:48 Site.js: now easier than ever to update

19

• Sat 18:00 Scary git-lfs “bad object” error not so scary after all
• Sat 16:31 Install git-lfs on a Raspberry Pi

18

• Fri 11:47 Site.js and Pi

11

• Fri 17:59 Build a simple chat app with Site.js

03

• Thu 11:30 Site.js, now also on Windows 10

August

27

• Tue 12:05 Introducing Small Technology Foundation, Site.js, and Tincan

July

10

• Wed 11:19 Small Technology at the Interactive Future Exhibition in Darmstadt

06

• Sat 17:11 ar.al is now running on a new server

June

22

• Sat 06:42 Have you heard about Silicon Valley’s unpaid research and development department? It’s called the EU.

15

• Sat 22:17 Rerun cloud-init on multipass

08

• Sat 16:04 Export/import issues with GitLab CE

May

11

• Sat 09:19 The Do’s and Don’ts of Tech Regulation

02

• Thu 15:09 Slavery 2.0 and how to avoid it: a practical guide for cyborgs

April

30

• Tue 13:16 Indie Web Server 9.1.0: Better error handling

29

• Mon 19:59 Indie Web Server 9.0.0: Housekeeping

20

• Sat 16:52 Indie Web Server 8.2.0: Cascading archives for an evergreen web
• Sat 14:05 Fixing the icon regression in Pop!_OS 19.04

18

• Thu 15:25 Indie Web Server 8.1.1: Reverse proxy (local mode)

17

• Wed 17:38 This site now runs on Indie Web Server

16

• Tue 20:20 Set up a live static personal web site in seconds with Indie Web Server 8.0.0

01

• Mon 11:10 Indie Web Server 7.1.0: Launch a live secure static site with a single command

March

31

• Sun 12:31 Indie Web Server: now with native 404 to 302 support for an evergreen web

30

• Sat 20:12 Custom error pages for Indie Web Server

29

• Fri 12:22 Upcoming talks: April

16

• Sat 14:36 How to trim an MP4 video without re-encoding it
• Sat 14:26 Using the Advanced Scene Switcher Plugin with manual overrides in OBS Studio
• Sat 12:58 Open Broadcaster Software Studio is amazing!

14

• Thu 18:29 Introducing Indie Web Server (video)

12

• Tue 01:36 Reclaiming your backtick/tilde key with a UK Macintosh key layout on an ANSI US Keyboard in GNOME

11

• Mon 21:44 Setting multiple key bindings for the same action in GNOME

10

• Sun 13:15 Indie Web Server

08

• Fri 10:19 HTTPS Server: now with seamless Let’s Encrypt support

07

• Thu 19:27 Upcoming talks: March
• Thu 14:16 HTTPS Server
• Thu 14:01 Nodecert

04

• Mon 10:19 Small Technology

February

18

• Mon 10:05 Hypha: Glossary

14

• Thu 12:17 Privacy is not a science, it is a human right

13

• Wed 14:30 On the General Architecture of the Peer Web (and the placement of the PC 2.0 era within the timeline of general computing and the greater socioeconomic context)

12

• Tue 14:18 Hypha Spike: Persistence 1

01

• Fri 15:04 Hypha Spike: Multiwriter 2

January

24

• Thu 07:29 Hypercore protocol deep dive

22

• Tue 13:00 Hypha Spike: Multiwriter 1

20

• Sun 14:08 Hypha Spike: WebRTC 1

15

• Tue 21:34 Hypha Spike: Diceware

14

• Mon 22:42 Hypha Spike: DAT 1

11

• Fri 12:17 I was wrong about Google and Facebook: there’s nothing wrong with them (so say we all)

10

• Thu 12:27 Hypha Spike: Aspect Setup 1

09

• Wed 12:38 The post-Web is single tenant
• Wed 12:23 Success criteria for the PC 2.0 era
• Wed 11:59 Deployment-first development

05

• Sat 23:40 Hypha Spike: Deployment 1

01

• Tue 20:17 Getting Green Recorder running on Wayland under Gnome on Ubuntu 18.10-based systems
• Tue 16:55 Al Jazeera News interview: French “tech tax”

2018

December

31

• Mon 12:38 Sometimes you have to stick a screwdriver in it (or how to liberate a Chromebook in ten easy steps)

29

• Sat 10:10 Tilingnome

23

• Sun 19:22 What does a private communicator look like?

20

• Thu 12:54 A simple Node transform stream with the new Node 10 pipeline() function

16

• Sun 16:00 Boogie Board: a beautiful, modern, portable take on the blackboard

15

• Sat 18:04 Kappa Architecture workshop
• Sat 17:46 Remember directory from last session in Tilix with zsh

10

• Mon 18:41 Surveillance Capitalism at the BBC

07

• Fri 12:14 Baby steps

November

29

• Thu 11:18 GDMR: this one simple regulation could end surveillance capitalism in the EU

08

• Thu 16:23 Gnomit 1.0.6

05

• Mon 15:34 Better Blocker 2018.2 release for macOS and iOS

October

26

• Fri 19:29 Gnomit 1.0.5
• Fri 16:27 With this amazing trick, you can stay an extra night in Paris but only if you use Linux!
• Fri 12:55 version: display Linux version information

19

• Fri 21:43 Gnomit 1.0.4

16

• Tue 22:59 Updating firmware on Dell XPS 13 With Pop!_OS 18.04

04

• Thu 17:09 Setting up Hiawatha web server on Ubuntu 16.04

September

25

• Tue 10:03 Better Blocker: thank you for our best week yet!

24

• Mon 12:02 Better Blocker for macOS Mojave

17

• Mon 17:58 Better Blocker for iOS 12
• Mon 11:08 Workaround for unclickable app menu bug with window.makeKeyAndOrderFront and NSApp.activate on macOS

16

• Sun 13:52 Responsive design got my app rejected

14

• Fri 19:34 Better, simpler, and more affordable

August

29

• Wed 23:29 Extended Codice Interview With Rai 1

27

• Mon 11:33 Better Blocker: two year review and thoughts on the future

26

• Sun 21:10 Get Unicode-aware length of string in JavaScript

20

• Mon 16:06 Gnomit Flatpak bundle

15

• Wed 17:16 Introducing Gnomit: a simple Git commit message editor for Gnome

13

• Mon 10:59 How to install the Vala Reference Manual into Devhelp using the apt package manager

07

• Tue 10:24 New Philosopher: How power corrupts
• Tue 05:14 Off to Denmark for Smukfest

05

• Sun 22:43 Getting your iCloud contacts on GNU/Linux
• Sun 19:25 Using iCloud calendars on GNU/Linux

04

• Sat 23:18 Multi-writer Dat could power the next Web

03

• Fri 15:47 How to enable the Browse Files setting in GSConnect

02

• Thu 23:57 Crafting a continuous-client desktop/mobile experience on Linux with GSConnect

July

31

• Tue 17:21 How to install DAT on mobile under Termux

30

• Mon 21:46 Workaround for npm install error on Lineageos 15.1
• Mon 20:44 Web development on a phone with Hugo and Termux
• Mon 16:33 Out of the frying pan and into the fire

29

• Sun 17:58 Broadcasting your phone’s screen to web browsers using Screen Stream
• Sun 16:05 Fix for “No Bluetooth Found” error after wake from sleep

27

• Fri 11:05 Getting started with WireGuard on Linux using AzireVPN

26

• Thu 12:02 Pop!_OS 18.04: the state of the art in GNU/Linux on desktop

22

• Sun 13:30 Camera fix for Samsung S9 (LineageOS 15.1)

21

• Sat 08:40 Upgrade Little Snitch Before Upgrading to Mojave Beta

19

• Thu 22:49 iOTA 360

18

• Wed 20:02 Typographical typing habits for Linux

17

• Tue 22:38 Open from terminal in Linux
• Tue 17:40 Enabling Better Blocker in GNOME Web

16

• Mon 16:42 Changes
• Mon 12:49 Adding “command not found” apt package suggestions to zsh

15

• Sun 20:06 Flashing stock firmware onto a Samsung Galaxy S9+ (SM-G965F) on Ubuntu 18.04 using Heimdall

13

• Fri 20:00 Initial git configuration

06

• Fri 12:31 Casino Data
• Fri 06:49 Whither ethics, New Scientist?

05

• Thu 18:08 Rsync Permissions and Termux
• Thu 12:47 Web+ on a Phone
• Thu 11:12 Spellcheck With Emacs on Termux
• Thu 08:10 Nginx: Remember to remove the default site

03

• Tue 11:18 Phones LineageOS 15.1 is officially supported on

01

• Sun 01:37 Refining the RSS

June

29

• Fri 11:33 Reclaiming RSS

28

• Thu 18:04 Are You Logging IPs Without Even Knowing?

27

• Wed 19:13 The Real News: Turkish Elections
• Wed 11:21 Kyriarchy

26

• Tue 16:59 Web+

25

• Mon 21:29 Demonstrating Web + Dat

21

• Thu 10:11 We Make the City: Next Generation Cities
• Thu 08:15 We Make the City: Opening Night

20

• Wed 17:10 Digital Masquerade
• Wed 16:42 Working From De Waag
• Wed 15:33 Override BaseURL in Hugo Server
• Wed 13:20 Little Saigon

19

• Tue 10:38 Public Stack Summit

17

• Sun 10:26 Giddy about CSS grid
• Sun 09:14 Formatting an ISO 8601 date stamp in Hugo

16

• Sat 17:04 Refining the blog

15

• Fri 15:44 Revision history
• Fri 15:00 Hello Peer-to-Peer Web

0001

January

01

• Mon 00:00 Talks
• Mon 00:00 Biography