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Slight Future journal — reflective technical writing on platforms, tools, and infrastructure decisions

Journal

The journal is where the writing is more reflective than procedural. Where the how-to guides walk through specific tasks and the tech notes document specific behaviours, the journal takes a wider view — examining platforms, questioning vendor decisions, documenting transitions, and recording the kind of observations that do not fit neatly into a guide or a reference note but deserve to be written down because they capture something genuinely useful about how technology works in practice.

The entries here are technically grounded. They are not opinion pieces disconnected from evidence. Each one starts from real experience — a platform migration, an advertising experiment, a privacy investigation, a backup failure — and builds the narrative around what actually happened, what the implications were, and what it means for readers dealing with similar decisions. The tone is direct. Where something is broken, it is called broken. Where something works surprisingly well, that is noted too.

These entries cover web monetisation experiments, operating system migrations, network security observations, mobile platform limitations, and browser ecosystem decisions. They tend to be the pages that age most interestingly, because the platforms they discuss evolve — sometimes in the direction predicted, sometimes not — and the original observations become historical context for understanding how we got to the present state.

Web monetisation and advertising​

The economics of independent web publishing involve a tension between sustainability and integrity that every small publisher navigates differently. These entries document specific experiments with monetisation platforms, assessed honestly.

Google Contributor: No New Signups​

Google Contributor was an experiment in letting users pay to remove ads from participating websites — a model that addressed a real problem and attracted genuine interest. This entry documents the experience of participating in the programme, the practical mechanics of how it worked from the publisher side, and the eventual closure to new signups. It captures a specific moment in the history of web monetisation: the brief period when Google seemed willing to experiment with alternatives to the pure advertising model.

Google Contributor Revisited​

A follow-up that revisits Google Contributor after the initial assessment, tracking how the programme evolved, what changed for publishers and users, and what the trajectory revealed about Google's actual commitment to the ad-replacement model. Read together with the earlier entry, the two pieces document a complete arc from promising experiment to quiet wind-down.

Brave Payments​

Brave's approach to web monetisation — blocking ads by default and offering a cryptocurrency-based payment system for publishers — generated strong opinions on all sides. This entry documents the practical experience: signing up as a publisher, integrating the payment system, observing the actual revenue, and assessing whether the model works at the scale of an independent site. The assessment is interested in what actually happened, not in the broader ideological arguments about advertising and cryptocurrency.

Platform migrations and infrastructure​

Changing the operating system or platform you rely on is a decision with consequences that extend well beyond the initial installation. These entries document the real migration experiences.

Migrated to Fedora​

Migrating a primary workstation from one Linux distribution to another is a task that distribution advocates make sound trivial and that anyone who has done it knows is anything but. This entry documents the migration to Fedora — the motivation, the preparation, the actual migration process, the things that worked seamlessly, and the things that required days of adjustment. It covers the specific desktop environment behaviour, the package management transition, the multimedia codec situation, the hardware compatibility differences, and the honest assessment of whether the migration achieved what it was supposed to.

The entry is useful both as a practical migration reference and as an honest account of the distribution-switching experience. If you are considering a similar move, the specific observations about what transfers cleanly and what requires manual intervention are directly applicable.

Abysmal Android Backups​

Android's backup story has been inadequate for its entire existence, and this entry documents the specific failures — the backup mechanisms that silently skip data, the restore process that loses settings, the per-app inconsistency, and the fundamental architectural decisions that make Android backup unreliable compared to iOS's approach. The entry is not a rant. It is a detailed examination of what Android backup actually does and does not preserve, tested across real devices and real restore scenarios.

If you have ever performed a factory reset on an Android device or migrated to a new one and been surprised by what was missing afterward, this entry explains exactly why. The backup mechanisms and their limitations are documented with specifics rather than generalities, and the practical workarounds — including the uncomfortable truth that some data simply cannot be backed up without root access — are covered honestly.

Network security and privacy observations​

Some security and privacy observations are better suited to the journal's reflective format than to the structured investigation format of the security section. These entries document specific findings within a broader narrative context.

Netcraft Anti-Phishing Toolbar IPv6​

The Netcraft anti-phishing toolbar was a widely recommended browser security tool, and this entry documents a specific limitation: its handling of IPv6 websites. The finding revealed that the toolbar's protection model had assumptions about address formatting that did not hold in an IPv6 context, creating a gap between the security it appeared to provide and the security it actually delivered. The entry documents the observed behaviour, the testing methodology, and the implications for users relying on the toolbar as part of their phishing protection.

Contribute to MLS WiFi​

Mozilla Location Services relied on crowdsourced WiFi access point data to provide geolocation without GPS. This entry examines the contribution process, the privacy implications of WiFi scanning, the data quality considerations, and the broader question of whether crowdsourced location databases represent a net benefit or a net privacy cost. It covers the practical steps for contributing, the tools involved, and the honest assessment of what the contribution actually achieves.

What readers usually need​

Journal readers tend to arrive through one of two paths: searching for a specific topic (Android backups, Google Contributor, Fedora migration) or browsing the section for technically grounded commentary. The most frequently referenced entries:

Why a journal section exists​

Technical writing is most useful when it covers the full range of what practitioners actually deal with. Procedures and reference material cover two important parts of that range, but they do not cover the reflective work — the assessment of whether a tool is worth adopting, the honest account of a migration, the examination of whether a platform's promises match its delivery. The journal fills that gap.

Every entry here starts from direct experience and builds toward observations that are useful to others in similar positions. The writing is personal in the sense that it comes from a specific perspective, but technical in the sense that the claims are grounded in observed behaviour rather than speculation. If you are looking for the site's procedural content, the how-to guides are the right starting point. If you want the specific behavioural observations, the tech notes section provides them. The journal is for everything in between.