I burned through a shit ton of tokens to finally make Paper run without the need for FreshRSS. I've also improved feed management, since I don't rely on FreshRSS anymore.
I've tested it, and nothing exploded, so far. For a quick changelog:
Standalone mode: Paper now works without FreshRSS.
Feed discovery and OPML: Find feeds from websites, import subscriptions, and export them.
Folder organization: Create folders, move feeds, and drag to reorder.
Performance fixes: Faster indexing and searches that no longer freeze the reader.
Reader improvements: Better keyboard navigation, steadier loading, and fixes for missing-date crashes.
Migration tools: Move from FreshRSS with backups and rollback. Still experimental; historical duplicates can occur. And they did occur for me.
It's still an alpha. Stuff is still a bit rough. I tested it on my iPad, and things were a bit all over the place, but I filed a few issues to work on that. (If anyone wants to help, feel free, by the way.)
Happy 15th birthday to the one game I've played the most in my life.
I still remember calling the local electronics store the day before the official release in 2011. I was still at university in Cologne. My theory was that they'd put the game out a day early to save on time. And they did, so my roommate and I sprinted to the shop (it was one hour before closing) to buy the game for Xbox 360.
Since then I've probably played over a thousand hours across all devices. I think I own 4 different versions of the game.
Skyrim is my feel-good game, still, to this day. Whenever I don't know what I want to play, I just get the latest version of some mod collection and play that. I mean, I am playing two collections at the same time currently, a 2D one and one made for VR. And the game is just getting better. Just look into the madness that is SkyrimNet. I usually run around with a bunch of followers, and now I can just use my microphone to tell them what to do.
I wonder if we get some release for today's birthday. Hopefully one that doesn't completely break mod compatibility, AGAIN.
A collection of short stories that aren't really connected, except that they all explore Chinese immigrant families and themes of identity and belonging.
I've been using RSS readers for close to 20 years. It's the only way I consume any writing these days. If there is no RSS feed for a website, it might as well not exist. If there is, and the topic is interesting to me, there is a high chance I have it in my list. There are, after all, around 1300 websites I subscribe to.
Since moving to Linux and Android and setting up my own home server, I have been using a self-hosted instance of FreshRSS for all my needs. But holy shit, that thing is ugly. So I "built"1 one.
Originally, I wanted to build a theme for FreshRSS, but realized that what I wanted to achieve was not really doable. It was like putting lipstick on a pig. You could change some colors, but not the layout.
So instead, I built a frontend that uses FreshRSS as the backend. It's called Paper2.
I've been using it for a few months now. Scrolling through all my articles is what I do each morning with a coffee. It has a bunch of cool features:
Paper groups related reporting into developing stories that persist across days. It tracks new additions separately from unread articles and lets me fix the grouping when needed. I stole the idea from Shaun Inman's Fever.
Morning and evening briefing emails combine related coverage, link to sources, and follow continuing stories without repeating previous summaries.
Three panes on desktop, with a dedicated reading view, swipe navigation, and pull-to-refresh on mobile.
It expands truncated feeds and cleans up newsletter formatting and publisher clutter. The original feed version stays available.
Some (OPTIONAL!) AI integrations, like chatting about articles and clearer headlines for selected publishers that are fucking clickbaiting all the time. Story grouping and the full briefings use AI too. Without it, Paper still works as a reader, but collections stop gaining new articles and briefings stops working altogether. These features send article text, titles, and source URLs to the configured external model provider, exposing some of my reading interests. Briefings also send my editorial preferences and feedback. Article chat sends my questions, selected passages, and conversation history.
Dedicated layouts for X, Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, and YouTube content supplied through subscribed feeds. X posts can even expand into threads. You need a separate service such as RSSHub for some of these feeds and the X thread expansion, though. My Instagram feeds use a custom collector.
There are also a bunch of features that I strictly built for myself. I use Readwise Reader as my read-it-later service, and Kirby as my blogging engine. I integrated both directly, and you can turn them off and on again.
Anyway. I quite like Paper. So I've uploaded the code and Docker Compose files to GitHub. I'd say that this is a very early alpha.
If you want to install it, point your agent to it, and tell it to set it all up. If you want to suggest a feature, open an issue. If you want to build one, open a PR. At least for now, I'll be the one reviewing and approving new features. If you want to use a different backend engine3, good luck. If you want to send money to someone, send it to the FreshRSS devs. And if you want someone to host this, ask someone else. And if you want to steal it and make it a service you want to sell, do what you want, and feel ashamed of yourself.
The first book I've read by TJ Klune, and yet I feel like I know his entire life philosophy after finishing it.
It's a good book. Some characters are weird AF, while others are beautifully written and have some beautiful things to say.
I unfortunately guessed the twist pretty early on. Also, the larger overarching storyline felt somewhat unnecessary to me. A bit shoehorned in, really.
Notes & Highlights
“Do we live to be remembered?” Don asked. “Or do we live to live?”
With the launch of Bazzite 45, we’ve done a great deal to improve how Bazzite is built behind the scenes to make the lives of contributors and maintainers alike easier.
On the topic of Linux, and in case you somehow missed this, Bazzite is the other Linux distro I use. It runs on my HTPC and is basically the center of my living room experience. (With KDE, however.)
Nintendo’s modern Zelda team have turned one of the best games of the 1990s into one of the best games of the 2020s, and made time-travellers out of us all.
It's as timeless as it ever was, managing to recreate one of the most beautiful games to date without compromising the magic of its 1998 predecessor – only adding to it.
No remaster or remake can fully replace an original so influential, but The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for Nintendo Switch 2 is the N64 masterpiece at its most polished and enjoyable.