#tech explained

This is an increíble thing that happens when trying to follow that subscribe link to the newsletter

yeah I know that's the joke

actually lemme explain the joke cause this is genuinely useful information and probably a ton of people just don't know about this anymore:

So this is what's called an RSS Feed

it looks like a bunch of data code nonsense because that's exactly what it is: a series of big blocks of data that tell you things like: what each of the last [number] of blog posts are, what the title of each is, what the date for each is... and actually I think I serve the entire content of each post through the feed so there's also a bunch of html formatting in there, image files, and so on. for the record, it doesn't look like that for me because I have a plugin (RSS Preview on Firefox) that can take that data and render it like this:

RSS files are just periodically updated documents--text docs, you can write them in notepad if you really wanted to!--that lives at a url on your website. Plug that URL into a "reader" and it'll periodically call my website up and check if there's changes to the data in the feed. if there's a new entry, it'll drop that into your feed and alert you to the fact that I've posted a new article. I've seen a few different claims of what RSS stands for but the one I like is "Really Simple Syndication". because it is really simple! I just have a bulletin board on my site that posts new information, and then your little robot goes around town checking all the bulletin boards and bringing the information back to you. you may instead visualize this as a kobold, army of hypno drone minions, &c, whatever's your fancy.

the best part from my perspective is that I don't need to have your email or deal with your service provider's (probably google's) opaque spam policies. if it's on my feed, you or anyone else can just call up the url whenever you want and find my stuff. it also means I don't have to update at a particular time on a particular day of the week and the feed keeps working months or years between updates, which gives this major major advantages over sticking a website into a bookmark folder somewhere on your browser and just reminding yourself to check it periodically. we have robots (kobolds &c) to do that for us! so, the joke here is that you can "sign up for my substack newsletter" by just... putting a url, into your program of choice, without worrying about whether I'm going to sell your email. it's just one of many things that makes blogs better than substacks.

the big question that I don't have a great answer for is what you do with the url. there's a LOT of readers out there, but there was sort of a collapse of the ecosystem and blogging as a whole after the fuckers at google obliterated Google Reader, which was the eponymous rss reader, from the eponymous google. it's like the fourth worst thing they've done after replacing their own search with LLM slop, monopolizing the ad market, and worst of all discontinuing Google Wave. that said, the fact that the market is quite fragmented is imo an opportunity to play around and find a reader that works for you. I'm using a fork of a fork that you can only get through github that looks like it was programmed in 2006 because it probably originally was, but I also just started parsing my gmail through firefox's email frontend Thunderbird, and that has a web calendar (also like rss--you can read about that here) AND an RSS reader built in, so I want to explore that and see if it's a solid modern alternative. I tend to gravitate towards programs that let me be a power user--because these feeds have a ton of data potentially you can do things like automatically discard, say, news articles with tags you're uninterested in, or move some articles to a particular "inbox" folder to make sure you see them, and a really powerful reader will let you automate that process.

that said if all you want is a simple reader that lives in the cloud and syncs up your webcomic library... there's definitely options for that!

and oh yeah, did I forget to mention? a LOT LOT LOT of webcomics still use RSS. it's actually the biggest thing I use my reader for, and why I'm keeping up with so many more webcomics again.

not that they always make it easy to find. dumbing of age for example has the rss feed aaaaall the way at the bottom:

Kill Six Billion Demons has it right at the top, but you might not recognize it. it's that orange icon at the end that looks sorta like a cartoon radio transmitter:

once again I recommend using the RSS Preview extension, which helpfully adds a little icon to my firefox url bar when it detects a link to an RSS feed. it makes it way way easier to find these things than having to hunt around all over a page for that little orange icon or a link that just says "Subscribe". it's not a perfect tool (I just noticed it doesn't detect the rss feed on Gwyn's blog despite it having a big link at the top of the page saying "RSS"!) but for someone just starting to set up a library it's invaluable imo

oh and fun fact: for a long time substack *was not aware* that if you followed a blog through rss... they were just serving paywalled content directly over the feed. like, I was just casually reading through paywalled articles without a care in the world, right there in my reader. they caught on to their screwup sadly but it was fun while it lasted. and hey, it still works for bypassing all the intrusive ugly bullshit that a substack throws at you when you're reading on their website.

so in a very real way, rss IS a way to subscribe to a substack!

so everyone go out and sign up for my substack newsletter today:

Ever wondered how you take a 10GB file, zip it, and suddenly it drops to 2 or 3GB, then when you unzip it, the file returns to the full 10GB without losing anything? At first glance, it feels like digital magic. So what is really happening here? Is data secretly being deleted and somehow restored later? Not at all. What you are seeing is smart mathematics and efficient data encoding doing…

Ever seen the term monochrome printer and wondered what it actually means? You're not alone! In today’s world of tech jargon, it's easy to get confused. So, let’s break down the monochrome printer meaning in simple terms 👇

🔍 So… What Is a Monochrome Printer?

The monochrome printer meaning is pretty straightforward: it’s a printer that uses only one color—black—to print. No color cartridges. No fancy graphics. Just clean, black-and-white prints.

They’re designed for people or businesses who mostly print documents like:

Essays

Invoices

Reports

Forms

If you’re not printing photos or colorful flyers, a monochrome printer could be exactly what you need.

✅ Why Do People Choose Monochrome Printers?

Once you get the monochrome printer meaning, it’s easy to see why they’re so popular:

🖨️ Fast printing – Great for high-volume jobs 💰 Low cost per page – Only one toner or cartridge 🧽 Low maintenance – Fewer parts = fewer problems 📝 Sharp text quality – Super clean for docs and forms

Perfect for students, remote workers, and small business owners!

🏁 Final Thoughts: Why the Monochrome Printer Meaning Matters

Knowing the monochrome printer meaning helps you avoid spending on features you’ll never use. If you mostly print black-and-white documents and want something fast, affordable, and reliable, a monochrome printer is a smart choice.

typically code executes linearly, it will run and once it has executed all the code and reached the end it will stop. the way games (and most programs tbh) work is you will trap the code in a while loop in which the program gets stuck in a loop.

in games this loop goes through 2 main steps: Update, and Draw.

the Update step handles any and all logic: player input, npc ai, pretty much any and all logic. the game will go through all the objects in a scene and update them in some way determined by the programmer writing the code, if the player presses the W key to move forward it is in the update loop the player character moves forward. if an enemy is attacking the player, they make the decision to attack them in the update, if there is a timer it will decrease it's time here (in a way, this is a simplification) all this logic gets executed every frame, at whatever frames per second

if you're using a third party game engine like unity or unreal, while the update step is a function you can add to in created scripts, other things like pressing a button or event based functions will still be running in the Update loop in the background, handled by the engine internally

the Draw step is where all the data about the current state of the game, where models, cameras, and lights are passed to the GPU and where the graphics card begins preparing the data to display on the screen using shaders, code that is written specifically for the gpu to use (instead of what is typically thought of as code that gets run on the cpu). there are two main shaders: the vertex shader, and the fragment shader

the vertex shader determines the position of a vertex on the screen, usually this would just be simple math, but for some effects a technical artist/graphic programmer (the ones who typically make the shaders) may mess with the vertex shader to move the verticies of the model without need to get the animator to make it an animation, which would harm the game's performance on the cpu side vs the much faster and more efficient method of using a vertex shader to animate it

the fragment shader determines the colour of the pixel of the screen, this is where visual effects like lighting, a glow effect, or an outline, or alpha control to hide a model, or whatever else that affects the colour will be done.

these shaders are ran on the gpu's cores for each pixel of the screen, so for a 2560x1440 resolution these vertex and fragment shaders will be run 3,686,400 times per frame

and that's how (for the most part) every game runs

That's so cool! I knew a lot about the CPU side, I've started a few hobby projects in Unity (that I never finished and ended up losing eventually, rip), but everything about the GPU side was new to me, and it's cool to have this insight!