I’m grateful for the IndieWeb community. I feel as if I’ve found my online tribe here.

I think I first discovered the IndieWeb somewhere around June 2026. I’ve had blogs way before that, but until the beginning of 2026, I don’t think anybody ever read them and I always felt like I was missing some kind of community.

Despite how connected the Internet is, if the only thing you do is buy a domain and host a blog on it, the odds that someone randomly finds your blog are low.

For me, finding the IndieWeb community was a game changer because I found other people to read. I could communicate with other bloggers over email or reply publicly to their posts on my own blog.

I have to give out a shout out to Rishi over at OneBerri, who was the first person to reply to one of my posts. I remember my heart skipping a beat when I saw an email from Rishi’s newsletter that started with “Antonio Santos said…” and my immediate thought was “oh no what did I say?”

Shortly after that, I discovered bubbles.town. To anyone that had to read Your RSS Reader Is Robbing You and the many replies it got, I’m sorry. I think RSS is great, but I enjoy seeing the different sites everyone spends time working on, that’s all. I don’t think I expressed that well. I wrote more on this in a Quick Log.

There’s other places that I’ve discovered part of the IndieWeb that are worth exploring, like PowRSS.com and for my fellow Spanish speakers BlogBlog.es.

I frequently browse the Kagi Small Web to find new blogs to follow. Its nice because it isn’t a list of posts like the other sites I mentioned. It only shows one random post at a time and I’ve discovered some nice gems on it.

I’d love to hear other’s stories about finding the IndieWeb, and whether or not their experience has been the same as mine. Feel free to publicly reply to this post or send me an email.

I’ve been putting a lot of pressure on myself that if I’m going to post something, it has to be “worthwhile”. It’s reached a point where I haven’t posted anything substantial since the beginning of October.

I feel like I need to break the ice with a low-effort post and get back to my regular rhythm.

I do have one recent regret, and I think it has something to do with the slump. When I migrated from antoniosantos.io to otolock.net, I chose to use 11ty instead of migrating my existing Django setup or creating a new blog with everything I’d learned working on the previous site.

I have to admit, coming back to SSG after being used to posting from my phone has had an effect on the frequency of what I post. There’s an added amount of effort if I want to post something, so if it’s not substantial, I abandon the idea instead of getting on my laptop, updating the repo and posting.

I think I’m going back to Django.

In his albums, Logic occasionally has skits that play throughout that are part of the album’s overall story. A song in his album Ultra 85 titled In Retrospect has a skit at the end that left me wondering:

[Outro: Thomas & Kai]

Thank God for synthetic gravity and ribeye that never came from a cow

I still don't understand how we grow meat without livestock

The marvels of AI, my friend

But wasn't it also because of AI that every country in the entire world deployed nukes as an auto defense against Russia's initial attack on the New Americas?

Mmm, I mean, but the steak though

Ugh, so good

Ever since I heard it, it’s left me wondering whether the benefits of AI outweigh the bad.

On the one hand, the scientific advancements are undeniable, such as detecting cancer 3 years before diagnosis.^[1] In areas where AI has proven to be a scourge, it has also proven to be a reliable tool. For example, while AI has facilitated the propagation of misinformation, it has also facilitated misinformation detection.^[2]

I haven't made up my mind yet, but I don't think we can look at AI as either good or bad and nothing in between. There are many inventions throughout humanity's history where the benefits have greatly outweighed the negatives. Are we at a point where AI has proven itself bad already, or have we not reached the peak yet?

If we were able to produce synthetic meat that was healthy and tasted just like real meat and stop killings cows, are the data centers worth it?

My last several birding outings have been with a single objective: to spot a photograph a Belted Kingfisher. So when I leave without having spotted nor photographed one, I feel as if the entire outing was a failure. I seem to have forgotten that:

1. Nature doesn't care what bird I want to see
2. I can still enjoy all the other birds I encounter

I realized that today when I got in the car. I was disappointed I didn't see one, was kicking myself for getting up early all for nothing, and forgot all of the awesome things I did see today. I didn't stick around my usual spot for too long. It's rained a ton recently, and the forest is full of mosquitos so I went somewhere else. But for the 15-ish miniutes I was there, I spotted 3 Puerto Rican Woodpeckers, which I hadn't been able to spot one for over a month (although I always heard them), a Northern Mockingbird chilling on a tree branch, and eight (eight!!) Monk Parakeets building a nest.

I know I didn't miss these things, I'm telling you about them, but in the moment, I know the only thing I was thinking of was let me hurry up and go to the spot I last heard a Kingfisher, instead of appreciating the moment.

So what I need to do is get some mosquito repellant, and get back out there tomorrow. Nature is ready to surprise us, we just need to let ourselves be surprised.

The bigger thing I want to reflect on is how tunnel vision can narrow our focus and we allow ourselves to miss out on amazing things because we're so focused chasing something that we may never get, and how chasing that thing can make us stop enjoying our hobbies.

I’ve always heard lenses being categorized as either fast or slow, with the contributing factor being maximum aperture which is how much the lens can open. The more light the lens can let in, the better.

I always associated the relationship between aperture and speed with shutter speed. The more light the lens lets in, the greater the shutter speed, which in low-light situations, means you have a greater opportunity to take photos without motion blur.

I’d never realized how aperture contributed to auto-focus speed until I got my first slow lens, the RF 100-400 f/5.6-8. Since I started taking pictures of birds, the thing I’ve struggled with the most has been getting them in focus. Before the RF 100-400, my main lens had a constant f/4 throughout the focal length, and I’ve always had f/1.4, f/1.8 or f/2.8 lenses before that. Auto-focus had never been an issue before and I couldn’t figure out what I’d been doing wrong.

That was until I was watching a bird photographer on YouTube talk about gear, and he defined what a slow lens really meant. Slow auto-focus. After that, it all started to make sense. When I was photographing within dense forests, auto-focus was a struggle, so much so that I’d started doing manual focus. But when I had great lighting, I had zero issues with auto-focus.

So for anyone getting into bird photography after years of landscape and portrait photography like me, you’re going to struggle with auto-focus, and its not you, and its not your camera. Its your new slow telephoto lens.

There's a cool new site doing the rounds on the IndieWebosphere called Pixel Area. It's a 100x100 pixel grid where everyone can claim one pixel. I also noticed the grid has different neighborhoods like Cache Hollow, Vector Fields, Mosiac Commons, Echo Heights, and more.

I find it pretty cool because as the inital release post says:

There are no rankings to climb and no algorithm deciding what you should see. Just a map to explore and places worth discovering.

Will you be my neighbor? I'm over at Cache Hollow at x19, y99. I'm excited to find new blogs to follow by exploring the grid.

Your phone is not the problem

Jeff says that he is a better person without his phone.

Widdershins says they’re the same with or without their phone.

I think they’re both right because when Jeff gets on his phone, he doomscrolls. When Widdershins uses his phone, he contacts his family, uses it as a digital planner, music and taking photos.

Jeff is a better person without his phone because Doomscrolling on X (formerly called Twitter) has no benefits. News outlets and social media make more money the more time we spend on them. Good news don’t catch our attention. Negative news keep us worried. They concern us so we want to be updated as much as possible on them.^[1]

But as Widdershins’ example shows: your phone is not the problem, its how you use it. You can use your phone to learn a new language, read books, identify birds in your backyard, identify plants and other animals that aren’t birds and to call or text your friends, to name a few things.

Some people like to advocate for dumb phones or replacing your phone with analog tools. Those work for them, and maybe that’s what you need to break the cycle. But for me, buying a small e-ink reader is unnecessary (against the better judgement of the tech-junkie in me) when you can read books just fine in your phone.

If putting your phone in another room is what you need to do, do it. But instead, consider what you do when you use your phone, and what cues you can alter to build better habits.

Delete the apps that don’t add to your mental health, or at least remove them from your Home Screen. You can also set limits with screen time settings and this is not an endorsement but there’s apps like Brick, which require a physical key to unblock certain apps, which I’ve been meaning to try out.

When I woke up this morning, just like every other day this week, I felt like going back to sleep and not going birding. Once I get out of bed, I feel well-rested, but if I skip birding, that usually means I get two more hours of sleep. Well guess what. I finally went birding today!

I'm so glad I didn't stay in, because today was a good birding day. Today I spotted 13 different species, with 3 new species for my life list:

• Veterano
• Gorrión Doméstico
• Turpial

You'll have to forgive me for using local names. If I learn the common english names for these birds, local birders will have no idea what birds I'm talking about. However, I left you the eBird links ;)

The Veterano and Turpial were pretty elusive and I wasn't able to snap great pictures of them.

Veterano

I wish I saw more of this fella, but they were small and flew away just as fast as they landed and I never spotted them again.

Turpial

The Turpial's call is unique. Merlin was unable to identify it, but I knew there was a new bird when I heard it. Took me a good 5-10 minutes to finally spot it since this bird seems to stick in the dense foliage of trees. The bright colors would make you think its easy to spot, but you'd be mistaken. But once you do spot it, its easy to follow it around. This one flew from tree to tree until it finally flew behind the tree line and out of sight. I was very excited to have spotted this one.

The Gorrión Doméstico was another story. Three of them landed right next to me while I was trying to spot another bird, so I was able to snap some good pictures of them, and even a video (though I'm not sure how to upload those on this blog yet).

One bird that I love hearing, and hear often is the Juí, but some days I hear them calling but never get to spot them. Today was a different story.

So all in all, I'm glad I got up and went birding today. I had been a little disappointed with my last few birding outings, spotting almost no birds and not being able to snap any good pictures of the few birds I did see.

Today was a nice reminder of why I fell in love with the hobby, and boy did the birds show off today.

I’m currently on a 60-week reading streak. I might not read every day, but at least once a week before going to bed.

I can tell you that in the past year and two months, I have not felt as hooked by a book as I have by Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman. For the first time, I’m looking forward to finding time to keep reading the book. Once I start reading, I’m as stuck to my e-reader as when I accidentally open Instagram on my phone. Probably not healthy, but at least I’m reading instead of doomscrolling.

I didn’t know anything about the book going into it, I’d seen all the hype around it online and the summary was interesting enough for me to download it. A few pages in, I knew I wanted to finish this book. I’m about 20% through already, and I started reading it last night. I hope the rest of the book is as good as the beginning, and that the rest of the books in the series are just as good.

I’ve always been a night owl, so I struggle with waking up early. No matter how early I go to bed, I fall asleep around 11:30 p.m. - 12:00 a.m., so setting an alarm for 6 a.m., knowing I’ll only get 6 hours of sleep, always makes me second-guess birding in the morning.

I know it’s mental. Once I wake up, I feel great because I left the house and went out to do something I love. But getting there is half the battle.

Hello there! Welcome to my new home on the internet.

Previously located at antoniosantos.io, I've decided to start publishing content on otolock.net moving forward, and I'm still debating if I will be migrating my content to this new domain.

The main reason for the change is cost. .io domain renewals went up last year to $51.80, with reports that another 12% increase is expected for 2027. That is simply not sustainable especially when other TLDs like this .net I got only costs around $12.50 to renew.

otolock has been my internet moniker for as long as I can remember. I grew up watching and playing with Transformers, and I recall thinking about a username and going for a play on autobots and landed at otolock. I've used it everywhere since, so I don't know why it never occured to me to use it as my domain until now.

Development Plans

I love tinkering with my website. It's fun to try out new technologies, hosting providers, deployment methods, frameworks, etc. The last verison of antoniosantos.io was built with Django, which I enjoyed working with. If you ever want to spin up a blog and have a built-in admin dashboard, I couldn't recommend Django more. However, that comes with its own complications. If I want to add a new post type, like links or replies, I need to scaffold a new model and update the database. With static-site generators like Astro, that is easier to do.

For this first verison of otolock.net, I went with Eleventy 3.1.6. I've seen many people on the IndieWeb use it to build great sites, like Michael Harley's and I wanted to give it a try after having used NextJS and Astro in the past. I'll write a bit about my first impressions later, but so far, it's been a smooth ride.

Before I get into more details, I did give myself one constraint with this new site: limited AI-agent assistance. I believe AI is a great tool, but I also enjoy the act of writing code. Sometimes, just because I want something done fast, I'll delegate a coding task to Claude or ChatGPT Codex. But, as I've written before, the faster AI gets you to a working solution, the less you learn. Since I want to learn how Eleventy works, I'm going to take my time slowly rebuilding the different building blocks of the IndieWeb and adding them to this new site.

If you've been following my blog through RSS, please add this site's RSS feed to your list. I will be posting here moving forward.

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