Stream marker tool

❦ Monday, 29 December, 2025

Time to slow down and take my time when traveling in digital worlds during live streams that become videos in 2026.

To help log elapsed timestamps for making YouTube video chapters, I made this stream marker tool to be used thus:

1. Press Start when beginning your stream.
2. Press Add Timestamp or Spacebar to add timestamps.
   Click Titles to edit, press Enter to save edits.
3. Press End & Save to save yyyy-mm-dd-hhmm-stream.txt with log entries with elapsed time in chronological order, and also copy the log to your clipboard so it works in an Open Broadcaster Software browser dock, which blocks file downloads. Paste the text into YouTube video descriptions for video chapters. You can also use it to log elapsed timestamps when observing anything, like your own daily stream of life.

If you find it useful you can File → Save… the tool to your computer and use it where you like, locally or on a server.

Wishing you a good 2026 ❤︎

PS. See Mindful Timer for help to take a break from screens.

Two thousand and twenty-five

❦ Wednesday, 17 December, 2025

2025, a year of learning and seeing new things.

Visited old friends in places I’d never been, met new ones close by, continued touching piano keys and musical dials and buttons daily, recording ambient sounds, diving into an ocean of audio and through a forest of wires leading to my first published songs.

Some favorite things from our latest spin-about the sun:

Books

Fingers Pointing to the Moon by Jane English, and The Listening Book and Bridge of Waves by W.A. Mathieu were the ones I liked best this year.

I read The Creative Act by Rick Rubin for a second time. Amber’s sick of hearing me talk about it :)

Am around half-way through Thinking: Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, a discussion of two modes of thinking we have, the fast, emotional, intuitive one, and the slow, analytical reasoning one, both of which can lead to silly mistakes whether you are an expert in a subject or not.

I started buying copies of my favorite books and giving them to people and it’s becoming a sort of ongoing project.

Creatures

My cat Fa has taken to meowing until I lay down so she can jump on my belly and paw (patinar) for 15 minutes, at least once per day. Slows things down, which is good. T and B have become a part of the house, temporarily at least. One learns much from observing animals, both domestic and wild, like the birds in the breeze.

Films & series

• La chimera.
• One Battle After Another.
• Watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind again and loved a scene I’d forgotten where the main character begins shovelling dirt into his own house. The artist in us versus the boring impositions and status quo of society and the world.
• Enjoyed Lynch’s The Grandmother at the Grand Rapids Film Society.
• Saw and liked both Dirty Dancing and Saturday Night Fever. How the people around affects one’s life, and the need to break away, choosing your own way.
• Am mid-way through White Lotus 3, enjoying the music and cinematography, as usual, also the story. “Spiritual malaise. Lost connection with nature, with the family. Lost connection with the spirit. What is left? The self. Identity. Chasing money, pleasure. Yeah? Everyone runs from pain toward the pleasure, and they get there only to find more pain. You cannot outrun pain. When you’re born you are like a single drop of water, flying upward, separated form the one giant consciousness. You get older, you descend back down. You die, you land back down into the water, become one with the ocean again. No more separation. No more suffering. One consciousness. Death is like a happy return, like coming home.”

People & places

• Elly, and my first music teacher Ms. M’Gaieth, left us, back to the stars 💖 🌌
• Concerts at Tip Top Deluxe Bar & Grill in Grand Rapids, MI, after walking and kicking a found tennis ball all the way there and all the way back to Yoot’s.
• Stockholm, visiting friends, fell in love with the city, particularly the gardens and greenhouses and forests and fresh food and instruments. Photographed a little, not as much as I’d have liked, but I’ll be back. Feel like going to live there a while to record an album, maybe the 2nd one.
• Helsinki, Finland, visiting friends, had my first sauna, played board games and arcade games, ate excellent food and photographed for a few hours.
• Tallinn, Estonia, after taking the ferry across the sea, for too short a time. Want to visit again.
• Back to NYC for a week to see my friend Artwo and family, old friends from youth at spring park.
• Spring Green for VVilliam the Spear Shaker and visiting friends.
• Bologna for the first time despite having lived in Italy on and off for so long. Young, old, dynamic condensed city. Still need to go through the photos. Music is the priority now.
• Rome visiting mom. She has been well this year, a relief. Thank you for your help, Beto. Bought crazy trousers for future performances. Always played music by ear, but had an opportunity for a few lessons from a classical pianist, which were very helpful. Maybe I’ll be able to play from and write musical marks on paper eventually, too, which can certainly be useful. Thank you, Paola.
• A campground on the northwest of Michigan’s big lower peninsula I forget the name of. Need to listen to the ambient sound recordings and look at the few photos.
• Reconnected with my junior high-school year history teacher, Mr. Benson, one of the best.
• Saw the Aurora Borealis from the ground for the first time with help from the X100. Photos forthcoming.

Songs ♫ & music

• Blonde Redhead’s Before, Choir Version, with Brooklyn Youth Chorus was my favorite song heard in 2025.
• Bird Hits Its Head Against The Wall and Yes It’s Me, The Goldfish! by Núria Graham.
• Requiem for My Friend album by Zbigniew Preisner.
• First live concert played in a semi-deserted natural area together with Yootsvik. A recording should materialize soon.
• E44 Stream End Piano Synth Improvisation by Hypertexthero.
• Piano Place Hold in Am by Hypertexthero.
• Fencing-Clouds from Night-Light by Peter Mergener & Michael Weisser.
• The performance by Donnie Rankin on a classic theater organ at Grand Rapids Public Museum.

Software

• Stream marker tool to set timestamps during livestreams that then become YouTube video chapters.
• Mindful timer to help remember to look away from screens regularly, or check the stove.
• 7-minute workout to stay in a basically decent shape along with healthy eating. Health is wealth.
• Began paying monthly for Signal (foundation) to help bring normality to the internet. “In a sense, I feel like Signal is just trying to bring normality to the Internet,” he said as we sat on a patch of grass near the beach. “A lot of what we’re trying to do is just square the actual technology with people’s intent.” He plucked two small feathers out of the grass, rolled them between his fingers, and planted them upright in the dirt.” Some career advice from Moxie.
• Learning Logic Pro and iMovie, maybe some Premiere Pro if needed. Notes forthcoming.
• Espanso open source text expander.

Instruments

Kept the following on throughout the day, playing and recording during breaks or whenever something comes from wherever:

• Numa Compact X SE piano and synthesizer.
• A “plastic box of buttons” named after a type of relaxing music. Notes forthcoming.
• Beastly synth named after a mythical creature, bought at Jam. Blog post nearing.
• Stratocaster and classical guitars.
• Anything that makes ambient noise, which I try to record with a stereo sound recorder.

Fast internet is available once again in Hypertexthero HQ, so expect more regular livestream projects in 2026.

Next year Linux will become much more popular.

Video games

Spent most of my video game art time with old favorites like Elite together with Yoots. Did enjoy the little I played of Arc Raiders, and some Reforger and Arma with the cooperative crew, but my appetite for shooters against human-like foes has been waning, and I’m feeling like flight and swords and magic again.

There’s a deluge of good games out there, so gotta be picky, and I’m glad game makers are making demos again, like in the days of old.

An Exanima stream will happen soon, probably before the end of the year, and maybe a couple of other new games.

Do play a free 5-minute long game called We Become What We Behold at least once a year.

Visual art, objects, etc

• The Vasa museum in Stockholm.
• The two towers of Bologna.
• Oodi library and Tove Jansson Paradise exhibition at HAM in Helsinki.
• Learning more about radios and solar panels from Yootsvik.
• New Hypertexthero calligraphic logo.

Websites

• Matthew Florianz

• Berklee.edu

• Ambient blog

• Mynoise vlog

• Sonic Cartography

• Obscure Sound

• Music for empty rooms & Selvetica (thanks, Dan)!

• A Closer Listen via my favorite video game writing site

• Gemini - lots of interesting loose grammar engine conversations with a prompt beginning with: You’re <name of an author of books that have touched me on a particular subject> and we’re chatting. Then I check source links. I still see hallucinations, of course, though this happens with real people, too (it’s always good to double-check and find out for yourself), and speaking with real people, in person, is so much better and less lonely!

  But this technology is a very useful tool for research. I’ve come to think of it as a powerful search engine that can read and type quickly, acting as if it is the expert of your choice. You still need to ask good questions, embrace doubt, and understand when it gets confused and leads you astray.

  I think Google’ll take the biggest piece of the pie rather than “Open”AI, and that we may hear a big POP! soon.

Things to do in 2026

• Music, drawing, writing, play, cooking.
• Publish first EP and first album.
• Since it was a successful experiment in 2025, I’ll continue to wake up early and avoid consuming information in the beginning of day. I’ll avoid news especially, and instead of giving away the attention dictators and thugs crave, I’ll write my thoughts, draw something, work on a song, bring something, anything, into being, so the day isn’t sucked away by things I can’t control. This practice may become part of Sound Space.
• Keep physical paper notepads and notebooks with pencils next to them in places I spend regular amounts of time. Write notes as they come. Use color as well as graphite. Condense them into notebooks with glue later.
• Make mobile streaming and note-taking setup.
• Get sinus headaches sorted. Check if it is a tooth and fix it.
• Excercise every day. Also 20–40 minute walks, or 100 basketball shots.
• Draw and write daily, even for 5 minutes.
• Practice piano scales and harmony. Learn one classical song, one jazz song, one pop song, the more the better.
• Handwrite letters to people.
• Complete exodus from Fb/“Meta”. Make it an episode of DIY stream series.
• Work on YWAB and other photo books like the one about games.
• Set up a weekly “office hours” stream to help people.
• Give YouTube a good try, but don’t succumb to making videos like all the others. Try to keep them creative and worthwhile. Keywords: Sound, music, drawing, painting, open and random worlds.
• Make a new 1 minute stream trailer and begin making 8–10 minute-long short films.
• Set up a basic solar panel and have it power a nature cam.
• Learn to fly a real airplane, should stars line up well enough.

Wishing you a good 02026, dear visitor.

Make web browsers render an HTML entity glyph instead of an emoji

❦ Thursday, 11 December, 2025

Web browsers and operating systems often default to rendering certain Unicode characters as colorful emojis rather than their original, monochrome text-style glyphs.

The most direct and widely supported way to request a text presentation is by appending the Unicode Variation Selector-15 (U+FE0E) character immediately after the character you want to display as text.

• How it works: This special character is an instruction to the rendering engine to use the text-style glyph variant instead of the emoji-style variant for the preceding character.
• HTML Entity: Use the HTML entity ︎ or ︎ right after your Unicode character or entity. Examples:

Example HTML code:

<p>Default heart: &#x2764; (often renders as ❤️)</p>
<p>Text-style heart: &#x2764;&#xFE0E; (tries to render as ❤︎)</p>

Note: This selector won’t work for all Unicode characters, as some characters only have an emoji presentation.