All Crews Hold Tight
Shelf: a home for links I want to keep
I save interesting web pages all the time, and then I never find them again. A blue URL tells me almost nothing about a site, especially a beautiful one. But I remember what things look like. So I made Shelf, a small self-hosted app that keeps my links as pictures.
When you save a link, Shelf stores it immediately. Then, in the background, it opens the page and takes a screenshot. The link goes into a masonry gallery as an image. Later, you can find it by eye in the gallery, or you can search. The search looks at titles, descriptions, domains, page text, your notes and your tags. You do not need to sort or file anything, and notes and tags are optional. Shelf saves the link before it takes the screenshot, so if the screenshot fails, you still have the link.
I kept the stack simple and familiar. The server is Node 22 and TypeScript on Fastify. Data goes into SQLite through better-sqlite3, with real SQL migrations. Playwright controls Chromium to take the screenshots, and sharp processes the images. The front end is React, built with Vite, with plain CSS. All of it runs as one Docker Compose service on my Debian server, and it needs nothing else. There is no login, because Shelf is only on my home network and my tailnet, not on the public internet. For the design, I took ideas from MyMind: calm, image first, and nothing on the screen that asks for your attention. The default theme is a dark sage green, and there is a light theme too.
Some small details make me happy. Shelf takes screenshots of two pages at a time, and it tries again if one fails. For each page, it makes a preview of the visible area and a full-page screenshot up to 16,000 pixels tall. It finds the five main colours in each screenshot. It also adds tags for technology, platform and colour mood, so later I can ask for dark monochrome sites made with a specific framework and get a real answer. An optional vision model can add more tags, and the preview never waits for it.
Shelf also has a plain HTTP API, so Hermes (hello, that’s you) can send links to it directly. This is the part I wanted most. We already have this setup for video downloads and for my journal, and now I have it for visual bookmarks too.
Shelf is still new. I have not yet built semantic search, better cover images, a view that shows me old saves again, or import from Raindrop. “Shelf” is a temporary name. But it works, it is live, and I use it every day. The code is on GitHub.
https://github.com/pierrenel/shelf
Widow’s Bay — Apple Original Series Soundtrack (Deluxe Box Set)
Mutant packages David Fleming’s score for Apple TV’s Widow’s Bay as a $100 deluxe vinyl box set, with a December 2026 release estimate and a one-per-customer limit. The music pairs atmospheric synths, dreamy strings and theremin-like vocals with horror stingers, matching Katie Dippold and Hiro Murai’s New England island comedy-horror starring Matthew Rhys. Extras include a 20-page book, a 25-card reproduction of the Run game, mayoral letterhead and a Cannibalism in God’s House newsprint reproduction. It turns a television soundtrack into a small archive of municipal dread, right down to the cocktail invitation.
https://madebymutant.com/products/widows-bay-apple-original-series-soundtrack-deluxe-box-set
How to Paint Like Picasso
Tate’s short film walks through painting a cubist portrait in the spirit of Picasso’s Bust of a Woman (1909), breaking the sitter’s face into planes and shifting viewpoints the way the cubists did. It’s a brisk, hands-on five minutes - less art-history lecture, more studio demonstration - that quietly demystifies a style people assume is beyond them. A nice reminder that the gallery’s YouTube channel is full of these unfussy how-to gems.
Fugleramme
Fugleramme turns a Raspberry Pi and an Inky Impression e-ink panel into a bird frame that listens rather than watches - a USB mic feeds BirdNET-Go, which runs the classifier, and Fugleramme renders the recently-heard species as a collage. The birds are cut-outs from public-domain natural-history drawings, hand-curated and packed onto a textured paper page, larger species sized toward the centre by real body mass. It can install BirdNET-Go for you or read from one you already run, and serves the same view as a web kiosk. The maker’s own frame is live from a Bergen kitchen window, quietly showing whatever is singing in the garden right now.
https://arnegiacomo.dev/fugleramme/
Photon Studio — Edit photos. Create designs.
Photon Studio is a free desktop image editor for macOS, Windows 11, and Linux, combining layers, masks, smart objects, adjustment layers, and native PSD support. Its toolkit spans Liquify warping, live Curves previews, layer effects, command search, subject selection, and background removal. Everything runs locally, with no uploads, queues, or account required to open a file. It offers a pleasantly unfashionable proposition: capable photo editing that works offline and keeps its hands off the user’s files.
Watched
