The Usual
A directory for the trades that don’t rank on Google — cobblers, tailors, welders, the people who fix things.
Every town has a handful of people who can actually repair something, and almost none of them are findable. They don’t have websites. They rank below three aggregators and a franchise. The knowledge of who they are lives entirely in word of mouth, which works fine until you move somewhere new.
So The Usual is a directory built the way that word of mouth works: someone has to vouch. You can’t buy a listing and there’s no review score. Each entry is a person, a trade, and a short note from whoever put them in — which turns out to be far more useful than five stars and no context.
It’s in private beta in one city while I find out whether the vouching model holds up when the people vouching don’t know each other.
A pocket TV channel
A single always-on stream of things I’ve shot, scheduled like broadcast TV rather than served as a feed. You tune in; you don’t choose.
Field recordings, mapped
Every audio note pinned where it was recorded. Less a podcast than a map you can listen to.
The fix log
Every repair on the camper, written up properly. Half service record, half apology to the next owner.
Slow directions
Routing that optimises for what you’d want to see rather than arrival time. Deliberately bad at getting you there.
Vouching chains now render as a graph in the admin. Turns out one person accounts for a third of the listings in the beta city, which is either a great sign or a fragility problem.
Rebuilt the homepage around a full-viewport cover with the sections as primary navigation. The feed sits directly below it now rather than behind a panel.
Photo classification runs on-device now instead of round-tripping. Cut the draft-generation time from about forty seconds to under three.
Propane fridge finally behaves. Wrote up what was actually wrong — it wasn’t the thermocouple, which is what everyone tells you it is.