Mon Jan 12
Recap: A mostly quiet back-to-routine week: school kicked off again, early tennis mornings returned, I binged some solid TV, and work was the usual security grind with one real troubleshooting headache. The vibe Back-to-routine whiplash. The week was mostly steady and low-drama, but the early mornings hit hard, and...
★★★★☆ I liked this book. I consider Cory Doctorow a good, smart writer. He can put together one good sentence after another (“this is why the roads leading to Amazon depots are littered with sealed bottles of human urine”), he can tell stories of boring things in riveting ways, and he can connect various themes and...
On my /stats page, I used the wonderful web component activity-graph to implement an Activity Graph that displays my posts over the entire lifetime of my blog. Now, as is common in Western cultures, the graph starts on the left side and is displayed horizontally. This means that the most recent and interesting...
BirchtreeI got into the irony of 2nd Amendment fanatics saying they needed gun for if the government sent masked men into their streets yelling, “papers please”, only to then cheer for those masked men when they did take to the streets.Things have been quiet around these parts and I apologize for that. Life,...
Matt Birchler, on vibe coding small tools: And you know what? It worked. The UI wasn't perfect, but it was damn close. And I already had a product that achieved the goal I set out to achieve. All in all, I'd say it was about 10 minutes from idea to functioning MVP (and half of that was finishing my run). (Do read...
A fragment of the first drawing from the session I managed to get my first 2026 session of life-drawing done this past weekend. I was trying to find a particular style of pencil work that achieved the result I wanted, which I didn’t manage to do although I feel I’m closer to it. I haven’t yet found the words to...
I went to a couple thrift stores last week looking for any book by Terryl Givens or Tad R. Callister. I didn't find what I was looking for, but came home with a stack of books, anyway. Among them was a book called “Radical Integrity: The Story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer” by Michael Van Dyke. It was relatively short (205...
The vet said she's doing pretty darn good for a gal of her indeterminate age. ⊕Currently Listening: XTC “Hold Me My Daddy”Reply via email
La ligne de commande communiste, le code Baudot et le comte ChatGPT Il y a quelques mois, un lecteur m’a fait découvrir un incroyable jeu historico-politique entièrement réalisé en AsciiArt: « Le comte et la communiste », de Tristan Pun. Le comte et la communiste (debeauharnais.itch.io) La simplicité des graphismes...
And wintery days Following on from my last post I took my camera with me when I popped into town at the weekend to top up our supply of decaf Yorkshire Tea from Malmö's British shop (a vitaly important thing to have around the house). The sun was shining and the sky was totally clear giving that crisp winter vibe...
Hannah Story, writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC): Authors including Miles Franklin winners Michelle de Kretser and Melissa Lucashenko will boycott Adelaide Writers’ Week (AWW) to protest the cancellation of an event featuring Palestinian Australian author, lawyer and activist Randa...
¿Necesitas configurar un temporizador para recordarte una tarea? ¿Necesitas una alarma diaria? ¿Necesitas saber la hora local y de otras localizaciones? Con Plasma de KDE estás cubierto Estaba cocinando mientras estaba con el portátil, echo lo necesario a la olla a presión, cierro y en 20 minutos debería estar...
Day 49: Do you have a set of rules or guidelines for your life? Did you write them? Why do you use them? I don’t usually bring up my belief system, but since that’s the point of this prompt, I’ll share. I identify as a Humanist because their rules and tenets make sense to me. Humanism, to me, emphasizes living in...
In 1995, I built my first website. It was a Metallica fan page. Black background, red text, animated GIFs of pixelated flames, a MIDI file that autoplayed "Enter Sandman" whether you wanted it to or not. I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever made and I was only 14. I had no idea what I was doing. I just knew...
A seemingly psychologically ill man with his friend try to save humans from an alien species from Andromeda galaxy. I went to watch this movie on Sunday without having any prior knowledge about the storyline. I did not even check the trailer, so I had not much expectations. From the beginning, movie was full of...
April 1, 2005, to John Gruber: John, I just wanted to write to thank you for Markdown, which is one of the coolest and most useful tools I’ve come across in a long time. I’m an English professor who does a lot of writing, and one of my frustrations over the years has been dealing with the various file formats of the...
... até que não quis mais. fin Deixa eu explicar melhor. Eu achei que na minha infinita busca em como me afastar mais do celular e ter uma vida menos preocupada com notificações fantasmas e achar que, se eu ficar olhando o celular aquela notificação vai aparecer magicamente. Apesar de não ter quase nada no meu...
I strained my right thigh and hip this fall doing something, but I don’t know what it was. Eventually, after several weeks of thinking it would work itself out, I decided it wouldn’t and started going to physical therapy. Several of the exercises I’m supposed to do at home involve getting into a stretching position...
Tech. Geopolitics. 2026 is terrifying. 2026 is exciting. Both can be simultaneously true. You can both like and dislike the current state of affairs (yes, this includes LLMs), but your individual stance won’t change the pace in which the world evolves. After spending most of 2024 significantly avoiding LLMs for...
Some Background I have been deeply grateful for the chance to work in the world of ASIC design and verification. But, while a mentally challenging career can be satisfying, after over years with the same employer, I encountered a spell of deep, accumulating fatigue that hampered my creative and executive capacities...
Replied to In The Beginning There Was Slop by Jim Nielsen (blog.jim-nielsen.com) You don’t need AI to produce slop because slop isn’t made by AI. It’s made by humans — AI is just the popular tool of choice for making it right now. Regular readers will now that while I think there are some potentially good use-cases...
A 1700s recipe for the miracle medicine Theriac, with most of the ingredients identified.
I just saw a post on Simon Willison’s blog where he linked to “Don’t fall into the anti-AI hype”. And I pretty much agree on what antirez writes there: Whatever you believe about what the Right Thing should be, you can't control it by refusing what is happening right now. Skipping AI is not going […]
I collect cool, interesting links spread all over the web and share them here in weekly posts. Hope you enjoy! See more of them. Apple and Google formalize partnership to use Gemini in the new Siri, @NewsFromGoogle/xcancel. The only good thing to take away from this news is the jab that both companies took at...
I use Umami for this site’s statistics, but I rarely read them. Well, now, to improve my visitors’ privacy, I’ve set up the service on my local server, bypassing the provider’s cloud. ✱ Thanks for enjoying the RSS feed and reading! You can leave your comments by emailing me.
A list of things I want to prioritize when choosing and customizing whatever static-site generator I use for building this site. Currently using: Jekyll, but not enthusiastically Next contender: Hugo 1. Just let me write my words I’ve recently realized that including software-specific text in my post and pages...
In which I challenge myself to draw a pokemon every day until I stop Mon 01/12/2026 - Mega Abomasnow I know, I know I said I was gonna focus on primary evolutions and not mega or gigantimax etc, but I got a request for Abomasnow from Megan (hire them for your composing needs if you're not hiring me) who specifically...
Today I set up the butane stove outside and cooked a pot of ramen noodles for the Noodl.ist social media stuff. I'm just waiting on the videos to migrate from my phone to icloud so I can pull them up on my laptop to edit into shorts and reels. Sometimes it takes a day or so. Tomorrow I'll edit it up and throw it out...
Been reading a lot lately. My spirits might be in the dumps, but my mind is high in the clouds. Thing is, so far I haven't read anything truly... good. At least nothing that satisfy my literary predilections. Ever since finishing The Daevabad Trilogy, I've been trying to fill the hole it left in my heart. Maybe...
Is there a German word for a feeling that combines admiration, weariness, and a touch of disgust? That word would be handy as we continue to catalog attempts to teach in a world of artificial intelligence, such as this one from professor of technology and business Panos Ipeirotis (NYU). As students are increasingly...
I wrote this up for my dissertation students back in 2018, and just found the document again now. It’s useful advice, and if I put it here, it will be easier for me to find it again/reference it in the future. While it’s aimed at UG dissertations, the advice is applicable to other academic work, and some (but not...
While I was writing “Publishing my citation preferences”, I consciously decided that the blog post should include a screenshot of the website feature described in the post – the new “Reference this post” section on my blog pages. I knew that I might change the design of the widget I designed in the future. If I did,...
I came to work this morning to learn that a coworker—almost a decade younger than I am—had lost her father over the weekend out of nowhere; combine that with ICE murdering and kidnapping people amidst the fascist overthrow of my country, the literal country-wide protest in Iran that’s cost hundreds of lives and is...
Practicing Contentment on Hard Days mtift Mon, 01/12/2026 - 08:05 I try and live the yamas and niyamas, yoga’s ethical principles. It’s not the only framework I turn to, but it’s often the place I start.Lately, my attention keeps circling back to santosha, typically translated as “contentment.”But contentment has...
Finally, after my hard drive failure became a thing of the past, I am able to return to my Jarmusho-tron. And this time we're jumping into the glorious 90s, also known as "the golden age of independent cinema" As Jarmush entered the new decade, he decided to make his last movie again, but this time better. Night on...
So, who wrote this? 'O that we might, for one brief hour,Forget that we are bound apart,And lie within each other's arms,Mouth pressed on mouth, and heart on heart.For just one hour, from all our life,To sink unchained through passion's deepAnd, cast upon the farther shore,To lie entwined in tender sleep!'It has a...
📷 Photographed with a Fujifilm X-T5 + XF150-600mmF5.6-8 R LM OIS WR 🎞️ 600 mm focal length – 1/500″ at f/11 – ISO 500 📍 National Elk Refuge, Wyoming, United States – Newe Sogobia (Eastern Shoshone), Cayuse, Umatilla and Walla Walla, Shoshone-Bannock, and Tséstho’e (Cheyenne) land
January 2026. Tenterden. I remembered it’s 2026 this time, after labelling the last one December ’25. Good job we don’t write cheques anymore. Mrs RM is busy “refining” her blog, but I did get her out from Rye (we’re attending to in-laws again) to explore posh Tenterden, half an hour north and 50 years into the...
This is the 1956 Pan paperback edition of These Old Shades. The novel was originally published by Heinemann in 1926.I finished Georgette Heyer's debut novel, The Black Moth, wishing that I could read more about the intriguing, unusual character at its centre — Tracy Belmanoir, Duke of Andover, better known as...
🎟️ Fluidifier l’accueil et sécuriser nos événements officiels Lors de nos événements officiels, nous avions 3 objectifs : ➡️ faciliter le processus d’inscription, ➡️ renforcer la sécurité, ➡️ fluidifier l’accueil des invités. Nous utilisons 2 canaux d’invitation : 📬 le courrier postal, via un carton d’invitation, 📧...
Ratz Instagib is a fast-paced first-person shooter. As the name suggests, each hit is an instant kill. Be not disillusioned by my writing of this article, for this is not a game I am good at. In honesty, one shouldn’t even venture as far as to suggest that it is a game I am so much as merely alright at. It is,...
Deferential Realism commits the one sin contemporary philosophy cannot forgive: it measures power instead of defining it away. Philosophy has spent twenty-five centuries refining methods for talking about oppression while ensuring the conversation never routes to action. We have Foucault’s genealogies (no...