Thu Jan 22
I’ve spent the last five years reading picture books with my kids at bedtime. Hundreds of them - and I’m still going, even as my eldest moves on to chapter books. One thing has consistently driven me mad: I often can’t read the words. Books that look fine in the shop become unreadable at night. Black text on dark...
A review of soup and a movie. ⊕Currently Listening: Bobbie Gentry “Courtyard”Reply via email
Two's Complement is a way to represent positive and negative numbers in binary. It's useful because we want a way to represent each number's inverse within a limited number of bits. The sign bitPutting aside two's complement, the "naive" way to represent a negative number is to simply use its highest order bit as a...
In his excessively long speech to the World Economic Forum yesterday in Davos, Donald Trump did some surprising backtracking. Not the stuff about Iceland Greenland, but on his method of calculating price reductions. For weeks—maybe months, time has been hard to judge this past year—Trump has been telling us that...
Practical patterns for mocking in Go without external libraries. Learn to mock functions, methods, interfaces, HTTP calls, and time using only the standard library
The Problem: Most people pick an AI model the same way they pick a search engine—they find one that works and stick with it forever. You’re a “Claude person” or a “ChatGPT person” or you use Copilot because that’s what your company deployed. The Reality: AI models are more like specialized tools than interchangeable...
Man, following the news this week was exhausting. Everything has kind of this ugly orange tint... I think it might be time for another news diet. There are still interesting things happening though, they just kind of disappear under all the awfulness. Did you know that next month a crew is scheduled to fly to the...
Cuando vi en la biblioteca el libro Presentes de Paco Cerdà no dude en acercarme a él y tomarlo prestado. En tres días lo había leído. En Presentes, el escritor valenciano nos traslada a esos 11 días que duró el traslado del cuerpo del fundador de Falange, José Antonio Primo de Rivera. Desde su exhumación en el...
We went to the mall during the weekend, and if there’s one thing that malls have, is phone case kiosks. Small shops selling peripherals and cases for popular Apple and Samsung devices,and not much else—at least that’s what I always assumed. When heading elsewhere, my mom suddently had the desire to get a new case...
It's an adorable collectible trinket in its own right, but camera it ain't.
This is a response to Thomas Rigby's post about the list of old things in his lifetime. Throughout my life, I have collected a fair share of assorted stuff (such as charms, fashion dolls, notebooks, and optical discs). While I have mostly accumulated them during my adulthood, I felt like they are missing the dainty...
Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business has revamped its MBA curriculum and has made ethics a focal point of its first-year curriculum. The McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University A press release about the changes states that As part of the opening term, students will kick off their MBA...
A busy switch full of connections, every lit port is a service path you should inventory, control, and monitor. (Photo by Scott Rodgerson on Unsplash) Ports are the “doors” your services listen on. Some doors should be inside the building only. Some should be behind a badge reader. Some should be welded shut and...
I love how this Byte magazine archive by Hector Dearman tries to do something different. It inspired me, and reminded me of the excitement of what Internet was supposed to be. I think we all wanted the web to feel more like this – fast, with infinite information right at your fingertips, the biggest library you...
January 2026. Widnes. A confession. I intended to make that post on Mudgie’s funeral a long read including the post-wake pubs, but Mrs RM had finished her pint/wine/Amaretto Disaronno in St Annes Spoons and I had to press “PUBLISH” in case the WiFi ran out in our Travelodge (£29.99). It would have been rude not to...
i wrote this whilst responding to one of my dearest friends on signal; an activity that, with the state i've found myself in, is one that i struggle sometimes to even muster up the strength to do. to claw my way up the walls of expectation that i've constructed for myself, that i feel rising around me as i dig my...
I collect cool, interesting links spread all over the web and share them here in daily posts. Hope you enjoy! More of them in the archive. 30 years of ReactOS (in English). The project aims (since 1996!) to create a FOSS alternative that is compatible with applications and drivers made for Windows. What...
Contents: Open source software changes the game. Not Just for "Hackers" Anymore Closing thoughts In today's world everything you do online can be tracked, stored and monetized. Free apps, smart devices, AI assistants - they all come with a hidden cost: your data. Even the platforms you trust most are constantly...
Abelujo es la única aplicación de software libre existente para la gestión de una librería, tanto negocios como librerías de asociaciones y ya dispone de su documentación en español Imagen: Heather McKeen Abelujo es un software libre que ayuda a los libreros a gestionar su stock de libros y otros productos en el día...
This is the final episode in the series of curated quote collections "Darwin in His Own Words". Darwin the Fun-Loving Young Fellow Darwin the Voyager Darwin the Man of His Times Darwin the Witness Darwin El Naturalista At last, it's time to talk about young Charles Darwin's scientific side during his voyage on the...
In which I challenge myself to draw a pokemon every day until I stop Weds 01/21/2026 - Meowstic Meowtic was specifically requested yesterday but the gender was left up to me so I decided with a coin toss. Thurs 01/22/2026 - Hisuian Zorark Another request! Today's was Zoroark and like, no offense to the OG design but...
The dismal weather of this interminable January – grey days, relentless rain, damp cold (the worst sort) – is only to be expected, I suppose, but it does depress the spirits and eat into the soul. It's time for a cheering poem, preferably set in summer – and here's one, taken from Wendy Cope's great little anthology...
I learned that Ebay updated its terms of service to explicitly prohibit the use of “buy-for-me agents, LLM-driven bots, or any end-to-end flow that attempts to place orders without human review” on site (Liz Morton for Value Added Resource, January 21 2026). This sounds like a sound policy to me. Even were I to set...
Let’s go from Argentina to Mexico this time. That’s 7'500 Km from Buenos Aires to Ciudad de México, a very long distance that shows the massive size of the Spanish Empire five centuries ago (let’s not forget that California and Patagonia were also parts of said empire). Anyway. You might have seen this Saturday...
Blog rolls are important. I have one. If you consider yourself a part of the “IndieWeb,” you should have one too. Because the IndieWeb dies without people spreading the word. The thing is, Google sucks donkey balls, and not the good kind. You can’t go search for my blog here unless you know it exists or you know my...
After reading Thomas's post, it inspired me to do a reply post with my own list. I then started to wonder about the parameters: is it something I have bought, or something I have been given? Or something within my lifetime? Let's exclude the house, which was built in the 1850s! Before my birthI have a UK Three Penny...
I’ve experienced one-too-many sendmail failures over the years, usually for no apparent reason. Maybe this happens after a server reboot, who knows? Rather than spending hours/days trying to figure this out (as I have done before, many times) I’ve finally had enough and given up. It all began with my e-mail reminder...
Rain pattered on the window. It had been coming down all day and was showing no signs of letting up. If anything, it was getting heavier by the minute. The extraterrestrial wandered outside, holding its appendages out, as if feeling it for the first time.“I don’t think it rains on their planet, Joe,” said Marcy.They...
Aleem Shaun has recently posted his answers to Ellane’s Eight Questions about Plain Text, and they’re a good quick read, as are Ellane’s. I’ve written about plain text before, and even made a zine about it, so I decided to throw my answers in to the mix as well. This may re-tread some of the same ground I’ve gone...
I'm gonna: Write about the effect of Malaysia Get a better theme and layout for this blog
January 22, 2026 While I was laying down to take a nap today (yes I take a nap every afternoon) I started thinking about what a fucking shit show social media is and how in my opinion it is destroying society. Social media as we know it today started in 2003 with MySpace and was then overtaken by Facebook and has...
“Susie… come home… and be my own again, and kiss me as you used to… I hope for you so much, and feel so eager for you… that the expectation… makes me feel hot and feverish, and my heart beats so fast.” Four months before her twentieth birthday, Emily Dickinson (December 10, 1830–May 15, 1886) met the person who...
Read on the website: Markdown seems to have taken root. But it’s not really a good choice of markup language, because it’s incomplete, non-semantic, and tool-specific.
Dear Ciara, Most days, whether I am at work or just wandering around my community, my vision is inundated with birds: peaceful doves, Torresian pigeons, sparrows, finches and munias, red-tailed black cockatoos, cuckooshrikes, lorikeets and scrubfowl. I feel blessed to live in a place with such rich and diverse...
Pintura de Kiefer. [Texto perfecto de Julien Gracq encontrado en el blog La Calle del Orco / de Kim Nguyen Baraldi] Hay un elemento esencial que corre siempre el riesgo de faltarle a la crítica, y en particular a las monografías, muy voluminosas con frecuencia, que dedica en nuestros días a esta o a aquella novela...
En general, cuando uso software en cualquiera de mis dispositivos, intento buscar siempre alternativas nativas, o que al menos se sientan como si fueran nativas. No es que tenga gran cosa en contra de las aplicaciones Web, que conste, pero por alguna razón me encuentro siempre buscando alternativas nativas a...
While I was working on mailing the 262nd edition of The Newsletter Leaf Journal, I noticed for the first time that our newsletter host, Buttondown, provides a QR code for our newsletter. I decided to add that QR code to the new version of our Newsletter sign-up page. But then a thought came to me: Why stop there?...
Hello from Maine, where the low in two days is predicted to be -9 degrees. That's an improvement over the forecast from a few days back, when they were saying -11. Let's don't talk about wind chill. If you don't talk about it, maybe it won't show come around. Oh, hello there, estimated snow accumulation of sixteen...
Hello, RSS reader! 👋 This post has some bespoke art direction you’ll only see if you view it directly. No hard feelings if you prefer to read here, I just wanted you to know! ✌️I used a Logitech K800 “Wireless Illuminated” keyboard for more than a decade. Its keys were soft and comfy. The wireless part made it easy...