Tue Feb 10
That's the title of a book I found on Project Gutenberg today: Good Things to Eat, As Suggested by Rufus - by Rufus Estes The title amused me, so I downloaded it. And the title may seem silly, but this book slaps. Turns out Rufus Estes was born into slavery in 1857. He started working at the ripe old age of 5, after...
I subscribe to many sites in my feed reader. Some sites tend to use descriptive headlines, which help me decide whether to open the feed item, swipe it away, or adjust my feed filters. One example of a descriptive headline came in the form of January 30, 2026 report by Alex Forbes-Calvin for Games Industry.biz...
I just published a NLJ article in which I made a reference to the murderous camera in Sonic Adventure for Sega Dreamcast. I described the camera as homicidal in my draft. But that did not seem right. While Sonic Adventure features Dr. Robotnik as a villan and human beings in its peculiar overworld, the camera issues...
Netscape's browser project was codenamed Mozilla during 1994; via Macintosh Garden. If web design is not yet a profession in 1993 because of the technical limitations of HTML and early browsers, then 1994 is the year web authors start asking the question: why can't we control formatting and presentation? At this...
I. "I've taken down your complaint, Mr. Henson, and I'll dispatch a new team immediately to have a look and fix the cameras. Really sorry for the inconvenience, Mr. Henson." The voice was so soft, so wispy. Henson thought he could hear this voice all his life. Then, he thought about what Barbara had said in the cafe...
As you know if you’ve been following along at all, my daughters are huge K-pop fans. Pink Floyd has always been my favorite band, so it feels right that we now have a pretty great cover of “Wish You Were Here” by FIFTY FIFTY. Reply by email
February 2026. Pavia. I was going to skip the architecture of Pavia and go straight back to Italian real ale, but Lana on her Retirement Chapter blog just got a great post out of Shirley, so how could I leave out the castle, the bridge, the cobbled streets, and those beautiful shops. In truth, Pavia didn’t look its...
Below are some of the software and services I like and consistently use (as of Feb 2026): ✍️ Productivity Notes - Obsidian - I've experimented with Notion, but prefer the simplicity of Obsidian. I also use Google Keep for short notes and shopping lists. Email, calendar, spreadsheets - Gmail, Google Calendar, Google...
This is a bit of an unusual post, as I generally don’t write much about my work life stuff since it’s rather boring, and this isn’t really a “professional” blog. However, this one was frustrating enough that I figure it might help some other poor soul out there. Maybe if I do more of these things, they’ll get their...
I’ve started experimenting with OpenClaw a couple of times, but I keep running up against the fact that I’m not willing to give it keys to anything important. If the risk associated with doing anything useful is too high, what’s the point?
This is a list of a few of the cool links I found around the web. A bunch of them I already forgot where I found (ADHD), but whenever possible I reference the source. I found a Stardew Valley TV simulator that gives your local weather and fortune (not local, I think). This is the cutest thing on this list tbh. I...
HWC: About Books & ReadingI haven’t attended a Homebrew Website Club event for a few weeks; it was lovely to see familiar faces again last week at the Pacific event (meeting notes). I managed to get @joelchrono to attend his first Indieweb event! Because we spoke about book/reading habit tracking on personal sites,...
February already. Can you believe it1? Although the month has changed, the weather has not, and it feels like an endurance test that is starting to get to me. It seems that it is always raining (and apparently, it is), with any glimpse of the sun just a teaser before it gets covered up by a blanket of cloud once...
New links… “The current state of education positively requires external pressure on the universities, demonstrating to them a model of inquiry that they have themselves patently failed to uphold” — Justin Smith-Ruiu introduces The Hinternet Foundation and its programs “How we interact with AI systems will shape what...
I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones!”—Albert EinsteinThose goddamn aliens ruined everything. We had everything lined up, from artillery and nukes to a few experimental weapons that would’ve made one hell of a bang, if nothing else....
I talked about the folklore-inspired budenovka hat of the red army in my post about Viktor Vasnetsov.
There are amazing and very creative signs people design for the annual commemorations of the 25th of April, in Portugal. I embarked on building a web application that would not only celebrate this boundless creativity, but also shine a light on a critical date in Portuguese history, in which 50 years of a brutal and...
I spotted this interesting thing at work today, and was curious about that phrase at the end: Turns out, it is basically a unique human-readable encoding of a 32-bit digit, I’d guess particularly for ease of voice/phone support communication. (Otherwise I imagine copy/paste would work well?) Asana has been doing...
A couple years ago, my bestie and I wrote a short book for NanoWrimo (We took 2 months and didn't reach the desired word count but we DID finish the story!). On one of my writing days, I proposed a new political system into the story's universe and I've been dreaming of it ever since. I really want it to become...
Brian drifted in slow circles, his gold scales catching the morning light that filtered through the living-room blinds. Outside, commuters hurried past the window. Inside, the house felt hollow; its usual bustle had been replaced by the rasp of a lingering cough. Mark, pale and hoarse, shuffled to the aquarium with...
The Problem with Tests In A Bronx Tale, Sonny tells young Calogero about the “door test” – watching whether a girl unlocks your door after you let her in the car. Sonny says if she doesn’t reach over to unlock your side, she’s not worth your time. The door test is clever, but it has a problem: tests feel like traps....
This is about a new package of mine: institution-calendar. It is not going to be available on GNU ELPA. Users will have to install it from source (code for this is further below). The reason is that the predecossor to this package, oxford-calendar, was not accepted:...
Dunque, premessa cruciale: a me Stranger Things ha sempre divertito senza farmi impazzire. Tuttavia, un aspetto che tendiamo molto spesso a sottovalutare...
Last year, I worked on a bookmarklet for editing pages on my website. When clicked, the bookmarklet would open the page in GitHub that corresponded with the page I was viewing. I used the bookmarklet so much I turned it into a browser extension, which I still use regularly to edit pages on my (still static)...
Album#32 头7 图1 《头7》专辑封面 专辑信息 专辑名称：头7 歌手：DJ小女孩 年份：2025-04-04 风格：电子、Electro house 时长：53:54 亚洲恐怖+电子音乐。制作周期12天， 演绎一场模拟死亡，她回来了，但是她死了；生前组成她的执念走马灯，都被变成死后的残响。在这一刻你的耳机就是为她祭奠的花圈。 在 Hopico HMA2025 提名专辑 中找到的一张电子专辑，说实话，大晚上一个人听第一首「妈妈的女儿」还是有点瘆人的。 从专辑名字「头7」、专辑封面、专辑发布日期（清明节），你大概就能感受到这张专辑是有点「阴间」的，网易云有几个评论蛮好玩的： 这么阴我疫情那会听就不会阳了...
Hoy comencé mi nuevo commonplace book. Para hacer este nuevo cuaderno tuve que inspeccionar el anterior, ver que mejoras podía hacer y cuantas páginas en realidad necesité. Resultó que utilice casi todas, un total de 25 hojas tamaño cuarta (las cuales corté en pedazos más pequeños claro, para hacer un cuaderno más...
According to the astrologers of the internet, Saturn – that stern planet whose job it is to teach us hard lessons – is leaving my sun sign this week, having been camped out here since 2023. Saturn is a hardass teacher, and whether you believe in astrology or not, I can confirm that the last three years have been...
This post is an adapted/expanded version of an abstract that I have submitted for a track on Open, collaborative and participatory science: rethinking knowledge legitimacy, policy and science futures at the EU-SPRI Annual Conference Over the past decades, the open science movement – as well as the many wider,...
Last April, I was minding my own business when I received a curious email in my inbox. Hack Club is renting an island. We are hosting a hackathon. Anyone who ships 4 projects gets to come. Flight stipends available! Dates are August 8th - 11th. Boston, USA. I'd signed up for Hack Club mailing lists in the past since...
In which I challenge myself to draw a pokemon every day until I stop Mon 02/09/2026 - Jigglypuff In honor of Lady Gaga at the super bowl lmfao I get that the pokemon company has like infinite dollars but a lady gaga super bowl commercial was never in my wildest dreams Tues 02/10/2026 - Dragapult Sometimes your kid...
A screenshot of the front page of this website from 2001 This post is part of February’s IndieWeb Carnival on the theme of “Intersecting Interests” being hosted by Zachary Kai: For this month's carnival, write about where your interests intersect. That might be a single unexpected overlap, a whole ecosystem, or the...
I am quite content to be alone except on a mild evening at twilight. During the quick hours of the day I am busy. Busy with things I enjoy doing, for the most part. Or busy with people I enjoy being around. I count myself among the luckiest alive. During the night I am dreaming. Night is dreaming time whether I am...
Read on the website: Package-inferred systems follow a useful one-file-per-package convention structure. But package-inferred systems themselves are harmful and should not be used.
Got out of the house which is a feat considering side streets are still a mess of snow and the bitter cold remains. Always perk up by these painted cottages of Moline Court. It's been so gray, it's nice to see a little color.Currently Listening: Billy Strings “Taking Water”Reply via email
I have been making a game about being a uboat "captain" for a couple of months now. It has been very on and of, so don't expect actual "months" of work. The Story Your character is a native of a small island chain that God forgot. It is a colony of The Crown Dominion (read Great Britain), however this is mostly just...
“Who was it that robbed me of my money and jewels?” said Cunégonde, all bathed in tears. “How shall we live? What shall we do? Where find Inquisitors or Jews who will give me more?” “Alas!” said the old woman, “I have a shrewd suspicion of a reverend Grey Friar, who stayed last night in the same inn with us at...
por ANTONIO LUCAS 09/04/2017 1 En primera instancia, todo es presuntamente normal. Saluda con la mano tímida, con la carne blanda, con los ojos fijos. Nadie garantiza, sin embargo, que quien está delante sea Enrique Vila-Matas. Esto es así. Este hombre tiene algo de experto en milagros caseros. Por dentro de la...
I’m a technology enthusiast, not a business analyst, so I’m not the right person to predict what all the money pouring into AI is going to do to the economy. I consider myself an environmentalist, but I’m also skeptical that every scary headline about AI data centers and energy consumption is entirely free of...
This week Discord announced that to continue to have full access to their platform, all users will be required to verify their ages using either a face scan or a photo of their government ID. This massively intrusive policy goes into effect in March, and if you trust Discord with this kind of data... please remember...
I did it! Yesterday I finished my three zines—well, six, because three are Jenni’s return-of-investment—zines.cool’s Zinetausch #10—mere hours before our flight to Cape Town. I am so happy that I made it and it was incredible fun! But what is a Zinetausch, you might ask. Well, it’s a German word and translates to...
Overscan is a book that I read last year, but didn’t review, even though it is quite important to me in a few ways. First, it’s a book written by fediverse creators, even featuring a story by Amin, who is quite the prolific in the Fediverse space, with his own Fediverse server and plenty of other projects, writings...
Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye, writing for Harvard Business Review: In our in-progress research, we discovered that AI tools didn’t reduce work, they consistently intensified it. In an eight-month study of how generative AI changed work habits at a U.S.-based technology company with about 200 employees, we...
Do not apologize for replying late to my email You don’t need to apologize for taking hours, days, or years to reply to one of my emails. If we are not close collaborators, and if I didn’t explicitly tell you I was waiting for your answer within a specific timeframe, then please stop apologizing for replying late!...
“We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others… There is a virgin forest in each.” It is both a terror and a mercy that we know ourselves only incompletely and each other hardly at all — because, somewhere in that lacuna of mystery, in that opaque space beyond absolute knowledge and absolute empathy...
As I said before, I’m a lazy listener. I don’t listen to a lot of music; I often just like one song of an artist, and I tend to listen to single songs and playlists instead of albums. But recently, I finally checked out the new album of an artist I enjoy: Princess Nokia. It’s been a few months since the “GIRLS”...
Here is a pretty graph. The way my Git commits across my repositories currently stand, the graph sort-of looks like it’s giving two middle-fingers to the GitHub-style version I made. It probably is. The GitHub-style graph was difficult to make. I eventually got it working and looking almost right, but having...
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. Selfie video: a new, simple, and secure way to recover your Google Account (pt_BR). Is it worth handing over your soul, I mean, your face to Google to make it easier to recover...
Hey all, in light of Discord deciding that assuming everyone is a teenager until proven otherwise, I've seen many people advocate for the use of Matrix instead. I don't have the time or energy to write a full rebuttal right now, but Matrix ain't it chief. If you have an existing highly technical community that can...
If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing. –W. Edwards Deming We're taught early that progress comes from having good answers. That smart people solve problems. That the world moves forward by identifying gaps and filling them in neatly, like bricks in a wall. It's motivating, tidy,...
AthleticThe last thing I need right now is hope in the Cubs chances…