Wed Feb 18
I don't know why, but gaming just hasn't been too fun lately. Am I becoming old? Do I need to get rid of my ~5000€ steam account? I doubt it, probably it's just life that is heavy at the moment. Nothing dramatic, but just stuff that takes time and energy. I also feel like unmotivated to play since I don't know when...
Over the past few weeks, I dove head-first into the YouTube rabbit hole of the analog life, the personal cloud, less dependency on big tech companies, and more of the like. I've devoured video after video about the topic, which might actually be kind of counterproductive, given that YouTube is one of those big tech...
The Spanish edition of my book A Body Made of Glass is published today by Barlin Libros, in a translation by Helena Vivancos Peñas. It has a new cover, designed by Isabel Mora:It's available to order directly from the publisher as well as via Casa del Libro and all other major booksellers in Spain.
One thing I’ve realised as I write more is that I write too much. Specifically I mean, when it comes to blogging, I have a tendency to try and say too many things in one post. Recently I talked about a podcast on VPNs that I’d listened to. One part of it annoyed me, and a few hours later I’d written a 3,000 word...
Laurel, Andy, Eryn, and I took the girls up to Lake Tahoe for a very long weekend away from school—SFUSD had both Monday and Tuesday off, for Presidents’ Day and Chinese New Year, respectively. We stayed in a lovely AirBnB in Homewood, on the western shore of the lake. With Eryn and EJ out in the snow Eryn went...
I have been thinking about the rhythm of my writing recently. I wrote in my drafts:I have spent much of this evening writing. I started by working on a draft of a post about clouds that I wrote on my phone using Apple Notes while waiting for the bus. I then explored a few more ideas that were in my notes. This has...
Kali Hays, Regan Morris, and Peter Bowes, writing for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC): The head of Instagram has defended his platform against claims it caused mental health damage to minors, arguing in a California court that even seemingly excessive use of social media does not equal an addiction. Adam...
At today’s IndieWeb Homebrew Website Club: Pacific event, we covered lots of different topics—RSS, ATProto, poll platforms, CMSes, databases, upvotes, YAML, etc . During the event, something @fractalkitty and @joelchrono said alerted me to two relatively “serious” bugs on my site (thanks you two!) Pagefind search...
One of the pleasures of grandparenthood is enjoying all over again some of the things that most entertained us in our own childhood and, later, when our own children were young. Books, of course, but also vintage animations – the great Chuck Jones classics, Popeye, Oliver Postgate's Bagpuss and Ivor the Engine, John...
I was thinking today a bit about the first records I ever bought myself. It’s going back 40 years, so my memories be slightly switched about which purchase came first, but I know the two records and the two stores I got them from. The first record was Big & Beautiful, the Fat Boys' third album, which came out in...
artist residency, dublin city university, nov 2025-apr 2026 In 2025, I was invited to be one of five artists in residence for SEED, a project based in DCU, Dublin (https://seedproject.ie/ ). The project explores how complex environmental data can be presented through artistic methods. For this work, I have been...
Web versions! The one where molly does CSS The one where molly doesn't do CSS Updates will appear as sections get written. Go forth and share the info!
A couple of weeks ago I started to listen to The Sundays again, I don't know why, they just came up in my mind and had the urge to listen to some of their songs. That turned into me listen to all of their discography and searching them up, that's how I discovered what was Jangle pop, in the list of genres that...
When I wasn't working from my home office or shoveling snow (we had our biggest snow storm of the season today – it's been a mild, dry winter and the snow was desperately needed) I was trying to think about the importance and solemnity of the day and reflect on Jesus Christ more than usual. I fasted in the Catholic...
You had a story you used to tell yourself about how you got here in life. You’d share the story with others. Maybe you’d be at a party, and someone would ask what you do, and you’d say, “I’m a programmer.” And their eyes would perk up and their mind would fill with images of ball pits and propeller beanies and that...
At my last job, at Audible (hi Audible folks, if you’re reading this!), I led the effort to port our remaining Objective-C to Swift. When I started that project, Objective-C was about 25% of the code; when I retired it was in the low single digits (and has gone even lower since, I’ve heard). Why do this? It was...
Cacambo expressed his curiosity to the landlord, who made answer: “I am very ignorant, but not the worse on that account. However, we have in this neighbourhood an old man retired from Court who is the most learned and most communicative person in the kingdom.” At once he took Cacambo to the old man. Candide acted...
Knights on campus! Brianna's mother has died, and to escape, she goes to college with her best friend Alice. While still processing her mother's grief, Brianna stumbles onto a secret society on campus. An order of people descended from the knights of the Round Table can call upon powers to fight back an incursion of...
Update: Apparently this doesn't work on safari. So, if you're using that browser... Well, get a better browser first of all, but if you don't wanna do that then this might not work for you. A while ago, Herman added the post token into the meta tags of blogposts. Thanks to this change, I can now make a bookmarklet...
“While wandering down the path of wonder, I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity.” It bears repeating that what makes life livable is our ability — our willingness — to move through the world wonder-smitten by reality. The most wonderful thing about wonder is that it knows no scale, no...
Changing a host’s name in Debian1 is a two-step process, and there doesn’t appear to be a more direct method. This seems odd to me, somehow. Because I stumbled upon this issue and a confusing error while relying solely on sudo, I thought I’d write up how I worked around it. Confused about an /etc/hosts hostname...
Palette cycling is an interesting technique borne out of limitations of old graphic cards. Today, any pixel can have any color it wants. In the 1970s and 1980s, you were limited to just a few fixed colors: as few as 2 for monochrome displays, or 4, or 8, or – if you were lucky – 16. Some of those fixed palettes,...
I’ve always loved making videos. Not because I love being on camera, but I really enjoy putting together jokes and stories and tutorials (etc) with video as a medium. The moment I had the ability to plug a camera into a computer back in the early 2000s, I was making videos. But, I’ve not really been consistent about...
Loving my Boox Palma, y’all! Been using it every day for a few weeks now and tried all sorts of things in it. I bought it second hand, but it came in mint condition and working perfectly. The Palma fits in my planner’s pouch, so I can take it with me any and everywhere. It’s also great for nighttime reading. I use...
“The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”-Princess Leia in Star Wars Leia wasn’t making a political prediction—she was stating a physical law. The Grip as Mandate Tarkin’s grip is pure mandatrophy. The Death Star represents the ultimate centralization fantasy:...
It's just a bit past midnight. After class yesterday I worked on a song cover all afternoon, then I read a book about music pretty much all evening because I had to stop working on the cover. It's a solo project for my choir (now that I write this, isn't that ironic—a solo choir project), and it's the first time...
Aah physical media. It’s something I haven’t really experienced myself in full as a child. I did know what DVDs are and how to use the DVD player on our TV, but thats pretty much it. When I needed a game or program on my PC I either downloaded it online or asked my dad to help, who wasn’t really willing to explain...
Yesterday was Chinese New Year and today is the first day of Ramadan. Both of these dates are based on yesterday’s new moon, so I thought it would be fun to write a little script to see how often the dates coincide. I used Emacs Lisp, mainly because I knew its calendar module had functions for converting between...
Spotted a cheeky jackdaw sitting on the sign, looking at the passersby. It flew off as I pulled out my phone to take its picture. Note the blue sky in the background — a rare moment of spring amongst days of near-endless rain. A tough week. Last weekend, for no reason whatsoever, the cloudy, grey feelings descended...
February 2026. Turin. We woke up on that first morning in Turin feeling a bit like this; I felt sorry (not sorry) for Mrs RM, who had gone pint, pint, half litre of white wine, pint of Leffe. Luckily I Reali Bed & (sort of) Breakfast had a coffee machine, but even after five espressos neither of us felt like doing...
This post continues the investigation that began with “This is not RLE”. If the first post was about dismantling assumptions, this one is about replacing them with certainty. Back then, we had a decoder that worked, a pile of strange patterns, and a growing suspicion that the name RLE was little more than a...
Problem statement: package prek for Alpine Linux. prek is a modern replacement for pre-commit, covered (many times) in this blog1. Previously. It’s already a breeze to create APKBUILDs. I’ve been doing so for ages. Now, in 2026, with agentic LLMs, it’s even more so! I can be more useful to the Alpine Linux community...
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I've been using Bear Hug's fun note styles and wave-y seperator on this blog. But I keep getting pulled out of the writing process once I put a bunch of html on the page. I came across Better Admonitions for Bear Blog, which lists out a fascinating way to pass through custom CSS to markdown's built-in quote parsing....
This post was written for the Grizzly Gazette's Bearblog Creation Festival. Bear Blog supports tables with optionally aligned columns in Markdown. As always, tables are easily customizable with CSS. Since the default table style looks too plain for me, it has been replaced with my custom design that matches the...
Creo que los navegadores actuales deberían ser mucho más restrictivos con las notificaciones push. Se están usando mucho con fines maliciosos. Tengo cierta confianza en que, igual que en su momento se popularizaron los bloqueadores de popups, se acabará poniendo coto al uso de estas API. Por mi (sesgada)...
El Cautivo es la última película de Alejandro Amenábar. Estrenada en septiembre de 2025 estamos ante un drama histórico, no exento de polémica, que recrea el cautiverio de Miguel de Cervantes en la ciudad de Argel. Aunque la base de la película es bastante simple, el cautiverio durante 5 años de Cervantes en la...
Zachary Kai recently asked if I’d like to be on a list of people willing to trade blog post titles. Of course I said yes, I really enjoyed our trade last year and would love to do more. Soon after James got in touch to offer a trade. I asked him if there was a piece of art he would like to see in person. James asked...
Soundtrack I have mixed but largely unfavorable views of the rise of industrial society, but what prevents my views from being wholly negative is my fascination with and admiration for the enormously complex projects that only became possible after the Industrial Revolution. I want to know how Bazalgette’s sewage...
Agree as well, regardless of if you’re having LLMs help with coding or writing. It’s your word/voice your putting out there. So you better be able to back it up. — in response to On Using AI in Blogging
Openclaw is still dominating the tech-news, and the recent acquisition from OpenAI raises a lot of opinions and reactions. It's not that I don't have my own issues with that change, but I find it more fascinating to follow the whole situation happening in front of our eyes, where Peter fairly obviously feels...
I’m going through an interesting time. I’ve been growing more uncomfortable with the way I’m always spoken over and interrupted at work. I started reacting to that and demanding they let me speak and finish my sentences. Also, it annoys me that I had explained a thing over and over at work for almost 2 years now,...
Navigating the complex feelings following a death in the family is never easy, and while it does become more manageable in time, the hole it leaves is never fully healed. You’d think that having had several losses across the years would somehow smooth the impact, while in truth, it never changes. It’s not possible...
Ieri sera - praticamente con zero organizzazione e meno di una settimana di preavviso - alcune persone del Fediverso ed io ci siamo trovate per guardare Scott Pilgrim VS The World.A parte la bellezza del film, sono rimasto molto soddisfatto di come lo spirito "comunitario" del Fediverso (e di chi lo frequenta) abbia...
Here we analyze the method from Majid/Suleiman/Omar. This is a block implicit method of order 4. $$ \begin{array}{r|rrr} p=4 & 1 & 2 & 3\cr \hline -1 & -24 & 0 & 0 \cr 0 & 24 & -24 & 0 \cr 1 & 0 & 24 & -24 \cr 2 & 0 & 0 & 24 \cr \hline -1 & 9 & -1 & 1 \cr 0 & 19 & 13 & -5 \cr 1 & -5 & 13 & 19 \cr 2 & 1 & -1 & 9 \cr...
This post is part of my List of Introspective Descriptions. I'm always accepting "curious introspection" links and submissions from everyone, regardless of the kind of inner experience covered. Also: This blog now has comments! You can add yours at the end of the page. To think better, you need to understand how...
Today is day #3 since our internet service decided to give up... Somehow... I'm still alive... If that first sentence sounds like it was pulled from the diary of someone slowly losing their mind, I apologize, because that’s certainly not the case.1 At least, I’m not the one losing it in this house. Almost 72 hours...
Matt Zwolinski (University of San Diego) says he has long thought it would be useful to have a website in which you could type in the name of a book and be shown all the different reviews of it that have been published. Tired of waiting, he recently, “with a lot of help from Claude code,” started building such a...
We can make the computers do things. It turns out that convincing humans is the tricky part.The Turing TestCo-Active CoachingMyers Briggs (16 Personalities)"What to consider when pivoting, from startup founders who got it right"
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. KDE Plasma 6.6. One of those updates full of small new features, fixes, and improvements. Coming soon to your favorite distro. Apple begins testing end-to-end encryption for RCS...
Last year, when it comes to movies, was probably one of the best ever in my life. I got to watch some amazing flicks and have some great moments binging movies myself or watching along with my family. I went through 50 movies total, and because of that, the summaries will be much shorter than in other recaps. I...
We can't seem to catch a break. Grandma is back in hospital again. I was only asleep for about three hours when my Mother came upstairs having a borderline-heart-attack. She was having trouble speaking, telling me that Grandma woke her up and said she needed to have the ambulance called. None of it seems to make any...
AI is the latest iteration, but financial predators targeting musicians with false promises is kind of an institution at this point Oh btw this has nothing to do with the topic; I like having visuals in my blog posts, you'll have to forgive all the cats (or ignore the text entirely and scroll down for more cats) To...
The most important and best parts of today included hanging out virtually with good folks from the internet, Jasper and Rachel. ⊕Currently Listening: Silversun Pickups “Au Revoir Reservoir”Reply via email
This post is an elaboration on a comment I made on Hacker News recently, on a blog post that showed an increase in volume and decline in quality among the “Show HN” submissons. I don't actually mind AI-aided development, a tool is a tool and should be used if you find it useful, but I think the vibe coded Show HN...
Days without turning off site blockers: 2 Doing a digital detox feels futile if there is nothing occupying my mind. I had a good day today, the detox part is actually happening. But it still feels like I am waiting for the day to be over so I can hop online. Having the TV on or using my mp3 player soothes the...