Mon Mar 09
After a decade of building software for other companies, I’m going indie! I’m launching Merryman Technology to focus on the problems that I find most interesting. This is a one-person operation: it’s just me, building software for Apple platforms. The kind of software I want to use myself: focused, thoughtful, and...
in my last blog, I wrote about what Susan Sontag calls the defining genre in the western development of theater, the metaplay.
This iPhone UI for dark/light theme is doing something clever: Ostensibly, there are two modes here: automatic, for when you want the theme to match the time of day manual, for when you want to keep one of the themes forever But check out what happens when I am in automatic mode, but toggle the theme by hand...
Last night Call the Midwife – the BBC's cosy, corny, sentimental, occasionally brilliant Sunday-night drama – finally came to an end, after 14 years. Well, it might be back with a prequel or even a spin-off, but it's certainly over for me, because Sister Monica Joan – the oldest nun and by far the most interesting ,...
A few years ago I had a conversation with my roommate at the time about how I sometimes find myself endearing. This was an alien concept to her. How self-absorbed do you have to be to find yourself endearing? Years later I come back to this conversation after working on myself and becoming closer to the person I...
" anatomical remodelling of the heart" (Juni, March 2026) a mixed-medium (graphite sketch / charcoals / collage) collation piece, using a 1960s car magazine to parallel the mechanical to the organic. to lay out the "engine" of our body in all of its raw, horrific, and venerable beauty. for our eyes to dissect,...
Got myself in an odd thought spiral tonight while listening to some oldies. What would the world be like if Buddy Holly had lived? What would the world be like if Hank Williams Sr. had lived? There are so many artists out there that died long before their time, men and women who were genre defining artists. Elvis...
A trip back to Alms Park, this time with Casey. We got a little hike in. ⊕Currently Listening: Ray Charles “Swanee River Rock (Talkin' 'Bout That River)”Reply via email
For the last few months I've been reading and researching streaming music services. I'm keen to find a service that pays a fair (or fairer) price to artists. It's not an easy task as most of the providers don't publish much data. The articles I've read, written independently, are making a number of general...
Anthropic’s Claude models are having a moment. Their newest release supposedly “changes everything” and if you don’t use it every day you just cannot have any opinion on LLMs. Which is the same story we heard about previous OpenAI releases or previous Anthropic releases. Every new (and more expensive) model is...
Previous part Milestone 3 is done! For this devlog, I will share the basic gameplay loop in practice. First of, let us look in the shipyard: It's very empty, since we haven't played yet we haven't discovered any upgrades. In lore, we haven't even tried our submarine yet, so we don't know what we want. Let us head...
If someone you know, like someone from your family or a close friend, used to say 90% of the truth but sometimes made up some shit and spilled it in your face like it was true, you probably would be furious or even skeptical about anything else that person was saying. Then why do we still choose to believe at AI...
Maspalomas es una película dirigida por el cineasta vasco José Mari Goenaga, está protagonizada por José Ramón Soroiz que ganó el Goya a mejor actor principal la pasada semana. En Maspalomas también intervienen Kandido Uranga y Nagore Aranburu, además de otros actores y actrices vascos. De hecho la versión original...
March 2026. Tuxford. Nottinghamshire. Mr Protz wrote the definitive book about the pubs along the Great North Road, but there’s far less of them than you’d hope if you had to make the trek up and down the A1 weekly. I took the sliproad to Tuxford (pop, now 2,809) as I fancied artisanal panini rather than Greggs...
Language is a container for thought and feeling that shapes the contents. The great danger is that we come to mistake the shape for the substance, reducing concepts and experiences we cannot name or contain to the words tasked with holding the spill of the ineffable. (This is what makes The Dictionary of Obscure...
Days without turning off site blockers: 19 Today was so sunny warm, I went on a walk with a friend and I was genuinely happy.
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. A new look is coming to Firefox on computers. Codenamed Nova, the visual redesign is very colorful and features rounded corners. I don't know… It’s weird. The work is in its...
This morning, I encountered two pieces on the same topic from separate vectors. The power of browsing compels me to write about it. First, here is an NPR piece on how "training willpower" doesn't work: NPR: Kids' willpower is no match for fast food and screens. Try this instead Short version: Trying to brute-force...
Jeden zweiten Montag im Monat lädt das noch recht neue und sich im Testbetrieb befindliche Kunsthaus Kalk zum Nachbarschaftsabend. Bei Obst und Ingwertee saßen wir gemütlich zusammen, ließen uns von Rosanna D’Ortana und Marleen Rothaus mehr über das Haus, die Vision und den Akademiebetrieb erklären und quatschten...
Harto de buscar excusas para no jugar a juegos de mesa o leer cómics, en febrero decidí ponerme la meta de leer un cómic al día y jugar a un juego de mesa al día. Estaba claro que la meta era inalcanzable. Lo que buscaba era ponerme en movimiento. Uno de los motivos por los que me cuesta ponerme con los juegos de...
A roundup of auditions, recalls, and booked jobs from February 2026. Published by AHE. on 10th March 2026 Auditions - 3 of those auditions Theatre - 1 (in person) Ads - 2 (self-tapes) February was a little tough, but a few lovely auditions softened the blow. I should have been working this month, I was working this...
Foggy days are here. For a few days over the past week or so, we have had some thick fog in the early mornings. It’s the sort of miserable fog which takes hours to lift. It dampens the mood, as the sun is not yet strong enough to burn through it quickly. Spring was in the air for one or two days last week, and some...
I Think I’m Paranoid was one of the coolest tracks from Garbage when I first heard them in the 90s. Shirley Manson was hot, bold and in your face in that music video. The song also had one of the freshest, crude yet appealing sounding distortions from a guitar. For someone in his teens, it wasn’t my first rock band...
Reincarnation is a fascinating topic for me since I grew up in a society where many folk tales and stories mentioned this phenomenon. I have heard about it so many times since childhood that it feels obvious to me. However, my friends from other parts of the world have a hard time believing it. Yet, whenever we...
On February 22, I ran my first half marathon. I ran it at a fairly slow pace of 6.54 min/km (10.38 min/mile), completing the whole track in 2h 18min. I'd say it's a great result, one to be happy about... and so I am! I know it's not that fast for a 24yo, but considering my mostly sedentary lifestyle (and the fact...
Vjeux once told me a story that stuck with me. It was about the good old days of the World of Warcraft. Blizzard shipped regular updates to the game, but their change logs were very sparse. The community had to figure out the details on their own, and there were a few websites that tried to provide in-depth reviews...
I have a penchant for having way too many tabs of Chrome open, and even though I keep buying more RAM I occasionally am still forced to interact with this screen, informing me that I have run out of memory. But if you hit Cmd+Shift+Esc then it disappears, replaced by the normal "Force Quit Applications". What then?...
It is allergy season, fuck yeah. So while I spend both days of the weekend outside (which was nice, don’t get me wrong. We even had sun!) I immediately crashed on the couch when I came back, defeated by the battle that my body is trying to fight against the pollen. And I’m sure the antihistamines didn’t help,...
In the year 2026, there are only a few mainstream religions that are recognized and popularized en masse. The loudest voice in Europe and America belongs to Abrahamic religions, in particular to Christianity. Although I personally do not have any strong prejudice towards Chriatianity as a religion, there are a lot...
The University of Leipzig is launching a new, tuition-free English-language Master of Arts program in philosophy. Professor Kristina Musholt writes that it is a two-year program “with a diverse range of courses that create the conditions for acquiring in-depth skills in academic work, placing particular emphasis on...
Ever wondered why a package ended up in your Nix store? Here's how nix why-depends can help you find out.
When a St. John’s College student described a six-day phone fast as revelatory—”presence with nearby people became necessary”—they echoed a thirty-year-old prescription: reframe digital detox from “anti-tech” to “pro-community” by filling screen-free space with genuine presence. Melissa Kirsch made the same argument...
I've spent a while making updates to the site. Not wanting it to look like a store or anything I went around looking at other review/discussion style websites and took cues from them. There are still a handful of bugs hanging around but nothing crazy. The goal was to make the site more inviting and cozy. I was...
I forgot to write a post yesterday. My first church meeting started at 9am and between all the church meetings, phone calls with family, and meals somewhere in there, I wasn't free until about 8pm. Add Daylight Saving Time starting and having to take allergy medicine that makes me sleepy on top of all of that and I...
Ahorita estamos estudiando la carta a los Filipenses cada domingo en mi iglesia. Una carta que escribió el apóstol Pablo mientras estaba encarcelado. Son pasajes que ayudan a ver la vida desde otra perspectiva y a afrontarla desde una relación plena con Cristo. En medio de esa carta, Pablo escribió algo que me...
A talk about CellPond, Lu Wilson’s spatial programming project
Finished reading Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman. A good collection of positive reflections on human nature, debunking many negative apocryphal stories about how people tend to behave in specific situations.
I really enjoyed Justin Duke’s thoughts in “The death of software, the A24 of software”. A24 didn't succeed despite the streaming era — they succeeded because of it. The explosion of mediocre content created a vacuum for taste, for curation, for a brand that stood for something. When everything is abundant and most...
I care quite deeply about scientific communication. Part of the frustration that I hold for how we currently communicate in academia is mostly to do with the stiffness and inaccessibility of our horrifically dense, jargon-packed publications. Is it truly necessary to encode all of our works in such a way? In some...
Al intentar actualizar openSUSE Tumbleweed curl me daba una serie de errores de certificados al querer acceder a los repositorios y no me dejaba actualizar el sistema Hoy me ha dado por encender mi viejo portátil que desde que compré mi Slimbook Exkalibur KDE Edition está durmiendo el sueño de los justos para...
Hoy he probado a hacerme lo que honestamente pensaba que era un café americano. He echado 35 gramos de un café molido más bien grueso (Delta Brasil en mi caso, porque es lo que tenía a mano) y 250 gramos de agua hirviendo. Un poco de edulcorante en la taza, a filtrar y a beber. Y la verdad es que esto está rico....
I realized this morning, I'm 16, and I've never truly had my heart broken. I've felt heartbroken before, but not actual heartbroken.
A few of the better captures from this weekend. Any light for photography was awful, thanks to the persistent mist and fog (permistent? meh.) for the last few days. Nearly every image was horrendously backlit and the wildlife was just as persistent in staying up high. I'm still stalking the Woodpeckers, nothing seen...
Contributing to Collaborative ProjectsDuring the HWC: Pacific event last week, Reilly mentioned a blogger called Molly White who writes about technology. I saw her photo and realized I watched her getting started guide on Wikipedia in the past—something I’ve parked on my “someday/maybe” list. Having joined the...
If you are a generally healthy person, it can be hard to conceptualize how quickly someone's illnesses can suddenly turn within a few hours, so here is an example from yesterday to illustrate it. My wife and I had made plans to go a tabletop/board game flea market at noon and then head over to a restaurant...
Today's summary, published in a couple of social places: More rain today. More writing today. More fleeing today. More chewing the cud today. Less talk today. That's a win. ¶ I like short URLs. Or is it URIs? The shorter the better. Some services or social spots have indecently long links. Discouraging. ¶ The...
I have been thinking about my characterization of OpenAI and Anthropic as being motivated by greed. This may be unfair, given that greed motivates all of us to some degree, and it is a necessary vice if you are to succeed in the corporate world. The economist Joseph A. Schumpeter observed in his 1942 book...
when i wrote my initial post i didn't realise how many people were going to disagree with "xenophobia is bad". some people on the right wing took it personally and made this a left-right wing issue. nowhere in my original post i mentioned that. i think it's funny that you put xenophobia in the same basket with the...
Hello! My big takeaway from last month’s musings about man pages was that examples in man pages are really great, so I worked on adding (or improving) examples to two of my favourite tools’ man pages. Here they are: the dig man page (now with examples) the tcpdump man page examples (this one is an update to the...
Esse talvez tenha sido um dos nomes mais bonitos de álbuns que eu já vi. Eu nunca tinha ficado em um estado de pausa como se tivesse dado pause num filme ou algo parecido quando li esse nome. É extremamente bonito. O nome é do terceiro EP da banda coreana QWER. Se vocês já repararam na entrada do site, elas estão já...
The Linux Foundation, the organization that we want to love but that so often makes that a hard bargain, has created something they call “Insights” where they gather lots of metrics on Open Source projects. I held back so I never blogged and taunted OpenSSF for their scorecard attempts that were always lame and...
TitleTender is the Night CreatorFrancis Scott Fitzgerald Year1934 Kindbook Read2026-03-10
A bout of bacterial tonsillitis recently necessitated a course of antibiotics. I had to take them 4 times a day at regular intervals. I did some maths and settled on 06:30, 11:30, 16:30, and 21:30. I have a terrible habit of ignoring Todoist notifications and I didn't want to clutter the family task list with my...
This week in particular felt excruciatingly slow, work was busy all the time and I really couldn’t catch a break as often as other weeks due to my workmate going on vacation. However, I still managed to do a lot with the spare time I got, and my weekend was amazing as well, so I can’t complain at all. 🌐 Went to...