Thu Mar 12
Thaaaaaanks for saving me from those monstros angry blue laaaaadyyyyyyy ⦁ ⦁ ⦁ ⦁ ⦁ I know this is a beautiful, mysterious moment—feathered, living flowers of light descending like snowfall, etc.—but I gotta tell ya, I see a bunch of glowing jellyfoosh a-blorpin’ my way my first instinct is probably not to let them...
Background: nuget.org is a Microsoft owned and run service that allows users to package software and upload it to nuget so that other users can download it. It is targeted for .Net developers but there is really no filter in what you can offer through their service. Three years ago I reported on how nuget was...
(Image generated using ChatGPT) A lot of security awareness advice still acts like phishing begins and ends in the inbox. That is not the world we are working in anymore. Lately, the attack path has looked a lot more like this: flood a user’s inbox with junk, call them while they are frustrated, message them in...
I just saw an article that called itself “yet another goddamn article about generative AI”—it’s good, by the way, you should read it—so I want to keep this somewhat brief. I’ve been wanting to write something about em dashes and AI for a while now, because I like em dashes, and I don’t like AI, but like, what else...
It wasn’t long before I realized I had my own personal thief. He’d come in every night around three and I’d pretend to be asleep. I didn’t dare move a muscle. Not out of fear, but because I pitied him. He was terribly obvious; he left the window open behind him each time, and he was clumsy, too. Once, he’d spilled a...
I found all three of my Sony Walkmans on the walkman.land website. WM-F10: my first Walkman, received when I was maybe eight years old. My parents really went for it! This was a high-quality, tiny cassette player with a built-in FM radio receiver (which I absolutely used). The build of this device was particularly...
I had written this article for the “Spreadsheets” edition (#84, published September last year) of my magazine De Programmatica Ipsum, before opting to pen another (much more appropriate methinks) about Felienne Hermans; but I still like this one, so here it goes in its entirety. In this magazine we marvel at the...
Hace un tiempo se quedó a cenar el que hasta ese entonces era el novio de mi hija. Un sujeto que me caía bastante bien porque me recordaba a un Gabriel adolescente que no paraba de hablar, al que su padre le dijo en ese momento de la vida “deberías hablar menos”. No me explicó el “para”, para escuchar más por...
Cómo sustituir la versión ESR de Mozilla Thunderbird por la de actualizaciones mensuales directamente desde los repositorios de openSUSE Tumbleweed y mantener tu cliente de correo siempre al día La distribución de GNU/Linux openSUSE Tumbleweed es una distribución «rolling release», es decir, de actualización...
# Ttile Category Genre Comments 1 Find Yourself Along The Way Album Shoegaze, Dream PopPost-Rock, Indie Rock Listening to the Sundays I found this and I really like it, I like the calmess of it. 2 a playlist for people who still care about music, #45 Playlist Indie, Electronic, Alternative, Rock, Hip-hop, Soul, Jazz...
March 12, 2026 I've noticed that I type faster and more accurately on my 11" iPad Magic Keyboard than on my MacBook Pro's full-size keyboard when I occasionally write blog posts on my 11" M2 iPad Air. My fingers are on the shorter side, and the smaller keyboard just fits my hands better. I can easily reach every key...
A couple months ago I put together a fairly lengthy post about getting an old MacBook set up to be a writing machine. It was pretty encouraging, the idea of having a machine that would just be for one thing. At the time of writing that post I was diving pretty deep into my work and I realized I was not in a “writing...
Although the occasion is very devastating, I still found the quote below worth sharing. For context, the whole interview revolves around uncertainty in life and how to cope with it from a philosophical angle. Philosopher Wilhelm Schmid (translated): […] There is also the other side of life, where something...
This post is related to a post that I saw on the Discovery feed yesterday: Our blogging struggles, and one of the "answers" to it (my blogging struggles). I've been thinking about restarting the blog after an extended time of inactivity, so I think this could be a good opportunity to reflect on some of the things...
Got a wild hair and thought that surely there was some way to hack a digital camera to change the default language from Japanese to English. Turns out, there was! ⊕Currently Listening: Oingo Boingo “Home Again”Reply via email
(image courtesy of mt59700664 on Lofter) i was asked to attempt a slightly different kind of entry, this time. one in which i reflect upon my progress since being admitted here. approaching writing with such a discrete, targeted air of positivity is somewhat of a foreign concept to me. i usually am a lot more...
I’ve tried quite a few systems and tools to manage my projects and ideas, and switching gets tiring. I don’t think I’ll stop switching anytime soon though, so here are some guidelines to help me choose which tools to use whenever I feel the urge to try something new. Stick to plaintext - preferably Markdown...
The site might be winding down, but I'm not. While it's still here, why not add another toy programming language. Last one for a while, promise.
Data protection, privacy and tech is a very dynamic field; every day, there are new court decisions, actions by big tech companies, and resulting questions, so thought I could share my resources that keep me informed. Unless marked with a German flag 🇩🇪, these are English. Newsletter subscriptions Noyb.eu GDPRtoday...
Quoted A Brief Mid-March Snow in Brooklyn by Nicholas A. Ferrell (thenewleafjournal.com) As I was walking in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn New York, I noticed small, dust-sized white particles falling sporadically from the sky. After about 30 seconds I was satisfied that I was not hallucinating – it...
There is something quietly remarkable about the people who built the foundations of modern computing. Not their technical achievements, though those are extraordinary. What is remarkable is where they came from before they ever touched a machine. Tony Hoare, who inspired the writing of this essay, studied Classics...
How I fought my smartphone addiction In a poignant Gemini post, Kevin Boone wrote about his anxiety to go out of his house without his phone. (This is the Gemini protocol, totally unrelated to the Google chatbot.) Phone anxiety (larsthebear.me) Web version of the former Around 2018, I had the same epiphany: I was...
- The fine line between culture and ostentation"> James (capjamesg) is hosting this month’s IndieWeb carnival, and the theme is “Museum memories”. Thank you James for hosting! I wanted to write an article about some of the best and greatest museums that I’ve visited over the last 15 years, but at the middle of the...
ManuYou either believe in something and you’re willing to power through, or you don’t, and you do what everybody else is doing.I guess it’s safe to say Manu doesn’t believe in the idea that “the truest sign of intelligence is the ability to entertain two contradictory ideas simultaneously.”I don’t know who or what...
This week felt like it was nothing but drama about AI slop everywhere and then every single tech journalist and Youtuber losing their minds over the latest Apple laptop. It's exhausting. Thankfully personal blogs are still a thing and are actually thriving, so there's always something great to read, whether it's...
This is a holistic introduction to Emacs: how useful it is and how it champions free software. It is a modified version of the talk I did for the “FLOSS @ Oxford” event, organised by people at the University of Oxford. This is the page I wrote about that event:...
I was delighted to present this talk at the final (for now) episode of The Eleventy Meetup: Eleventy Build Awesome is great for rapid prototyping! Tyler shows off a few of his favorite shortcodes, filters and other techniques to quickly populate interactive mockups and wireframes with “dummy” or FPO (for placement...
There are fun things you can do in software when it is aware of the dimensions and features of its hardware. iPhone does a cute Siri animation that emanates precisely from the side button: A bunch of Android phones visualize the charge flowing to the phone from the USB port… …and even the whole concept of iPhone’s...
I published Subscribing to category-specific RSS feeds in early 2023. As the title of the article suggests, I noted that many websites (including this one) offer author, section, or taxonomy feeds in addition to a main site feed, and that these narrow feeds may be the “right” feed for certain reading and use cases....
Basic template to request interview feedback: Subject: Data Subject Request To: dpo@{company}.com1 {Greetings}, I’d like to get access to my interview feedback (“personal information”) from my last application at {company} as a candidate ({NN} {weeks,years} ago). My email is {email}. I am emailing this alias as per...
§0. Orientation & Constraints Arena: Analysis (Neutral) — This essay examines the structure of a research paper, not the underlying technical problem. Key Line: AI hallucination research conflates epistemological translation (formalizing known constraints) with institutional discovery (documenting novel...
Been off the past few days because of these stomach problems, and I am completely confused as to what is happening at work now.
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. Parent managed accounts on WhatsApp. That's right, we're going to normalize children under 13 using WhatsApp. On LinkedIn, the head of WhatsApp for strategic markets said that...
Lucky and not so lucky things to be grateful for this week: cheeky bumper stickers saying things out loud instead of bottling those things up music (and wireless earbuds — I feel like we take that magic for granted?) unionized workplaces plants dogs biting their owners’ leashes (the people with these dogs are...
Welcome to my Linkblog where I share interesting articles and blog posts I found about social media, Indieweb, geopolitics, Chinese and Malaysian stuff, cute cat videos or anything funny and interesting I find online. FYI: I also share links in the “Weekend Tales” of my Substack newsletter, Tai Tales. The newsletter...
In every corner of my life right now I cannot seem to escape the increasing fervor of the ongoing debate regarding AI and machine learning in general, where on one side you have people who are completely anti-AI and others who are completely pro-AI, and any point made in opposition to either of these things is seen...
Notes for book club: Lefty was a beast under the latest hormones being a permanent human, but did she never smile? Oh wait... did he ate her? possessed her? I am confused! "Him and him"? I actually had to read this part twice to understand...
The most popular link last time was this colour-matching game, with Roxane Gay's essay about the menopause second. I definitely have iPod brain and I'm not ashamed of it. In fact, I recently bought a sort of iPod-dupe mp3 player and am having a lovely time listening to music I like again, rather than music Spotify...
One of the things we have tried to do as a bishopric is visit people in their homes. We've set aside Wednesday evenings as the time to do this. Sometimes schedules don't line up or we aren't able to arrange to visit with anyone (we don't want to show up unannounced), but when it happens, it's always a wonderful...
The latest links… “It is puzzling to many why enthusiasts of sports get so emotionally caught up and absorbed in the outcome of games in spite of the fact that those outcomes rarely if ever have any appreciable bearing on their ordinary lives” — Is this like getting emotionally invested in fiction, as some argue?...
It often feels like I spend most of my writing time using a keyboard, but I also have a fondness for nice pens, and an obsession with notebooks. My day-to-day pen is a black-ink gel Japanese Muji 0.5mm. However, if I want to savour the writing moment I always select a fountain pen. I have a few to choose from but I...
March 2026. Nottingham. My Nottingham gig ends at a quarter to ten so Rescue Rooms can put on a Harry Styles “Fandom Party” (aka disco), a change from my usual London gigs that start just before 10pm and ensure I’m dashing to Kings Cross for the last train, full of drunk HR professionals from Royston. That gives me...
An analysis of non-Discord messaging options following the announcement of Discord’s imminent age verification requirement.
I’m thinking a lot about adding a blogroll lately. I’m considering everything from a simple list to a full-blown reader experience. My WordPress installation is old enough to still have the Links Manager, so I might just use that. Reply by email
Below are some pictures I took at one of the Australasian gannet colonies at the Cape Kidnappers Gannet Reserve in New Zealand. Nearly all of the chicks have grown up and left by this time of year. I've got a large panorama of the whole colony here (warning: loads large 50MB image).
I’m not superstitious. I just think it’s smart not to insult ghosts, wander into fairy rings, or follow mysterious whistling noises into the woods. You know. Basic common sense. For example, I don’t necessarily believe in ghosts. However, if I’m walking down a dark hallway, I will absolutely turn the light on. Not...
Published by AHE. on 13th March 2026 or "In praise of Bear Blog" It's the one year anniversary of this blog, and I've been thinking a lot about why I started AHE, what my motivations and goals were, and why I continue to write. To keep things brief I, like many others, got my start writing a blog/being involved with...
My previous post ended with me mentioning how inspired I was feeling today, referring to my desire to make another post! The truth is that this is often the case, especially on Mondays that are rather free of any work duties and where I am done with my weeknotes relatively quickly—even if there are times where I end...
A pre-dawn run through Lijiang's old town, and the gear, principles, and philosophy behind how I train.
I am home sick today with what had better not be influenza A symptoms (but a bunch of my students and a couple teachers have been out with it the last few weeks so I wouldn't be surprised if it is). I did feel good enough just now to stagger out and get the mail, though. Which is where this story comes from. In...
Once our basic physical needs for sustenance and shelter are met, most of our psychological suffering is a problem of selfing — contracting the scope of reality to the pinhole of the self and using that to explain, always painfully, the actions and motives of others, the course and causality of events. As this...