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Wed Apr 08
Chiayi, Taiwan 2009
April 8, 2026 I read something today that left me with a lingering dread. The kind that settles in your gut and doesn't go away when you close the tab. As reported by The New York Times, Anthropic has developed a new AI model called...
Today I had other desires for coffee. I would have walked to this place I have not been for some time. Enjoyed the morning with their $1 iced americano. Thought and wrote and read some. Lately I’ve been enjoying Current Reader a lot. Its...
We just wanted to drive around NSW’s countryside and maybe visit a farm. Camden came up in the search, and the Airbnb there looked nice, and hence we settled on it. It was also perfect fir for the Easter weekend (4th and 5th of Apr) as...
I had a pleasant surprise in my Bluesky timeline today. Brittany reposted a custom feed made by Marisa called “Nature in the News”. The feed surfaces positive news about nature in general, wildlife recovery, advancements in renewable...
G is for Ghost I was convinced my parents old house was haunted. It was built in the early 1900s, had faded and peeling wallpaper. Dilapidation and general neglect for the past eighty or so years was abundant. But what made me think it...
(a brief note about sex between men, described in street language — entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest) The hybrid. From “The Human Urinal” episode of MEN.com’s The Men’s Room DVD (the first scene (of 5) on my recently...
The Marc Sanders Foundation has announced that its 2026 Prize in Metaphysics has been awarded to Ezra Rubenstein and Verónica Gómez-Sánchez (both of UC Berkeley). They won the prize for their paper, “Logical Atomism“. Here’s the abstract...
I recently discovered Meow as a modal editing replacement for evil-mode, and it has become a mainstay in my recent vanilla emacs configuration. Meow piggybacks on the Kakoune/Helix style of editing (of which I had never used prior, and I...
The origin of The Secret Agent: subject, treatment, artistic purpose, and every other motive that may induce an author to take up his pen, can, I believe, be traced to a period of mental and emotional reaction. The actual facts are that...
The barn in coming along nicely. We got a lot done today. More tomorrow! Reply by email
Nothingburgers who think they’re unique and exceptional. Not sure how the US is going to climb out of this mess, but the rest of the world is definitely moving forward.
I first tore through this series back in early-December 2025; by the time I finally got to watch the first season of “Heated Rivalry”, my brain had already been wreaking havoc, for months, with my ability to read and write (see footnote...
So say you're sitting down to dinner after a long day of travel. You're in the dining room of one of the historic inns in the Indiana State Park system -- let's say, the Potawatomi Inn at Pokagon State Park on the shores of Lake James....
It has now been several years since I've taught my own classes, or even acted as a tutor. That is to say: I worked with students after the lockdowns for COVID had ended, but before LLMs changed the nature of our field. I will likely take...
It has been about a week of no cigs and no porn. Go me! While the time apart from those things is irrelevant, I am more optimistic about this attempt at abstinence. Especially regarding the pornography, I'd be having all kinds of...
TIMBRE LUMINISCENCIA [La Jornada, Martes 7 de Abril, 2026]Los investigadores forenses utilizan el luminol para detectar trazas de sangre invisibles al ojo humano. Cuando los asesinos intentan borrar las huellas de sus crímenes, lavando...
I missed last month's carnival (the topic was "your favourite meme"), mostly because I couldn't really think of one. I guess I don't use memes extensively enough to have a favourite. Instead of memes, I mostly collect quotes and funny...
“Grandpap” is how I knew my maternal grandfather, William Stevenson, Sr. He would have been 100 years old today. He passed away on May 17, 2018, at the age of 92. I spoke at his memorial service, but didn’t write a post about him at the...
Con los días de vacaciones no pude escribir sobre el 50 aniversario de Apple. Algo que sí que hice el primer año de este espacio, cuando aún no tenía mi Macbook. El pasado día 1 de abril, la empresa de la manzana cumplió, nada más y nada...
Thanks to Zak I just learned that today (April 9th) is CSS Naked Day, a day to strip your website of it's CSS and show what it looks like underneath in plain HTML. By sheer coincidence I worked a bit on making the HTML more readable...
Cannock Chase is big – something over 20 square miles of heathland, woods and plantations – and not very far from Lichfield. So you would have thought that by now I would have become a frequent visitor – or at the very least have managed...
Sejak tinggal di Cimahi, saya jarang banget main ke Bandung, kecuali ada keperluan. Selain karena Cimahi sudah cukup lengkap untuk kebutuhan dasar, Bandung saat akhir minggu rawan macet dan penuh. Kami lebih suka ke area Kota Baru...
Intro This is going to be a long rambling post about the past five years of Taylor. Be prepared for it not to be well edited and for my thoughts to jump around a bit. I thought about making this a video but life has not been kind...
There are a lot of times when the specification says one thing but common implementations do another. Here are some especially common examples to watch out for. Attribute quotingAccording to the HTML specification, single-quoted...
My brains are weird. I used to be interested in all kinds of e-ink devices.. But here I am very excited about physical, paper notebook. As much as I like my reMarkable 2 tablet, it's rather big and takes bunch of space on my desk....
Today is CSS Naked Day! That means this site is extra basic instead of its regular about of basic. (I was very late updating my site for this, sorry.) Enjoy!
I spent some time recently rebuilding my sponsorship and membership pages across GitHub Sponsors, Ko-fi, and Buy Me a Coffee. On the surface, that probably looks like a small housekeeping task. Update some wording. Clean up some old...
Gerty took a detour through the medical tent on her way to the latest test of the escapement mechanism. The stretched canvas shelter was only about one-third full, and though it was a temporary building, to her it had become a permanent...
I wanted to read The Count of Monte Cristo for years, but never did. And guess what I found in a little library? Another Dumas' classic! What a lucky find, I assumed Oh boy, was I wrong. Oh, what an unlucky find it was. I hated it,...
I wondered yesterday: ...those question headers are displaying differently, with the background colour no longer spanning the width of the window. I'd like to understand why. Turns out it was pretty straightforward: diff --git a/quiz.el...
Why read the book? C.S. Lewis wrote The Four Loves. He looks at four natural ways people love. These are affection, friendship, eros, and charity. Lewis explains each one with care. He shows their strengths and their dangers. Affection...
This post has been deleted and started over at least a dozen times in the last twenty-five minutes. I've ripped two smokes trying to figure out how to start this one, and I've bounced between normal for this time of night DEFCON Radio...
JUXT, a software consultancy based in the United Kingdom, report discovering a bug in the code of the Apollo Guidance Computer, nearly fifty-four years after the last Apollo Moon flight: The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) is one of the...
I’ve been having a bit of a think about data I’ve left entirely in someone else’s hands. Specifically Google Photos, which has photos going back to 2011 and no local copy anywhere. I’m not going anywhere dramatic with it, but having a...
Bubbles appeared in my analytics today and it could be a fun little project. It seems to be a version of Hacker News for personal and those sites that are non commercial. In short, it curates a bunch of feeds from a bunch of sources (see...
I’m a messy reader. I’ll start a book, put it aside for a bit, and either abandon it or look at it again a few months later. Or I’ll pick up a book and binge it, and its sequels, in a matter of days. What I’d like to do is track these...
As regular readers of mine know, I have long been a big fan of The Rest Is History podcast: I joined the Club as a Friend of the Show within weeks of its inception. But in the last year or so the show has, or so it seems to me anyway,...
“How is it that I seem to be this Margaret Fuller? What does it mean? What shall I do about it?” This essay is adapted from the sixth chapter of Figuring. “I am determined on distinction,” Margaret Fuller (May 23, 1810–July 19, 1850)...
Vandaag verscheen het rapport “Digitale autonomie binnen de energie-intensieve industrie”, wat ik schreef in opdracht van Energy Innovation NL, voorheen bekend als de Topsector Energie. Het rapport is hier te lezen. Dit was ontzettend...
The AthleticCould it be? Some actual good news for Chicago sports—even if it is just future potential that will probably be squandered away eventually anyway? Even better is this excludes the young established guys like Bedard, Nazar,...
In late 2025 I put together a list of things I would dump in 2026. Three months of the year are done, so how have I been getting on? A mixed bag: ‘social’ media – down to one social media platform, using mastodon via federate.social. I...
I use Mermaid diagrams occasionally on my Hugo blog. It came with the theme I had so I learnt to use it. Just now as I was working on a draft post, I decided to make a diagram, and found out nothing was rendering at all for the whole...
"Protomedico" (Chief Physician) from the Gli abiti de veneziani (1754) by Giovanni Grevembroch, translated by René Seindal.
This time it's a rather simple sketch running on my new favorite board — the ESP32-2432S028. It reads and displays a random line from the vocabulary.txt file on the SD card. I use it to brush up on my vocabulary. Auto-refresh is set to...
A couple of weeks ago I acquired a tiny ereading device, the XTEINK X4. It all started with a YouTube video reviewing the device that I first shared in one of my weeknotes. A day later I saw that James had been using one already, and...
A tour boat crosses the natural harbor of Ine Bay, a fishing village on the Tango Peninsula. 丹後半島の漁師町、伊根湾の天然の港を遊覧船が進む。
Liked Build A Boy by Natalie Cursio (Crowd Supply) Build A Boy is a retro gaming handheld you build from scratch, brick by brick. The shell, the electronics…all of it! This DIY kit turns the Lego Nintendo Game Boy replica into a playable...
2026-04-08Hello! My life has been flipping east and left and all around, and I'm signing up to crazy things this month. Loving every second of it. So enjoy a post including nothing crazy, written in the wee hours of the morning.I think...
Apesar da tag de anime, isso na verdade é um mangá. Mas como eu não quero criar uma tag só pra isso, aceitem esse aviso aqui. Muitos (eu mesmo) diziam que eu não iria mais me interessar por anime ou mangá. Pra ser bem sincero eu não me...
Okay whole new movie, first things first, let’s check the extra featu—aw yiss, no Family-Friendly Version available this time, we’re gonna hear ALL the fish-cussin’, we had best prepare ourselves for an extended visit from the...
The conventional understanding of freedom emphasizes action—the capacity to speak, to choose, to participate. But this framing obscures a more fundamental precondition: the capacity to leave. Freedom is not primarily about what you can...
So I failed in my "make at least one piece of art a month this year" goal already. Didn't even manage 3 months. That said the idea is to be making things regularly again rather than anything stricter, so I'm counting this as March's...
April 2026. Tyldesley. A slight post now, perhaps, but I thought you’d like to see the highlights of my mile walk through central Tyldesley (pop. 16,142) in Wigan’s old colliery belt. Love a Monkey Puzzle tree. A spotless red brick town,...
You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in...
Words, and meanings, amaze me. More so the ones which are used colloquially — and have different meanings across the continents. Recently I was sarcastically ridiculing someone. (it was Trump and he deserved it!). This blog post was...
Do you have LaTeX projects on GitHub? Ever wondered how to get GitHub to build them automatically? Here’s how I do it. Building LaTeX documents via TeXLive on GitHub. Image credits: TeXLive logo, GitHub logo, PDF file icon A geeky...
When Google killed Google Reader, I didn’t look for a replacement feed reader. Most of the blogs I followed since the early 2000s had died and their authors had switched to social media platforms. Posting to social media is a lot easier...
For this entry in the series, I have picked a beautiful song which evokes that curiosity we have about the otherworldly. The Elves is a song written and composed by the much-beloved Socratis Malamas. My favourite version is performed at...
When people discuss computer displays, they always talk about the refresh rate and LCD vs OLED. I understand that high refresh rates and true blacks are appealing for gaming and media consumption, but when it comes to colour grading for...