Wed Apr 08
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 bits from YouTube shows I watch. The other day, I came across one that I'd almost...
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 a live concert together with Ioulia Karapataki:...
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 1). However, I had planned on reviewing all six Game Changers books, and, being...
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 without CSS yesterday. So this is what this site looks like without CSS. Not...
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 la sangre de pisos y paredes, por ejemplo, el luminol los denuncia con su tenue...
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。
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 Claude Mythos so powerful that they're choosing not to release it publicly. Instead,...
Reverse engineering the traffic system from Pizza Tycoon (1994): how the original devs drove dozens of cars through a city with almost no CPU budget.
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!
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 fixture of the base layout. As they were not in an active combat arena, 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 backup I actually control felt overdue. Part of the problem is how frictionless it...
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. Opening it is always a bit cumbersome. I have to click a button, look for the right...
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, been declining in quality. Earlier episodes were typically informed either by the...
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 Foul-Mouthed Bass ⦁ ⦁ ⦁ ⦁ ⦁ …so wait if water pours from these floating-islands, wouldn’t...
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 energy, and more. I scrolled the feed for a couple of minutes and saw news like:...
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 do within a system, but whether you can credibly refuse the system itself. Exit...
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 most scrutinised codebases in history. Thousands of developers have read it....
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 quite like it!) to visually select and then act upon text in a way that makes...
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 like the feel of it, and enjoy the eclectic mix of people on there. X is now...
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 to find it. You would be wrong on both counts: on my first attempt (last year,...
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 b/quiz.el index 2dbe45d..c1ba255 100644 --- a/quiz.el +++ b/quiz.el @@ -40,7...
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 site. I am not sure when/what caused it, but I couldn’t fix it quickly last night,...
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, with a heartening number of Chinese takeaways and an Indian gastro pub called...
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 attributes are perfectly valid; for example, these HTML fragments should be absolutely...
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 it was a small town. Camden is not far from the city, so we planned to go to...
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 of the paper: The core of logical atomism is the view that fundamental reality...
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 for Lush in search for the spark. Let's just roll up our sleeves and dive right...
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 120s, but it can be changed by editing the REFRESH_INTERVAL_MS variable in the...
“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) writes to her former teacher. She is fifteen. The year is 1825 and she is...
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 system using carts from your childhood, with a few modern twists. I recall...
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 perks. Swap out a few links. Done. But honestly, it felt bigger than that. It felt...
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 recently so this is what I have the energy for. So please sit back and enjoy my...
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 leuk om te doen, en ik ben erg blij dat men me gevraagd heeft om dit rapport te...
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 menos, que medio siglo. Sin lugar a dudas, la empresa de Cupertino ha marcado...
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 interesso por nada do gênero a uns 2 anos. Com raras exceções de filmes como o do...
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 soon enough after a few more reviews I ordered one myself. Along James, some other...
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 this mantle up again soon, and I find myself uncertain. Teaching is clearly the...
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.
While in Berlin, I spotted my dad’s old Kindle that we got him for his birthday back in 2014. Fueled by my longing for digital independence and encouraged by my parents’ permission to do with it whatever I wanted, I composed myself to jailbreak that little black brick. This is the only way to get use out of the...
"Protomedico" (Chief Physician) from the Gli abiti de veneziani (1754) by Giovanni Grevembroch, translated by René Seindal.
One of the readers (thank you, Peter!) reminded me that there is a version of a blink comparator that all of us are exposed to perhaps every day: many photo editing apps – Apple Photos, Darkroom, Aphera, I imagine others – allow you to quickly compare the photo as-shot and with your edits. Sometimes it’s a tap,...
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 piece and so will try and do another later this month for April. Anyway, without...
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 workflow for LaTeX documents I’m a geek. More precisely, I’m a physicist. So I’m...
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 books so I can see how much I read. My Kindle would automatically post to...
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, despised. But I kept on reading. I was disgusted, I was repulsed... and I could not...
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 most people than blogging, I suppose. And there’s that wonderful dopamine...
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 Parahyangan untuk cari makan atau jala-jalan sore. Kota Baru Parahyangan (KBP) adalah...
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 sparked by a conversation I had with someone about the meaning of a word; we...
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, and Levshunov.
Mr. Verloc going out in the morning, left his shop nominally in charge of his brother-in-law. It could be done, because there was very little business at any time, and practically none at all before the evening. Mr. Verloc cared but little about his ostensible business. And, moreover, his wife was in charge of his...
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 video and photo, those are irrelevant. Instead, things like colour accuracy and...
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. You order food, sit back, and then realize something important. There's a good...
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 was haunted was the mirrors. My mom told me when we first moved in, when I was...
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 ecstasy at your feet.~ Franz Kafka
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 that there are hidden gems all around town, and even when you've been to a place...
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 them here) and then people can upvote on the posts they like, and over time the...