Sat Apr 11
I gave the opening keynote at Deep Dish Swift 2026 today! It was so fun. The event is very iOS-oriented and nearly 300 people in the Chicago area, and it was cool meeting so many folks who I hadn’t met in person before. Before the event, I actually spoke on the podcast for the event, called Slices! I love all of the...
“What are we, anyway, at our best, but one small, persistent cluster in a greater ferment of human activity — still and forever turning toward, tuned for, the possible,” Adrienne Rich wrote in her classic Arts of the Possible while the field of counterfactuals was emerging in theoretical physics as the science of...
An American oil company has plans for a new refinery and sends someone to Scotland to buy up an entire village, but things don’t go as expected. A story about corporate greed, humanity, telling the story of an oil executive that leaves Houston to the wild parts of Scotland to set the things in motion for an oil...
Problem: High Latency and Lag on SSHMy little Raspberry Pi 4B homelab server has always been headless and accessed via SSH on my Mac. After upgrading the home router to the GL.iNet Flint2 last month, the SSH connection has been super flaky with severe lag. Wi-Fi packet loss was high with 21.6%, with high jitter (up...
My review of Wes Anderson's 2014 film 'The Grand Budapest Hotel'.
NotesMassive work related step finished late Friday evening complete overhaul of our Tekton pipelines ci/cd for two of our bNice #Artemis dashboardthe whole #Artemis trip makes me want to project Artemis dashboard mission on my walls and have a stream of real time daBookmarksBookmarked:...
I happened upon this on Facebook today. It's an uncollected poem by Alan Garner, and it amused me – it reads like something Thomas Hardy might have written, if he hadn't been Thomas Hardy...R.I.P.A girl in our village makes love in the churchyard.She doesn't care who, but it must be the churchyard.They say she...
How I'm messing about with my own spud routine this year. Skip this one if you're only interested in the stuff with links and ranting about writing.
Recent experiments observing an inverse spin-valve effect in Niobium-Rhenium (NbRe) heterostructures have positioned the material as a promising, scalable platform for superconducting spintronics. The signal suggests the presence of intrinsic spin-triplet Cooper pairs—a parallel-spin state that could enable quantum...
This is an entry from my journal. I describe a small part of life in the mountains as well as my experience at an Easter celebration. On Sundays it is common for people here to prepare souvla (barbecued meat on a long skewer), if the weather is good enough. Other dishes are also available, so there is something for...
I completely missed the 100 Days To Offload blogging challenge. I had seen the hashtag but didn't delve deeper. Today I discovered the website. Simply, the aim is to write 100 blog posts within a year. The year can be any point in time, not necessarily the start of a year. I had a look at my own blog, and in the...
Here are five images from five days of roaming around Northumberland. This wasn't a photography specific trip, but if I'm going to Northumberland then the camera is always coming along, and so these are more opportunistic captures than any real planning or thought behind them. Basically, I just shot what I see, and...
In 1958, Mao ordered every village to produce steel. The steel was useless. The crops rotted. Today’s top-down AI mandates are producing the same pattern: ba…
Attention! This is satire. Once again we have been attacked and slandered by state-sponsored shills. This continued harassment was unprovoked and is another clear example of the global plot to misrepresent SCHOLSBAG. On a recent pigcast by LibreLard, known for spreading lies about pig privacy and pig security and...
Recently I've been thinking that it would be interesting to get to know a little about the Model Context Protocol and see what it's about and get a feel for how useful it might be, if at all, for anything I do. As always happens when I want to try out something new, I reached for a problem I know well so I don't...
Heya! I just saw this post from Jacob Varney about adding alt text to your stuff. And, while I agree with the notion of doing that, the method he shows is sadly also wrong, and won't meaningfully improve your sites accessibility. In markdown, to add alt text to your images, you do this: 
Translating errors at layer boundaries so storage details don't leak into the handler or, worse, into client responses.
It’s very simple: Open a chat with the @BotFather Send /deletebot Confirm The bot and its token will be permanently removed. This action cannot be undone. It doesn’t even need the bot token! For some reason I expected this to be more complicated. — § —Reply via email#dev
It was time to see Versengold again… and for the first time in my hometown of Wiesbaden. It’s great when it only takes a 10-minute bus ride to see your favorite band. Earlier this year, the guys released their ninth studio album, and it rightfully climbed straight to the top of the German album charts. We’ve seen...
Sadly, I failed convert the Docker compose files provided by Immich into Quadlets using Podlet. Nevertheless, I found this repository that documents in detail the whole process. Convert uploads to JPEG XL #TODO)) Using immich-upload-optimizer?
I made a pie. ⊕Currently Listening: Peter Gabriel “Till Your Mind Is Shining (Dark-Side Mix)”Reply via email
Today is the last day of my writing PACT where I set out to write and publish a blog post every day for 30 days. I’ve written about various things that were on top of mind: Side projects, sport, personal finance, general life advice that I found useful, replies to blog posts and lately about our new family member....
Table of Contents What is post-historical society? Life under this régime Conclusion Post-scarcity is here. And with it has the life without meaningful political action. The consequences of this can not be understated, although they have somehow been with us for quite some time, paling in comparison to the...
I need to replace my work Mac within a few weeks. 1 My work laptop is synced with my personal one for everything that involves iCloud. I have pretty much the same apps, and I use Homebrew for everything I can. So, with the switch coming up, I’ve been thinking about rebuilding my dotfiles for macOS. The idea is to...
Spent all day creating a dream journal using python and AI, piece by piece and finally it is something I want to use! A year of learning how to properly write prompts is finally working. I will be lost cataloging my 750+ recorded dreams for a while and then to find the ones in my journals and transcribing them....
I wrote a couple of times that I reduced my activity on #LinkedIn and put more effort into the blog here – and I did! And I’m quite happy about that. In parallel I had an anonymous account for IT related topics, but honestly, I missed posting as my true identity. Also as I couldn’t […]
This recipe comes from the Half Baked Harvest Super Simple Cookbook (pg 79). Tieghan Gerard also has a version of this recipe with chickpeas on her website as well. Between the sun dried tomatoes and avocado, it has a lot of oil, but it makes for a more filling salad. Lemon juice on the avocado should help reduce...
Most of the thirty or so little tables covered by red cloths with a white design stood ranged at right angles to the deep brown wainscoting of the underground hall. Bronze chandeliers with many globes depended from the low, slightly vaulted ceiling, and the fresco paintings ran flat and dull all round the walls...
Wendy’s review of the newly-released The Harvey Girl intrigued me and jogged my memory enough that dug up this old ARC from the digital shelves, and, because it has been in my digital TBR shelves for over three years, I’m going to claim it for my February TBR Challenge entry, what with the theme being ‘vintage’, and...
2026-04-11Back at the university garden...Hello! Writing to you from Delaware, where I'm yet again out of my comfort zone.It was mostly cloudy when I took the photo, with only a few moments of sunshine. I took this photo in horizontal / landscape orientation, but cropped it as vertical. There are just too many...
I'm not much of a movie watcher. I somehow prefer watching multiple episodes of a TV show over a few hours over investing 2 hours into a movie. I get antsy in the second half of the movie and episodic stuff can more easily be paused for a break. My wife has gotten me into more movies the past few years though,...
Everyone (for some values of everyone) knows GNU nano, the editor that you use when you don’t know how to use emacs or vim (I’m sorry nano lovers). Nano is a fork of pico, the editor integrated with the alpine mail client. Both nano and pico are also SI prefixes, and I think they started a small trend of naming...
This blog is a niche blog. Its topics are computer programming, mathematics, and computer hardware. Each month I have roughly one thousand real visitors reading blog posts. Posts on this blog are not dictated by any commercial requirement, they are solely governed by my current interest. It costs me money to host...
April 11, 2026 It seems likely that you’ll soon be leading Apple, which will place unfathomable responsibility on your shoulders. As you grow into the leader that we know you can be, I urge you, on behalf of everyone who loves computers as much as we do, to protect and cultivate this spirit of Apple’s founders as...
April 2026. Norden. Greater Manchester. Closing in on a belated completion of Greater Manchester GBG entries now (two Wigan brewery taps left, and who can guess when they’ll be open). As you’ll know by now I tend to go stir crazy if I don’t get to visit somewhere new every week day hour, so I’m off to posh suburban...
Found in an archive of font design (for Olivetti typewriters) and smiled: Handoff problems were there before us and will remain after we’re gone. This, too: #history #process #typography
J is for Justfile My coworker put me on to justfile a bit ago, and after wrestling with Makefiles for a few decades, its a nice upgrade. The justfile syntax is yaml with instructions that are in yaml for more credence towards earning my greatest title of ‘yaml developer’. Not the biggest fan of using more yaml, all...
Going to museums is one of my main hobbies. I'm not formally trained in any particular form of art or art history; I just enjoy looking at different types of art. Like anyone else, I have my favourite styles and artists, but overall, I'm an "omnivore." The last handful of exhibitions that I went to include an art...
One last post of cherry blossoms for the season, taken on Arashiyama's Nakanoshima Island in soft, buttery sunlight. Shot with Fujichrome Velvia 100 film. 嵐山の中之島でバターのような柔らかい日差しの中で撮影した。フジクローム・ベルビア100フィルムで撮影した。
Zhenyi Tan, in a blog post titled Ensheinification, writes: Every time I replace something with a new thing, the new thing is worse. My mother-in-law bought a new rice cooker. It has 20 settings and none of them cook good rice. The old one had one button and made perfect rice for 10+ years. I talked to her about it....
I read everything, or very nearly so, that my friend Adam Roberts publishes, online or in print, so when I read this post by Adam I immediately checked to see if indeed I did respond — and in most cases I did. One of Adam’s essays in particular, this post from 2017, now strikes me as particularly important, and my...
Orgasms are great, genuinely one of the best feelings that I think we get to have. Generally, this is achieved through masturbation or sex, and sometimes some of us might get them in our sleep. I believe I've woken up post-orgasm once or twice in my life, but I've had many many dreams where I get extremely close....