Tue Apr 14
I think I'm mostly caught up with the collection of Emacs Lisp packages that need updating and tidying, which means yesterday evening's clean-up should be one of the last (although I would like to revisit a couple and actually improve and extend them at some point). As for what I cleaned up yesterday: wordcloud.el....
At a Glance Intro What Does this Mean How do I Participate Outro Intro After much hinting, faffing about, and being worried about having to be a community manager a golden opportunity fell into my lap! Javier reached out to me to discuss bringing the Taylor community to the Ruby User Forum. I was weary initially...
Dear reader,Robert Birming published a blog post recently, where he encouraged bloggers to stop limiting themselves by only writing about a niche topic.Don't go niche . . . The only thing that matters is that you feel free in your blogging. As soon as you start limiting yourself, trying to trend, you've got one foot...
Why you shouldn’t use AI to generate your poster. Over the Easter weekend I was taking a stroll down the Rhos-on-Sea promenade, and noticed the following community noticeboard promoting local events. I stopped, took a photo, and went on my merry way. Of the posters, I can confidently say that there is a Betws-Y-Coed...
One lesson I learned from the trip my wife and I made to Halifax, Canada, was that I absolutely didn’t enjoy having a huge, 41L backpack on me while walking around all day: It was heavy, hard to handle and very warm. So in preparation for our upcoming trip to Portugal, I went down a rabbit hole to find a sling bag...
Translation of the parts related to Venice of the "De Administrando Imperio" (c.950) by Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus.
Living at Ease mtift Tue, 04/14/2026 - 08:31 At the end of my yoga classes, I say a lot of things. Be kind in your thoughts, speech, and actions. Take care of yourself and the people around you. May you find peace.And then I say something that sounds simple but isn’t: may you live at ease.Most people hear “live at...
Claudia Efemini writing for The Guardian: The AI clone of Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder and chief executive, is being trained on his mannerisms and tone as well as his public statements and thoughts on company strategy. Ostensibly Zuckerberg’s AI clone will allow tens-of-thousands of Meta employees “access” to their...
2026-04-14Hello! My first ever panorama photo!I have a couple of ideas on what to talk about floating around, but none of them fit a certain photo. So today, let's talk about Christmas.We're about as far from the Christmas craze as we could be today, so it's a perfect time for me to recount a story from Christmas...
I. The drill bit screams through ice older than human civilization, and Kira feels it in her teeth. Sixty meters down in Europa’s crust, the vibration travels up through the rig, through her suit, through bone. She’s been on surface for four months now. Two more until rotation back to Ganymede. Her radiation counter...
In this citizen’s opinion it’s…pretty gross that Jake makes his kid call him ‘sir’; my parents tried to foist that on me but didn’t start until I was WAY too old and it went poorly. I know he was military but like—how’s all that military stuff worked out for you so far bro, how’s your opinion re: the military these...
It’s been a while since I’ve posted an #ArchiveTheUnimportant item. Today’s is a 28-page paper newsletter from April 1990 that I found in the basement. Used Computer Locator billed itself as “The National Guide to Used Computers and Surplus Electronics.” One of dozens (or hundreds), I’m sure. The content was...
This was a great talk! In a C++ conference, who would have imagined? Via Adam Gordon Bell: Kate Gregory has been writing C++ for over forty years. Books, keynotes, a consulting firm she built from the ground up. At sixty-three, she’s one of the most experienced programmers alive. She surveyed hundreds of software...
April 2026. Lincoln. South Herts have made a splendid job of organising this week’s CAMRA Members Weekend, putting the emphasis on pub crawls curated surveys of licenses premises. If you’re in St Albans this weekend and see Paul Mudge, don’t forget to buy him a half. They’ve also just produced a leaflet promoting...
“Life is wasted when we make it more terrifying, precisely because it is so easy to do so.” In a world pocked by cynicism and pummeled by devastating news, to find joy for oneself and spark it in others, to find hope for oneself and spark it in others, is nothing less than a countercultural act of courage and...
I started a french blog for practice. I won't spam the feed with its updates, though, besides this one.
Introducing Bam Adebayo’s 83 Point Game On March 10, 2026, Miami Heat center Bam Adebayo scored 83 points in a game against the Washington Wizards, which now stands as the second-highest individual scoring effort in NBA history behind Wilt Chamberlain’s 100 points on March 2, 1962 (see box score and highlights). Mr....
Rivva von Frank Westphal trägt seit 19 Jahren (!) zusammen, was die deutschsprachige Blogosphäre umtreibt und ist damit ein geschätzter zentraler Dienst für Menschen mit eigener Webseite—das Indie Web, das Smol Web. Umso seltsamer ist es, dass die Unterstützung von Rivva bisher verhalten ausfällt; auch ich gehöre...
A science teacher goes to space to save our sun. In this journey he meets a friendly alien who also came for the similar reasons. Ofcourse, the alien speaks a different language so they need to figure out a way to communicate and to face awkward problems. The movie is full of nice and creative humor. I like that the...
M is for Multitasking Its funny. A few years back, I read that a person couldn’t actually multitask. That it was infact just focusing on one thing and flipping to the next. That it wasnt healthy and that it was essentially feeding the same distraction brain rot that one could get from using social medias infinite...
I did not have much time to engage in my daily “feed reading” this morning. But I will not let that stop me from publishing my daily Pook-Emu Bee links. 1. Justice Department Files Case to Revoke U.S. Citizenship of Mastermind Behind Multimillion-Dollar Tax Fraud Scheme (USCIS. April 13, 2026.) The marriage fraud...
Recentemente eu tenho acompanhado um círculo de pessoas com uma habilidade muito peculiar. Arquivar e preservar jogos antigos. Não jogos de SNES, PSX e Dreamcast. Mas pessoas que vão atrás apenas de nichos específicos. Jogos de um sistema mais desconhecido, apenas jogos em disquetes, visual novels da década de 90,...
Spied a dogwood that has both pink and white flowers today. + 1 photoCurrently Listening: The Church Sisters “In The Garden”Reply via email
I recently added setting up a proper Bee hotel as a goal, but I didn’t think something similar would happen naturally. I love the concept of Bee hotels. Bee hotel is a man-made structure for solitary pollinator bees to rest. It seemed like a fun project, so I added it to my TODO list. This week, we found that one of...
I have bad handwriting. I used fountain pens in school till ball-point pens and then gel pens replaced them. I wasn’t fascinated by fountain pens then, as much as I was about gel pens when they first arrived. Over the past 8 years or so, I’ve taken on a liking and appreciation for fountain pens. There is something...
A PC-98 style artwork of a woman sharing a wagashi giftbox. Made in Krita using the new Pixel smoothing setting.
I went for a walk today. No destination, no idea how far; I turned wherever the light was green and ambled unhurriedly. My thoughts followed me like a dozen frantic shadows, scattering and regrouping between sights of happy trees and fading murals.Listening to: “Vous Dansez” by KZAReply via email
I have never seriously kept a commonplace book, but I have long had a habit of jotting down, usually in scrappy little notebooks, short quotations from things I'm reading or have come across. I lost several such notebooks some years ago when my bag mysteriously disappeared in the course of a Tube journey (presumably...
The Assistant Commissioner walked along a short and narrow street like a wet, muddy trench, then crossing a very broad thoroughfare entered a public edifice, and sought speech with a young private secretary (unpaid) of a great personage. This fair, smooth-faced young man, whose symmetrically arranged hair gave him...
Put away your phone and play Pokémon on your Nintendo DS instead
I wanted to quickly highlight a new blog discovery platform I’ve just learned about called Bubbles. It uses a community voting system similar to sites like Reddit, Hacker News, or Bear Blog. Signing up is super easy since you just log in with a Fediverse account (with read-only permissions). I think it’s an...
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. Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly building an AI clone to replace him in meetings, The Verge. This is a good use case for generative AI, though it’s not particularly impressive — it...
Waiting for a train at Chesham tube station. It’s always a bit surreal to jump onto a Metropolitan Line train so far out of the capital. Despite last week being filled with illness and unexpected jobs that consumed me for days, it felt great to be back at my desk on Tuesday, so my time off must have been restful...
In cybersecurity and IT, stress gets normalized way too easily. That does not make it healthy, and it definitely does not make it sustainable. April is Stress Awareness Month, and I think that is a good excuse for those of us in cybersecurity and IT to be honest about something our industry still handles poorly. We...
I’m back to traveling for work. My old project and my new job will require me to travel more often, much like I did in recent years, when four out of every 14 days I spent 800 km away from home. Over the past few weeks, I’ve taken trains and planes several times. I’ve set foot in Italian train stations and airports...
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has announced its new class of fellows, and three philosophers are among them. They are: Alan Baker (Swarthmore College) Kate Manne (Cornell University) Gina Schouten (Harvard University) Alan Baker, Kate Manne, Gina Schouten From nearly 5000 applicants, 223 fellows...
Computer clock synchronization is a complicated process, requiring protocols like NTP and a specialized server to answer requests. In this post I explore a “serverless” method, which relies on widely available CDNs to distribute time. It’s the serverless time servers we didn’t realize we already had. If you're...
Schalten in Programmen. TENDLER: 7. Start, Statistiken und Schalten Das Schalten im Programm LSODA Das Schalten im Programm DEASY Das Schalten im Programm RKF4RW Das Schalten im Programm NTI/SIMPLE Das Schalten im Programm PAI4 1. Kurzbeschreibung des Programmes LSODA 2. LSODAR und Programmtransparenz 3. Bewertung...
Just sharing two software/workflow changes I’ve made recently, and why they’re improvements over what I had before. Window management: Magnet → RectangleI bought Magnet ages ago, back when it first came out. At the time it was pretty much the only reliable window management system around.Recently I learned about...
We were running late to our own wedding reception. It was the middle of October, and the rain came down heavily, pattering insistently against the windshield. There was no wedding ceremony, of course: social anxiety won in the end, and the reception was the compromise. As we waited, gridlocked and enveloped by...
This post came across my feed after work today and this bit from that piece really struck me close to home: Maybe I'm too old or my month to month interests are just very settled? Maybe I just need to open up a bit? It's the kind of page that likely would have found more use when I was discovering lots of new things...
I couldn’t send the last few Mediations due to sickness and not getting enough rest to recover fully. I kept telling myself that I should write and send something, but I didn’t want to send anything half-baked. Also, I realized that I still don’t have a stable mechanism for sending this newsletter biweekly to keep...
Sleep review, lunch break nap April 14th, 2026: 8/10, too short, otherwise no notes. Reply by email
Wakamaifondue is a web tool to inspect font contents, and it starts by you dropping a font file (.ttf, .otf, or .woff) into a browser. It handles file dropping so thoughtfully, it’s worth pausing and recognizing it: Here’s what’s great about it: You can drop the file anywhere. There is no designated small drop area...
I spent the entire day cleaning and fixing up Game Boys for the market event in May. The consoles will run around 150-250 dollars depending on if they have mods or just new shells and batteries. Knowing full well I might sell a single console the entire day, and it's just for one day, I pulled a bunch of singles...
In its simplest form, journaling is keeping a record of our thoughts, emotions, and reactions to our circumstances. It gives us a history to revisit, reference material that would otherwise get lost in unreachable corners of our memory. I've gone back to pages from 4 or 5 years ago and been surprised to realize that...
In which I challenge myself to draw a pokemon every day until I stop OK so I know this feels moot at this point but like. Covid? Covid's got hands?? Before the first lockdown happened in March of 2020 my partner and I started taking it very seriously because of health stuff in our immediate household. I don't wanna...
Jake and Neytiri’s family grapples with grief, encountering a new, aggressive Na’vi tribe, the Ash People, who are led by the fiery Varang, as the conflict on Pandora escalates and a new moral focus emerges. The movie looks fantastic, the movie is great, the story is crap. It’s beautiful, but empty. The bad guys are...
This weekend was packed with quite a bit of stuff, I wonder if things will calm down a bit now that the Easter vacation period is over. 🎨 Modified my website design, just a bit! I created a new background wallpaper pattern featuring icons of game consoles, videogames, hobbies and the like. I also went back to a...
One of the main issues I've had so far, is that I sometimes want to add a file from my mac to the remarkable, and still be able to interact with the graphical elements of it on the reMarkable. Simple example: Adding a pdf page with a circle as a pdf to the reMarkable only makes it a passive background layer by...
The year is 2143, people customarily greet each other with a saying of long-forgotten origin, “let me share my screen”, eliciting the enigmatic yet empathic response, “I can see your screen”. — Radhika, 24 août 2023 (Mastodon)
Troubleshooting FulfilmentsI don’t know about you, but I love working through and solving problems. That feeling of accomplishment, especially when it’s in a field you’re not familiar with, is awesome. What’s something you solved recently that made you feel this way? Feel free to send me a webmention if you reply...
This is the first novel by AM Kvita. Overall, fun, a touch of cozy, with queer found family tropes. I had some world-building hang-ups, but it's more of a character piece. Our protagonist, Joan Greenwood, comes from the ruling witch family of New York, and yet she's got a distant relationship with them. While Joan...
Personal Encyclopedias, by Jeremy, via Kottke. delphitools indie toolkit, by ruby morgan voigt, via Jeremy. Via Virginia: defuddle.md is a simple tool for generating a Markdown representation of a web page. It’s super easy to use it from the command line, too: % curl defuddle.md/alertbutnotalarmed.com Kicking its...
Just noticed that I am featured on bubbles, and that shit slaps! Discoverability is the biggest problem in blogging today, and while I may have managed to get a decent RSS feed, I still continually struggle with finding new blogs. Bubbles works as a syndicator with the wide goal of sharing active, non-corporatized,...