Tue Aug 04
Constant quiet may not be a good idea, just like constant busyness. It’s the latter that makes the former more meaningful. Still, I have to make sure I find stillness during my personal hours, too, and not just on the weekends. I should not expect myself to live all of life in just two days every week. I need to be...
I joined the Fediverse, or more specifically Mastodon, I think some time in 2021. I was drawn in because of the promise of a decentralized social network, a social network not controlled by a single company, but rather governed from the bottom up. Especially around the time Twitter went the way it did, there was a...
I cannot understand Mozilla. We took time off of X, but we’re back. The internet is changing again, so we’re here as an independent voice for our users and the open internet. @firefox · Jul 20, 2026 They either do not know who their user base is, or they know but those are not the users they want. I care about the...
What have I been upto? I’ve been to Scotland! I had a week off to go some travelling, surrounding a wedding which was last Wednesday, so we went from Dundee (where we saw the Lemmings Statue) to Inverary. I’ve eaten well (blog post to follow on that), saw Castle Aaargh, and generally drove through some incredible...
Alan: Let’s establish some guidelines and guardrails, shall we? I understand that most users of Claude enjoy the fiction that Claude is a human, or very human-like, personal assistant, and in that context it seems natural for Claude to offer to follow up, to express interest in an idea, to praise a comment for its...
“You’re just nostalgic!” They will say when you point out the fact that everything today is crumbling around us. Where every McDonalds has transformed into a grey box without a playplace - because the playplace would mean people stay longer without paying more money, and the grey box can be sold in the future when...
2026-08-04Hello!This must be obvious to any long-time reader, but I think that I've found a cohesive style surrounding most of the photos I publish on this website. They're spontaneous moments that I capture on photowalks, showing the outdoors through the seasons.I'm still an event photographer by trade, and I...
In this video I demonstrate the built-in ‘speedbar’ command. This is the file explorer that Emacs ships with. Starting with Emacs 31, the ‘speedbar’ can be configured to appear on the side of the frame. Whereas the default is to show up in a separate frame. To me, the default is impractical, whereas the new option...
Put another way, the ads give brands like Ally and the non-profit professional organization Project Management Institute another lever to pull on how they show up in generative search. LLMs can pick up a brand’s information from the ad and index it, which can then shape AI-generated responses, which in turn, can...
July 2026. Newcastle. Not even lunchtime as I leave the Free Trade for the walk through Ouseburn back into Toon. Actually, a rare walk along a dried up river (I never knew that watercourse was actually called the Ouseburn till today), my first look at this Newcastle cultural highlight since a Julia Jacklin gig at...
Two Things Instead of a List mtift Tue, 08/04/2026 - 08:03 During the summers in Minnesota, just about everyone I know gets busy. We have a few glorious months to go outside in shorts and sandals, and we use them. For my family, with both kids in town from college, that means more weekends at the cabin, swimming,...
I wanted to earn enough to buy the sun, but here on earth I started hyperventilating and ran out of air. I didn’t breath again until I gasped at the sight of a cream and midnight striped tent. I stopped everything to watch the circus. The acrobats wore the night sky speckled with stars and held a little bronze bird,...
Actually, I just posted this on Mastodon, but I so agree to all those points that I want to reference them here on the blog as recommended reads as well. Generative AI is reshaping software engineering—but the narrative has gotten ahead of the evidence. Marketing claims, anecdotal wins, and misread studies have...
Why good innovations mint new elites — and how to tell the dangerous cases from the merely disruptive Every year something like forty thousand Americans die on the roads. The strongest large-scale data we have — from driverless fleets logging hundreds of millions of miles — suggests that within the limited areas...
Mood: Wanting to throw a $30,000 prototype into a lake. There is a feel-good genre of viral video that I call "The Inspiration Porn Industrial Complex." You know the one. It usually features a college engineering team, a dramatic piano soundtrack, and a disabled person strapped into a machine that looks like a...
I see that my old university has given a professorship to a fantasist and plagiarist (both 'alleged', m'lud), for reasons that are all too painfully obvious. The story is still unfolding, in jaw-dropping detail, and will surely do real harm to Cambridge's reputation. One of Arday's outlandish Munchausenesque tales...
Buying new devices for a hobby or entertainment purposes is exciting. I enjoy researching, watching reviews, and digging into forums to determine if my purchase will be worth it. I imagine myself using my new toy. Often, this thought makes me happier than the actual experience of using it. In the past, I purchased...
Looking out over the valley towards Lucca. We spent this week on holiday in Tuscany, Italy, with eight of our friends. Our summer break was planned to be early this year as our eldest son heads back to university next week. This holiday came and went in a flash, as they always do. Our home for the week was Il...
Is The Bad Take back? And some reflections on leaving an online footprintAbout 3 people in the world would have noticed that there is a new episode of The Bad Take podcast. On Saturday, Himal and I recorded a conversation about Christopher Nolan's new film The Odyssey. I edited it over the weekend and published it...
Andreas posted some interesting thoughts, wondering if maybe we are too paranoid when it comes to AI slop. Please, go read his words first, I only intend to add to the conversation here, not to put him in an uncomfortable position or something, we are friends and everything after all—even if he barely mentions my...
Last year, it was comments. This year it’s AI. Now, I think if you’re going to blog, you should do it yourself. Using AI for inspiration, I suppose, is okay, but the actual writing? Why bother having a blog if you’re not going to do the writing yourself? The entire point of blogging is to express yourself. That...
After just a wee bit too long without news of any kind about it, I’m really excited to announce that initial drafting on the third Arcane Revolution Trilogy book is finally done, having been completed late last week! The Premise The novel picks up where From the Ashes left off. Ten years on from the end of the...
This weekend is prerelease for the Hobbit Set. It costs $50 to enter. You get six packs of play boosters, a random foil card, and a spin down d20. (They removed stamped promos.) From that you create a 40ish card deck of the random stuff you pulled hoping you can play well enough with it. The event takes about four...
I recently repaired the Micro USB socket of an old Raspberry Pi; the one through which the Pi receives it's power. It was a bit of a fiddly soldering job because the connections for the USB port are tiny. Because of this, I briefly considered just sending the power straight into the 5V and GND pins on the Pi's pin...
Last edited 9 minutes ago. This is my 37th month of August on this earth as a human being. The past year of my life has been... eventful. Unfortunately. One might even say it's been a series of unfortunate events, but I've heard this is copyrighted or whatever. I've been financially struck due to my own mental...
More or Less If anything, he looks as surprised as I am at the notion of being awake. Or surprised at the notion that I haven't done a true "Snowapple says good morning" post since December. He's been in other posts but the format itself really stopped a long time ago and I hadn't even realized. The sleeping habits...
Băi, da' cât de împărțită poate să fie lumea și cât se poate urî unii pe alții. Așa a fost cu COVID, așa a fost cu războiul din Ucraina, Palestina sau Iran, așa a fost cu alegerile prezidențiale cu Călin Georgescu și pe urmă cu Nicușor Dan, și acum este cu AI-ul. Nu mai știe lumea cum să te urască mai tare și cum să...
A strange thing happens when you press Enter on an empty item in a list in most text editors – the entire list item disappears: This feels counterintuitive. Isn’t Enter for committing and adding more things? Wouldn’t Backspace be the right key to press to break a list? Yes, and no. I am not sure who invented this...
“Top of the World” by Carpenters Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. What song makes you feel like you’re in love with the world? The first song that my Mum heard on the radio after I was born. She described it me later as “feeling like she was finally connected to the world”,...
Cheerful fumbling It’s a damp early morning, the house clearly recalls the past hot day better than the cooler night. I’m playing a four chord song on my piano: my voice leading is clunky, the rhythm is uneven, and I couldn’t be more pleased to spend five minutes like this, skill-taste gap be damned. Even though...
If I spend more than a few days in a new town, I start to poke around for a breakfast diner. It's a sort of greasy time bubble where everyone sets aside their differences to gorge on eggs and coffee. Eggs, coffee, bacon, pancakes. Notes to a song that we (and our physicians) know by heart. I take comfort in the...
Disclaimer: This is a guide for Amrita Bangalore students. I made a huge mistake, and lost my first and second semester gradesheets. I wanted to document what I had to do to request a duplicate gradesheet from the university becaues I found the whole process troublesome and mired in bureaucracy. The bigger problem...
Quoted What is a Visual Novel? (Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction) A Visual Novel (VN) is a digital narrative focused game that requires interactions where the player must be able to impact the story world or the story’s progression. The story and interactions are most commonly presented through a...
A note from my journal that I just stumbled across again.It's fascinating how you can always put things in a new context just by flipping back through old entries. Almost as if the process of coming to terms with things continues way beyond the last entry. It's been a while since I wrote about my journal where I...
Thinking about selling the 64GB RAM from my laptop and paying off my mortgage... Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.
Yesterday I moved my blog to Hugo and, despite my rigorous testing locally and in a staging deployment, I broke my RSS feed in production. Perfect. 🤦♂️ The issue was that the Hugo baseURL setting wasn’t being applied properly, so all the post links were pointing at localhost. The scrappy,...
Lighthizer, N., Chen, J., Niyazmand, H., Patel, K., Janzen, J., Xu, P., … Alam, K. (2026). Patient experiences of laser and surgical lid procedures performed by optometrists. Clinical and Experimental Optometry, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1080/08164622.2026.2699980 This study highlights the benefits of expanding the...
New links… To say that something is indescribable is to describe it. What should we think about this “paradox of ineffability”? — best to dissolve it, argues Peter van Elswyk “Moving through time also means moving through space” — this makes time travel “a very bad idea”, explains Douglas Giles (via the Browser) Two...
Part 3 of the Blue Team Fundamentals track in my CybersecKyle Security How-To Series begins where a scanner export usually ends: deciding which results represent reachable risk, who owns the affected systems, and how a fix will be verified.A vulnerability scanner is good at producing observations at scale. It may...
Like many projects, this one was abandonned for a while. But it’s (mostly) done now. solarigraphy Solarigraphy is the photographic practice of using a pinhole camera to capture an image of the sun’s path over days-weeks-months-years. Typically it uses regular B&W photo paper[1] for capturing the image. And...
A mission post by Lieutenant JG Veda Dragomirov, Commander Nadiv Sharir Mission - Lick Your Fingers Clean Veda was still a little exhausted from the looping the artifact Morgan had accidentally gotten stuck in caused; not physically tired, she was thankful that every loop had started off with her being as awake as...
Bookmarks related to tech and web development My Opinionated CSS Reset by Declan Chidlow. How the same content always has multiple different versions by Diana Khalipina. Blogs are back. Email address obfuscation: What works in 2026? by Spencer Mortensen. Post 13264 by Chris Coyier. CSS is filling the gaps with...
… I think about how, when I was four years old, my mother put me in a Catholic daycare so that she could return to the workforce (we were not Catholic) only to pull me out in short order because with my long hair and delicate features (such a hippie child) the nuns kept thinking I was a girl and sending me to use...
Jorijn Schrijvershof’s decision to close the Mastodon instance toot.community, which he established in late 2024, highlights many of the difficulties facing instance administrators on the decentralised social media platform: Every day, I deal with spam, bots, technical issues, abuse reports, and user conflicts. Much...
There’s been a fair bit of publicity of the Open AI “rogue agent” that hacked into Hugging Face. This prompted Anthropic to check what their models were up to and, to my complete lack of surprise, discovered three incidents where models had gained unauthorized access to data in other organizations. Simon Wilison...
I know, it’s not fair to call a note “banana cake- rant” and not mention “banana cake” once. Might I remind you, “Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.” — Oscar Wilde. I almost quoted Princess Bride, but Wilde is a better fit. Saturday, August 1, 2026 banana cake- rant...
A Los Angeles detective chases a murder suspect in a remote Alaskan town. A sleep-deprived Al Pacino yelling his way left and right, Robin Williams with a decent performance, Hilary Swank as the young blood, they all add up to a decent thriller under the direction of Christopher Nolan. I wouln’t call this...
Para quien no lo haya conocido, el Hitz (o Hitz-Musik.net), fue un sitio web y una promotora de bandas que nació en Chihuahua a inicios de los 2000. Organizábamos tocadas y cubríamos la escena musical local como medio. Hacíamos entrevistas, fotografía, difusión de bandas, guerras de bandas… básicamente cualquier...
Earlier this week I was thinking about inspiration – what inspires me to write? Nature, friends, what I see in the world as I walk around – all these are the basis of many of my blog posts. Museums, too, inspire me, both to think and to create. When I am in a museum, I can get lost in an artwork, ebbing between the...
📌 Yesterday, Cocoa's (kitchen) water bowl has officially dried up. We haven't emptied it since the last day she took a sip from it 13 days ago. It's hitting me pretty hard. The grief I feel comes in waves. At the same time, it also feels like being stranded in the middle of a vast ocean, where I spend every waking...
En la entrada anterior , que lleva el mismo nombre que la presente redacción, conocimos cómo la historia del impresionismo es tan apasionante como observar un cuadro de sus representantes. No fue un estilo que surgiera de forma espontánea, sino el fruto de la amistad, el debate y la rebeldía compartida de un grupo...
PrefaceAfter reading a few posts from fellow bloggers about how much it costs them to run their site, I am intrigued as to how much I am actually paying for this passion project of mine! Check out the last section for more examples. Note The requirements for hosting a personal site and a commercial one is vastly...
Nothing to see here. Just some photos from my Foursquare check-ins turned black and white to look fancy.Reply via email