Wed Aug 19
This post is about Windows. Last time we saw that sockets are pretty much just handles, and as such, they can be inherited. If a process creates an inheritable socket and runs CreateProcess with the appropriate parameters, its children will retain access to the socket. This has obvious security and functional...
I’ve been thinking more about these weeknotes, pondering whether it’s time to explore a different format. Six years ago, I made a note that I was inspired by Ton Zijlstra’s format, and it’s served me well. But I’ve stopped looking forward to documenting my week as much as I used to. Part of my reluctance to change...
I can’t remember the last time I applied for a permanent full-time job, but it was in the years soon after I left school. I held a couple of these sorts of jobs, but have pretty much worked freelance since. Leads there have come through people I know, or even disassociated. It’s fair to say I have no idea what the —...
For the past few years I’ve been working on reverse engineering and remaking an almost 40 year old DOS game. Despite its age, I’m often surprised by the complexity and little tricks the game used, one of which is sound priority. Here’s the deal: the game, Crystal Caves, uses PC speaker audio, an extremely primitive,...
Microsoft Surface Pro 5 cu i5-7300U, 8 GB RAM și 256 GB SSD, se găsește SH între 800 și 1200 de lei. De unde scot oameni așa prețuri? Este o tabletă din 2017, nu este una nouă. M-am uitat pe eMAG la Surface Pro 11 și 12 - are preț de laptop, între 4000 și 6000 de lei. La bani aceștia îmi dau laptop sau PC în toată...
♠ More and more I’ve been resorting to LLMs / Gen AI to file feature requests or issues/bugs in upstream repositories. Sometimes I get completely ignored, even when I follow the project guidelines. For example, last week I filed this issue in Pi. It got auto-closed. I know why it was auto-closed, but it’s lame,...
Got stuck in NYC. Made the best of it by seeing Upright Citizens Brigade sketch comedy.Reply via email
You might be wondering why I’m already back hiking since I walked more than 40 km just a few days ago. And the answer to that is that I’m not hiking. This was a short stroll to briefly visit a church that would normally be part of the tenth and final segment of this ten-part loop. As I mentioned in my previous post,...
Well, not really but almost! It's preseason and I've watched a preseason game! For the past couple years, watching Titans games has been equivalent to self-flagellation. The team has been bad, and there hasn't been much cause for optimism. It's felt like we've been a bad organization. Since 2022, we're tied with the...
I'm currently reading “The Notebook: a history of thinking on paper” by Roland Allen. Here I am, urged to think on paper. I grow increasingly jealous of those in ownership of discipline and solitude for thoughts. My motherhood years have just begun and I can only feel gratitude when I look at my perfect children....
This is my morning drink. A favorite! Iced Espresso Tonic from Peixoto Coffee Roasters in downtown Chandler, Arizona. The tonic is a Sonoran Desert inspired Prickly Pear and Lime. This was the first time I've had this flavor and it did not disappoint. The tonic is topped with a freshly brewed shot of espresso. The...
The implicit promise of modernity is: we have to work really hard for a few centuries, but eventually we’ll get to the Star Trek future where we’ve automated all the drudgery, and all work is meaningful, heroic, and dignifies the spirit. We will be artists, scholars, captains of the starship Enterprise, etc. There’s...
[ ] Figure out what info actually is required [!EMAIL]- [[2026-02-16]] Francis Just keep collecting any background papers similar so we have ab it of an evidence base to work with. The more awareness you have about patents and the process the better prepared you can be - see if there are any guides or training...
Over a decade ago, Jennifer Whiting (Pittsburgh) asked us to seriously consider an idea of Annette Baier‘s regarding tenure and promotion decisions. Recent technological developments speak in favor of revisiting it. Initially, Baier’s proposal was meant to address how pregnancy and childcare may interfere with or...
As a former librarian, I am always keen to learn of writers, artists and musicians vastly more illustrious than me who also worked as librarians at some point in their lives. So far, my list includes Proust (who took a job as a volunteer librarian, to please his father, but hardly ever turned up for work), Marcel...
Internet à moda antiga: conheça a indie web, onde as pessoas ainda fazem seus próprios sites Also posted on IndieNews
An astounding performance by Cory Wong, Joshua Redman, and more: Reply by email
I like a good old rule of thumb. Like the one I came across recently. To quickly figure out if a certain food is an efficient source of protein, use the following formula: Protein (g per 100 g)×10≥Calories (kcal per 100 g) \text{Protein (g per 100 g)} \times 10 \geq \text{Calories (kcal per 100 g)} Protein (g per...
Rina wakes before the bell and lies still, reading her. Anna sleeps on her back, one hand curled near her chin. Everyone born down here sleeps like that, nothing like the training reels. Her breath is shallow and fast. It has been getting faster for a week, and Rina knows it the way she knows the fans in their...
August 2026. Coventry. Right, let’s leave inner Coventry and head to the underpass, follow those scooters. Spon End is the heart of the light manufacturing quarter west of town, watchmaking mainly, a place few tourists tread. Of course, most tourists tick the cathedral(s) and the music museum that Lana just found,...
Guys this is crazy. On Monday, I dreamt that I searched up the healthiest food on google, and there it was.
A year ago, I wrote about the four Anbernic handhelds built around an Allwinner H700 system on a chip I had purchased over a period of time. Two of those were heavily-inspired by two of my favorite Nintendo handheld consoles: the original Nintendo Game Boy Advance (RG34XX H) and the Game Boy Advance SP (RG35XX SP)....
Content warning for MATTERS GASTRONOMICAL, for SAFEWAY GAS-PUMPS BEING A DICK, for HOPEFULLY UNFOUNDED FEARS OF CANCER, and for POTIONS OF CRAP-YOUR-ENTIRE-SKELETON Hiya! So you may recall some time back—exactly how far I can’t recall, for time has become a flat circle under whose edge I am ground like so much...
Keeping the Pook-Emu Bee weekday streak going on this sunny (here in Brooklyn, at least) August 19, 2026. I upgraded the InfiniTime firmware on my PineTime yesterday. 1 | Vindman Vaporizes $16.2 Million in Loss, Spends 36X DSA Candidate on Ads (Paul Bois for Breitbart. August 18, 2026) & Rep. Cory Mills Unseated in...
Just thinking, as one does, about the first and original Godzilla film (the original Japanese title being Gojira), released in 1954 as an allegory for the nuclear holocausts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and how every adult actor in that film lived through, if not those two bombings, then all the rest of the bombings...
August 19, 2026 My sites have never been hugely popular and I’ve never had a large audience except for blips and spikes here and there. But that’s not why I have a website. I make blakewatson.com for myself. I do it so I can copy a link and send it to a friend. I do it as a record of my thoughts and passions. I...
I knew of the existence of paperless-ngx for a long time. A new YouTube video now finally gave me the push to set up an instance on my VPS. It’s configured to use Bunny.net storage using S3 and rclone for the media files, and a restic backup is configured to regularly back up the bucket to Scaleway. Now I just need...
Also here's a cool unrelated photo of a chipmunk Look at this little guy. They don't know what an AI model is and they're so much better off It’s nothing short of an indictment of our society at large that Aaron Swartz, one of the co-creators of the RSS protocol (among many other things) was effectively assasinated...
Beautiful bike I saw walking around in Hermosa. It was parked up against a car, so I removed the background in Photoshop and replaced it with a purple gradient, for more of a studio look. ハーレー ハーモサビーチを散策中に見かけた美しいバイクだ。車の横に停まっていたので、Photoshopで背景を削除し、紫のグラデーションに置き換えて、スタジオで撮影したような雰囲気を出してみた。
En el blog Tecnoysoft publicaron el pasado 9 de agosto de 2026 una entrevista ficticia realizada por una IA. A raíz de ese artículo, me pareció interesante «reciclar» la entrevista y publicar en mi blog mis propias respuestas. El artículo original de la web Tecnoysoft lo podéis leer en este artículo con sus...
I only have ever seen my grandfather in this one portrait picture on my grandmothers wall, and on my mom's nightstand when I grew up. In this picture you see a man in his thirties. He has a tall face, framed with dark wavy hair. He has a half smile on his face, open and and reserved at the same time. There is a...
The Mastodon team published some mock-ups of the upcoming version 5.0. The ideas all seem good to me, especially the greater distinction of private mentions (renamed “messages”) and the emphasis given to the lists (renamed “custom feeds”).
I made a smol client-side syntax highlighter that uses the CSS Custom Highlights API called MicroLighter. I’ll talk about why I made it in a bit but first I wanted to… ahem… highlight… some of the features. Zero-dependencies ~2kb minifed+gzipped Uses CSS ::highlight(token-name), not spans Leverages Textmate’s...
I feel a bit frazzled today. Let me record some snapshots:--I meet with my Candidacy Committee today for an Endorsement Panel. I have completed the huge writing project, and the people involved know me on some level. I'm not nervous, exactly, but I'm taking it seriously. During my upcoming walk, I'll try to...
Some time ago, I shared a video talking about games that leaned into their bugs and made them part of their lore. One not listed there, perhaps because it’s the most obvious example, is Pac-Man’s kill screen. A few weekends ago at an arcade game convention, I spotted something really interesting. It was an arcade...
I am indifferent to the debate about what LLMs can or cannot do. I only know what interests me: writing good English and reading the well-considered words of other human beings. (Human beings have certain shared experiences on which I place great value. YMMV, so you do you.) But the increased power of LLMs has had...
A quick little update to Rogallo, bumping to v1.11.0. This release is mainly in support of people who like to use the mouse as much as, if not more than, the keyboard; and also in support of people who might wish to reclaim a couple of lines of display for actual content. The main change in this release is that I've...
TL;DRWhy building an app over the weekend isn't the same as building enterprise software I’ve noticed an interesting gap opening up over the last six months. It isn’t really a gap in technology. It’s a gap in what different people think software engineering actually is. The conversation usually starts the same way....
Partitioned life you seek of joy minus the suffering Homesick you thus are for a land that never is aspiring to a state you shall not be present in This rugged boat of yours can sail to the furthest edges where glaciers never melt and fire burns eternal only to demonstrate that foam and depth here and there are one
A leading team of analysts are buried in the heart of GCHQ, secretly working to neutralise threats against Britain. Good TV Drama about cyber security and the unseen war. It feels a bit over the top at times, and it drifts into sentimental bullshit, which is unlikely for British TV, but it’s still a solid thriller....
Picture a fairly ordinary MSP automation project. The first version reads an incoming support ticket and produces a summary for the technician. It saves a little time, touches one source of information, and cannot change anything. Then the team connects it to the documentation platform so it can suggest a fix....
If you follow me for even five minutes, you will find my disenfranchisement with modern smartphones is palpable. It seems to be a massive waste to have this capable device that sits in your pocket be nothing more for 95% of people than a doomscrolling facilitator. As such, I have wanted my phone to be the fablelled...
So one of the things I've been trying to do as part of my journey to lose weight and get fit is sort my diet out. As the saying goes, "you can't out-train a poor diet". And the worst part of my diet is definitely snacking in the evening. The routing generally goes: Have dinner. Put the kids to bed and settle down...
I'm a little behind and just realized that Bear blog now gives users the option to add a Previous and Next to a blog post template. This allows readers to navigate to your Previous or Next blog post without having to go back to your Archive / Blog list. If you have been using this, you may have noticed that these...
Response to My writing is not 100% organic anymore I am so tired of posts about AI, so I'll try to write about everything besides it. Believe it or not, I am not a native english speaker either. When I started blogging, I also used a LLM to proof read. I used it to help me formulate myself. It made my posts...
I didn't think I could write a post a day, until I did itWhen I first heard about Blaugust, an annual blogging challenge where participants post 31 times during the month of August, I thought, "I'm never going to be able to do that". I was intrigued, however. Not enough to sign up officially as a participant, but I...
Well, I’ve gone from initial, curmudgeonly reluctance, to shruggy acceptance, to full-blown, guns-blazing, AI mania at work. I’m writing skills, shipping agents, thinking through internal distribution logistics. I think I’ve used about $100 of tokens in the past few days, and that number is growing rapidly. I’ll...
“Zen practice … requires great faith, great courage, and great questioning.” If death is so enormous a mystery that we remain unable to wrap our grownup minds around it, despite comfort from our great poets and consolation from our great philosophers, how are tiny humans to make sense of it all? Although there exist...
Ich bin mir nicht sicher wie hoch die Informationsdichte dieses Textes ist, man könnte ja mal nachzählen (meine Prognosen fallen niedrig aus). [33/1000] Informationsdichte ist ein Maß dafür, wie viel Information, wie viele Unterschiede, die einen Unterschied machen in einem bestimmten Stück Text enthalten ist. Ob...
2026-08-19Hello!We are close to Day 200 on dpanphoto, and I'm compiling a list of links across the internet that I find interesting. If there's a website I should know about, please contact me! I do this, in part, because it helps me take account of my biases and my circles of knowledge.This is an old-fashioned...
The Rise, the third novel of the Arcane Revolution Trilogy, is currently being promoted on Kickstarter to help me raise the funds for its final editing, production, and ongoing promotion. The Premise The novel picks up where From the Ashes left off. Ten years on from the end of the Yellow War and the defeat of...
A couple days ago, the fucking crawlers ramped up their efforts to get past my 429 error page, so I finally set up a fail2ban rule that would block anything that kept on poking at things.Hoo boy that was the wrong thing to do. When the bot farms started to detect that I was blocking them at the IP level, they...