Thu Sep 17
I am tired this morning--it's a good tired because of a more intense week of good stuff, but a good tired is still tired. Let me collect some fragments before they float away:--One of my colleagues at Spartanburg Methodist College has been bringing in watermelon from her garden, which seems miraculous to me. I've...
Video: https://youtu.be/fBfJMNS0MnQ?si=mxBOzq0wXYGfLFsGThis is the best video I've ever watchedSimply amazing.
More publication news! This month Iâve actually had 3 co-authored publications come out and hot on the heels of the mĂ©lange paper, a rather different piece of work Iâve contributed to has just come out: the latest assessment from the Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise known as IMBIE to its friends, has...
When I first set foot on Japanese land, in October 2011, it felt strange in an unexpected way. The country itself is of course "different" by Western standards, but I already knew that. The truly strange part for me was that it didn't feel nearly as strange as I thought it would: there were no major surprises or...
I finally built something I wanted to build for ages - I build me a VS Code theme based on my website colors called Cita Theme.
What song always makes you feel better? Iâve always loved a song that builds, that layers in the instruments. Iâve always loved a great drum track. Iâve always loved interesting harmonies. Iâve always loved rock music. Iâve always loved a hint of tongue-in-cheek silliness. Iâve always loved Queen. And yeah, Iâll...
Radio 3 this morning was getting very excited about Radio 6 Music's T-Shirt Day (not to be confused with International T-Shirt Day or National T-Shirt Day â heaven knows what thrills await us on those dates). This is the kind of thing that tends to happen on the once sedate Radio 3 (what would Piers Burton-Page...
No me gusta para nada ese regusto amargo que te deja al final de tomarlo, no importa cuanta azĂșcar le añada, eso no cambia. Me desilusiona, porque lo que sĂ me gusta es su olor, con ese aroma yo pienso que va a saber delicioso y luego al probarlo me llevo una gran decepciĂłn. No me pasa eso con el tĂ© por ejemplo,...
A Piece of Red Cloth, written by Leonie Norrington, Djawundil Maymuru, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, and Djawa Burarrwanga, has been named winner of the fiction category in the Australian Prime Ministerâs Literary Award for 2026. Australian works of literature are recognised annually across six categories:...
September 2026. Godstone. Surrey. Three nights in Royal Tunbridge Wells looking after the in-laws, with only a tiny bit of exploration. A rare visit to mysterious Tandridge district; north of Gatwick, south of the Croydon suburbs, west of Churchillâs home and the National Trust parkland. Oh, and very close to...
This is a simple package to automatically preview in a window the file at point in Dired buffers. Preview windows are closed when they are no longer relevant, while preview buffers are killed if they have not been used for other purposes beside previewing. The package provides several customisation options to...
Trying some new functions for clouds. Featred: towering cumulus at dusk #rasdFastwalkerLeague View on Bluesky
Like a skeleton supporting the skin of a text, the page disappears in its very function, and in that unprepossessing nature lies its strength. A Brief History of the Page by Alberto Manguel in A Reader on Reading ; YALE 2010. As bloggers (and writers) we gaze at a blank page; pencil dancing clumsy steps through our...
Last night, the sliding door (in front of my shelves of shortboxes of comics) popped off when I was sliding it open. I had noticed that it had gotten a bit âstickyâ lately, but hadnât really investigated. And⊠this turned out to be the problem: Those ârailsâ at the bottom slid out. Like WTF. And it turns out that...
Every now and then, I find myself fascinated by the concept of game glitches. For example, yesterday, I watched a video showing some unused content from the 2nd gen Pokemon games that. In this specific case, the unused content was a house with a woman (and a Pokemon in it). It still exists in the game's code, you...
In July, I began circulating a draft of my next book, Humanlike: A Defense of AI Rights. I set it aside for a couple of months to get some distance on it while it accumulated comments. I'll soon dive back in for a fresh round of revisions. Comments are still very welcome! As a teaser, here's the current draft of...
2026-09-17Hello!I don't have much to say here. I ate some food to recharge in between my chaotic photography hunt for certain landmarks.The food wasn't all for myself, by the way(!) I was with some colleagues for the day and I'm glad they were able to contain my energy, if only a little. They know who they are.The...
I have an Interrail ticket that I bought during Black Friday discounts of December 2025, and I did not have the chance to use it, but I must before it expires in November 2026. Therefore, I am taking advantage of it for a series of trips I am doing in October 2026. 16 October: Rotterdam â Paris 19 October: Paris â...
A series of hardware tests that run directly from the web browser. It has for keyboard, mouse, screen, video game controls⊠For free.
Read When To? now!Do you have any âTimâsâ in your life who maybe get hyperfixated on something, ignoring the things that need to get done around them?Myself. Iâve had to set aside a day each week for laundry, dishes, and other household chores and then hold myself accountable to following through. Fictional worlds...
I recently replatformed the site from the Digital Ocean app engine to a Hetzner VPS. I wrote about why I migrated off of Digital Ocean here. I decided to use Caddy as the web server because it made getting up and running with TLS nice and easy. During the migration, my domain's A and AAAA records were still pointed...
We spend our lives mastering the art of losing. Our necessary losses shape us; the unnecessary, senseless, devastating losses bend our shape to test our breaking point. We can lose people to life â to conflict, to confusion, to the consequences of their trauma â losses painful precisely because it could be...
The call comes in completely unexpectedly, as, I'm sure, all great things do. Itâs Ray. He knows I wanted to come over to his house today, but he asks me if I want to have him come over here to my apartment complex, today. Usually, I don't like for people to come here because my apartment isn't exactly the best...
Your phone is not the problem Jeff says that he is a better person without his phone. Widdershins says theyâre the same with or without their phone. I think theyâre both right because when Jeff gets on his phone, he doomscrolls. When Widdershins uses his phone, he contacts his family, uses it as a digital planner,...
A few months ago I wrote an article on De Programmatica Ipsum about Keza MacDonaldâs awesome book âSuper Nintendo: The Game-Changing Company That Unlocked the Power of Playâ, and as I was reading the book I took some notes; here they go, in their entirety, and without any editing, and with the page numbers appended...
Youâre driving along the information superhighway when suddenly you hear a siren, so you pull over. Itâs the internet police. The officer gets out and comes over to your window. âWhat seems to be the problem, officer?â âI had to pull you over because I noticed you used the word âlayâ incorrectly in one of your blog...
Check out As in guillotine... for more. NOTE: Iâm not making this a weekly thing, but my schedule continues to be completely out of whack, and this is one of the few routines I can still (somewhat) control right now! âKick that style, wicked, wildâŠâ _ONE If Marketing Reports to Sales, Who Owns the Future Market? |...
I feel kinda stupid for even saying this, but itâs probably worth saying anyway: companies are not people. Companies donât make decisions. Companies donât decide who they want to donate money to. Companies donât feel shame. Companies donât learn from their mistakes. Companies donât have political orientation....
Make Some Noise is one of many fantastic improv comedy shows on Dropout. I noticed one of the ongoing themes is âtech gone bad,â so I compiled a short list below. I just find these really funny. Video call with shitty wifi: Logging in with 30-factor authentication: A cutscene in a video game thatâs glitching out: In...
Mr. Kremlev also has direct ties to President Vladimir V. Putin. In April, Mr. Putin honored Mr. Kremlev with a high-level state award, the Order of Friendship. And just days before Mr. Trumpâs wedding in May, Mr. Putin and Mr. Kremlev were seen together in China.Nothing to see here, I'm sure. Just another Russia...
For the past few years, the tech industry has kept pushing passkeys as the ultimate solution to logging in. Many Big Tech companies "helpfully" inform you every time you sign in how much easier and effortless passkeys are. The only way to make them stop is either to concede and set up a passkey or dig into the...
â Problem statement: how can I run terraform destroy after deleting a project from the current Git checkout? Deleting Terraform configuration does not destroy resources from its old state. My just destroy wrapper could no longer find the project: % just destroy g08-opencost Resolved path: g08-opencost Error handling...
Last year, I wrote an article called âSeriously, Markdownâ in which I gently dismantled the ânobody can do serious writing in Markdownâ arguments that come up every so often. I got some pushback, none of which I confess I found particularly convincing because they invariably rehashed points I addressed in the...
I love my mother, and also her most consistent skill is to disappoint me on my birthday. This year is no exception. This year, she disappointed me because I was today years old when I discovered the Integrated Taxonomic Information System exists: https://www.itis.gov/ I learned this from refdesk.com. Not from my...
I keep seeing people talk about herdr, so against my better judgment, I searched up tmux vs. herdr. Search hit: Herdr: One terminal to rule them all (herdr.dev) on Hacker News. I wanted to mention that zmx is a beautiful piece of minimal software that basically has gotten rid of my tmux and zellij use. đ€š Now...
When was the last time you were standing somewhere public, took the phone out of your pocket, scrolled on some app for a while, and then left it, and moved on? When was the last time you did that while still walking? perhaps almost crashing on someone in front of you? Even if you havenât done that yourselfâIâm very...
I have a lot of mixed feelings about AI and LLM technology. Iâm fascinated by its effect on our profession, excited by the potential gains in productivity - and thus the products we could rapidly build. On the other hand, Iâm fearful of the damage AI might cause: agent swarms taking over our virtual and physical...
There are many, many reasons to be angry at the AI crowd. One of mine is that they took the term vibe coding â how else am I going to describe the flow state when I have some repetitive music running in the background and am just breezing through some programming work? (And donât get me started on the sparkles...
Speaking of OIDC, I searched in my drawer and found all three security keys I own again. A YubiKey 5C NFC with firmware 5.4.3 (apparently not so secure anymore and not upgradable) and two SoloKeys Solo 2 (one USB-A and one USB-C, both with NFC) I funded via Indiegogo many years ago. Those have upgradable firmware,...
Drei Tage habe ich noch bis zum Kunstmarkt und davor steht noch die Reise ins Saarland fĂŒr eine Hochzeit an. Also gilt jetzt der Titel dieser Notiz: Plots rausballern! Gerade konzentriere ich mich auf das Anfertigen von meinen Minis: Kleine gerahmte mathematische Kunstwerke von Fraktalen, Random Walks, Klassikern...
España partida en dos en su versiĂłn de novela grĂĄfica es la adaptaciĂłn de la versiĂłn ampliada y actualizada del libro que el historiador JuliĂĄn Casanova presentĂł en el año 2022. El texto original se adapta por parte de Miguel Casanova (hijo de JuliĂĄn) con las imĂĄgenes dibujadas por Carles Esquembre. No he leĂdo el...
Last spring I gave myself a spring writing challenge, and now I think itâs high time for an autumn challenge! Feel free to join me! For this challenge Iâve created the following prompts: leaves clouds rain storm cardigan pumpkin coffee You can use these words as prompts for short stories, short memoir pieces,...
This week I learned the term "meat proxy". What's a meat proxy? "A person who forwards AI-generated text, code, or other output without reading, understanding, or validating it. The person acts only as a relay between the AI system and the intended recipient." I had the misfortune of talking to someone like this a...