We take our kid to some concert, like the Wiggles but it isn’t the Wiggles. That band does their thing and leaves, and then They Might Be Giants comes on! My wife and I are very excited. The kid is nonplussed. (It’s funny because my wife actually doesn’t super care about TMBG, but anyway.) TMBG play a few songs, and...

I cleaned out the dead links on my site today. The internet is a great place, in no small part because of its ephemerality. I heard about the dead link checker somewhere online and thought, what the hell, let’s see what it says. There were, broadly, 6 classes of dead links: Links that had never existed, like my...

Skins are the best parts of any fruit. I say this partially as a political statement: one’s skin is one’s interface to the world, the barrier between what is and is not … one (this britishism is awkward, let me change to the more conversational you) … Your skin is both how you perceive and how you are perceived. In...

I apply stroke-based sorting to the Roman alphabet.

Kev Quirk writes about people who’ve published their salary history online, and worries how it might skew readers’ perceptions in a keeping-up-with-the-joneses type way. Their article reminds me of that instagram effect where, because everyone posts their best selves and you know your whole self, it makes you feel...

Over in the #tildetown IRC we were discussing the dozen and its variations. Along with the traditional baker’s dozen, skalnik mentioned the long dozen and metric dozen. Here is a full listing of the dozens variations. Half-dozen: 6. Self-explanatory, really. Baker’s half-dozen: 7. Gotta throw in that extra one (see...

The venerable cp command is well-known to any Unixer. Whether you want to copy one file or a whole tree recursively, cp is always available and always ready to help. However, as with most things in life there is more than one way to cp the cat. In this article, I’m going to explore some alternatives to cp that you...

I just came across the Done by Humans “movement,” which appears to similar to not by AI: both offer badges to display proudly on your human-made website after some kind of vetting process. I don’t understand the appeal of sites like these or what they offer, and I think it’s possible they represent a new way to...

My birthday is coming up, so I’ve been thinking about birthdays. For the past three years or so I’ve also had a “Casemas” holiday on my calendar for the third Wednesday of July, since I was born on the third Wednesday. I don’t remember quite what the conversation was, but noaks and I must’ve been discussing it at...

The article you are currently reading has been written in a markup language of my own design, called JAMES. It’s a line-based language that borrows ideas from Gemtext (itself inspired partly from Gophermaps and Troff though it’s not a programming language like Troff is but a markup language. The rest of this article...

I don’t like talking about Nic Cage movies, because every time I do I get this nudge-nudge-wink-wink “yeah Cage is so great right?” thing where I know my conversation partner means no he’s actually not. Or they express their dislike and think I’m doing an “I like Nic Cage” thing for the bit. But no, I actually...

I like Colbert, even though I quit watching him around oh, 2012? Just lost the habit of tuning in the Report every night, then with what all happened in 2016 and beyond I just lost interest in pretty much anything news-shaped. Anyway, he apparently has a Questionert now, and since Sunbird answered it I will...