As part of my mission to find, discover, and expose cool things, I’ve decided to start sharing the cool stuff I have found on the internet once a month with the rest of you. Unfortunately, in October, I had this idea rather late, so the pickings are a mite slim.

I’m usually the first to admit that the transition from late summer into autumn is one of my least productive periods of the year. This isn’t to say I’m doing nothing, but it’s a time when my thoughts tend toward gathering rather than producing. This is (after spring), the season for tidying, and laying in the...

In a tale as old as time, it’s common among people in my rough age cohort - the Millennials and younger end of Gen X - to lament the pre-“social media” internet. I think the key problem with that is just a matter of phrasing, and a carried implication that the internet pre-social media wasn’t social - in fact, it...

There’s a genre of mastodon post that I occasionally enjoy recapitulating, and I call it my “tin cup sermon”. It’s never quite the same twice, but it usually goes as a lament that socially, our conception of what I’m going to call the “ease of zen” is exoticised. That is, when we picture zen surroundings or zen...

I haven’t really wanted to admit it to anyone, much less myself, but for a while now it’s been painfully clear that I am mentally, temporally, and financially over-committed. It wouldn’t even be wrong to say that I’ve been in that state for a few years now. But recently, something has changed in my life, and that...

After the earlier-in-the-year (or was it late last year?) fracas with amazon retroactively changing their DRM policies to essentially vendor-lock their libraries to devices running their e-Reader application (or, indeed, their own line of E-Readers), I’ve been more than a little peeved with them. I’ve long held the...

I am not above judging books by their cover, and the snap impulse to snatch something up off a shelf and interrogate it deeply has brought me more joie de lire than just about any other way of discovering books; I occasionally get a good recommendation from a friend or fellow-reader, and more often than not fall...

Around the middle of 2024, I set myself a goal to “read more deeply”, which is a horrible goal by most metrics, since it doesn’t have a concrete deliverable artefact or metric you can care about. This was actually something of a weird theme in 2024 for me more broadly: for a year that was supposedly (at least in...

Today in the lab, we’re doing some celebrating. I set myself a goal back around the turn of winter that PETI version 0.5.0 would release before Spring had Sprung. And now, with just about a full day to spare, I am announcing that release on time. This marks the fisrt time that a PETI release has been even close to...

"In the darkness, the netchiman's wife felt great knives try to cut her open. When the knives did not work, the Dwemer used solid sounds. When those did not work, great heat was brought to bear. Nothing was of any use, and the egg of Vivec remained safe within her.A Dwemer said, 'Nothing is of any use. We must go...

It’s kind of held as a truism, at least in the west, that we become more cynical as we age. That’s certainly been my experience, though of late, I’d prefer to fight that impulse. With the ongoing decay of my personal mobile devices, and microsoft pushing people off of their Windows 10 installs, and Nintendo making...

At least a few of you Sanity Line fans are at some risk because of a coming change at Amazon/Kindle: starting February 26, you will no longer be able to download your books directly, but will have to read them on a kindle device or using the kindle app. This was something Amazon did unilaterally and has nothing to...