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17:15 - I feel like a blob today. I did my laundry and wrote a blog post. Saving up energy to cook for the virtual potluck. Was I meant to be a rotund seal?
My colleague Marissa Mission and I sat down with Ben Kornell to talk AI and ed tech for his Ed Tech Insiders podcast. We ranged across a few things including my belief that human aspects this work, not tools, will ultimately be the differentiator and best competitive moat for vendors. ICYMI – On a BW Linkedin Live Reed Hastings, Mike Goldstein, and I talked AI tutoring and what to expect (or not expect). It’s an interesting conversation because Reed’s deep faith in the...
Got Edie a new house because she sneezed too much in the old ones.Currently Listening: Phoebe Bridgers “Panorama”Reply via email
Mit ein paar Tagen Verspätung wünsche ich dem Journal von Markus alles Gute zum 25. Jubiläum. Es ist immer wieder eine Freude einen neuen Post im Feedreader zu sehen. Auch die kurzen Einträge auf GrumpyOldMan bringen mich regelmässig zum Schmunzeln 😊 Der Weblog auf kniebes.com (damals noch unter cyrus.ruhr.de, deep-resonance.org, kniebes.de und weiteren unterwegs) war eine der initialen Inspirationen welche mich selbst zum Weblog bauen/schreiben gebracht hatten. Daher...
A Mastodon post by computer scientist David Chisnall has a very Unsung opener: I have used vim since around 2000. I have written five books, a PhD thesis, a few dozen papers and over 150 articles with it. At this point, my higher brain functions are not engaged at all when I use a bunch of common vim commands, they just happen. Documents I wrote with anything else have random :w in the middle. Chisnall goes on to talk about one specific vim feature: Persistent undo is one...
Hello, loves! Let’s see if we can sort out the scaling issue with the inventory display. Tout le monde déteste l’IA. The scaling issue is this: to get the inventory pictures to display in the inventory panel, we have to scale them up: class DungeonView: ... with self.cameras.inventory_cam.activate(): cam = self.cameras.inventory_cam w = cam.width h = cam.height x = w / 2 y = h / 2 cam.position = (x,y) rectangle = arcade.rect.XYWH(x,y,w, h)...
About a year ago I started looking at digital cameras. I describe myself as a perpetual hobbyist because I love trying out new things. I wanted to take a photography class, and the good classes near my house required a fancy camera. The hobby would've had a practical purpose. Most of the photos on be the future are ones I've taken over many years. I'm starting to feel like I've run out. It's taken me a year because I'm allergic to impulsive purchases (except for tinned...
I'm traveling to Chicago for VCF Midwest next month. I'll be demoing NTP time history on vintage Macs, with my own GPS-derived NTP service hosted on an Xserve G5, synced via NTP or a strange AppleTalk timing extension from the 1990s. So I built a little 'portable homelab' (pictured above) that supports 1-10 Gbps networking, can run off a small battery for at least an hour, switches between multiple WANs (so I can get my own 5G Internet connection, in case I need it), and...
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) offers a blunt title for its most recent review of US fiscal policy: “The Nation’s Fiscal Health — Urgent and Sustained Action Needed to Improve the Fiscal Outlook (June 2026). This figure shows the current-law projection of where US federal debt is headed, a projection built on the cheerful assumption that no new catastrophes like the Great Recession of 2008-09 or the COVID pandemic happen in the next 30 years or so. The reasons...
One of many gullies that run down the side of Kohala Mountain. When it rains at the top, which it does often, water funnels down the gullies to the ocean. Heavy rain, such as during the recent hurricane, can cause flash floods and dump a lot of sediment into the ocean. If the rain is heavy enough, it can also cause considerable property damage.
I love making a fresh start for each month and doing a themed set-up at the start of each month gives me a chance to start over. Each month is a new beginning and a chance to recommit to goals, trackers, etc. This month’s theme was sort of “the whole world in your hands” inspired by globes, back-to-school and a sense of optimism and hope, at least for me. I am trying to do better, be better and be happier. I hope this inspires you to recommit to your goals and passions....
I’m fine. Woke up with a sore leg, directed to the ER for some just-in-case tests, and ended up staying four hours as the least critical person there. I was in one of those medi-cubicles in the middle of the main hallway, separated by a half-closed sliding curtain, with nothing but time to observe and listen: The orderly who wheeled me to x-ray down a maze of basement hallways, dodging maintenance carts, workers on ladders fixing things above the drop ceiling, people...
For most of this year I have at times been finding it difficult to summon the patience to start my day with pour-over coffee. Some days I am just too tired or too impatient to slow down and enjoy the process — so I found myself reaching for instant coffee, which is an aberration.I thought I could get a machine with a timer — quality machines like that certainly exist. We have one, without a timer, and the power switch is a weird toggle that won't work with a smart plug. I...
I'd like to bring back the photologs on this blog. One of my goals at the moment is to use my digicam more, and I miss snapping photos with the idea of sharing them here. I hope to get outside more in the future, but it's been so hot lately, so almost all of these photos were taken indoors. A photo of Ranni that was actually taken back in February, the only one of this bunch that wasn't taken this week. She looks so pretty here (but she's always pretty!). You can see she...
An ongoing series Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. A delightfully lo-fi sci-fi goof centered around Back to the Future? You know I’d be into it. If there were any justice in the world Matt Johnson would get an Oscar nod for his wonderful, wacky performance. The Odyssey. Truly what cinema is for. Zeus’s law requires that I commend movies like this for taking religion and myth seriously in all their weight and weirdness (complimentary). My first time in literal decades...
As you may be aware if you're a regular reader of my blog, I love learning, studying, and academia. And I've been thinking recently of how to take the opportunity to better intersect this with my knowledge of web development and technology in general. You see, for many years there have been free, open-source resources for people to use if they wanted to learn programming, such as the Odin Project which maintains a Discord community of 708,000 learners, and freeCodeCamp,...
My 2015 London trip, part 5. Read part 4 here. ARCHIVE(D): JANUARY 21, 2015 MorningBreakfast and my walk to the office. LunchI believe this was lunch at The Sydney Arms. I look like a different person. (I was a different person.) I love meat pies (or pot pies, as we call them in the US). I was remember being disappointed because this was just a puff pastry on top with the filling in ramekin. I like it when the filling is baked into the pie. Then I had bread pudding for...
Sorry this one is a little later. I completely lost track of the days. However, it’s now time to dive in to this week’s metal releases. Hails! Torturous Inception - death - USAMorgued - death - USAAngoixa - death - SpainAtomic Aggressor - death - ChileEpicardiectomy - death - CzechiaNekomeshi(222) - melodeath - JapanProjector - melodeath - ChileXenith - melodeath/thrash - UKStatic Abyss - death/doom - USAGorod - death/prog - FranceMiscreance - tech death/thrash -...
I have been writing consistently here for a year now. You can go back a year and find one essay published every single day without fail. I have broken a lot of the writing advice that gets thrown around on social media, except for one piece of advice—and that is something I didn’t learn from social media. Social media is filled with advice about maintaining a swipe file of ideas. They tell you to keep track of trending topics. Write about subjects that are most likely to...
CHE reports on the letter here; I’ve sent CHE the following letter to the editor: I signed two earlier letters defending the academic freedom rights of Nathan Cofnas, since the principles of academic freedom encompass racist scholarship, as long as it meets the standards of the applicable discipline, and even if it is of dubious merit. I declined, however, to sign the most recent letter, the subject of your recent article:...
I will be showing at WOCA again this weekend. Saturday. A selection of works made from found objects at the beach. I’ll post photos in the future. But come on down to WOCA and I’ll be there. I hope it’ll be fun. We may get food from The Hat afterwards. Art Spiegelman remains an influence on me. This piece from The Guardian is–sobering–Art Spiegelman: ‘The US needs a counter-revolution’. The documentary about him is rather good: Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse. Here’s...
The moon disappeared for a while last night.
I watched a few videos this morning, looking for ideas of what I could use AI to do. In one video, someone had an agent monitor tech news sites every 30 minutes to notify him of a variety of developments. No doubt that’s less effort than visiting a bunch of sites every half hour. But not monitoring tech news in real time takes even less effort. Another video mentioned having Grok Bot order a sandwich through DoorDash. If I want a sandwich, I make a sandwich. One video...