Disc binding seems to be quite a niche thing these days, but I've found it very useful for role-playing material.
Here’s a thing I’ve quietly hated for years: managing static IP assignments and DNS names for the little fleet of gear on my network. Every homelab has it — the Pi in the garage, the shop printer, the sensor node in the attic, the pool controller. You want them at known addresses with known names. And the “normal” way to get that is to stand up a DHCP server and a DNS server and keep them in sync. Ugh, no.
“I’ll just collect the 90s era liveries that you can get on these lovely N gauge models” I naively stated way back at the start of this N scale adventure. Today I’m sharing yet another modified, bashed model requiring extensive reworking to represent a specific prototype…In the gap between I suppose that childlike enthusiasm for ‘box fresh’ liveries has morphed into a deep attraction to these miniatures. The act of making each a personal response to a prototype fondly remembered. In this…
Most system prompts are personality sketches or compliance checklists. I wanted something operational: how the model researches, disagrees, edits, uses tools, remembers context, and knows when the work is finished. This is the public version of mine. I removed personal details and infrastructure, then combined the rules that survived into one prompt. Copy it whole or steal the parts that solve a problem you actually have. # General-purpose collaborator system prompt You are a direct, exact,…
I was browsing through some of the posts at bubbles.town and I came across a post by Antonio about how “Your RSS Reader Is Robbing You”. It instantly reminded me of another post I read on another blog a couple of months ago about a similar topic about how people painstakingly create their blog and how unique each personal website is because of all the love, thought and hard work would have gone in to them to make them look and function in a unique way. For a long time I felt this way as well…
Related Post: You Should Try A Framework That Doesn't Hold Your Hand This is probably going to be a bit of a incoherent ramble. I'm trying to convey a vibe why I find more open libraries and frameworks easier. I have been tinkering with programming for atleast ten years. I have started a huge amount of projects, and most of them have failed. Most of them have failed due to a lack of a coherent idea, or because I lost motivation/wanted to work on another new project. However, on a few occasions,…
The CIDER 2.0 announcement was, by necessity, a mile wide and an inch deep - there was simply too much to cover. So I’m planning to make up for that with a small series of articles, each shedding a bit more light on one notable change and the reasoning behind it. This is the first one, and it tackles the area that has probably generated more confusion (and bug reports) than any other over the years: session management. Truth be told, I meant to write this article back when the work landed in…
For the last few years, I have tested out the latest Mac and iOS developer beta versions, and I've had a lot of mixed experiences. Sometimes it's been rocky and I regretted doing it, other times, it hasn't been that bad and I enjoyed new features I've wanted to use months before they arrived for everyone else.The public betas of both MacOS 17 and iOS 27 were released this week to the general public, and they coincide with the third release of developer betas. The first few developer betas I've…
John Gruber: Gurman on OpenAI’s Upcoming Hardware Product: ‘Movable, Screenless Speaker Built as AI Companion’ No one wants a companion they need to lug around.
I finally got around to re-customizing the related posts on my blog. Specifically: hiding related posts on asides and links. They’re short. A set of related thumbnails can be as long as (or longer than) the actual post. Years ago I had this set up when the site was running WordPress and Jetpack. I’ve since moved it to Contextual Related Posts (in order to keep it local on my server), and later to ClassicPress. Neither plugin has features to skip based on post formats, but you can use hooks,…
Slack needs a “move message to thread” feature or a warning, “are you sure you didn’t meant to reply to. thread” warnig.
Umarang, or Uma the VRRV, was retrieved from the mechanic shop this afternoon.She went in for frequently occuring OBDII error code P0152. Here's what Google AI said of the error:The Ford E-450 P0152 code indicates that the upstream oxygen sensor on Bank 2, Sensor 1 is stuck at a high voltage reading (typically above 0.9 volts). This tells the powertrain control module (PCM) that the engine is running excessively rich (too much fuel, not enough oxygen) on the driver's side of the engine.The…
Search for apple and get a phone. Read about freedom and get a router upgrade. Language is transactions. Human experience is product features. Click Big Bang theory, get sitcom commentary. The highest output is vomiting feelings about last week's consumption. Not thought. Just signals. Display to prove herd membership. Some attempt authenticity. A cat shitting. A hamburger swallowed. Just meat recording its own functions. There is no mind to document. The web is not broken. It exposes minds.…
Homescale, PlanetScale at home. I worked for a database tools company many years ago and was lucky enough to build a few database cloning tools before PlanetScale was cool. Those tools were never destined to be as successful as PlanetScale, but they had their uses. The idea behind those tools was simple: isolate the storage layer from compute and use the best storage technology for cloning the database files. This idea came back to me a while ago while I was tweeting about an interview I had…
Crossmate is in the App Store! If you like crosswords, you might be curious to check it out. It’s my new crossword app for iPhone and iPad that supports 1-3 players.
tl;dr - I made the data that powers Pike open to everyone at OpenInterstate. Go watch the website drive down I-10 near where I live. I released Pike - Next Exit Guide several months ago, prior to my 38-day roadtrip, in order to simplify how my wife and I would locate useful exits while on the road. I'm biased, but we genuinely found it useful, especially for finding rest stops. When the dust settled after releasing the app, I realized that a tremendous amount of my effort was related to…
Sarah Perez, TechCrunch: In a newly published Apple Advertising Services policy, effective as of July 14, 2026, the iPhone maker shares its rules for advertising on Apple Maps. Notably, it prohibits the broad category of home services businesses, like plumbing, electrical, locksmith, HVAC, pest control, roofing, and general contracting services, among others. If Apple is interested in updating its advertising policy further, I suggest none. I spent lots of money on its nominally premium…
# Reply to: Colin Walker - Jul 14, 2026... # I have now added an on-the-fly RSS feed for post comments. If there are any comments for a particular post, the link gets added to the live RSS feed using the <source:comments> attribute, e.g. <source:comments>https://colinwalker.blog/blog/comments-feed.php?post=2426</source:comments> The post ID is passed to a new page which builds and returns the specific feed.
Anil Dash (@anildash.com) explains why "'Wherever you get your podcasts' is a radical statement" in simple terms: Being able to say, "wherever you get your podcasts" is a radical statement. Because what it represents is the triumph of exactly the kind of technology that's supposed to be impossible: open, empowering tech that's not owned by any one company, that can't be controlled by any one company, and that allows people to have ownership over their work and their relationship with their…
In Go, it’s common to wait on a condition via a channel while also respecting context cancellation. A common idiom looks like: select { case <-condition: return nil case <-ctx.Done(): return ctx.Err() } An issue with this is that if you’d prefer that condition (i.e., the non-error case) be treated with precedence, you’re racing with ctx.Done(); select chooses a case at random when multiple cases are ready. My coworker suggested a solution with a nested select within the ctx.Done() case to…
You've already seen The Odyssey. You've probably seen it many times. I'm not talking about filmed versions, one in 1954 and another in 1997. I'm talking about movies that -- knowingly or not -- have retold the Odyssey story, if not literally, then by mimicking its structure. You know the drill. A valiant hero is separated from all that's familiar to him. He must overcome many obstacles to achieve a goal that resonates in movies as diverse as The Wizard of Oz and E.T. The hero wants to go home,…
I wrote a document today. I used my brain and no LLM was consulted. It took me 10 minutes to write and it’s 3/4 of a page long, yet it has all the basic info we need to get started. I’ll be able to reason about it, reference it, and talk about it succinctly without issue BECAUSE I WROTE IT.
Hell would rather freeze over before I use FL as my main DAW — Me, apparently While I agree that FL definitely needs some MAJOR improvements, all that’s left to overhaul is the optimization of the graphics stack and the MIDI subsystem. My gripes with it got pretty much.. resolved over the years, which are basically: Limited channels Resolved with dynamic channel counts Limited channel effect slots “Patcherize all” in any dropdown which turns every plugin into a patcher No crossfades They added…
I released json2xml-rs 0.4.2 and json2xml 6.5.0 after a focused profiling session across both implementations. The final result: Pure Python conversion improved from 83.0 ms to 57.2 ms, a 31.1% reduction. The Rust accelerator improved from 6.007 ms to 5.632 ms, a further 6.23% reduction. Both implementations produced identical XML before and after the changes. The Python suite reached 100% statement coverage: 421 tests covering all 762 statements. The Rust release shipped first, followed by the…
Replacing MinIO with RustFS.Amazon S3 is cloud-based object storage. You probably know that. You might also know that S3’s API is one commonly implemented by other S3-compatible storage providers like Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, and Wasabi. It took me a while to realize that MinIO is a storage provider whose software I could self-host. So I could have S3 buckets for web apps and backups that use servers I’ve already got. Riskier than using huge providers with enterprise-grade uptime and…
Separate from my proposal for key transparency for the Fediverse (which I’ve certainly blogged about a lot), the W3C has been working on building out end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for ActivityPub. The two projects are mostly being developed independent of each other, though connecting the two should be straightforward. As I prepare to tie up the loose ends and call my side of the work “feature complete” and consider tagging a major version 1.0.0 for the specification and reference…
At The Web You Want event in Amsterdam last month, Léonie gave an absolutely fantastic talk. You can now read the whole thing: Accessibility is resistance! She makes the very good point that generative tools are a necessary accessibility recourse when humans have failed to do their job properly. Images without alt text? Somebody messed up. But this is damage that can be routed around with large language models. So if you—like me—don’t like the idea of people using extractive generative tools…
View from Cariboo Dam, pre-run: Warm and dry. The air, that is. Or something like that. First, I’ve decided to add the Performance Condition stat to each run, because I love stats. Garmin explains it here: For a real-time assessment of your current ability to perform, look at your performance condition. During the first 6 to 20 minutes of your run, this metric analyzes pace, heart rate and HRV. The resulting number is a real-time assessment of the deviation from your baseline VO2 max, with each…
