One Month of Bubbles Bubbles turned one month old today. I launched it on March 21 with a short [Mastodon post](https://troet.cafe/@viermalbe/116297302547554995) (original in German): > ... So I built Bubbles. For me. And hopefully for a few thousand others too. On that evening just 4 weeks ago, writing "hopefully for a few thousand others too" was a joke. I put it there because I genuinely assumed this would be a personal tool that maybe a dozen people liked and used. 6,500 visitors in the…

Back when I purchased my Nintendo Switch in 2023, there were only a few titles I cared about trying on it. Among the first games I purchased at the time was Hades, released in 2020, developed by Supergiant Games. Hades had already made a name for itself, as a title that redefined the genre and the medium, in manners that only a few get to do. It happened with Ocarina of Time and 3D action combat, with Halo’s controller layout for FPS games, with Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of the…

I opened my eyes and saw pink flowers; the countryside was dotted with flowers of all colours. Bees bounced between the thistles. I was delighted by all that I saw when I opened my eyes on the train journey; sleep is seductive, but so, too, is colour.I spent the afternoon on my feet, wandering. I think wandering felt right because I wasn’t sure where I wanted to go. I wanted to walk to figure out where I should be. This has been a theme lately: I put one foot in front of another and look…

You’re forgiven if you assumed 58 Joralemon Street was just another beautifully restored Greek Revival row house in Brooklyn Heights. Built in 1847, it resembles many of the elegant single-family houses on the block, with its red brick facade, long windows, and brownstone trim around the entryway. But take a closer look, and you’ll notice some oddities. For starters, the windows are black, and no curtains or blinds hang behind them. No personal effects sitin the windows or on the stoop, like a…

I don’t like writing prompts. Prompts are common in online fiction writing advice. You can buy analog writing prompt kits. Writing workshops and workbooks often use exercises (essentially prompts) to help develop skills. I bounce off of all of them. For me, coming up with ideas / getting started is not the hard part of writing. I think it’s great for writers who find themselves stuck on starting to use prompts to get past the blocker of the blank page — but I have come to realize I don’t enjoy…

At Shrewsbury library Doomscrolling, late 1800s style The father of evolution, Charles Darwin was born in Shrewsbury on 12th February 1809 at Mount House. Before attending Edinburgh and Cambridge University and sailing on the HMS Beagle, Darwin fished for newts in the Dingle and studied rocks in the Quarry Park.— Original Shrewsbury.

The SpaceX IPO, valuing a motley collection of dubious business at over a trillion dollars, marks the abandonment of the Efficient (financial) Markets Hypothesis, one of the zombie ideas I criticised in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. Not only do financial markets fail in the task of valuing assets accurately, but the institutional structures that are supposed to make them work have given up trying. This was prefigured by the rise of Bitcoin and other forms of crypto. Revealingly, no…

What’s going on, Internet? Friend of the site James recently shared a new post Blogger Archetypes which asks a series of questions to help you narrow down your character as a member of the blogging community. A bit of indie web fun. Here are my results: You are a Link curator The web is not just its pages, but the connections between pages. You have internalised this and love spending your time exploring the web and sharing what you find with the world. You are also a Culture maker You love to…

As I mentioned in my earlier post, I listed my site on bubbles town. What that meant was my posts could be discovered from bubbles town. Bubbles Town has the nice feature of upvoting the blogposts that one likes. Now those upvotes are shown near the top of each blog post on my own website. 1 If you have a login on Bubbles town, you can upvote the posts you like there. The best part is you do not need to create a new account. If you have a Fediverse account, you can just use the same one to log…

The fox continues to prowl around our chickens. This morning we caught it in the GARDEN a few feet from our favourite chicken. Luckily the magpies warned us and we were able to scare it away. It's not nice keeping the little cluckers cooped up in this heat, but needs must unfortunately. Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

I recently rebranded these updates to rewinds instead of weekly rewind to remove the pressure of publishing weekly, yet, I found myself enjoying and spending time on this one. Guess because I'm removing more and more constraints to what and how I put things here. So here we are with a rewind of the previous week.⏪ Week in rewind👨‍💻 While I'm happy with Safari on mobile, I've always run into problems with bookmark management and handover from desktop to mobile, as I spend most of my time on a…

A wet morning but a nice afternoon. Norman Harris brought 16 sacks of stuff to burn. A new countryman car came. Did some mowing round courts.

I wanted to visit TVC to monitor the construction of the house and help Kiran set up the fiber backbone for internet connectivity. TVC is roughly 90 kms from MG Road. It’s a good distance with variation to test my Yamaha and see how it performs over a long distance. If it can do 200 Kms in a day, it can probably do 350 Kms. And I don’t think I can ride more than that on this motorcycle in a day. I left early at 6:20 AM and took a break in Anekal for breakfast at Raghavendra Bhawan. Then I took…

When I was a TV-obsessed pre-adolescent, I loved the series Three’s Company. Technically, I was probably too young to be watching it, but all the “adult” humor flew right over my head1 as stuff that grown-ups must think is funny. I just treated it like a live-action cartoon. But even as a pre-teen, I quickly got frustrated with it. This is dumb. They could easily avoid all of these wacky hijinks just by explaining the misunderstanding! I mention that to establish that I’ve got a long history of…

I don’t work in the tech industry myself but am closely connected with people who do. This is based on my observations and conversations with tech workers in the Seattle area. Ok so Ethan Marcotte wrote this better (to be fair he literally wrote the book on tech unions)… my version is a little more documentary. 1. The American tech labor market softens The workforce shrinks and developer jobs intensify The industry hemorrhages workers to free up funds to invest in data centers. Workers try to…

Why do so many of us dream about giving up desk jobs for something tangible? I look at where that pull comes from, why the dream erodes just like the job does, and what's making it feel more urgent lately.

I took a gamble on some Noctilucents reappearing last night with a 40 minute drive out to the coast, and then a 20 minute walk to find a clear view of the Northern horizon. There is never any guarantee the clouds will show up, but I have read many reports that the summer solstice brings more activity. I'm not really sure why, or if there is a genuine scientific reason for that, and perhaps its just more so that its bang in the middle of a typical Noctilucent season (late May-late July). PS.…

Words quiet. Pages empty. Pens full. Ride the Japanese wave — increasingly getting to the higher end of A2 — make art — soft watercolor strokes in sunny evenings. Dune Messiah reaching conclusion, aching to start the next — my favorite of all the Dune books. Less writing. Few attempts brought upon ache... might be Carpal Tunnel returned — most likely triggered by daughter's tantrums; she's 3.5 — the keyboard brings less satisfactions than pen and paper... A few scribbles here and there, but it…

Marcie, in her last blog, wrote about our visit to Pioche, Nevada—a quiet little town tucked into the mountains of Lincoln County. We strolled past historic buildings, admired old mining relics, and snapped photos of the famous Million Dollar Courthouse. It’s hard to imagine that this peaceful place was once considered one of the bloodiest towns in the American West.During the silver boom of the early 1870s, Pioche exploded from a remote mining camp into a thriving boomtown. Along with miners,…

When you’re leading a one-off singing workshop, or have large influx of new members to your choir, there will be lots of people who don’t know each other. Here are a few simple ways to mix people up so there’s less chance of things becoming cliquey. mixing people up Whenever I lead a singing workshop, I always mix people up before the warm-up. I ask singers to stand in a circle in a particular order, then introduce themselves to the people either side of them if they don’t already know them.…

Hartley Charlton for MacRumors: Apple is unifying the email domains used by Sign in with Apple and ‌iCloud‌+ Hide My Email under a single private.icloud.com domain later this summer. Sign in with Apple currently uses privaterelay.appleid.com, while Hide My Email uses icloud.com, the same domain as standard ‌iCloud‌ email addresses. That shared domain has historically made it difficult for services to selectively block disposable ‌iCloud‌ addresses. Blocking icloud.com outright would also block…

go toolachain cheat sheet Environment go env: see go environment go mod tidy: add all used libraries to the mod-file and download them go get -u: update and download all dependencies go tool <go repo with main>: run third party go repo (mockery, regctl) Research go doc <package>: Show index of given standard lib package go doc <package> <identifier>: Show only identifier with its docstring Tracing GODEBUG=gctrace=1: garbage collector debug info a la gc 2 @0.856s 0%: 0.023+0.16+0.011 ms clock,…

The Full Moon is Tuesday June 30. In the morning Saturn and Mars form a long line. Mars and Uranus are close together in binoculars and the pair are also midway between the Pleiades and Hyades clusters. In the evening, Venus Jupiter and Mercury form a line. On the 25th Mercury and Jupiter are close in the twilight. On June 28 the Moon occults the bright star Antares (East coast only early morning).The Full Moon is Tuesday June 30. The Moon is at apogee, when it is furthest from the earth, on…

A few months back, Ars Technica published Password managers' promise that they can't see your vaults isn't always true. I haven't used an online password manager in 5 years. Previously I had been using Bitwarden, which is fine, I just prefer to take ownership of as much of my digital life as I can. My setup is KeepassXC to manage all my passwords in a database and Syncthing to sync all my passwords across my smartphone, laptop, and server. I read a comment on HN recently about how a couple…

I often hear that AI is resulting in 10k LOC reviews and this is creating a bottleneck. I don't think you should waste time reviewing every single line of code in here and just use AI to review it! What you contribute as a reviewerYou need to know what you contribute as a reviewer. As a reviewer, you contribute your Out Of Distribution knowledge that the author or the LLM might not have Its a mistake thinking you can outsmart an LLM into nitpicking few lines of code here and there. This is not…

A command-line poker game where you play against bots to train real-world skills https://filiph.net/text/pokerd.html

Ansel Adams is one of the works most famous landscape photographers with an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society and photographs boosted into space as a record of human artistic greatness. He famously documented the stunning vistas of Yellowstone National Park; timeless renders of unsullied prehistoric landscapes. My attempt is like ordering an Ansel Adams off Wish but I'm starting to work out how to capture his dramatic skies. Thanks for reading this post via RSS! Let me know…

My heart predictably sank at the predictable announcement by Kier Starmer that the UK government will ban social media for under-16s. The ban sounds ineffective, imposes restrictions on everyone (providing ID to use social media), and largely lets the big social media companies off the hook for what happens on their services. I a post by Iain Mansfield that lists objections to the ban and sets out his arguments against them. I wanted to clarify some of my thoughts so I’ve taken his structure…

The Open State Foundation has its office on the old naval yard in the heart of Amsterdam. Right next to the national maritime museum, in the 17th century warehouse of the Dutch admirality, and across from the 1960’s former Base Commander’s home our (as I’m a board member there) offices are surrounded by other small organisations, start-ups, assorted innovative efforts, a tech academy, a hostel and a microbrewery. Normally it is easy to forget that the area is also still in active use by the…

Last week, a MetaFilter member posted a link to what appeared to be a new website for The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, John Koenig’s decade-long project to make a “dictionary of made-up words for emotions that we all feel but don’t have the words to express.” The polished site includes everything you’d expect from a publisher’s promotional book site: an author biography, press mentions, and links to buy the book on Amazon. Strangely, it also includes the entire text of the book, from its…