2026-07-25Hello! Sleepy morning.This is the Downingtown Borough Hall in Pennsylvania. I've passed by this building a couple of times on road trips, but never thought to step inside, despite it being the grandest building around in this small town.Downingtown has great views in certain spots; there's this nice river and some bridges that have been littered with a bit of silver graffiti. But they all felt a bit too similar to photographs I've taken already, and I didn't have the time to explore…
[🎶 Look out! Here comes the Spider-Man ad! 🎶] Surprise! You don’t really own your BMW.Link: https://www.techspot.com/news/113327-bmw-putting-spider-man-ads-dashboard-after-promising.html
Celebrating 25 years of blogging with gratitude, reflection, and a sweet slice of success surrounded by creativity and joy. August 6, 2001, 25 years ago. I started blogging. I had a website made by Microsoft FrontPage and hosted on GTE (now Verizon) in the homepages they offered back in those days for residential customers. In fact, your ISP provided everything for you. You had so much website space and an ISP-provided email, which you lost if you changed providers. That's foreign today. But I…
I’ve written very little on my blog about so-called Artificial Intelligence, an old term applied to a relatively new technology, Large Language Models (LLM). I don’t think I have anything new to say about the subject, and my first-hand experience with LLMs is negligible, since I eschew them. Fortunately, my employer does not force me to use AI. (I’m self-employed!) The benefit of writing a blog post expressing my opinion about AI is that I can refer to it in the future when someone—some…
This is a survey for developers about everything but coding, that is accepting answers up to September 5. If you’re a developer, it’s worth participating! It doesn’t take long to fill and can help understanding the current environment of the dev industry in such chaotic times.
Reading a sci-fi anthology and a new mystery, watching Taskmaster and Traitors, still playing Zelda. This post was delayed by a request from a job I applied to that I submit video recorded answers to generic interview questions. It threw off my day plan. Aside from the fact that I resent having to do so much free work for a minimum wage retail position, I also think its just silly from the company's point of view. Do you really need to screen multiple times to find the best candidate for this…
Low resolution, high compression, wonky colours and press-the-button-and-hope photos! Yes, it's the shitty camera challenge!
Only the good die young All the Evil seem to live forever That's taken from the Iron Maiden song Only the Good Die Young from the Seventh Son of a Seventh Son album. I've been thinking of this lyric a lot recently as I keep seeing good musicians and actors, people who spent their lives bringing joy to others, die relatively young, while all the horrible people in the world seem to thrive and live forever. It's kind of depressing to watch and think about. So maybe let's not think about it too…
Last updated 1 minute ago This is a reply to one of GiveDirectly's blog posts, and also the accompanying video. I'd advise you read and/or watch before you engage with this1. The tl;dr of this piece is pretty simple: putting AI tools in the hands of the world's poorest, to ask questions such as “How to make a profit in three months?”, “What is the number of neighbors I should be cautious about?” and “My child is in trouble, what should I do?” (real questions from the blog post!) instead of just…
We were on a challenging hike recently, and a few of us got to talking about what a lovely analogy hiking is for life. When you’re working your way up a steep climb, you have to take it one step at a time. There’s little point looking back at how far you’ve come or ahead at how far is left — both just pull you out of the only step that matters, the next one. Along the way, you cross paths with all sorts of people, each on their own version of the journey. And the encouraging thing is that…
General anesthesia using gases for surgery is one of America's great nineteenth century medical achievements. In early 1845 dentist Horace Wells used nitrous oxide to painlessly extract a tooth. In October 1846 dentist William T.G. Morton successfully demonstrated ether anesthesia in Boston during an operation by John Collins Warren. The Morton/Warren event soon made it's way around the world. The Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology outside Chicago maintains an extensive timeline that covers…
As part of building a service for automatically publishing blog posts from RSS feeds into atproto's standard.site lexicon, I implemented atproto OAuth for logging in and getting access tokens to publish for the user. This means that any user with an atproto account, whether they created it on Bluesky, Eurosky, or Blacksky, or any of the other Personal Data Servers available, can log in to your service. Atproto OAuth does not require pre-registering clients with a service, one implementation…
Another interesting recent topic of discussion in the OSM community has been on corporate influence on the project. The concern about corporate influence on OpenStreetMap is fairly old. For some time there had been substantial concern about a direct takeover of the OpenStreetMap Foundation by large US tech corporations. I had commented on this in the past. But i realize that the focus of that discussion had been somewhat one sided, looking mostly at the influence of individual business…
I’d mentioned earlier in the spring that Kim picks up two new hanging ferns every year so the birds can nest in them. This one has had two separate momma birdies choose it to birth and care for their young this year. And yes, that’s a lot of poop! 🤣
tl;dr: After almost seven years my Netgear Nighthawk M2 has started rebooting on its own, reporting nonsensical battery percentages and ignoring most of my presses on its touch buttons, so I spent the past three months replacing it with the GL.iNet Mudi 7 (GL-E5800), a 5G NR Sub-6 travel router with two nano-SIM slots plus an onboard eSIM, Wi-Fi 7, a 2.5 GbE port, two USB-C ports and a removable 5380 mAh battery. It is the most capable mobile router I have owned, its 13.5-hour battery rating is…
Two years ago, I wrote about one of those “human made” badges used to signal content free of AI. Since then, these badges have spread across corners of the internet hostile to generative AI. In a somewhat viral post from the indie web, Case Duckworth lists a few reasons to reject them. His criticism isn’t aimed at the badges themselves, but at initiatives that centralize this kind of signaling. His view is condensed in this paragraph: However, I think that having a third party verify (or not,…
A minute in the world's life passes! To paint it in its reality, and forget everything for that! To become that minute, to be the sensitive plate... give the image of what we see, forgetting everything that has appeared before our time. Cézanne title here
Wavyleaf basketgrass (photo from Wikimedia) 6 August 2026 Have you seen this plant? Its wavy leaves are nothing like the plants I’m used to in Pennsylvania so I was surprised when I saw it at Bear Run Nature Reserve in late May. Was it a new wildflower? No! This is wavyleaf basketgrass, an extremely invasive plant that is just starting to take hold in Pennsylvania. This month the Pennsylvania iMapInvasives Program is holding a statewide blitz to find it so we can beat it back before it covers…
Following up on yesterday's post. If you're not interested in the AI bubble, you might want to come back next week because this thread is going to be running through Friday.Here is Ed Zitron discussing the AI industry's huge off-the-books debt. Before we jump in, however, there's one point I want to emphasize (we'll dig into this even deeper tomorrow when we discuss Patrick Boyle's analysis). This story is Enron-esque. It is Enron-reminiscent. It is "a little bit Enron." It is not, however,…
♠ Today I learned: Atuin ships hooks that capture commands executed by AI LLM coding agents into the same shell history as mine. As of today there are hooks for Claude Code, OpenAI Codex and Pi. % atuin hook --help Manage AI-agent shell hooks Usage: atuin hook atuin hook <COMMAND> Commands: install Install hooks for an AI agent to capture commands in atuin history help Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s) install --help doesn’t list which agents are supported, but a bogus…
And in a follow-up to yesterday’s post on the ‘Minutemen’ of the old 328th, here is a second piece from the TEC4 William Faucett collection: the Grapevine unit newspaper of the 26th (Yankee) Infantry Division from October 1945, which details the outfit’s march from Utah Beach to Czechoslovakia and Austria. The 328th was one of the 26th’s three infantry regiments, along with the 101st and 104th, all of which are touched on. Fresh off the scanner! These are large images, so be patient.
Thin fog forms as the rising sun begins warming the humid air and rain-soaked vegetation. I look for the half moon, still high overhead, in a large patch of blue.
Sketchbook pages from July 2026
The Juilliard School announced a multimillion-dollar acoustic renovation to its legendary Morse Recital Hall this week. Known for its intimate setting, the upgrades will enhance the reverberation and tonal warmth for both soloists and small ensembles. The space has long been celebrated as the premier venue for musicians demanding absolute acoustic fidelity.“The new paneling will allow performers to fully explore the dynamic range of the room,” said Juilliard’s director of contemporary…
In 2003, Nintendo solved their own problem it had spent more than a decade creating.The original Game Boy Advance was technically brilliant, but it inherited one frustrating flaw from every Game Boy before it: unless you happened to be standing beneath perfect lighting, its screen could be pretty difficult to see. The Game Boy Advance SP changed everything. Folding neatly into a pocket, introducing a rechargeable battery, and eventually receiving one of the most beloved backlit displays…
Charlie Kurth, currently Professor of Philosophy at Clemson University, will be moving to the University of Georgia. Professor Kurth is known for his work in ethics, philosophy of psychology, and philosophy of mind. He is the author of The Anxious Mind: An Investigation into the Varieties & Virtues of Anxiety (MIT, 2018) and Emotion (Routledge, 2022) as well as many other works. For more information on his publications, see here. He will be taking up his new position at UGA as Professor of…
In the autumn of 1998, a hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management lost roughly $4.6 billion in about four months and had to be unwound by a consortium of banks assembled at the Federal Reserve’s request, for fear its collapse would take the rest of Wall Street down with it. The fund’s principals included two Nobel laureates in economics and a team that had, by any ordinary measure, done the math correctly. Their models of bond spreads were not naive. They had been checked, refined, and…
Annexing the Bronx made perfect sense from the perspective of nineteenth-century New Yorkers. The city of New York was growing northward up Manhattan island and, while it had not yet filled all of the space, the end of that form of expansion was in sight. The semi-rival city of Brooklyn had far more space to expand and, prior to the completion of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883, discussion of New York and Brooklyn being something other than rivals was rare. The area we call the Bronx, on the other…
You could read today’s Cory Doctorow column or you could watch this Nathan MacIntosh bit. 😉
I’m in an Air BnB in Wilmington, Delaware right now and somewhere between airport layovers, North Carolina micro-breweries, high school golf tournaments, and road trips through the Piedmont of NC and Virginia, I lost track of what day of the week it was. For some reason, it has really bothered me that I got my days messed up and double posted on Monday and posted on Tuesday thinking it was Wednesday. Here’s the fix: Music Monday:…
