This is all a huge amount of work. I’m retired (though my wife may dispute that!) and I’d rather be out sailing than working on rsync security issues, so I have reached for several AI tools to help with what needs to be done. I have absolutely no regrets about doing that, although from the storm of anti-AI rage it’s clear that many people think I should be hung up by my toe nails and flogged for even considering doing this. Source: rsync and outrage For the amount of vitriol that Andrew…
Dear readers, I am happy to announce the release of Don Matrelli’s Legacy. It is a mod for Grand Prix Circuit (DSI / Accolade, 1988), one of the best motor racing games available for DOS before Geoff Crammond entered the scene. The expansion features: Three new tracks Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps Baku City Circuit The Möbius Space Dragster Track Three new cars Rivella, with great maneuvrability and acceleration Anglo-German, the fastest car but with tricky handling Gastón Martini, for people…
I started moving my site from alanwsmith.com over here to al9000.com earlier this year. I started with basic pages. The first blog post came in April. That post is called I'm Not Ready to Start This Blog1. One of the reasons I wasn't ready was I hadn't built an RSS feed for the site yet2. As of yesterday, the RSS feed is operational. There's still work to do. Things like adding a little header to posts that feature JavaScript based features that won't work in most feed readers. All that stuff…
There’s a lot of talk right now about companies deploying AI tools and not seeing results that map to the spend. Many reasons get cited. But I suspect the simple one at the heart of it is constraints. The analogy comes from Eli Goldratt’s famous book “The Goal”, a pre-read in most introductory operations management classes. If you’re manufacturing a car and you figure out how to produce doors more efficiently — great. But if doors aren’t your bottleneck, it doesn’t matter. The body still needs…
When I embarked on presence as my theme for the year, I hadn’t expected to learn about boredom. Half a year in, I’ve realised just how closely intertwined the two are. Boredom, in essence, seems to me to be the homelier and less glamorous twin of presence. Presence is easy to market. In a time when we can feel our attention becoming hopelessly fragmented, it feels like a very real oasis in a desert filled with parched sand and mirages. Take mindful breaths. Be fully here in the now. I don’t…
It’s been a crazy whirlwind of emotions lately. A death in the family. Keeping up with the grandkids. Celebrating my wife’s latest theatre gig. With that, Sunday Morning Reading is on hiatus this week. Enjoy your Sunday, while I enjoy time with the grandkids. (If they don’t wear me out!) Thanks for reading. Feel free to subscribe if you want. It’s free. If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading…
I am currently in the process of migrating to a new mailserver setup that is integrated into my normal hosting setup on a new VPS at netcup. This time, the setup is based on the Docker images and configuration from a project called docker-mailserver (I previously used the other more popular docker-mailserver). It’s less monolithic and more flexible to adjust configuration etc. It also has a web UI to configure users, domains and aliases. On my old setup, I used the European AWS’s SES as relay…
My back is still giving me trouble, but a week’s worth of moving about carefully and a little exercise “fixed” it (as in, I can stand again for extended periods of time). And I’ve pinned down the most likely cause–I have been spending far too much time sitting at my desk. As much as I love working remotely, the relentless (and sometimes idiotic) pace of dozens of daily meetings (often booked haphazardly and with the usual sense of bogus urgency that comes with the typical corporate need to…
We’ve seen a few test PCBs now; games that were only sold alongside Japanese arcade cabinets to satisfy a law requiring a minimum amount of functionality. Sega gave us Dottori-kun, a remake of Head-On; Taito gave us Mini-Vaders, another retro throwback. But what about Konami? Let’s test out our system with Target Panic! No Expenses Spent Konami’s Target Panic is a small densely-packed PCB, intended presumably to be sold alongside cabinets like the 1996 Konami “Windy”. We haven’t seen a Konami…
8604/21523I haven't got to spend too much time with the kids recently as I've either been in hospital or in bed and trying to isolate a bit so I don't pick up any treatment-threatening, life-threatening bugs. But they came in today to give me my Father's Day cards and presents and to remind me (as if I needed reminding) that I absolutely can't die for at least 15 years, however much my body wants to self-destruct.I didn't get the #1 Dad it the world this year, but it's nice that it's gone to…
This is a fun concept. Folks who set aside a little time each week to take calls with whoever about whatever. unoficehours.com I've got a bunch of traveling to do. Setting up calls with some folks is on the list for when I get back. -a Endnotes I'll totally be using this to talk with techy folks about bitty to get feedback from them. For the non-techy folks, we'll play the conversations by ear and see where they go.
Adventurers Character Race Class Description Anoran Hall Human Cleric level 2 A thin, wiry, and bald follower of Promehene, the God of Time. He doesn't know what drives him to adventure. Drokh Human Monk level 2 A tall, lean human monk with piercing eyes, weathered skin, and a warrior’s poise—calm and charismatic, he speaks with purpose and strikes with precision, wielding spear, bow, and blade. Ignaeus Elf Fighter level 4 / magic-user level 5 An arrogant and self-assured sellsword wandering…
Comics Curmudgeon readers! Do you love this blog and yearn for a novel written by its creator? Well, good news: Josh Fruhlinger's The Enthusiast is that novel! It's even about newspaper comic strips, partly. Check it out! Judge Parker, 6/21/26 Look, we know what you want and what you don’t want out of your soap opera comic strips, and what you don’t want is character growth. That sort of thing is how you get the man once known as “Tommy the Tweaker” yammering about his skivvies in a…
Caitie texted me Friday night and mentioned she was coming into Albany on Saturday, not Sunday. So I left early yesterday (0550) and drove straight through to Clifton Park without stopping. I guess it makes a difference if you skip breakfast and have nothing to drink! Traffic was light so I made good time. Got to Jimmy's Egg in Clifton Park a little after 9:00 to have some breakfast before I went to Mom's. Visited with her for a couple of hours before I went to pick up Caitie at the train…
Over the last few weeks, I've been writing about what it means to show up consistently. The compound effect of doing it. What it looks like when it's hard. The difference between presence and performance.All of that was about how you show up for your work. For your team. For your career.This week is about the showing up that people often deprioritise: showing up for yourself.The Things That Get PushedYou know exactly what they are. The training you've been meaning to do. The exercise that used…
The Cunning Plan Why Paying the Piper Bubbles and Pin Pricks A Certain Musky Odor The Point At the risk of constantly returning to the subject of the lack of use from large language models—and I hope to keep this one short—early in June, I started seeing a strange shift in sentiment. After years of screaming at us to “get on board or get left behind,” and after the massive backlash especially from software developers, a bunch of people—half a dozen blog posts that made it to my screen, as…
Love the spectrum of colours nature paints. Nothing man-made comes close. Reply to this post
Wake-on-LAN is used to power up devices via LAN. ip -br link to find the name of the network interface in use. sudo apt install ethtool to install the tool required to inspect the Ethernet configuration. sudo ethtool enp2s0 to check whether Wake-on-LAN is available and/or enabled. Wake-on: g means it is enabled. I found it to be enabled, so I will skip the steps required to enable it. ip a to find the MAC address of the interface. Look at what follows link/ether In the remote client My laptop…
Take THIS to your leader!
As I do every morning I was on my usual walk. A stroll down to the end of my street; I loop around the Commons by the Post Office and then jog back up my street. It's an overwhelmingly peaceful trek that's far too punctuated by awful, noisy, polluting car traffic.Almost every day I see some kind of minor traffic violation; forgetting to engage (or disengage) their turn signal, running lights being off, driving 15 miles an hour over (or under) the speed limit...This morning, though, I saw a…
Matt Murdoch, in his day job of being not Daredevil, is at the law school of Empire State University: The NYU law school, as seen from West 4th Street:
This is Day 3 of 13 of my Balkans road trip with Just You, doing a circular tour from Romania, through Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Kosovo and Serbia – and ending up back in Romania. If you missed the start of the journey here’s the link to take you there. I woke up in my third country in three days: Bulgaria. This morning I was in Veliko Tarnovo and we’d be heading to Sofia this afternoon. What’s the Yantra Grand Hotel like? Once again I had a great night’s sleep on very comfy pillows. You never…
Tilde.club — a shared Unix computer where you can do, learn, and share stuff. moments — A smol photo journal by Bear blogger Peter Gombos. TownSquare — Super cute thingy to add to your website. It's SO CUTE! Open Video Downloader — A youtube-dl-gui seems handy. Biodiversity Heritage Library — Read about this lovely site in a Guardian article. Lettera — I like Markdown, so I'm always interested in new, shiny editors. Evergreen Sewing — Cool people. When they need to buy a manual, they share it.…
Sunday Asides #100 I've reached a point of relative stability with work right now. Both part-time jobs are steady, my full-time job search is still fruitless, but I'm doing okay. Not great, but not terrible. Just...okay. Surviving, not thriving. Living, but not giving. I'm here, I'm queer, and well...I'm used to it. According to Bloomberg, tech workers who don’t embrace AI could face 3x the risk of being laid off. Back when I worked at my last full-time job, I had to evaluate my team based on…
A couple of days ago I recounted a common complaint: I keep seeing programmers say how angry it makes them that people are willing to write detailed CLAUDE.md and PROJECT.md files for Claude to use, but they weren't willing to write them for their coworkers. For larger projects, I've taken to having Claude maintain a handoff document that I can have the next Claude read, saying what we planned to do, what has been done, and other pertinent information. Then when I shut down one Claude I can…
The post Serenading Linden Lime appeared first on Robin Harford from Eatweeds.
Old wisdom says to cut an ancient salt marsh plant fresh on the longest day of the year, the summer solstice. For the best ... Continue The post The Forgotten Summer Solstice Harvest That Tastes of the Sea appeared first on Robin Harford from Eatweeds.
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