In technology, “boring” is usually meant as an insult. It suggests something old, conservative, unimaginative, or simply behind the times. In infrastructure, though, boring can be one of the nicest things you can say about a system. A boring system is often one that has been around long enough for people to understand it. Its failure modes are known, its tools are mature, its documentation exists, and the strange edge cases have usually hurt somebody else first. With luck, that person wrote…

I have been wondering why the past couple of years have been so much harder on me even than Trump’s first presidency, and this is exactly why. There is just so much happening, all at once. (Beware: image and link heavy post below the fold; both the images and discussion of government violence rape may be disturbing–if you are in a vulnerable place, please skip this one) ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ ICE constantly detains U.S. citizens for the crime of not looking white enough. 1 ICE has deported over 500 U.S.…

Cameras spotted during a house inspection I’ve mentioned before that I would love to see some more photos on blogs. Even if text is the main thing on your blog, a photo every now and then is such a lovely bonus for me as a reader. Maintaining a gallery is a bit of a hassle on most indie platforms. I’ve tried various ways of doing it, but it always ends up the same way: I forget to update it. Therefore, I decided to create a /photo slash page. Like a /now page, but just for photography. One…

The 100 Famous Japanese Mountains or Nihon Hyakumeizan (日本百名山) are a list of 100 mountains picked by mountaineer Kyuya Fukada in 1964. These hundred mountains are very popular among Japanese hikers, and generally have good public transport access and well-maintained trails. I wouldn't say that these are necessarily the "100 best mountains in Japan" but for any hiker living in Japan, this is the list to check off. I climbed my first hyakumeizan a little over 4 years ago and have been steadily…

I've had lots of hobbies over the years. To name a few off the top of my head, there's been fish keeping, guitar, harmonica, fountain pens, watches, motorbikes, this blog, web development, 3D printing, tattoos, digital minimalism, table tennis, and many more. Some of my hobbies have stuck, but I've never gotten so enthralled into a hobby that I become obsessed. Instead, there's generally 4 steps in the process: I decide I want to take up a hobby. I read, watch videos, and obsessively learn…

Last edited 1 minute ago. I have nothing to do on my phone anymore. I feel that urge during the day to take out phone so I'm either not bored or procrastinating something I don't wanna do and... I have nothing to do on it. Without social media on it anymore, and now without my main game I used to play on Apple Arcade, there's literally nothing to be staring at. When I left big social media platforms a few years ago, I wasn't doing it because of "phone addiction". It was more out of a sense of…

I talk to a lot of old people, those who were born in the 20th century, and if I ask them what the word “unalive” means, they usually have no idea what I’m talking about, except for some of them who have kids or who study Internet culture. This will, of course, probably seem very weird to most people who were born in or grew up in the 21st century. Just to recap for the olds: “unalive” is the word you use to represent concepts like dying, or death, or killing or being killed, on digital…

Normally I reserve my vitriol for the slopbros for my personal blog, but this has become extremely DNA Lounge-related of late, as I shall explain. (This counts as plumbing-related, the internet being a series of tubes, full of toxic slop.) As you may be aware, our web site is being constantly, relentlessly hammered by AI scrapers. I am spending an absurd number of hours just trying to keep things barely functional under this brutal onslaught. It's not only us, obviously; this toxic blight…

Many years ago, I worked with the NYU Music Experience Design Lab to create a browser-based music theory tool called the aQWERTYon. It has two purposes: to turn the computer keyboard into a playable instrument, and to visualize chords and scales in an intuitive way. I am very proud of this tool, it was a lot of hard work, and I use it constantly when I’m teaching music theory. However, in the years since we stopped working on it, I have thought of some features I would want to add and…

Skuka says they barely share good things online and I understand why. I understand it's a big, vulnerable leap. The void is infinite and cold and the silence is deafening. They are talking about personal stuff but I thought about it more broadly. My take, though, for myself, is that this is all the more reason to. There's so much negativity online, and in life generally, that I feel like I actively want to try to redress that balance. I'm not saying I can but I want to. I certainly don't want…

I just realized that I don't know what hypertext actually is. Like I know HTML and I build HTTP APIs for a living, both of which have hypertext in their names, but what is actually hypertext? What is the definition of hypertext? A quick visit to wikipedia later tells me that for text to be considered hypertext, it needs to: Be text On a monitor (or just any electric form I guess) With links to other documents Which can be accessed immediately The prefix hyper isn't just a marketing gimmick…

Here’s what happens when you try to update your Android phone if it’s low on battery (even if it’s connected to a charger): It’s a pretty cheap error UI, a misaligned string thrown carelessly in between existing interface pieces. It doesn’t even bother explaining what “too low” means. Compare this to what the Playdate does in the same situation: If the device battery is depleted, the software simply charges if first to the necessary minimum (spelled out on screen), before automatically…

Ogawa Coffee has a very long history, first opening in Kyoto in 1952, and more recently (since 2020) expanding to a number of stores in Tokyo as well. They even have one store in Boston! Although most of their branches are named “Ogawa Coffee”, there are three with the “Coffee Laboratory” moniker in Tokyo where I suppose they are going for a different sort of vibe. For their Shimokitazawa location they describe it as an “experience-based beans salon”. Well, whatever that means, it for sure is…

I have a hard time not cheating once I’ve started. I’ve noticed this about myself in a few different places, and I’ve known for a long time. I don’t think…

🌲 gonna 🌼 go 🌱 touch 🌳 grass 🌷 now Be good to yourself. If you enjoyed this post, click the little up arrow chevron thinger below the tags to help it rank in Bear's Discovery feed and maybe consider sharing it with a friend or on your socials.

2026-10-01Hello! It's October now.I wonder if I should have skipped this photograph today. It's foolish to be standing in the middle of a busy road (even though I was safe in the median) and I don't want any photograph of mine to become imitable behavior.Even still, the coloring isn't great and I don't think my attempts in editing made it any better. I was attempting at hand-recreating the common Instagram filters and presets I see being passed around. It was worth a try, but there's a lot more…

After using the same few image formats for 20+ years, I’m now on the WebP bandwagon. That isn’t something I thought I’d ever say. Now I’m wondering how soon it’ll be before I can use a couple more. When Google announced the WebP format in 2010 it was interesting, but only academically. WebP support was added to Chrome in 2011, 1 but other browsers took their time supporting it: Edge in 2018, Firefox in 2019, and Safari in 2020. Until there was baseline support, the format was only being used…

A couple of weeks ago, I shared Jacob Coxon's Twitter thread in re: his resignation from Anthropic, and also referenced it in this post. Coxon was Jon Stewart's interview yesterday and it's worth watching. Stewart doesn't necessarily explore depths in re: AI we haven't all thought about, but at one point, this happens: Stewart: We hear a lot of the utopian talk. "We're altruistic, man. We're doing this for society." But what we see is, it's really they've stripmined the entirety of human…

2026-09-30Hello!If I had not insisted on experimenting with this photo, I might have thrown it out. And now, it's one of my favorite images.Hanging in my room is a bit of watercolor artwork that I purchased on the used market. It combines streaks and splotches of color on a white canvas, and it has levels of detail and texture that I can't understand. These splotches of colors in a photograph remind me of it, and I love it.By inverting the colors in post processing, I can take a simple snapshot…

2026-09-29Hello!I designed my Philadelphia street photography walk to hit two points, with wandering in between the endpoints in case the wind takes me somewhere. This was one of those points. Well, this and City Hall.I like giving myself a set point to go somewhere, otherwise I'll be wandering the city for hours and I'll miss my train home. Hell, I only caught the train with minutes to spare even with a set schedule!This was taken in the late afternoon, so most shops had closed their service.…

2026-09-28Hello!I hate to say it, but I think I've exhausted the interesting compositions from my local area. If I'm going to drive out anyway, I might as well head to the city and do some work there.The changing of seasons might serve to give me some inspiration, but an unfortunate amount of plans I've made as of late have failed in some crucial way or another. I ought to pull out of this dive.Finally, The Ambassadors is a nearly 500-year-old painting of scientific objects in high detail. Also…

Bringing receipts for xkcd.com/2347. adactio.com/links/22794

Today I wanted to try and find an extension for iOS that would automatically block the google AI results on searches. I know you can type in -ai and have them not show, but wanted to make it simple and also sometimes I go from spotlight search to safari and don't add it there. So can I add a iOS extension that will eliminate google search AI and maybe other sources of AI answers like Amazon and others. When I searched for "any good apps for removing AI from safari on iOS -ai" I was greeted with…

Monte Carlo simulations (or methods) is the technique of applying randomness and the Law of large numbers to the solution of various scientific and engineering problems. One of its first documented uses was by Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann for nuclear weapon simulations after WWII [1]. In this post I want to provide examples of some simple uses of Monte Carlo simulations. We'll start with the classical example of calculating the value of by throwing darts. Estimating pi Suppose we take a…

Blog post: https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1177/malicious-compliance

I see a lot of posts about people leaving platforms. This one about leaving Reddit, this one about leaving WordPress, and a bunch of others about leaving Discord, GitHub, Codeberg, Photoshop, and more. There are also those talking about leaving the web entirely for the smallweb (Gopher, Gemini, etc). The reasons vary. Pricing changes, AI training on everything you post, a new owner, a new policy, or just the slow feeling that the place stopped being built for you. But the posts all have the…

import NotePanel from ’@/NotePanel’ import Figure from ’@/Figure’ import TechnicalTerm from ’@/TechnicalTerm’ When I was a kid in the early 2000s, I spent a lot of time playing games that I borrowed from our local library. Many of them were German point-and-click adventure games, since those were the games that ran on my dad’s Windows 95 computer. Even back then, I was interested in tech and always tried to figure out how I could keep playing these games after giving them back to the library,…

I've been a fan and follower of Weird Web October ever since it started a couple of years go (and obviously I'm a fan of keeping the Internet fun and weird). But this is the first year in which I've actively participated in it. This, my first contribution to Weird Web October 2026, targets day/prompt 8: skeuomorphism. I found myself thinking about all of the examples of skeuomorphism in our computer user interface metaphors: radio buttons, toggle switches, drawers, tabs, etc. Then I realised…

I wanted to share my open-source solution on Reddit. I created an account, found a community where people post links to their projects, and posted a link to my GitHub project there. The post was immediately deleted, and my account was banned.It turns out you first need to write normal comments and posts without links to make it seem like you’re a regular user who isn’t trying to promote anything. Only then can you post a link.Okay, so I registered a new account from a different IP address and…

What’s going on, Internet? If you don’t follow my Bookmarks through the feed, then here’s the bookmarks from September. Enjoy. MVNDY — THE POWER OF VISION Spend more time on the idea than the tooling. Craft on its own doesn’t change much. I don’t like passkeys I’m not a big fan of passkeys either. I’ve tried them and don’t particularly care for them. Rubenerd: Ban infinite scrolling I’ve never liked infinite scroll. I prefer pagination. I always lose my place in infinite scroll websites. This…