A command-line tool can print lines, which stay in the terminal's scrollback but look plain. Or it can take over the screen like a full-screen app, which looks good until it exits and takes its output with it. I wanted the looks of the second and the scrollback of the first, so I wrote console, an OCaml library for tables, trees and live progress rows that print into the scrollback. Its first version, 0.9.0, is now on opam: $ opam install console console-eio It comes in two parts. console is a…

Agent hooks are small scripts that your agent tool runs automatically when something happens, like right before a shell command or when the agent finishes. Claude Code hooks, Cursor hooks, and Codex hooks all work this way, and they are the most reliable way to make sure a rule is followed every time. I use … → The post Agent hooks in Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex explained appeared first on SwiftLee.

To liberate podcasts from the German ARD Sounds app, use this neat open-source tool by Sebastian Cohnen (tisba): https://ardsounds.tisba.de I came across this on Mastodon, heard about it again in the Wochendämmerung podcast, and used it to subscribe to the Kult! podcast (German audio books of classical literature) upon a recommendation by blumenstrasse who plugged the The War of the Worlds audio book.

I'm not in the market for a new MacBook right now, but I think I'd be sticking with the regular MacBook Pro next time regardless. OLED would be lovely, but for the price, I don't need a touchscreen laptop.

Things that brought me delight in October, 2026:The Cramps, Gravest GravyIf you're a Cramps fan, you'll recognize a lot of the tracks on Gravest Gravy, but you haven't heard them quite so raw and primordial as this. This batch of tracks was slated for release in the 90s, but they got shelved until now--and we are absolutely blessed to be able to hear them in the year 2026. This is purestrain Cramps--rock 'n' roll that still sounds dangerous, a mindset warped by b-movie and trash culture kitsch,…

In the interest of full disclosure; this is a rant that has some racing content, but the main topic does not have a ton to do with IndyCar or motorsports in general. You’ve been warned. Anyone who has read this site for very long, knows that I despise change. In case you didn’t know, my […]

When I came out of my mom’s vagina, they put a cowboy hat on me. – Clint Patterson I picked this song as John Anderson’s sendoff because I used to sing a parody of it called “Weeblin'” to amuse Grace after she declared that as she put on weight she felt like a weeble. The links above the video were provided byFranklin Harris, IncarcerNation (x2), Charles Hill, Mike Masnick, Jesse Walker, and Jessica Pishko, in that order. That Bigfoot film finally proven a hoax. Cops never stop showing what…

This page is meant to serve as a hub for all of the features written to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the North American release of the Wii.11/2/2026: 20 years of the WiiThis newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.Powered by beehiiv

Scene from the film gravity – Astronaut blown into space high above the earth We live in incredible times with such possibilities that is clear. Although its easily dismissed seeing the AI reskins, hearing how AlJazeera was hacked with a zero click attack and reading about cognitive atrophy To quote Buckminster Fuller “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” You are seeing aspects of this with…

It’s the October 2026 Playlist! We’ve got a bunch of great songs from albums I enjoyed in the past month below. Artists with multiple songs on this playlist: The Olivia Tremor Control (3), Old Joy (3), Paper Jam (2), Charlie Kaplan (2), Fish Narc (2), Dummy (2), Bliss? (2), Pet Fox (2), Dazy (2). Here is where you can listen to the playlist on various streaming services: Spotify (missing one song), Tidal. Be sure to check out previous playlist posts if you’ve enjoyed this one, or visit the site…

I was in the office at work. This was the view from the nearest window to my desk in downtown Indianapolis. I’ve written a couple times recently about starting a job that requires me to be in the office five days a week and what a rough transition that’s been. But for a couple years, at my last full-time job, I went in every Tuesday. I told my team that I’d buy lunch or beers for anybody who also came in on Tuesday. I was trying to build in-person camaraderie. But few took me up on it — it was…

New and revised entries at online philosophy resources, new reviews of philosophy books, new podcast episodes, recently published open access philosophy books, and more… . (If we missed something, let us know.) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy New: ∅ Revised: Philosophy of Linguistics by Barbara C. Scholz, Francis Jeffry Pelletier, Geoffrey K. Pullum, and Ryan Nefdt. Consequentializing by Douglas W. Portmore. Narrow Mental Content by Curtis Brown. Meaning Holism by Henry Jackman. Thomas Hill…

Inevitably there will be times when you are not available. But the show must go on. What do you do? It could be ill-health, a diary-clash, a family emergency or being on holiday. There will be times when you are not available to do your job. The best solution is to prepare in advance. Have a substitute to lead the rehearsal or workshop Somebody you trust and who works in the same way as you. Better still, have a pool of such people to ensure that somebody will be free. If a concert is coming up…

Coping with the loss of a loved server On Sunday I got one of those chat messages one doesn't want to read: the SSD in the big machine I've been using for the habitat work was severely degraded, and so work was stopped on that machine, and I had to find a new home for my habitat map work. For the last year or so most of the work I've done on biodiversity pipelines I've done on the Mac Studio that sits on my desk: with 32 CPU cores, 80 GPU cores, and half a terabyte of RAM this machine is no…

Introduction Hamming Distance Intuitive Estimation of Error Correction Bits Digging Deeper Comparing against BCH Codes What about Reed-Solomon Codes? BCH vs Reed-Solomon Codes References Footnotes Introduction I’ve been interested in error correcting codes (ECC) for a while now, and though I haven’t gotten very far, I keep on reading and, occasionally, writing about it. Except for really simple schemes, ECC theory gets complicated quickly. The two codes that I’ve looked at most are Reed-Solomon…

According to Gallup, managers account for about 70% of the variance in their teams’ engagement. How committed people are in an organization depends mostly on their direct boss. In practice, middle managers are the ones really responsible for engagement and for whether people stay, whatever their job title says. Nobody experiences a company’s strategy in the abstract. They experience it through the person who hands them their work, makes clear what is expected, notices what they do well and…

They look like the kind of unassuming houses built across Manhattan just before the Civil War, and a newspaper ad offering the lots for sale in 1851 lends support to that possibility. Built at today’s northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 81st Street, these five attached cottages likely housed working-class families. Three were united under one cornice, and most featured shutters that must have looked quite pretty in the row’s early years. The wood-frame building material tells us that the…

Unterspreewald According to Google Translate, these photos were taken in Lower Spreewald near Schlepzig

A client certificate is supposed to prove more than an identity printed on a certificate. It is supposed to prove that the connecting client has the corresponding private key. That’s the trust boundary at the center of Canonical’s October 28 security advisory for LXD and MicroCloud.The issue, CVE-2026-112816, lets someone who can reach the affected HTTPS API authenticate as a trusted client by supplying that client’s public certificate in a crafted certificate chain. The attacker does not need…

Welcome to part 114 of my Never Ending Mixtape where the latest additions take us from 5,213 songs to 5,237 with the addition I Am Your Season by The Womack Sisters. Their debut album might well be my album of 2026.My Never Ending Mixtape is pretty eclectic - I add songs in no particular order, with no thought behind the song, artist, genre ... or anything. The complete opposite of the old days when I would make mixtapes or mix CD's! Thanks so much if you are one of the 388 people who follow…

It was during my work on Leonard Cline that I first encountered the name of Haniel Long. (According to Long himself, his first name was pronounced Han-eye-el, with the accent on the second syllable.) Long was born in 1888 in in Burma (now Myanmar) of Methodist Missionary parents, who returned with him to the US in 1890. Settling in Pittsburgh, they later moved to Duluth and then to Minneapolis.

9732/21651Who Shots on bluesky tweeted a picture from old, proper Doctor Who of Sarah Jane talking to a big, green, one-eyed, penis-headed alien and not for the first time I had a Proustian-style flashback to the 1970s in Loughborough and the Weetabix Dr Who diorama packets. Would Proust be as famous if his jolts to the past were caused by genderless alien who somehow looks like all human genitalia all at once?

I think this is the first time in 9 years blogging here, that I outright forgot to make my daily post! So here I am, at past 2am, making up for it. 😄 Actually, it’s past 3am. Our province no longer does daylight savings time, but not all our devices are connected to services that … Continue reading I forgot!

Went to a barbershop for the first time in 44 years, 2 days ago. AMA.

Cabinet screws are incredibly designed pieces of engineering. They ripped through poplar and into a stud like butter.

2026 romantic fantasy, second of a pair. Now that Osric Mordaunt, assassin, and Aurienne Fairhrim, healer, have worked out that they kind of like each other… what will they do next?

When I was a teenager growing up in rural Utah, I read the newspaper every day. Why? Because my dad subscribed to it, and he read it every day, so I started reading it because I figured there must be something good in there. After a while I became hooked on the news, and looked forward to my daily readings. (I still like to consume news every day now, but I have cut way back - mostly for my mental health.) Part of that daily habit, my favorite part actually, was reading some of the daily comic…

I went cross-country skiing on Saturday. It was my fifth ski day of the new season, which is a welcome change after last year’s abysmal snowfall. We have another storm underway and with any luck, we should have some packed trails this week. Saturday also happened to be Halloween. I think of Halloween skiing as a Grand Mesa tradition, and since I’m a data nerd I have numbers to prove it. I am not one of those people who use Strava or religiously track kilometers skied or training numbers, but I…

Among the most interesting and exciting of pterosaurs – in my humble opinion – are the tapejarids, a short-snouted, toothless, often elaborately crested group vaguely akin to the sometimes gigantic, stork-faced azhdarchids. I like tapejarids enough that I’ve written about them on numerous occasion here (see the links below) and indeed they’re one of several pterosaur groups that I’ve had the privilege of studying. Caption: reconstructed life appearance of the new tapejarid Hintighernia…