Over the years I’ve gotten myself into all varieties of technical rabbit holes and wild goose chases. But I’m feeling weird about my latest trip, involving a forgotten Linux tablet. I blame AI.Recently, I took on a project that I thought would be a lot of fun … but in the end, I did not like how it made me feel. And I think it reflects the real dangers of leaning too aggressively on AI for stuff you’d like to try out.A quick explainer: About four years ago, I got a hold of a JingPad, a…

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please. I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here.

As is tradition during the Halloween season, Serafina, aka Krevborna's Angel of the Graves, aka protagonist of my novel Ornamental Women, favors the decrepit denizens of the Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque Discord server with a movie of the week leading up to the best day of all. She tends to announce each movie with the deadpan morbid humor of a classic horror comic host, so I've preserved both her selections and her teasers her for posterity.Posterity--and because she had me at…

Back when renting a game meant going to a specific physical store to pay $5 and borrow a game for a week (rather than buying a game at full price these days then having your ownership revoked because the publisher said so), there were a few diamonds in the rough that I eventually forgot about. However, while Mute and I were decorating her new bedroom in the upstairs portion of the Cartomancy Cafe, we'd dug up an old memory of playing Twisted Metal: Black. After a little bit of ruminating, we…

The litter red metal box honesty box mounted near the entrance or exit platform of trams and buses and was in use until drivers started taking passenger fares.

You are all computer scientists. You know what FINITE AUTOMATA can do. You know what TURING MACHINES can do. For example, Finite Automata can add but not multiply. Turing Machines can compute any computable function. Turing machines are incredibly more powerful than Finite Automata. Yet the only difference between a FA and a TM is that. the TM, unlike the FA, has paper and pencil. Think about it. It tells you something about the power of writing. Without writing, you are reduced to a finite…

Replied to Jeff Starr (@perishable@mastodon.social) by Jeff Starr (Mastodon.social) #WordPress 7.2 is adding a (customizable) /random/ endpoint that returns a set of random posts. It's enabled by default (which it shouldn't imo) and getting some vigorous debate on the announcement post: https://make.wordpress.org/core/2026/11/05/your-content-is-going-to-get-more-random/ WordPress 7.2 will come with a “random” endpoint (see WordPress post). The feature, which will be enabled by default, will…

Inspired by a conversation with Cascade Default Caveat EmptorThis is a change designed to slow down advancement. Not every table wants that kind of slowdown which is understandable. Hell LevelsThis is intended to be used with your favorite version of D&D. A "Hell Level" is a character level where their XP rate is reduced by a percentage to prolong their time at said level. The standard place to put hell levels would be 4->5 and 8->9. These break points represent large spurts in power for the…

I care an unreasonable amount about the decline in quality of the opening theme song to PJ Masks.

If I could write 10 more books like “Ingenious Mechanicks,” I would be a happy guy. The book is exactly what I thought I would be doing as a writer and woodworker: Find an ancient workbench or tool that has been forgotten (such as the Roman workbench) Travel to foreign countries to research these kinds of workbenches. Find that there is still a 2,000-year-old example in a museum basement Visit it. Measure it. Get to pick it up Build a reproduction and work on it to find out how it works. That…

I’ve been really sick all week. Big cotton wool head, engorged brain cannot think properly. Tried to work a bit, mostly failed. I did manage to play a bit of Factorio, a few friends are playing through Space Age on a server. I haven’t managed to be on there as much as I wanted to because see above. Because of sickness we didn’t get a lot of house work done but we did tear out the shower cubicle in our bathroom. It was so grim! We’re leaving the tray, tiles, and shower head in place (after a…

I have been waiting a bit to write my take on the election. I know a lot of people have already, and I wanted to let people make their views known while I refine mine. I am not going to make this a long post. But here is my take, with a little history so that you know where I am coming from. I am currently, and have been for almost the last 20 years, a non-partisan registered voter. I started out when I registered as a Democrat when I first was able to vote at 18, because that was what my…

I have been waiting a bit to write my take on the election. I know a lot of people have already, and I wanted to let people make their views known while I refine mine. I am not going to make this a long post. But here is my take, with a little history so that you know where I am coming from. I am currently, and have been for almost the last 20 years, a non-partisan registered voter. I started out when I registered as a Democrat when I first was able to vote at 18, because that was what my…

The result of high levels of hype about new technologies is that people start to think that: The world has just been changed forever (which sometimes, but rarely, is true to some extent). The new technology that is being hyped will continue to change the world in powerful and unimaginable ways. The new technology is a once in a lifetime, or even once in a millennium, singular event. [[I think it is no coincidence that these three thoughts are similar to those that found new religions or cults.…

Scribed by Sandre the Giant Released: 20th August 1996 It is always fascinating to listen to records from twenty, thirty, forty years ago and still find them to feel utterly different from anything you can listen to today, and Type O Negative could be one of the most obvious examples of that theory. Their gloomy, sardonic gothic doom has rarely been imitated even if a lot of the little bits and pieces of their sound have been appropriated by so many bands over the years, but no one has really…

★★★★★ Great local electronics repair shop. I’ve taken two devices in for repair over the last couple of months: a 2020 Pixel phone that needed a new battery, and a 2019 late-Intel MacBook that had just stopped booting. With the phone they had to order the battery, so it took a week, but with the laptop they recognized the problem, had the parts on hand, and fixed it overnight with no data loss. (I strongly suspect the Apple store would’ve pushed me to buy a new one, and if they were willing to…

Photo by Al Parrish I grew up with campaign furniture. My grandparents collected it. And my dad was fond of building it. We had stacking campaign chests (and, weirdly, side tables) in our house in Arkansas. I didn’t think anything was odd about it. It was simple and rugged stuff. Nothing fancy. But when I started working at Popular Woodworking Magazine, I found that none of the editors had any interest in the style. After surveying 200,000 readers, they had data on their side. Here’s what…

Every content medium comes with their own reader’s behavior. You can’t complaint about people not reading your social media posts. Because people don’t read on social media. They skim and scan down feeds. Just take a look at someone “reading” on Instagram, LinkedIn, or TikTok: Scroll, scroll… Go back for a few seconds, like… Scroll, scroll… Just like Herbert Lui wrote in A good story needs a book: When someone watches a video, they stay for a minute at most… But when someone reads your work,…

Reviewed by Tony Baer: VLADIMIR NABOKOV – Lolita. The novel was written in English, but fear of censorship in the U.S. (where Nabokov lived) and Britain led to its being first published in Paris, France, in 1955 by Olympia Press. [Source: Wikipedia.] Reprinted many times. Could be called: ‘The Pedophile with the Broken Heart’. Humbert Humbert, our antihero (i think that’s what you call it when you’re embarrassed to call the lead character the protagonist), is a pedophile. He blames it on the…

The longest constitution of any country in the world belongs to India, which is appropriately the world’s most populous country. It stands at 145,000 words – a bit longer than Homer’s Odyssey in the original Greek, and over twice the length of the second longest national constitution, Nigeria’s. As a point of comparison, the United States constitution, arguably the world’s oldest active written constitution,1 is only around 7,500 words including amendments. But there’s another active…

Today was Stake Conference in my LDS stake. That meant we didn't have 8:30am ward meetings and a 1pm conference meeting instead. So it presented an opportunity for me to attend my first Sunday Mass at my local Catholic parish at 10am. I've attended Sunday Mass several times with my mother and step-dad at their parish, and I've gone to a few Saturday evening ones at mine, but I wanted to see what a Sunday Mass was like here. It was well-attended, with lovely music, and beautifully-presented…

A cartoon coded in CSS from comiCSS.

LANCE: You should take a break from all the AI stuff and talk about your book!BILL: I will! But its not my book its co-authored with Erik Demaine and Mohammad Hajiaghayi. The title isComputational Intractability: A Guide to Algorithmic Lower BoundsLANCE: That sounds similar to Garey and Johnson's classicComputers and Intractability: A Guide to the Theory of NP-CompletenessBILL: Indeed. DGH is a sequel to Garey and JohnsonLANCE: But so much has happened since 1979.BILL: Yes. That's why the book…

Every now and then I see attempts at a "Linux Phone" but I think that is a huge mistake because I need my phone to actually fucking work I think a way better strategy is to start with a "Linux Tablet", because that I am much happier to tinker with and don't need to suffer the indignity of it failing at some socially embarrassing moment Then you can boostrap you way onto mobile OkayThankyouBye

I have 100+ GitHub repos and pay $5/month for GitHub Pro. Worth it. GitHub allows 100,000 repos per account, with a recommended maximum of 10 GB for each repo’s .git folder. Multiply those figures and you get 1 PB on paper, alongside my $5/month bill. But large repos still make clones slower. I’d keep code and ordinary images together, and put videos and other large files that don’t need code versioning elsewhere. An agent should download those only when a task needs them. When to use Git LFS…

Hope you’re not tired of another beautiful fall sunrise. For the second month in a row, I woke up early to search for an owl. Last month I woke up early to search for a Great horned owl and saw the waning crescent moon as the sun rose. Today I watched another fall sunrise while searching for (and seeing!) the moth-like flight of a Short-eared owl as it hunted over frost-covered fields in Superior Township, Michigan. Look closely in the sky, above the silhouetted trees against the deep orange…

Portal Frame Holiday House for the Dollander Family, St-Clair, 1949-51, arch. Henri Prouvé, built and furnished by Jean Prouvé, : RMN via jeanprouve.com “Industrialists originally from the Vosges region of France, Roger and Marguerite Dollander were among Jean Prouvé’s close friends. In the late 1940s, they commissioned him to design their holiday home in Saint-Clair, on the French Riviera.“Conceived in its entirety by Jean Prouvé and his brother Henri, the villa stands as a remarkable…

Thanksgiving is easily one of my favorite holidays to cook for! After spending more than six years cooking every one of Ina Garten’s recipes and hosting themed Friendsgivings inspired by some of my favorite cookbook authors, I’ve developed some pretty strong opinions about what makes a great Thanksgiving dinner. This is where I’m bringing it all together: my favorite Ina recipes, the best dishes I’ve discovered beyond the Barefoot Contessa, my own Thanksgiving recipes, and all the tips and…