It is becoming a new recurring topic on my blog, a short video recommendation. Short in a sense of less than 10 minutes or so, not a few seconds long reel (god save). Today I’d like to recommend not your usual YouTube video, but a piece of art. Anton, designer living in Tokyo, collects memories of his life in various forms, from journal to an incredible complex graphic intensive hand crafted videos. I enjoy visual arts a lot, and follow him for some time already. And if you liked this video,…

Or, @gruber, they do call the new MacBooks “Duo” but it is because they dual-boot to iOS. Eliminate the need for an iPad from both ends! Which is why it would never happen, but it would be a valid use of a good name.

L-R Rachel Barry, Ben Wiggins and Beverley Klein in Memoriam, Southwark Playhouse. Photo: Charlie Flint If scientists could extract memories and replay them through virtual reality headsets for others to experience, whose memories would be worth preserving and who benefits? That’s the premise of Noga Flaishon’s play Memoriam at the Southwark Playhouse. Rachel (Rachel Barry) works at the company that preserves memories and then puts an edited version up for rent for people to experience. It’s an…

I’m back online. Same blog, new domain. Shortly before going to China over the summer I set myself a goal; relaunch my blog before I travel. I had a week to get it done and I failed spectacularly. More frustratingly than that, I half completed the job essentially blocking any new posts until the job was complete. Throughout 2026, I’ve been publishing more than in previous years. Most of these have been journal entries liberally supported by an ever growing collection of images. I was starting…

I love a rainy day. I fucking hate the flu. Today, I get both. I don't do well with illness. When it's me, I assume my death is imminent. For now, it's only a tickle in my chest. When my son so much as sniffles, I'm an anxious mess. Today is his fourth day at 103°F+. I lost a sister when I was very young. I have vague memories of waking up in the middle of the night to find her being tended to by my mother on the couch in the living room. Small, sweaty face by the light of the Christmas tree,…

Richmond works while I sleep.

An excellent if stressful book. The first Dostoevsky that I’ve read, and I was pleased to find it far more approachable than I’d anticipated. The book follows a destitute student in 1860’s St. Petersburg with a weird sort of napoleon complex, who commits an evil crime and falls apart over it. Egotistical and mostly unlikable to me, he is handsome, popular, respected, loved by friends and family, and quite deranged, often delirious from nihilism, disease, poverty and guilt. Reminds me a of Keep…

If Usagi Yojimbo was mixed half and half with Berserk and a touch of Twin Peaks you'd get this. 26 episodes. There are samurai and yokai, but also the crudeness of war vs the best aesthetics i've seen in a long time. There seems to be a modern remake but looks ugly af

(It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories. This is a real story, and an excerpt from chapter 12 of my book Shift Happens.) The keyboards of the first teletypes looked as if the Shift Wars had happened in an alternate timeline won by typewriters with two Shifts, a century before the arrival of the iPhone. The first teletypes were, too, built with only three banks of keys, the digits sharing the top row of QWERTY. Among the most common was the striking…

Sinosauropteryx and ArchaeopteryxA feather can change how we see an entire animal.Preserved beside a delicate skeleton, its faint outline tells us something bones alone cannot: this ancient creature wore plumage. Two remarkable fossil animals, Sinosauropteryx and Archaeopteryx, have helped transform our understanding of dinosaurs and the origins of birds.One was a small predator with a fuzzy

The other day I had a nightmare. I woke up in the middle of the night, my heart was pounding. In my dream, Anthropic released Claude Opus 6. The problem was that it was much worse than Opus 5.5. I was so terrified, I didn’t know what to do. How will I develop software now? For almost a year now, I have been leveraging LLMs during my work and while developing my side projects. At first, I was hesitant to use LLMs, but then I gave in to the vibes, embraced exponentials, and forgot that the code…

Hey all. Hahahaha, it’s tuesday… Not much done in terms of Big Projects. But… I’m feeling pretty alright, generally. [Read more...] Tag(s): Monday Roundup

Last Monday (26/10/26), Alder Martha Grekos distributed a seismic paper headed “Reform of the Office of Lord Mayor” to all elected members of the City Council. She apparently also sent it to senior officers of the Council, the Livery, the All Party Parliamentary Group conducting a survey on the future of the Corporation, the Chairs of City Residents’ Associations, and local and national journalists. We reproduce the text of the paper below. Anyone with an interest in this Council should read…

Crystal Caines & Tony Quattro – “Escape” Deki Alem – “Pretty Toes” Ecco2k – “Aldehydes and Ketones”The post Visual Velcro 65 first appeared on Palms Out Sounds.

Rope is falling off, dirt that used to hold the clay together is blown away. Whatever pressure existed from the outside is gone. All that is left is disintegrating.

As described in a recent Science paper, researchers successfully used AI to create sixteen useful bacteriophages. But the same AI methods [used to create disease-fighting viruses] also lower the technical barrier to building other kinds of biological agents on demand, including viruses with the potential to cause disease, sharpening a long-standing worry that systems developed for medicine and biotechnology could be turned, without much modification, into biological weapons. AI Can Now Design…

(It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories.) In July, I shared a video showing how strange visuals can get as you moved them further away from [0, 0, 0], and they start to be affected by the inherent limitations of floating point numbers. In response to that post, one of the readers (thank you, Ronan!) shared a similar video from a game Outer Wilds: But I was curious if I could see something like this in a productivity app. I mentioned that Figma…

Back when I used Windows, over ten years ago, I had a serious case of Mac envy, all because of Notational Velocity, a lightning-fast note-taking app. Its signature look, with the list of notes at the top and the selected note’s text below, came with full keyboard control and a global shortcut to start a new note. Under the hood, everything was saved as plain text files (*.txt or similar). People loved it! I wanted that app so badly that one day I described it on my personal blog, hoping some…

Aside from writing a bunch of books and short stories, I also write fiction podcast scripts. Luckily, the fiction podcast space isn’t so rigid as other industries, but still, there’s a few conventions I stick to in order to make everybody happy. I write all of my fiction podcast scripts in Fountain. It’s free, portable, literally, and can be converted to almost anything, even Word files. Sidebar, here is where you can look at all the podcasts I love This isn’t going to be a guide on Fountain.…

I’m grateful for the IndieWeb community. I feel as if I’ve found my online tribe here. I think I first discovered the IndieWeb somewhere around June 2026. I’ve had blogs way before that, but until the beginning of 2026, I don’t think anybody ever read them and I always felt like I was missing some kind of community. Despite how connected the Internet is, if the only thing you do is buy a domain and host a blog on it, the odds that someone randomly finds your blog are low. For me, finding the…

I saw Austin Kleon's Be the weird you wish to see prints recently. And I'm writing the next part of my actual aunting experience which is very much about modelling behaviours. It also kind of ties into my average post. Indeed my first post on this blog was about how I wanted to make little and weird things. What puts me off saying 'weird' explicitly here is I don't want to be all "I'm so mad, me. What am I like." I have a horror of drawing attention upon myself and any sort of performativity.…

Last week I shared a demo ("Generating PDFs from Word Templates with officeParser") that made use of the awesome officeParser open source library. That demo was a simple "customer report" web app that took custom data and a Word template. Once the form was submitted, the library converted tokens in the Word template to real data and output a PDF. I decided to build another demo using the library, this time on the server with a simple Node.js script. As I mentioned previously, this new feature…

Imagination Products has a supplemental trademark registration in the color orange (Pantone Orange 021c) for hand-operated plumbing snakes. It claims that several defendants, including Omont, sell drain clog cleaning tools that violate its trade dress in the orange shade. This is not a SAD Scheme case, but it is adjacent. The plaintiff sued the Chinese defendant but did not seek an ex parte TRO. It requested, and received, permission to serve the defendant by email. When the defendant…

Due to recent conlanging efforts, I thought a quick guide for this would be proper. All my website pages assume familiarity with Arabic script, but I don't want to spend a TIR page talking about how to read it as that's general, non-TIR-specific knowledge. So this blog seems the most proper place. Contents Overview Letters B, P, T, N I, Y, Ë R, Z, J D, E O, U, Ö, Ü, W Q, F GH X, ZH, CH S, SH A, L K, G, NG M H Handy chart Stroke order Numbers Disclaimer: I haven't been learning Arabic, but…

Someone submitted my post about archiving my gem repositories to Hacker News, the house journal of venture capitalist Silicon Valley techbro orthodoxy, and it made it to the top of the page. Despite my trepidation, to my surprise the discussion (with over 500 comments) was mostly reasonable. The presidential election result in Brazil was a relief. It’s good news for the Amazon rainforest, and thus for (almost) everyone and everything. It’s bad news for Zuckerberg, a man who always seems to be…

Skeletons and skulls have always appeared, throughout the history of art, as emblems of something that awaits us all, when we slip off our mortal coil and leave behind the remnants of our time on the planet. I suppose that’s a long-winded way of saying that we have celebrated the advent of death by making art out of our fears. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has amassed a rather spooky collection of momento mori over the course of its 174 year history. Why not have some fun while…

Another UC Irvine doctoral student, Songyu (Alfred) Liu, successfully passed his doctoral defense this week, co-advised by Mike Goodrich and me. Alfred came to UCI in 2020, initially working with cognitive scientist Mark Steyvers, who has a joint appointment in computer science. Their work eventually turned into a 2024 publication, “Combining Human and AI Strengths in Object Counting under Information Asymmetry”, in the 12th AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (2024), but in…

Thanks to Charlie Horse 47 and Killdumpster for their sponsorship of this post, via the magic of Patreon. ***Image by Tumisufrom PixabayTalk is cheap but speech is free.What a bombshell discovery.But one that leads us into the senses-shattering return of the feature that all of humanity and beyond is talking about.It's the one in which you and you alone, as well as everyone else, can choose the topic of debate.Therefore, make sure to register that topic in the comments section below, before…

This year has been unkind to us from the very beginning — more so, even, than last year.In January, we said a sudden, heartbreaking goodbye to my mom. Then, at 17:45 on Friday, 23 October, my great-aunt Betsie passed away at the age of 94 years and six months. With her passing, another era came to an end.She insisted that we call her simply “Betsie”, and she was an institution in our family. Her doors were always open to visitors; despite raising four children, with pets underfoot, her house…

I have been organising a paper conference for the last few years so naturally I get interested in paper at work. We have a bias towards eliminating paper as much as possible both in population facing interactions (invitation or reminder letters) and clinical contexts (for clinicians or admin staff using software). The latter is the one that interests me most as I think people use paper for lots of complex reasons. As an example, my favourite (and older) GP has a booklet she writes to-dos in for…