A newly-manufactured (and already weatherworn) torii stands in front of the reinstalled monument. Along the waterfront in the Port of Hualien stands a monument dedicated to the memory of Eguchi Ryōzaburō (江口良三郎), a career soldier, policeman, and veteran of the 1914 Truku War (太魯閣戰爭) who headed the colonial government’s Aborigine Affairs Section (理蕃課) before serving as the fifth sub-prefect of Karenkō Prefecture (花蓮港廳), now Hualien County, from 1920 until 1926. He is credited locally with…

Paul Graham shared how to earn a billion dollars. Being the founder of a startup incubator, it’s not a surprise he recommends starting a successful startup. For that, he recommends building something people like so much they tell friends share about. For that, solve a need of yours. And for that, build projects just for fun. After all, entrepreneurship doesn’t have to be complicated. Or maybe the alternative is to become a time billionaire.

It has been nearly 6 years since I last made any significant changes to my video call and conference setup. Back then I ditched the Logitech Brio (which sometimes showed odd behavior on macOS) and got an HDMI-USB adapter and a Canon DLSR camera. While this setup might be a bit overkill, it worked really well and the video quality was great. In the beginning, getting the Canon to work was a bit of a challenge. While the camera provides a clean HDMI output (without all the additional data people…

Nau maiYesterday we played in the Puritan colony of New Haven, Connecticut. This is the new sport. I slept late after a big night of supporting Jon in his racing career, and I had just risen from my bunk when bus driver John arrived and began changing everyone’s sheets (this happens once a week on a bus tour). I headed to the galley and constructed a simple breakfast using ingredients from pantry, fridge, and fruit bowl. Fresh strawberries were quartered, a kiwifruit was roughly sliced, a…

Perhaps all cities are illusory, each in their own way...

As regular readers of my blog know well, I enjoy navel-gazing and writing about writing. I consider myself a specimen of curiosity just as I do any other topic I write about. Being someone who has decided to write so frequently and publicly, I've gone over the throughlines and various thesis topics I've discovered I gravitate towards, I've gone over my workflow from idea to publishing, I've gone over how each day of writing is both a wishing paper crane and message in a bottle I'm sending out.…

The Adventures of Elliot released last week so I downloaded the demo and got stuck in. The game is fun but I don't think it's a 'full price' game for me. I am a sucker for things that resemble 2D Zelda titles, and this game hits all the right notes. Definitely one to put on my Wishlist for the winter sale (or beyond) I did try and play some more Cybersleuth but now I realise now is not the time. After not playing for a week or so, I couldn't figure out where to go without a guide. I don't know…

I used to live above a corner shop and when this corner shop changed hands the new owners had new signage put up. Revealing, in the interim, a ghost sign. Painted onto the corner of the building, covered by the modern external signs. Just hanging out there all that time. I love that they are called ghost signs because that's exactly how they look and feel. There are a few I see regularly in my city and I think I might cry if anything happened to them. I really ought to check they are on a…

This squarely falls into the "everyone probably knows this but it didn't click with me right away" category so please feel free to laugh at my ignorance, but it's something I realized over the past few months, and as I just used this technique this morning, I figured I'd share it on the blog. The idea is simple - it's trivial to ask a Gen AI tool to do something for you - and depending on the ask, may work great. But what I realized a few months back, especially in regards to having AI parse…

The Ghost of Dibble Hollow by May Nickerson Wallace, 1965. Elisha Nathanael Dibble Allen, called Pug, is excited to be spending the summer at the old family house called Dibble Hollow that his mother inherited! The summer starts out awkwardly when he gets on the wrong side of old Mr. Smith because his dog, Ricky, chases Mr. Smith’s chickens. When people find out that his family are Dibbles and that they’ll be staying in Dibble Hollow, Pug and his sister Helen learn that the locals in the area…

If you’re in the USA chances are you’ve heard of AAA – the American Automobile Association. It’s a $60 or so yearly membership and includes some travel discounts, trip-tiks/maps, and other things the internet pretty much have made obsolete. It also includes towing and roadside assistance, which is the only reason I still had it. TL;DR – just a story you have all the info you need in the title of Yesterday was Father’s Day in the US. A day that pretty much means you get a card and maybe go out…

Last week, Cuba’s Prime Minister Manuel Marrero announced a package of free market reforms, including the legalization of private businesses in agriculture and tourism, that “significantly expand the private sector six decades after Cuba’s communist leaders forbade all private business—even frita stands—and adopted a centrally planned economy model that ended up ruining the country and dragging Cubans into a severe humanitarian crisis.” Source: Nora Gámez Torres, Miami Herald (19 June 2026),…

I do enjoy doing a good quiz, so here's my results for my blogging archetype: You are a Explorer To you, the web feels like a library that's open all hours and has everything you could ever imagine! You love reading others blogs, and know how important readers are to the whole of the indie web community! You are also a Author You love writing and have a growing backlog of posts on your website! Words are your best friend and you're always thinking about what to write next. Other archetypes…

I've been socking away money (mostly through credit card reward points) in the hopes of upgrading my iPhone 14 Pro whenever the new ones come out this year. My current phone works pretty well most of the time, but I've been noticing a drop in performance and battery life over the last few months (even with a replaced battery) and it's been overheating a lot more. Apple saying they're going to be raising prices on all their stuff which is making me a little nervous but for something I use daily…

At this point, you basically know what you’re getting from Japanese post-rock heroes MONO. Unlike some of their peers, they haven’t executed any dramatic reinventions (relative within the parameters of the genre, at least) but instead just grown and evolved naturally, their records and music reflecting who they are at the point in their lives […] The post MONO – “Gerbera” appeared first on Space Echo.

We have long “known” that kids from homes which contain more books tend to be better at reading — but we couldn’t be sure that that wasn’t because of encouragement from parents, who by buying books, might appear to have valued reading more than parents who didn’t and might therefore be assumed to encourage it in their offspring. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) reports on a five-year controlled experiment involving 30 schools at which pupils were given books, with 30…

Michael H. Keller, Eli Murray, Danielle Ivory, and Irineo Cabreros, New York Times (gift link): The surge in pedestrian deaths has baffled researchers. Most other wealthy countries haven’t seen similar increases, suggesting that possible culprits like smartphones don’t tell the whole story. Other likely causes of deadly crashes, such as drunken and distracted driving, have attracted immense attention from the public and policymakers. But the trend toward ever-larger vehicles has received much…

Yesterday was music day in France. If you're not from this part of the world and don't know what music day is, basically it's a national event where anyone is allowed to play music in the streets. It's supposed to celebrate amateur musicians and on paper, I'm all for this.1 In practice though, I tend not to go. In big cities such as where I live, it tends to draw huge crowds, and the older I get the less I tolerate being cramped with a mass of people, no matter the occasion. It's not phobic or…

It’s 10 years tonight that this station recorded over 60mm of rain in 24 hours. It remains the largest daily fall at this station since records began in 1960. Rainfall rates touched over 60mm/hr during the early hours of June 23rd. The closest station at the waterworks at Redbridge Roundabout recorded a similar amount. The next closest official station, St James’s Park, recorded only 46mm, illustrating how varied rainfall can be over a small area. The rainfall during the event was around three…

Since I’m a good mood today—at a beautiful science camp with my kids, high in the mountains near Big Bear Lake in California—I thought I’d blog about something positive. Last week, five authors posted a major paper to the Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity, which shows (or anyway, credibly claims to show) that the Bipartite Matching problem is in the complexity class NC. Assuming this stands, it resolves a central problem in parallel algorithms and derandomization that’s been…

Consistency serves a purpose in visual design, but it seems to have become the purpose of a lot of visual design. Look no further than these evolutions of macOS icons (image courtesy of BasicAppleGuy): The Creator Studio icons are undeniably consistent visually: rounded rectangles, controlled gradients, simplified forms, restrained depth, etc. In contrast (and by modern standards) the originals seem heretically inconsistent. They lack coherence in visual details like shape, material, and…

LocateAnything Explained: Parallel Box Decoding and the Next Generation of Vision-Language Grounding Paper Code Project Demo Modern detection-and-grounding VLMs treat a bounding box as text: each box becomes a short string of coordinate tokens, decoded one at a time, left to right. This means a model predicts box coordinates one token at a time, despite all coordinates belonging to the same geometric object. The approach inherits the limitations of language modeling rather than exploiting the…

I’ve known about file local variables for a long time. I also knew about the eval keyword, which can be used as a file variable, but instead of binding the given value to the (non-existent) variable eval, Emacs evaluates it. This is often useful, but the usefulness is diminished by the fact that Emacs nags the user whether it is safe to evaluate a form provided that way. (Of course, it is reasonable security-wise, and that’s why I didn’t set enable-local-variables to :all – I still prefer the…

Here ya go, folks — check it out here. Thanks to the aforementioned RAM and memory apocalypse happening due to so much of the current pipeline of RAM and storage being pre-purchased for AI data centers, the pricing is a tough pill to swallow. You’ve got the base Steam Machine, 512GB of storage, no controller, for $1,049. If you want to add the Steam Controller (normally $99), that combo is $1,128. Want 2TB of storage? $1,349. Want that one with a controller? $1,428. But at least the 2TB models…

The last Korean review I did involved a spicy and sweet noodle served hot I kind of think might have been better cold. Well, here’s a cold noodle. Sounds good – let’s check it out! Woobool Restaurant Cold Buckwheat Noodles – South Korea A distributor / import sticker (click to enlarge). Detail of the packaging (click to enlarge). Contains fish. To prepare, boil noodles in 500ml water for 2 minutes. Rinse with cold water. Take sachets and add to 180ml cold water and stir. Finally, combine and…

Cosmic Summer No. 13, paper collage, 2026 I love retro-spacey beach art. For that reason, whenever I find vintage beach imagery, whether in magazines or on postcards, it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that I am going to pair it with a spacey sky. Indeed, I have a rather sizable collection of retro-futuristic summer-themed collages […]

When we examine what types of films were trendy in the silent film days, we’ll find the era well-stocked with Civil War films, WWI propagandistic adventures, tales from the pioneer days, and of course an abundance of Westerns. But what … Continue reading →

AI disclosure – I used AI to write this blog post. I figure having an AI blog post is better than not writing it at all. I will always disclose though if I use AI to heavily write any content on this blog. (I use it for minor copy editing all the time.) For the tech details, I used gemini flash 3.5 with medium reasoning in the Antigravity IDE, using the same advice I said in this blog post. (Minor preference to Claude Code for writing blog posts for those who care.) It is the outline of the…

This is a short aside in our virtual memory series. We have talked extensively about the size of a virtual address and the virtual address space, but we haven’t yet looked at the size of a physical address.As you might expect, physical addresses on x86-64 are smaller than 64 bits. But they are also not necessarily the same size as virtual addresses. In this video, we look at how big physical addresses are, how you can check this on your own machine, and why different processors may expose…

This one took a long time to get out, but it is finally out. #100 was recorded and will come out next week 🤞 .We chat about how developer experience affects delivery speed, happiness and morale. We also chat about how a lot of problems with team dynamics are self-inflicted. At the end of the day it's all a wire act where balance is crucial, but the more skilful people you have, the easier it is to maintain that balance.