I've been struggling, for years, to share little maps of places I've been and trips I've taken. The evidence is there, if you care to dive deep for it. A couple of days ago, all that changed. It is now easy-peasy: Overland1 on my phone records the trips and sends the data to Compass on my server; when Compass receives notice that a trip has ended, it sends the details to the new Micropub plugin here in Grav; and the plugin creates the route on a static map image and drafts a bare-bones post to…

Ich gehe immer gerne auf Suche nach spannenden kulinarischen Erfahrungen. Umso schöner, wenn man nicht lange suchen muss, sondern einen (Geheim)Tipp von anderen Foodies bekommt. Ich wäre ohne die Empfehlung des lieben Felix (@felix.dining) wahrscheinlich… Der Beitrag Einfach nur WOW – Zum Kölner Dom erschien zuerst auf Sternestulle.

I first read James Clear's Atomic Habits in 2021, but since I'm currently trying to improve my habits in a couple of areas (daily writing and better planning) I took it with me on a work trip for a quick re-read.

Caught up with a friend whom I have not met for more than six months. We are each other's sounding board. We share our frustrations, dreams and insecurity. I told her that a common friend of ours is coaching me pickleball. She remarked that while I am focusing on getting better in the material world, have I considered getting a coach for my soul? I am not a very religious person. I believe I should be busy living life and not to worry about death. Given that I have less than 50% of lifespan…

A beautiful panoramic photo of a lake, with color-changing trees on the far side. As I write this I'm ending my first day at a week-long artist residency in the Pocono Mountains. It's being held at a lakeside cabin within a nature sanctuary, the air has a crisp chill but isn't yet truly cold1At least during the day, and the leaves are changing color. It's beautiful, and as much as I love #philly, it's nice to get out of the city for a bit. I believe I first started thinking about trying to get…

I used to make jokes about them, pointing out that having too many tabs open would take up as much space in your head as it does on your screen. But here I am… having more tabs open than I can count on two hands, at all times. It’s especially true for my work laptop. Just the other day I got access to Superlogical’s new terminal multiplexer Rex. And it finally made me realize that vertical tabs have made it so easy to hoard stuff I don’t need. Before I switched to Zen Browser, I used Firefox. I…

There are a couple of related ideas I found myself writing about here and there, either on the IRC server or on Quxnet. Ideas and thoughts about what the web used to be, how it used to feel, about how things have changed, and what can be done to bring at least some of the old web back. We often point fingers at the big social media platforms, with their relentless algorithmic curation as the cause for the awfulness of the modern web. Maybe we blame the SEO folks, or the influencers. There’s a…

After the Disabled God of War Became My Concubineby Liu Gou HuaGenres: Fantasy, Historical Fiction, Light Novels, Romance Pages: 402 Series: After the Disabled God of War Became My Concubine #3 Rating: Synopsis: CAN LOVE CHANGE HISTORY? Jiang Suizhou, modern-day history professor turned historical cut-sleeve prince, has helped Huo Wujiu regain his former self. The “god of war” can finally walk again, his men are embedded in the city, and soon he may have an army. But a most shocking discovery…

Recently I experienced something wondrous and oh-so-rare for a Floridian: I got a little chilly outside. That's right, my friends, it got down to almost 74 degrees. Granted, it was nearly midnight at the time, but I'LL TAKE IT.So this is me officially welcoming Fall, the Sweetest way I know how: (By Marion's Vintage Bakery) And also the sparkliest way I know how: (By Albena's Custom Cakes) Orange and teal is my favorite color combo, so I'm over the harvest moon for this stained glass beauty:…

Week notes, week 1345 / 2026-11-01 I got an email! After cleaning my inbox last week! (shakes head you guys, didn't let me enjoy it even a single week!) It was regarding my Puzzle Maths article, and the person messaging me seemed nice enough, so it has been added as a comment (with a slight editorial edit) 😇 I sent out an email! To a friend from my writing days; after reading a nice self-printed book I had left sitting on a shelf for that exact purpose... ✨ Work was predictably hung up in a lot…

For 40 years we’ve been told there is no alternative. The neoliberal #deathcult has made a religion of markets, competition, individualism and profit. We’ve been told to keep our heads down, accept the consequences and leave everything to the market. Now look at where this has taken us. People work hard but cannot afford housing, food, energy or the basics of a dignified life. Economic insecurity grows while wealth and power concentrate in fewer hands. Democracy becomes hollow when governments…

TrackBear & Writing Month Stats: 2016-11-07 Introduction With this post I am combining the stats from both the TrackBear leaderboard and Writing Month. I highly recommend Writing Month if you want something that is easier, and a little more direct to use than Track Bear. You can’t go wrong using either tool. Note: I’m blocking out some project names for Writing Month folks as I don’t want to leak anything they don’t want made publicly known. (I know one participant added a “working title” to…

When there is no warmth from the sun or when the kindness from the hands of loved ones are gone away or too far to touch and too distant to hear from, and when the room is empty, the crowd is gone and the attention dwindled to an emptiness, there is no way to avoid the reflection in the mirror or the absence of company.So on I go with my fair share of introspetive therapy.I think it is important to experience this. I think pain is important, and likewise, I would never wish this or my…

On 8 November 1974, Lord Lucan vanished without trace. The previous evening his children’s nanny, Sandra Rivett, was bludgeoned to death in the basement of his children’s home at 46 Lower Belgrave Street. As the police began their murder investigation, Lucan telephoned his mother, asking her to collect the children, and then drove a borrowed Ford Corsair to a friend’s house in Uckfield then vanished. On 8 November 1429 the Duke of Norfolk crashed his barge into London Bridge, but survived by…

# Introduction I wrote a few small programs for my home, mostly Prometheus exporters for IoT devices. They run in containers, and until recently I had to build their images on my laptop and push them to the server. This worked, but there was no test before deploying, and I was not updating the base image which is a security issue. Now, the images are built on the CI of my Forgejo server, and pushed to a container registry in my network, then the servers pull them automatically when there is a…

This blog post is a weekly update of my journey in Djangonaut Space , an 8-week mentoring program for future open source developers in the Django ecosystem. Series: 3… 2… 1… becoming a Djangonaut Djangonaut Log 1: Lift-off and first week in Djangonaut Space Debugging a flaky test — how I methodologically tamed an annoying bug Assumptions are sneaky Djangonaut Log 2: Leaving the atmosphere and first merged contributions Djangonaut Log 3: Into the orbit! Djangonaut Log 4: Avoiding asteroids (you…

It’s 2026. You can put on VR goggles, consume content all day that was generated by artificial intelligence, and never have to care about the physical world at all. So to combat this, let’s look at something totally physical. Something that doesn’t even have a power cord. We’re looking at a typewriter. And because this is Nicole Express, it’s from 1970 and has fake wood paneling. Let’s get classy. It’s in a box We’ll start with the typewriter still in its case. The Royal 240 is an…

I know roast chicken probably isn’t the poultry you’re focused on this month, but Eric Kim’s Vietnamese-Inspired Roast Chicken might change that! Eric takes the warm, aromatic flavors of phở gà (Vietnamese chicken noodle soup) and brings them to a roast chicken, starting with a dry brine of fennel, cinnamon, coriander, cloves, salt, and black pepper. Before roasting, you brush the chicken with butter and add ginger, onion, and cinnamon sticks to the pan along with a little water which helps the…

Being abroad makes me painfully aware of how good the food in Vietnam is, every single day. Some of of them are already world famous, you probably must have heard of "phở" or "bánh mì". While I do love them, the only thing I am dying to get whenever I am back to Vietnam is a bowl of bún chả chan (rice vermicelli with grilled pork, chop and grounded, mixed) in a family-owned breakfast house next to my grandmother's house. Bún chả (Rice vermicelli with grilled pork) is famous among tourists…

There’s no mystery as to what happened in the U.S. this week. Thanks to the large number of Americans who stood up and said “enough” there’s a better chance for things changing than there was the last time I published one of these Sunday Morning Reading columns a few weeks ago. Oh, there’s still work to be done, still dangers ahead, and questions remain. But our chances are better. Some, but very little of that appears in this week’s links beyond this preamble. While we gear up for the work…

📷 295/365 - Vintage.

UpdatesA milestone week for me, as after nearly forty years of employment, I have now set out as self-employed for the first time. On Monday I opened the calendar for my new coaching business - named unsurprisingly: Matt Rutherford Coaching. I'll be delivering one-to-one coaching for anyone who is taking or planning the next step of their career and would like a sounding board. I am both nervous and excited simultaneously. Starting out on my own is a new experience but I know from the coaching…

Today I heard a story from my friend Kwak. Back when she was applying to colleges, she applied to study film production at a university in Seoul. The university required all applicants to take an entrance exam, so she flew all the way from Jeju to Seoul. However, when the time came, she didn't go to the university because she was too afraid to take the test. "I didn't go to the testing site. Instead, I went to watch a movie near the university," she said. I pictured a teenage Kwak sitting in a…

For a while now I’ve been running an Excalidraw instance on my VPS (with Yunohost). Excalidraw is a virtual whiteboard, and a useful tool to me. Excalidraw is lightweight, and any drawings you make are stored in text format, which makes them highly portable. It integrates very well with Obsidian, with the Excalidraw plugin, by fellow PKM enthusiast Zsolt Viczián. My Excalidraw instance is also used by my company’s team. I run my own Excalidraw instance for reasons of digital autonomy. For…

This has been a good week for lamb. Relatedly it’s also starting to get very cold, and I need a new winter coat! Lots of time spent working on an audit tool this week and getting good results. Bar Trench is pretty good, I understand the hype. Lots of small improvements to my Kanji study tool, including brand new mnemonics that I think are better? Partly powered by a new library for rendering ruby text (or furigana) in Markdown. Got a new homework assignment this week, this is a note to myself…

Goethe, letter to Charlotte von Stein (December 4, 1777), tr. William Cooper: How this lonesome journey has taught me to love the class of men that is called the lower, which, however, in the eyes of God is certainly the highest! Here one finds all virtues united: self-restraint, contentment, straightforwardness, fidelity, joy over most humble possessions, innocence, patience... Wie sehr ich wieder, auf diesem duncklen Zug, Liebe zu der Classe von Menschen gekriegt habe! die man die niedre…

AI may, when given a goal, be able to optimize its way towards the goal. However, AI do not know what goals to pursue, and what goals to avoid. As Steven Strogatz and Alex Townsend write in The Guardian: As optimisation becomes more powerful, avoiding these traps becomes more important. The challenge is not simply finding the best answer. It is deciding what “best” really means – and knowing what not to optimise away. ~ Link: The Efficiency Trap: Why Optimising Everything can Backfire, Badly,…

Vibecoding is really blowing my mind at the moment. Not only was I able to vibe code an invoice fetcher recently, but I also accomplished two other projects since then. One is an ePaper downloader. In a configured interval, that tool checks three different portals from the local public library to get the latest issues of some configured newspapers and magazines. Previously that was running for one of those portals in a few n8n workflows, but a custom Go-based tool just works better and is more…

Eleven years ago this morning, I stood in front of a mirror in a hotel, slowly adjusting my collar and making sure my hair was not in disarray. The hotel was a short ride from the Aga Khan Museum, and I hopped in an Uber to get there early. About half an hour after I arrived, a gorgeous white car drove up to where I was, and from it emerged the most beautiful woman I had ever seen: Lise, my wife-to-be, the light of my life. We embraced and laughed — it was all caught on camera — and got ready…