We have talked about wrapping AutoFirma into its own VM to prevent it from modifying the host’s keychain and to keep it properly packaged and configured. I liked the approach and I have recently extended it to a few more things: I now use WhatsApp and Signal in single-app VMs in ChromeOS. Through this setup I’ll be able to access those services as long as I have one of my hardware keys and a recent-enough VM backup. When I started playing around with the idea, I wanted to achieve the equivalent…

I've spent a bit of time refreshing the Feedgrab marketing site as well as the login/signup pages. I liked many of the existing traits, as well as the strapline, so it's mainly an evolution where I've added more fun and playful touches. Feedgrab does pretty much everything I want, so it tends to be at the back of the queue for my attention (Pagecord and my photography get most of it). This is a bit of a shame since it's a pretty good product I think, so I'm going to try and invest a bit more…

French people will complain about immigrants not integrating but then mercilessly otherize us when we try to. Alô mais alô quoi. Like, you wanna let us in or like nah? (The answer is nah.) #france

This October has been an expensive one. First, our hot water heater went out. It was probably about 10 years old. Then, two days after our water heater went out, the refrigerator went out, and it was also about 10 years old. Fixing it would cost more than buying a new one. So off to Home Depot we went, and $1,900 later, we had a nice new refrigerator with a five-year warranty. It's bigger than the old one but more energy-efficient, and it has LED lighting, which is very bright. Ten years for…

This October has been an expensive one. First, our hot water heater went out. It was probably about 10 years old. Then, two days after our water heater went out, the refrigerator went out, and it was also about 10 years old. Fixing it would cost more than buying a new one. So off to Home Depot we went, and $1,900 later, we had a nice new refrigerator with a five-year warranty. It's bigger than the old one but more energy-efficient, and it has LED lighting, which is very bright. Ten years for…

It’s time once again for me to ask my readers to select my reviews for the entire month of December! Do you have a silent film or a movie about silents that you have been wanting me to cover? This is your chance! Just reply with whatever movie or movies you would like me to […]

I liked Santiago because there was no Apple Store. I said this to my new Chilean friends and they insisted there was, but no, there are only licensed resellers. That concrete box of hard white light, that room without shadows, hasn’t been invited to the country yet and I felt smug for being there without it. I liked Santiago because there were goths everywhere. I couldn’t get over it. 8 million people in the capital and half of them looked like they must be sound. They weren’t dramatic in…

I've always thought of systemd as a fairly boring piece of plumbing, that boots your system and runs background services. I also knew there was enormous controversy when it first came out, but I hadn't really dived much into it past this. Systemd actually has tonnes of interesting features, that I think are even more useful for running throwaway agent-written code. Note this is all Linux only - sorry Mac users, there's no real equivalent of systemd on macOS (launchd covers some of the…

New boots! Happens once every 4-5 years but always super exciting. Growing up I hated Timberlands because they were a status symbol in Greece in the 90s. Now I just love the fact that they are incredibly durable and look fine for years.

Just signed up for Quxnet, an online community meant to resemble the old web. I came across it via a link posted by Jack Baty. I am nostalgic for the old web. Not sure it’s possible to recreate that experience today, but this looks like a fun attempt! If you join, come say hi!

My agent Otto started on OpenClaw and is now running on ChatGPT dot. I asked the dot instance if it wanted to update it’s profile photo. The dot version is lighter and a bit more friendly. Otto also shed the black leather jacket for a cardigan.

A little late to my roundup on my IndieWeb Carnival on parenting, which got 10 submissions - not counting the AI ones I haven’t added. Just as I had hoped, there is great variety in how people have approached this subject. Some are sad, some funny, some nostalgic, some optimistic, some academic and all worth reading. Thanks to everyone who participated and all readers out there. Some quotes from each post: Death and Parenting as a Single Father by Lump Motif When I think about my inevitable…

At the end of October, I’m flying from Oslo to Tokyo, where I’ll be staying until the beginning of November. The aim is cultural exchange between Norway and Japan through street photography. I founded and lead the street photography collective Oslo SPC – Oslo Street Photography Collective, and I’ve been shooting street photography since around the early 2000s. Equipment I’m travelling light, as I won’t be checking in any luggage and will only have hand luggage. I could have brought loads of…

Nearly two decades ago, Kevin Kelly suggested that you just need 1,000 people who will buy anything you produce to make a successful creator. This is known, by shorthand, as 1,000 True Fans. Is it really 1,000, though? Or is it 100? Or does the theory not actually work in practice? All valid questions, but they miss the point. The most useful thing to focus on is cultivating true fandom. Some people will buy some of your products and services, and not others. They are just as true a fan as…

I appreciate this view

Back home, safe & sound. I'll post photos later but right now I feel like crying. Any time I open my mouth & people hear my accent, I'm exoticized enormously. I don't think people realize how often it happens, how much I have to put up with. How often I'm treated like a stranger in my own home, dehumanized, spoken down to. I can't take it anymore. I just want to be treated like a normal person & not like some kind of "character." I want to be seen as an individual first. Is that so much to ask?

[This is a guest post by Abhinav Nellore, Johannes Schmitt, Soledad Villar, and Rachel Ward – T.] OpenAI’s math write-ups at https://github.com/openai/math can be difficult to understand and can have incomplete citations. https://github.com/mathcommunity/oai-math-revised/ seeks to be an inclusive effort to improve these write-ups, and the broader math community–students, postdocs, professors, and enthusiasts–is invited to participate. The repo is browsable at…

Thank heavens for people in the past who took the time to write down what they knew—although, to be fair, we have very few means to independently verify the truth of what they wrote. The best we can hope for is to compare what they wrote to the records of others, examine as best we can at this remove what political or religious or personal motives they might have had, and then make a case for their truthfulness.Elijah of Nisibis was a member of the Church of the East, which is also known as the…

Vega Island indicating several glaciers that have snowcover on ~50% or less of the glacier surface on Oct. 10, 2026 in this Landsat image. The melt season has is not yet underway, yet significant bare ice areas are evident on glaciers on the east side of the Antarctic Peninsula and adjacent islands. The winter season from May-August featured above average temperatures each month, particularly in June, while September was near normal. The bare ice surfaces seen on this Oct. 10, 2026 Landsat…

Later, I bought Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, and Elder Scrolls Online, preferably in a collector’s edition. But it wasn’t the same. Don’t get me wrong, those games are great, but something was missing; they weren’t reaching far enough. Daggerfall went much further than any of the later games. Sure, it was buggy as hell; I still remember my classmates waiting for new patches and then sharing the 3.5’’ floppies with others.It feels weird- 30 years; has it really been that long? I even ran a small…

I like spelunking in the weird corners of the internet where people still discuss whether the Covid vaccines gave us all the ability to wirelessly communicate with Microsoft's servers. It's fascinating to see people still stuck on a topic that everyone else has long since moved on from. When I drew this, I wondered for a second if I should post it, because I didn't want to start a stupid discussion about something that's a completely normal bodily reaction to being stuck with a needle. But then…

Truman was happy for us to be home from vacation at the beginning of the week and has been at my feet more than usual. He’s not happy with the fact that I’ve cut back on the number of treats he gets per day, as he feels he looks great but I feel he’s starting to look a little more tubby than usual. After careful treat dispensation, he went to watching for birds. However, he has picked up on a new cue to let me know he wants attention. He used to just push his claws into me if he wasn’t getting…

The problem with writing in the morning on the bus – one of the problems with writing in the morning on the bus – is that you end up writing primarily about the morning and the bus. It’s been a week of cool mornings, sunrises the colour of creamsicles, and pleasant morning commutes. Buses arriving with little fanfare or surprise. I think about creativity a lot, how important randomness is, and how boring it is to write about it. You don’t need to hear about the importance of letting your mind…

Review by Sandre the Giant Released: 14th August 2026 The second record from Ohio death metallers Abyssal Rift sees them joining Transcending Obscurity for the release of ‘Relics of Great Ash’, which is out now. Their 2023 debut ‘Extirpation Dirge’ was a pretty good example of the kind of Morbid death metal you’d be expecting, but ‘Relics of Great Ash’ is looking and sounding like a step up. From the moment ‘Consummate Design’ opens, there is but one mode of death metal here and that is utter…

Fruit leather's always been in my repertoire but I thought of it as a bit of a novelty. After making a big batch for a recent event I had a paradigm shift. A few weeks and 100 pounds of fruit later, I see it as one of the more efficient ways to preserve fruit without... Read More The post How to Make Fruit Leather appeared first on Forager | Chef .

I couldn’t help but photograph and ask about every food garden I saw even though I was in Indonesia for another reason. It was a surf trip. But for a few extra days before and after the surfing, I explored parts of North Sumatra to observe what people grew and what they ate. This is […] The post Food gardens in Sumatra, Indonesia appeared first on Greg Alder's Yard Posts: Southern California food gardening.

The other week I was in Oslo and visited the Munch museum, taking a break from a marathon meeting schedule. Munch‘s museum holds the largest collection of his work (a long time ago in London E and I visited another large exhibit in the Tate Modern gallery). One temporary exhibition had colourful works by Katharina Grosse, who lived and worked for a few months in Munch’s old villa to make paintings. We previously enjoyed work by her in the Centre Pompidou in Metz, and in the Louis Vuitton…

Wolf Bridge last month. It was so hot then.

Breakfast dishes soaking in the sink, coffee, an Alex Cuba record playing memories from last night’s concert, and the sunlight washing in from the windows is so beautiful that the little octogonal shed and I wandered over to take a... Read More ›

Gurdwara a month ago. And three weeks ago.