Speaking to reporters on Tuesday in Washington, Dutch Trade Minister Sjoerd Sjoerdsma said the U.S. and the Netherlands share common goals over preventing sensitive technology from ending up in dangerous hands. However, "elements in that Act seem to suggest that the United States might take control over some of these decisions that affect our national security and the way our companies operate," he said. If the excellent cooperative working relationship with Washington "becomes cooperation by…
Guest Post by: David Tonaszuck A reflection on the Gospel of Matthew 10:37-42 Dear Friends in Christ, There’s a house on the edge of town, old but warm, with wide porches shaded by tall trees. In it live Mary and Joseph—an older couple, married nearly fifty years. Their children are grown, the rooms are mostly … Continue reading A Cup of Cold Water: Serving Christ in the Little Ones The post A Cup of Cold Water: Serving Christ in the Little Ones first appeared on The Simple Catholic. The post A…
In the same way equipment and gear help you get things done in the dungeon, friends and contacts help you get things done in the city.What this is forNo rules are needed to legitimize PCs' relationships with NPCs, but procedural scaffolding cuts down on ad-hoc decisions and provides rationale for how both the players and GM may approach this dimension of the game. In the same way I use reactions tables and x:6 chances in circumstances I want to avoid GM fiat, a procedure for camaraderie takes…
Sending iMessage Mini-App Payloads from macOS I have been super excited by the stuff the guys at Photon have been doing with iMessages. They kind of nerd-sniped me with their launch letting you programmatically send custom mini-apps. Basically, they let you send arbitrary web content via their helper iMessage app extension. I believe they also support sending custom payloads for any iMessage mini-app. Their helper app extension Spectrum makes it so you don't need to worry about needing to setup…
I can understand the feeling that citizenship should mean something (I'm not sure how much--we'll come back to that). However, it should not be a political football, which it surely is. My question is, notwithstanding marriage and naturalization, what makes someone a citizen?Your parents were citizens. Perhaps they were granted citizenship by naturalization or marriage, but that is clearly the minority case. You presume you are a citizen because you presume your parents are citizens because…
Screen compulsion is a widespread problem — anyone who says they don’t have it just hasn’t realized it yet. Is ditching the screen while keeping the tech apparatus connected to the internet a possible way out? I’ve been thinking about this since I put an Apple Watch on my wrist. (I’ve since taken it off after four months.) Apple’s watch fulfilled the prophecy made by Brazilian pop duo Claudinho e Buchecha back in 1998 — and suddenly, I could control my calendar — and many other things — without…
In a short novel I wrote about 20 years ago, there’s a scene where Eric K. (the protagonist, a private detective) and his best friend Patrick Z. (a hacker), are approaching the investigation from different angles. There’s a bit of banter between them, then Patrick ends the conversation dismissively, hinting that there’s work to do and they’re just wasting time. “Off you go,” he says to Eric, “As they say, You’re a detective, go detect. I’ll stay here with my machines. [a beat] They’re…
CELA S’APPELLE L’AURORE is a pretty good movie but as a Bunuel movie it isn’t very Bunuelian. A donkey gets beaten, on the one hand, which is moderately Bunuelian, but there are a great many kittens, and nothing terrible happens to them, on the other hand. But one thing the movie has is two (count […]
Last night I printed/stapled 10 books to bring with me to Kawacon. YAY!! Ty everyone who congratulated me and expressed interest <33 My helper: I’ve outsourced printing of my sketch zines before, but for more experimental comic/zines ones like this I really like the freedom of printing at home. Tools: Bonefolder (idk when I got this) Bostitch booklet stapler Color Printer - cover page B&W Printer - interior pages You could also get the cover/pages printed elsewhere! I happen to have two…
Below, a quick roundup of a few of the things I learned over the past few months. Migratory freshwater fish are in steep decline, with populations down roughly 81% since 1970. These species depend on long, connected rivers, but dams and human pressures are cutting off their routes. (CMS) The Rymer variety of cooking apple, once believed to have died out, has been found on a rural property in the New South Wales Southern Tablelands. (ABC) Researchers testing children’s shirts from multiple fast…
It's back! I caught up with the ChoiceScript releases, new WIPs, and updates that came out during February-June when I was less online. Enjoy!
A practical guide to OWASP A05:2025 Injection. Learn how SQL, command, and other injection flaws really work, and how to stop them for good with parameterized queries and safe APIs in Python.
In 2023, Neal Agarwal created The Password Game, a viral browser-based game. Wikipedia has a nice summary: Although the initial requirements include setting a minimum of characters or including numbers, uppercase letters, or special characters, the rules gradually become more unusual and complex. These can involve managing having Roman numerals in the string to multiply, adding the name of a country that players have to guess from random Google Street View imagery (as a reference to GeoGuessr),…
I just spent a week in London, my first time there and my first time to Europe. Thank you to the 50+ people who provided advice, so much of it was valuable and led directly to us doing things we would not otherwise have known about. I do not believe you can make sense of a place in one visit, much less have a firm understanding of it; it took me years of regular visits to wrap my head around New York City and as many times as I've been to Vegas, I still don't think I actually feel like I know…
> Reply to KnoppixKnoppix nostalgiaOh man, fond memories. I remember being very interested in programming in middle/high school, but all the environments in our school computer lab had windows (this was in India), and I think at that time (maybe 2001-2003) I didn't even know there were other operating systems. Our school was participating in something called International Cyber Olympiad, and of course I gave the eligibility exam. They sent all students who passed a Knoppix Live CD to prepare…
In my three decades online, it has never occurred for me to try this, and I found it so delightful once I did – both Chrome and Firefox will quietly rewrite backslashes in URLs into slashes: Not Safari, however, even though the URL living standard says it should. I am very curious if the presence of backslashes in URLs is owing to Windows still showing backslashes in file paths, or just because people casually don’t see any difference between / and \, which are arguably both similar, and…
In which I challenge myself to draw a pokemon every day until I stop As a starter, wanna toss out that the Supreme Court ending pride month 2026 with "eh maybe trans people shouldn't have any rights" is pretty par for the course with the christofascist regime we're living in but that doesn't make it any less painful, especially in light of the 8-1 vote upholding conversion "therapy" back on the Trans Day of Visibility. It feels designed to hurt intentionally. Anyway, short term I don't know…
Excerpt from a conversation while the TV was on, the news talking about heat waves in Europe and Paraguay's president declaring a national holiday after winning a soccer game: "Next cup is going to be in the Mediterranean during summer, imagine the heat four years from now?" "But the next one is going to be in South America during winter, imagine the party? That is, if there's still a world eight years from now..."
Even before the “remaster,” my essay about the Polish S bug was routinely discovered by Hacker News and other places, so I thought I would take a look at all the commentary over the years and summarize. First, pragmatically, these are the lessons for any keyboard shortcut designer: On Windows, AltGr (Right Alt) and Ctrl+Alt shortcuts are one and the same, and Right Alt and alphabetic keys are used for some languages to output regular accented letters. You should not prioritize Ctrl+Alt…
"Pixel Symphonic is a show about video game music. We’re here to learn and talk about it with the people who make it, the people who listen to it, and everything in between." I was perusing the Original Soundchat podcast feed the other day, as one does, and was shocked to see a new episode for a new podcast by Joe DeVader—published back in March 2026! Oh the delight I felt when seeing the episode and the new show's first guest. I'm half way through the catalog already and if you are like me and…
I knew very little about tuberculosis prior to reading this book. I enjoyed learning about how advances in medicine led to the discovery of a cure, and was of course disheartened by the fact that the disease is still a major problem in many parts of the world. Green does a good job of mixing stories of individuals in with facts about TB and showing how disease can be a mirror of social inequities. He also manages to paint a hopeful picture by the end as he describes small groups of people…
has a large sample size. Read the linked article at: https://asteriskmag.com/issues/14/in-praise-of-observational-evidence
→ Bloomberg Opinion
I doubt that there will be anyone reading this article who hasn’t been targeted by a writing scam. That’s how prevalent and aggressive they are these days. Fraudsters who prey on writers employ a variety of methods to recruit clients: advertising (especially on Facebook, which is awash in ads for scam publishing service providers), sponsored links on Google (plug “find a publisher” into Google, and the top results will be for scam or vanity publishers), social media activity (watch out for…
The eighth episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out:In Episode 8, I chat with Brennan, the author of brennan.day. We talk about, among other things, writing routines, building community in the indie web, "start here" pages on personal websites, and more.I hope you enjoy the episode!Wonders of Web Weaving also has an RSS feed you can use to follow along from wherever you get your podcasts. Brennan brennan.day The eighth episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out Wonders of Web Weaving also has an…
When people talk about animal care, especially small mammals, the conversation can become extreme very fast. One side can make it sound like keeping or breeding animals is automatically wrong. The other side can act like animals only need food, water, and a cage. I do not think either extreme is useful, and I do not think either one represents true husbandry. Real husbandry sits somewhere in the middle. Animals deserve proper care. They deserve clean housing, safe food, enrichment, protection…
I had earlier written about using Hooks to enforce certain rules in AI-generated code. The idea was to use deterministic checks rather than prose-based guidance which can't be enforced at time of generation. A hook here is just a script that runs at a point in the agent's lifecycle and can block it from continuing. The broader idea is to enforce invariants and in this post I will show how we can use: Classic Architectural Decision Records (ADRs) to record and enforce invariants Use the RFC 2119…
I loved football as a kid but without Sky, I couldn’t watch much beyond Champions League and FA Cup matches on ITV and Match of the Day on BBC1. That means I somehow missed/forgot a lot of Ian Wright’s best years (that and as a Man United fan, I shut out anyone who didn’t play for them. Except Tony Yeboah but I’ve written about that before). Thankfully, YouTube exists and this video shows all 185 of his goals for Arsenal. It’s a record that’s since been beaten by a certain Thierry Henry but…
Junited 2026It’s June again, a month of many special occasions: Pride month, my birthday, and Junited! I’m very excited for this. Junited is simple, and basically what many bloggers already do: sharing others’ posts. No challenge, no pressure, just the good kind of blog joy. Robert is organizing this community activity for the third time in a row. I participated last year as well and thoroughly enjoyed it. Just like last year, I’m also compiling a Junited list to blogs in Dutch. So without…
Transcript Welcome to the Misaligned Markets Podcast. I'm your host, Mike. I'm also the writer of the Misaligned Markets blog.Fundamentally, Misaligned Markets is a project about a marriage that has gone deeply wrong, a marriage between capitalism and markets. Now, when I say capitalism, I'm talking about this idea of enclosure, the historical process of gating or privatizing resources for the rent of an owner.And so capitalism is a system that functions by labeling things in the economy so…
