It’s hard to believe it’s been over 20 years since we took these two photos in Tucumcari, New Mexico. We were on a cross-country Jeep tour in our first Jeep (2004 Wrangler Sport X). It was the day after chasing our first storm with golf ball sized hail in Amarillo, Texas.

t2linux (CC-BY-SA-4.0) It’s nearly impossible to buy reasonably priced compute hardware in the current market. Consumer memory has regressed to 2009 prices and high-end video card compute has skyrocketed12. While looking around for DDR4 RAM and systems on eBay, I discovered 2019 Mac Pro units at seemingly reasonable prices. Their value dropped as Apple abandoned the Intel architecture. Although Apple released a version of this model with the newer Apple Silicon, it couldn’t even utilize the…

There's been conversations on Twitter about what it means to "snap out of depression" lately, and the implications of it and how tiring/ableist it can sound has weighed on my mind a lot. Especially in wake of my deep depressive episode that lasted for a good while (a month plus, even) which made me think about my life up until now, living with this for more than 10 years as I had. "You have to snap out of it someday, no one but yourself can save you" is frankly terrible advice, in my…

Tonight I am stepping outside my usual range for this year’s challenge. This one was my wife's choice because she likes werewolves and Alexander Skarsgård. Most of what I have been watching has been from 1984 to 1987, but as I was watching, I began to think about something specifically for my Valhalla, Alaska, setting. It has wolves, isolation, strange local beliefs, and the tournaq, or tornrak, wolf-demon.Hold the Dark seemed like a good choice for all of this.Hold the Dark (2018)Medora Slone…

“Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one's weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.” ― Mahatma Gandhi #100DaysToOffload (No. 180) #prayer #faith #quotes

Jarrett Fuller [sic]: It’s 2026 and when I click the button on my glass phone, it makes a shutter sound! There are still skeuomorphs in iOS after all! The skeuomorphic designs of the early camera simulated a shutter closing and opening when you a took a photo but that’s long been replaced with just a subtle blink of the screen. And yet! The shutter sounds remains. As Fuller writes, it might be the very last one. I would also make a case for the lock sound. It is not quite the padlock noise it…

Rudolf Zimmermann, “Heidelbeeren” (1919.08.11), Deutsche Fotothek There are two ways the universe—and edible plants, in particular—might turn out to be, supposing you didn’t have much experience with it, or them, and were reasoning from first principles. The first way is the one conjured up by recipes that call for “three cloves of garlic.” Have you seen garlic? Its cloves come in radically different sizes. Garlic, as everyone knows, is added to recipes for flavor. If “three cloves of garlic”…

Wrote this little long to practice some fingering and chords. https://youtu.be/wS9jZ-QJmfM https://youtu.be/wS9jZ-QJmfM This post (Song - Hello Hollow) was last edited 3 minutes ago.

Hi there. There’s been a lengthier-than-usual gap between Maurilia Station posts, since by mid-year, my creative activity and much else if my life had been purposefully dialled back. The plan has mostly held, but inevitably I find myself doing things. So, I’m back with an update of what I’ve been up to lately. I thought I’d change up the structure of these posts a little too, so I’ve put the shorter updates at the start, before plunging you – quite literally – into my compost bin. I figured it…

In my latest newsletter, I take a harrowing trip through AI pornography. Read it and make sure to subscribe.About I My Book | Consulting I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Email

I know that this sounds so passe, but I honestly feel that the action of boycotting is never an old news. We boycott certain products/brands in different ways, times, and reasons. Also, since we are now rampant with the news of Indonesia getting burned (not “burning”. “Being/getting burned”. There’s a difference), there have been some discussions among Indonesians themselves on boycotting palm oil-derivatives products. One of them was an IG Reels by Nadya Hutagalung. Nadya was an MTV VJ for MTV…

Thanks to Claude I spent half an hour playing a game from my childhood that I had not seen running in more than 25 years.

Don’t you have time to read books? Leave a book in your kitchen table. This way, when you’re done eating, you can steal a few minutes from your routine to pick and read a book. That’s the perfect excuse to reduce your scrolling and pause to ease your digestion. Win-win for your body, mind, and spirit. That’s the strategy I’ve followed to read about 10 books so far. You can leave my books in your kitchen table. Available on paperback and Kindle too.

🌳 I have been spending more time offline this month... ...And part of that was a trip to Parc Montagne du Diable in Quebec. This park has all sorts of different options for camping, and me and partner rented a tiny house to spend a long weekend. It was very nice, we just needed to bring drinkable water, food and blanket. The house was equipped with fridge, an induction cooktop, microwave, towels, pillows and all basic kitchen utensils. It is very nice! I loved the minimalist vibe. There was no…

“‘It’s significant’: Ukraine fears US is withholding allied-funded air defense supplies to pressure Kyiv” kyivindependent.com/its-signi… #RussiaIsATerroristState #TrumpIsACriminal #SupportUkraine #СлаваУкраїні

Below Deck season 13 episode 2 "Pier Pressure" introduced us to deckhand Matt's condom-snorting talent and my new favorite character, Mama Ying.

https://colorbrewer2.org/ A set of color-blind safe color palettes that I've used as the basis for a bunch of visualizations

https://billmorris.io/shoals/2026/10/18/colorblind-cartographer.html Nice piece by Bill on what it means to him to be a colorblind cartographer I finally, earnestly solicited some opinions from friends and colleagues about what they saw in the same images that I was looking at - in particular in the comparison between the true color image of the airstrip surrounded by blooming canola fields, with the protonopia-simulation version next to it. The words I heard to describe my simulated view of…

The blogosphere (stupid fucking word, by the way) is boring as hell. It seems to be inundated with AI or AI-adjacent posts. It’s a giant circlejerk of anonymous scribblers fellating each other for their valiant resistance to all things AI. If not that, it’s something like here’s my shitty TTRPG or blogging is so cool, so I blog because it’s good to blog, let’s blog together. Don’t get me wrong, there are some gems. I like Lili. I picture her as Faye Wong in Chungking Express. The neo-Luddite…

My perhaps strangest confession to date: I’m annoyed about all the common ways people obfuscate text. I think I developed this frustration during the GUIdebook times. In my gallery of splash screens, I would often be faced with this situation: I didn’t want to propagate the registration info, and could think of a few ways to obfuscate it: The first one felt okay, but it looked like the information just wasn’t there to begin with. Black bars and blurring didn’t look realistic, felt ugly, and…

19 Confused | INDEX | 21 Hero Self-imposed constraint: Use the letters of the prompt word inside a 2-inch square to illustrate its meaning. Hongdian Black Forest fountain pen, EF, black ink on 120 gsm paper.

by Cláudio Alves Last but not least, in this miniseries of Latin American highlights from the 51st Toronto International Film Festival, we have a quartet of films that ponder return, whether to a place or a time, perchance a cultural root or the depths of literary history. You have Lisandro Alonso’s Double Freedom, premiered at Cannes to rave reviews and which, effectively, marks a sequel, quasi-remake of the director’s quarter-century-old debut. The Hummingbird Paints Fragrant Songs considers…

R&R: Rest and Repairs.After a 63-day hiatus, we're trying out camping again on a short trip beginning with camping at the Mueller State Park campground. After almost getting rid of the RV due to repair estimates, now that we have decided to keep her, might as well get some more use out of her. At least that's the plan for now, I'm not sure when and if I will head south and west into Arizona if at all this year. Mueller SP is a nice park, with 132 spaces for camping in high season. The weather…

It’s been another good recovery day, and I’m feeling better than I have in a very long time. It does mean keeping to restrictions is not easy! Still, I did manage to get a few useful things done. I’ve been able to make my own meals, even if it’s just reheating leftovers or making a … Continue reading A quiet day, saving seeds and garden progress

Chapter 1 of my first foray into fiction is out: Heavenly Lord - the story of Maewen. Mind the messy writing!

I had a busy weekend, and it is going to be an active week full of meetings and errands too. I'll be driving around a good deal, and certain tunes have been, "On repeat," in my car. Here are some of them...Beyoncé: "Morning Dew, Donk Remix," Featuring Jay-ZI enjoy Beyoncé's music but have never been a huge fan or especially critical of her. When he puts out a banger, however, she puts out a banger! This remix, with its weird blend of original beats, a big sample of the Isley Brothers, and Jay-Z…

Time to don our coats of many colours once more for another round of Sixth Doctor audio stories. Last time, we bade a fond farewell to Evelyn, as we took in the last audio dramas that Maggie Stables had managed to record before she retired from acting for good. Prior to this, Stables’ involvement had become patchier than it had been in Big Finish’s early days, her declining health perhaps contributing to prior experiments in the way of stories where Old Sixie is travelling alone, or with…

Some people think that LLMs should not be used in technical fields like programming or mathematics, because those fields are actually art. True or not, this kind of argument is not going to be persuasive to the general population. The argument goes something1 like this: It doesn’t matter how effective LLMs are at technical fields like programming or mathematics, because one of the essential values of those fields is that they’re art. While it looks to laypeople like these fields exist to solve…