Sometimes a contractor or service-provider will ask if I’d rather pay in cash. The implication is that a cash transaction can be done without tax – and either or both of us can “save” some money. What’s not said, in these exchanges is: Hey, want to cheat on our taxes together? No thanks. I’ll pay the tax. I enjoy the schools, the roads, public broadcasting corporation. I don’t have some sort of extra-strong moral muscle. It makes me sad that people see the collective pie as something they can…

Classique I’ve watched a pile of YouTube videos in search of omelette mastery. I’ve only ever had diner-style omelettes at restaurants, and while I liked them plenty, it turned out that there was a world of omelette-making techniques to explore. The version I love the most bears little resemblance to the diner-style omelette, but that doesn’t dampen my appreciation for the diner-style omelette when I eat at a diner. Rhonda and I met up with Aaron last weekend, and we got to talking about…

Last week I was in the Public Records of Victoria (PROV) looking at records of the Melbourne mint. My substack about the Sydney mint by rights should come first, but I’m fresh-ish off the plane so I’m doing this one first. It was a bit extravagant building two mints in Australia. As I flicked through the massive file of equipment to order and repair I wondered why they built another one. I’d assumed it was just that Melbourne was much closer to where most of the gold turned out to be. Image…

Egypt's Golden Couple: When Akhenaten and Nefertiti Were Gods on Earthby John Darnell, Colleen DarnellGenres: History, Non-fiction Pages: 384 Rating: Synopsis: Two celebrated Egyptologists bring to vivid life the intriguing and controversial reign of King Tut's parents. Akhenaten has been the subject of radically different, even contradictory, biographies. The king has achieved fame as the world's first individual and the first monotheist, but others have seen him as an incestuous tyrant who…

lingthusiasm:Lingthusiasm Episode 121: Vampires, ghosts, imposters and more linguistic monstersVampires, werewolves, witches, ghosts, zombies, imposters, and frankenstein have something in common: they’re all possessed by the spirit of linguistics! In this silly spooky episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about various kinds of linguistic monsters. We talk about how vampires would make the best historical linguists, the ghosts of borrowed words and old…

Sunlight diffuses through the canopy and light fog at Northern California’s Avenue of the Giants. The post Redwood Glow appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

How I built an encrypted offsite backup solution for my Immich photos. Backblaze, Hetzner and Scaleway were in the running to store it, but none won. Read the full post on the blog.

There is a long tradition in American women’s popular music performance of using lyrics about romantic and sexual relationships as metaphors for bigger-picture social issues. As Angela Davis writes in Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, “The expression of socially unfulfilled...

Creeping up on Halloween, I might as well get into the spirit with a bit about a dustjacket showcasing one of the many weird carvings crafted by horror and fantasy great Clark Ashton Smith. My bookman pal Paul Dobish and I were talking about something bookish, which brought to mind a first run dustjacket on an Underwood-Miller book. I realized that he might not know about it, and Dobish is deep into that kind of thing — he discovered that the boards on the Arkham House first edition of Stanley…

Weekly cleaning and home improvement series, with some thoughts in between. Since I barely slept on Sunday and had a rigorous day, I let myself sleep in and turned off all alarms. It's now 13:12 and I'm eating my breakfast as a type this. No matter how late I wake up, I still eat breakfast. The term comes from "breaking fast," so semantically it still applies. Life feels like a jumbled mess these days. There are so many moving parts: relax, find job, pay bills, how to earn money?, sit up…

💬 “I still think the real revolution is to make the world safe for poetry, meandering, for the frail and vulnerable, the rare and obscure, the impractical and local and small.” – Rebecca Solnit Via Bradley Andrews

By FARHA GUERRERO This hourglass-shaped word collage gathers the remarkable range of subjects I’ve discussed over the years on Prof Talk and The Blue Hour, my radio show on CiTR 101.9 FM, with some of the most beautiful minds at UBC and beyond. Seeing this image brings me so much joy. As the Argentine singer Facundo Cabral sings in No soy de aquí, ni soy de allá, “Y ser feliz es mi color de identidad”—“And being happy is the colour of my identity.”

This week I wrote a bunch of blogposts! Some of them were quite fun, some others were rather personal and dealing with complicated emotions, but I am once again feeling pretty chill about life. The weather continues to go colder and I’m having a really good time. I’ve been doing some small changes that already feel good and working on figuring some things out as things move along. Here are some notes on other things that happened between October 13 to 19, 2026. 💻 Work has been interesting. My…

This essay presents a framing of stupidity as requiring the capacity for intelligence. Stupidity is not the opposite of intelligence but its evil twin, the dissimulating Cain to a cerebral Abel. And perhaps surprisingly, the degree of stupidity available to any system scales directly with the intelligence that system possesses—more intelligence begets greater feats of stupidity. It would be a stretch to call a bacterium stupid, and we know that cats and dogs achieve modest feats of it. But…

🏃 We had Field day over the weekend at Leo's school. Thankfully, the weather cooperated. The skies were blue, it wasn't too hot, and there was a cool breeze. Leo was very excited and did well. He placed second in his race (and only then because he looked to the side at the last seconds) Well done!👏. Just as important as placing well is he was positive about his placement and his effort. Nothing like his original races in pre-school where he just nonchalantly walked once it became clear he…

The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX/BSD/Linux systems. Whenever I stumble upon something worth mentioning on the Internet I just put it here. Today the amount information that we get using various information streams is at massive overload. Thus one needs to focus only on what is important without the need to grep(1) the Internet everyday. Hence the idea of providing such…

I just discovered that the prinsessor-loving Des’s long-running blog Desbladet has vanished from the internet, and if you turn to the Internet Archive you get the dreaded “Sorry. This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.” If you go to the site itself you get: “After a long period of inactivity, this diary was moved into long-term storage. Its archived entries were not deleted.” But they charge you $19 to begin “the restore,” and who knows what you get for that — one post? An emoji?…

If there were doubts about Reform's political character, ITV's undercover documentary has put them to bed. In encounter after encounter, its reporters were witnesses to unprompted, off-the-cuff racism. But we're not talking about the casual dropping of slurs. Instead, a parade of councillors and party officials outlined their elaborate, violent fantasies. Of ripping people from their homes and shoving them in concentration camps, of personally carrying out public executions, of terrorising…

This post (give or take a day or two) will be one full year of me doing weeknotes! Crazy! I'll put my thoughts about weeknotes at the end of this post because I want to write about the fun stuff I did last week first. Two of my good friends Dan and Tayla got married in Newport this past weekend!! I was one of Dan's groomsmen and my friend Tim was his best man. Picked up my tux on Thursday and drove down to Newport the next morning for the rehearsal and the friends and family dinner. Hadn't been…

Stellantis, the company behind car brands like Fiat, Dodge, and Jeep, has a rocky history of releasing plugin hybrids that burst into flames as well as EVs that are consistently reviewed poorly and sell in ridiculously low quantities.Let's recap their EV journey so far.The Wagoneer SIn 2024, Jeep released the Jeep Wagoneer S, a pure EV luxury SUV that was a little odd. For one thing, the Wagoneer badge had come from a classic off-road ready family hauler, but this is a 600hp pavement monster…

Tycho’s lid latch misaligned. Fixed it, but accidentally broke other part. Bummer. Superglue to the rescue. Also, I checked why the Right cursor key and PgDn key weren’t working. Depressing and massaging them fixed them, whew! I was already getting frustrated on the idea of not being able to buy a replacement keyboard. The F3 and F4 keys still work intermittently, tho.

1 day late, but it's my bearvesary! I was thinkin about this post like 2-3 weeks ago, but I really lost the habit of writing. May I pick it up again by writing this post. A lot has happened in these last two months that I didn't post, specially this last month. Somehow everything always happens around my birthday, in a good way. I got a new job at the start of this month, same position as before (full-stack dev), I was excruciatingly nervous for my first day, but all went well. I also had to…

Stepping off the train at Faversham station last Friday, a minute or two after midday, brought back quite a few memories. The four-platform station is more extensive than I remember but not untypical of other stations further along the line, at places such as Margate and Ramsgate. I ascended the steps, crossed the road and right in front of me was the Railway Hotel, an imposing and attractive red brick late, Victorian public house. Like many pubs in this pleasant north Kent town, the Railway is…

For what must surely be Matthew Warchus' final new production at the Old Vic he revisits Alain Boublil (book and lyrics,) Claude-Michel Schönberg (music and lyrics) and Stephen Clark's (lyrics) Martin Guerre in what is described as a new version of the musical and, frankly, when has this ever been staged in anything other than a rewritten version? I saw the original production 30 years ago and I still didn't quite see the first version: By the time I went in 1996, a couple of months after it…

As I announced on this blog a couple weeks ago, I’m teaching a new course this semester at UT Austin, entitled AI Alignment Theory. To call such a course “timely” seems like an understatement; this is the first course I’ve ever taught for which multiple gargantuan developments relevant to the course have happened while I was teaching it. Since AI alignment is still a field with no standard textbook (although that might be changing), no accepted body of mathematical theory, etc. etc., the way…

Last week I watched a really really really l o n g form YT video about productivity. Apparently this is better for increasing attention span and productivity than short form... I watched to the end because I thought the content might expand the way life lives me. [Generally, here, trusting life to unroll itself, including some loose priorities for the period between each new and full moon seems to create an enriching mix of scheduled stuff and surprise.] I also found the interviewee vivacious,…

As described in Part 1, September 2026 marked the 100th anniversary of Arizona’s entry into the federal registration areas for vital statistics. The woman who piloted Arizona to this milestone was Ruby Loy Jacquemin, a Prescott native who, after early widowhood, became the statistician for the State Board of Health. Who was Ruby Jacquemin, and what did she do?Ruby Loy in PrescottRuby May Loy was born in Prescott on September 16, 1889, a few months after territorial capital had been moved (or…

Two Jack LakeSummaryIn which our intrepid travelers leave the United States and depart for our neighbor to the north, experiencing the joys (ha!) of modern air travel and the wonders of the Canadian Rockies.Day OneThe first of many selfies on this trip.Our two hour flight from Nashville to Toronto was relatively uneventful - and featured an empty seat beside us! Upon landing in Toronto, I had my first experience with Canadian border customs which was uniformly pleasant. (Key note: this is my…

A huge tree has been getting huger and huger. Nothing grows in the corner of our garden that it overshadows.9:30 am (for scale, the "hedge" being dwarfed on the right is nearly 10 ft high...)But it's not in our garden, just in the very corner of a neighbour's. From various conversations, we knew she wanted it gone, but couldn't afford to take it down. It's just going to get even bigger, so we asked her if we could take it down. She very happily said yes.We asked the people who keep our own…