VMPal is described as “Virtual Machines built for Apple silicon and AI agents”. Straight from Apple, installed in minutes, with Metal on your Mac’s GPU. VMPal Tools add the clipboard and drag & drop. On macOS 27, setup takes no clicks. I’ve used it briefly to setup a new MacOS install, and it worked great. I haven’t tried it yet, but I have dreams of using VMPal to automatically setup a new install for me, run some tests, and tearing everything down. The angle the VMPal developers are taking,…

Inspired by Matthias Pfefferle, I also just implemented JS-based rendering for the sitemap.xml, which was using XLST until recently. XLST broke when I made the Content-Security-Policy in GoBlog more restrictive. Given XLST is deprecated anyway, I switched to CSS, but that’s more limited. JS-based rendering works great, though. I didn’t know using JavaScript on XML-based documents was even possible. I also applied it to the blogroll.opml while I was at it. With the new DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017…

The five Lisbon girls are impossibly beautiful angels, adored by the local boys, raised by an overbearing mother and a weak father in the affluent suburb of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, in the summer of 1975. The historical context is important when reading the novel, and will explain some of the language and the attitudes. The premise of the book is very interesting, as is the perspective from which it's written: an unnamed neighbourhood boy, twenty years after the fact, recounting the events of…

With week 42 complete, it's time for me to remind everyone that there are now 9 weeks left in 2026. Do you have a project you wanted to finish this year? Time to get moving (he says with many incomplete projects). I had something to say about resolutions and how they're meaningless (before diving into how it's just January 1st as a day to start being meaningless, and if there's something you want to change in your life, start now) but I can't remember what prompted it. It came to mind while I…

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 28-30: In June 1881, Austria-Hungary and Serbia agreed a commercial treaty. Three weeks later, it was supplemented by a secret convention, negotiated and signed by Prince Milan himself, which stipulated that Austria-Hungary would not only assist Serbia in its efforts to secure elevation to the status of a kingdom but would also support Serbian claims to territorial annexations in Macedonia. Serbia,…

i’ve worked for about 3 years in my life almost no one asks how i did it and if i get asked, the answer is: you were lucky instead people judge me for how i live and complain that their life is so hard fascinating… and please don’t ask ;-)

An old friend, knowing my interest in such oddities, has alerted me to a wonderfully outlandish theory that seems to have attracted thousands of believers, many of them already adherents of Flat EarthTheory. It all began ten years ago, when someone in Crimea, whose account has since been deleted, posted a video on YouTube in which he argued that there are no trees on Earth: what we take for trees are mere bushes, shrubs and saplings, remnants of an age when supergigantic trees, with trunks two…

Tags: #food #dispatches #portraitsJen, Jan’s friend from way back, served the Taiwanese beef noodle soup into the little upside-down cone-shaped bowls. A piece of beef, a pile of the hand-pulled wheat noodles, ladles of delicious steaming broth, and an offer for a couple of drops of the “super spicy chili crunch”, optional, but recommended. And then, almost forgot, a chopsticks full or two of the sour cabbage topping. These are Jen’s home flavors, and she’s very excited to be having a whole…

Derek Sivers meets 30 people in Istanbul. One of them is a dear friend of mine. After a long break, Kyla Scanlon has a new book-length post out, about the American economy. There is a bone-chilling graph tucked in the middle of Part 4. It ends on a hopeful note. It’s good. Ted Gioia recommends seven Philip K. Dick novels. A ridiculously detailed history of Lemmings, the game. Surgeons behaving badly. Ada Palmer has a podcast. I miss The Elder Scrolls. Apparently, the new one is in production…

“Translation is a Political Act” When I wrote about Don Mee Choi’s newest book Freely Frayed (Wave Books) last month, I didn’t say much about her role as a translator. But my interest was piqued by what she wrote and I have been going down the proverbial rabbit hole ever since, reading several very recent books on the art of translation. I intend to write about them in the coming months. In the meantime, I want to go back to Choi and the topic of translation. In particular, I was struck by the…

I’ve been writing about science since the late 1980s. That’s long before the public got on to the World Wide Web, before smartphones and when Wi-Fi was still sci-fi, Before Google, Facebook, TwitteX, and Heaven forbid, TikTok and Snapchat. Before the Human Genome Project was even launched, before Dolly the sheep was cloned, and before CRISPR gene-editing first went snipping. Before the Hubble Space Telescope was launched, before we discovered a single exoplanet, before the Higgs boson was…

The audio experts at Rogue Amoeba are back to sponsor 512 Pixels. Their app SoundSource adds powerful audio controls to your Mac that you’ll be glad to have. It starts with volume controls for each and every app on your Mac, all in one place: your menu bar. Turn down noisy websites without affecting your music, or boost a quiet video call past the usual maximum. SoundSource does much more than just volume, though. Use it to send any app’s audio to a different device, so your music plays through…

Many years ago, when I first tried gaining weight, I followed a diet plan that called for me to eat egg whites. The only option that came to mind at the time was to buy a carton from the grocery store. It tasted very unpleasant, and it was probably processed. I tried it a couple of times and gave up. As I started working out with a personal trainer recently, I’ve also needed to adhere to a diet plan. Once again, egg whites. I was about to add it to the grocery list when my wife made a…

This week’s earworm is Dominoes by The Big Pink, who had a moment back in 2009 or so. I don’t know if they’re still around (too busy to do a Google search right now) but I dig the beat of this song—I miss good heavy drums in current music.

Overview first, zoom and filter, details on demand. - Ben Shneiderman's information-seeking mantra. In an apparent paradox, I find both the node-based scenario and the Carved from Brindlewood approaches to prep unsatisfactory. The first is too rigid; the second is too loose. I want there to be a core truth in the GM's mind that informs how the world responds to the players. I want there to be a reasonable cause-and-effect to everything that happens. Cause and effect is hard when you don't…

The number of papers being submitted to the Open Journal of Astrophysics continues to rise, as demonstrated by the following graphic which shows the stats for new submissions for the last five years: It’s very clear that the thicket is getting thicker and thicker as times goes on! The increasing number of articles is of course very welcome indeed, but it is increasing the load on our Editorial Board and that includes me! I think it’s time once again to look for more volunteers to join the team,…

The news that Sally Rooney’s books will not be being sold in the UK any longer is quite a surprise. This decision has been made because such sales would apparently be against the law — or at least paying royalties to the author as a result of such sales would be against the law. This comes about because Ms Rooney, an Irish citizen, has pledged her royalties to Palestine Action, which has been designated a terrorist organization in Britain. The Terrorism Act of 2000 makes it an offense…

Harry and I have been helping businesses think about how to best use AI. As you’d expect, we bring a strategic focus to this work. Which is why in episode 47 of Traction Heroes, I read a fragment from Stefanie Hutka’s new book, What Your Machines Should Do. Stephanie describes the breakneck pace of AI developments, and notes: Beneath this momentum is a rarely examined assumption. Human thinking is a process that can be separated from the thinker and reproduced by a machine. If that assumption…

With a special guest, Ren!!! 00:00 Intro 00:48 Goodbye, Lara 38:40 Outro Music Credits: “Clover 3” by Vibe Mountain “Seasons” by roljui

The upcoming solo board game Storyfold: Buried Truths (2026) features string connections in its promotional art and game board. From contributor Mike Odom.

I ask this with all the judgment I can muster: What’s wrong with people? I try my best not to annoy anyone when I’m out and about, but some people don’t seem to care. Smokers above all, who lost their sense of smell (and dignity) ages ago and seem to think they’re not constantly polluting a huge area around them. Then there are people who use their speakers for phone calls—or, even better, FaceTime calls, holding their phones so the person on the other end can see nothing but their nose hairs.…

Music organization and the week's links. A couple years ago I went through my archive of music files and re-organized and re-tagged them using MusicBrainz Picard. I then discovered that the music player I use on Android, Musicolet, uses only an older version of the tagging standard so every time I edited a tag on the app, for example to change the genre, it totally fucked the rest of the tags up. Up until now I've been syncing a selection of music files with syncthing and using Musicolet or…

A lot of new construction these days starts with a concrete slab, but this building has a post and pier beginning. One thing you don’t have to worry about in Hawaii is cold weather freezing your house’s pipes! Our water line runs above ground from the meter to the house. There are disadvantages to this though. Last week, the line ruptured because it runs through a clump of palms, and those growing plants finally bent the water line beyond its ability to flex.

Earlier this month I went to quilt guild meeting and a fellow knitter/spinner/quilter/pen-lover came up to me and handed me a ziplock bag full of ink samples to try. I had brought her 2 little vials, so the trade was quite uneven, but I was delighted. (Thank you K!) Since then I’ve had fun getting out my swatching equipment and seeing what she shared. So far that Dominant Industry Sunset has stolen my heart, but I’m enjoying a variety of seasonal colors and I’ve got lots more still to swatch.…

Say a customer asks your support bot, "can I get a refund on the second one?" The bot searches your docs for "refund second one", finds the generic refund page and tells them all sales are final, which is wrong. The right policy was in your docs the whole time, but the bot went […]

Say a customer asks your support bot, "can I get a refund on the second one?" The bot searches your docs for "refund second one", finds the generic refund page and tells them all sales are final, which is wrong. The right policy was in your docs the whole time, but the bot went […]

Monday means Fantasy with Friends time! All the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is about whether fantasy is about “real things”: Some people argue that fantasy isn’t worth reading because it’s not about real things. What is your response? Mostly, I think that if fantasy isn’t for you — if you can’t suspend disbelief, or you argue too much with basic premises, or can’t keep the worldbuilding straight, or whatever it is — then… don’t read it,…

Finished: Plato’s The Republic by Plato 📚. Plato sure doesn’t like creative-types! Talk about zero self-awareness. Though, I suppose “philosopher” wasn’t considered the same school as sculptors and poets back in the day.

Splitting N! into N factors is trivial. It’s defined as the product of N integers, the integers 1 through N. Can you still split N! into N factors if you put a minimum size requirement on the factors? You can’t split 3! into three factors unless one of the factors is 1, but you can split 4! into factors ≥ 2: 4! = 24 = 2 × 2 × 2 × 3 Define t(N) as the largest number such that N! can be expressed as the product of integers greater than or equal to t(N). So based on the discussion above, t(N) ≥ 1…

Forgive me dear reader, it’s been well over a week since my last post but for good reason. Not least, I got my first head cold of the season, which is typical as my Covid/Flu shots are not till the last day of October. Quebec is always late rolling out free shots for the elderly — having long since stopped offering them for anyone under 60 back in 2024. And yes, sadly, I now fall into that category: elderly. But the free part is mostly because of health issues. Anyway, all this to say I am…