A few months ago I wrote that Claude Code on FreeBSD is a game changer for self-hosters. I thought I had seen everything. I was wrong. 😅 Dawarich : a great app # Dawarich is a self-hosted alternative to Google Timeline. Your smartphone (via OwnTracks or Overland) sends its position to your server, and Dawarich shows you where you went : a map of your trips, a heatmap, the countries and cities you visited, distances, transport modes, statistics per year... It can even import your old Google…

Sometimes, you feel physically better with someone. You know there’s a spark between you, a chemistry so perfect it feels almost unreal. Even though you aren’t exactly in a relationship, the spark never lets you stay away from each other. There’s a pull you cannot define. It makes you do stupid things sometimes, but you don’t regret them because that’s what such attraction does to you. There is no definitive name for this feeling. How would you define a feeling where you cannot stop thinking…

With Province House reopening this week after a long restoration, I thought it high time to improve the rendering of the building—and Queens Square around it—in OpenStreetMap, in three dimensions.OpenStreetMap is not, at its heart, a 3D map, but it supports tagging buildings and other objects with information about the third dimension—height, roof shape, etc.—and there are experimental websites that will use these tags to render in 3D.There’s a degree of unsatisfying hopeful magic to figuring…

Subject line: Using AI? Here’s how to protect your information AI tools can be helpful, but it’s important to protect your personal and financial information when using them. Avoid entering sensitive information into AI tools. Anything you share may be stored or retained outside of [Financial Company]’s secure environment. Here are a few ways to stay secure: Never share your [Financial Company] username, password, or verification codes. Never enter account numbers, credit card information, or…

Source: YouTube

Spoiler: it’s the Nazis. This has come up surprisingly often lately on several blogs I’ve been casually reading or linking up with or visiting via weekly linkups, leading to me actually deciding to add a couple of points to my commenting policy banning promotion of Nazism on my blog (including promotion of Substack). It seems that there’s still a fair few people in the world who don’t realise that Substack provides Nazis with a platform, makes money from Nazis and promotes Nazis. At least, I…

By FARHA GUERRERO In correspondence with a fellow writer, I shared an idea for an epistolary novel that has been dwelling inside my mind for some time. But in thinking about this, I also remembered watching Adolfo Bioy Casares, Jorge Luis Borges's very good friend, speak about something I might call the enduring imaginative life. In a 1983 interview with Martín Caparrós, Bioy Casares said: “Yo vivo con seis, siete, ocho cuentos por escribir y dos o tres novelas...” I live with six, seven, eight…

What do you do below something big?This is a very general question, but an important one. Many pieces of urban architecture are quite large, especially overpasses, bridges, elevated rail, etc. And there are a lot of different approaches to what you put below that, from "nothing" to "actively hostile to homeless architecture" to "cool stuff."So let's consider the advantages of each.1. Nothing in ParticularSometimes you build something big and high, and just ignore what's down below.This bridge…

I’m sitting at a café in my neighborhood. A song came on that I think is one of the most beautiful songs ever written. “Jag ger dig min morgon” by Fred Åkerström, which is a cover of Tom Paxton’s song “I Give You the Morning”. The original is fantastic too, it’s just that it resonates even more when it’s sung in my native language. But there are some nuances to it as well, like the Swedish translation being my morning instead of the morning. It emphasizes the beauty of giving someone your time…

Introduction Last month while working on my OpenTofu/Terraform provider for Forgejo, I encountered a bug in the Forgejo API. I had some time to investigate so I wrote a fix, and was pleasantly surprised at how welcoming the project was to a new contributor. The problem The problematic endpoint is PATCH /orgs/{org}. This endpoint returned 200 OK when I tried to set an organization’s visibility to public, but the setting remained unchanged. Before creating a new issue, I searched through the list…

Seaham, a town of about 20,000 people, is just down the coast from Sunderland. Its main development stems from the construction of a port in the 1820s to export coal, but its fame today is based around sea glass. The Londonderry bottle works were opened in 1853, and at their height produced 20 million bottles per year. Waste glass was dumped into the sea, and is now washed up as rounded off sea glass, which is much in demand for use in craft work. On my weekday visit in the middle of the week…

I found my way to Jacinta Palud’s blog through a link in Stephen’s guestbook.It’s a blog in a very old-school sense, and I enjoy the mix of links, photos, and Winnipeg insights. Subscribed.

Massey College, at the University of Toronto, is an important example of Canadian efforts to emulate the ‘OxBridge’ educational and college system at Oxford and Cambridge. I was pleased to join Massey as a junior fellow when I began my PhD in 2012, and found the college to be an indispensable social hub amid U of T’s general coldness. I was a resident during term time over three years but, for the rest of my PhD, still visited routinely to read, have lunch, or just see who was around. It used…

I first covered Scragtag, the verminous mid-1980s puppet operated by Marcus Kimber, in 2013. I must have watched him in programmes such as T.T.V and Scragtag and his Tea Time Telly, but I couldn't remember him at all. No matter, I eventually discovered he was an excellent character, even if his BBC vehicles were weak. Since 2013, however, little else regarding Scragtag has surfaced. So, I decided to go digging. I can't promise you a plethora of footage. Neither can I finally reveal Marcus…

This video is all about making the neck blank from some very special Cuban mahogany. Also, I set myself the challenge of making a head inlay to match the mandolin’s rosette as seen here- Cheers Gary

I suffer from Post-Christian Stress Disorder (PCSD). I made that up, but I have faith that it’s real, so you have to respect it or you’re a bigot. The quacks at the American Psychiatric Association (APA) continue to ignore my strongly worded emails demanding an emergency revision to the DSM. My ACLU lawyer just sighed and told me to stop bothering him on the weekend. I’ve been cursed with weekend work. Three standups a day with consultants—a desperate attempt to get a $100M tech transformation…

We didn't have a great time at our last metal music festival just a few weeks ago, and were hoping we'd have a better time at the more local festival that we've attended the past few years. So we returned to Sloss Furnaces↗ in nearby Birmingham, Alabama for Furnace Fest↗. The festival had a kind of rocky start thanks to some weather but we did wind up seeing some great bands and having a fantastic time. Saturday We woke up Saturday after the storm rolled through to find that the day's set times…

Can you still find a good hotel in London for New Year’s Eve? Yes, but not a cheap one. On 17 October, I found at least 20 well-reviewed hotels with a room for two from 31 December to 2 January for £500 or less for the two nights. The cheapest was £407, and most were between £450 and £500. Under £150 a night, there was almost nothing with a private bathroom: one hotel, rated 7.2, and its price went up within the hour. And things move fast: my top pick on 17 October, the only well-reviewed hotel…

The Nahvalur Eclipse was one of the pleasant surprises of my 2025 review queue. The design is admittedly not for everyone, but as a retractable pen, it works well, and is fun to use. I have one Eclipse in the Hepatizon with Silver Trim, with a Fine Steel nib, to give away this week. And the winner is: Congrats Laura! I’ve sent you an email to collect your shipping address.

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades. Hello. Here is a jazz cover of the Balatro song. I don’t say Balatro theme song because it only has one song. Here is the jazz cover (8 minutes). Enjoy responsibly.

[Sports journalist Charley Rosen passed away last year at age 84. He left behind plenty of magazine articles about the NBA past, including this one published in the January/February 2000 issue of Hangtimes. Rosen asks the simple question: Do former players make better coaches? Rosen never really answers the question, but he broaches many of the myriad issues worth parsing to answer the question. That makes his article historically interesting, and it remains topical today as retired players…

Occasionally in the Prismatic Wasteland discord we make an impromptu d100 list. It always gives me a smile. Here are the folks involved in this one: Pool Time With Swim Allen, d4 Caltrops, Patchwork Paladin, Rise Up Comus, Brackish Draught, Murkdice, d4hpmagicuser, Sparky Bee Special mention goes to Hodag, the OSR's hardest-working illustrator. Thanks guys! In the depths of the catacomb stands a strange machine: a heavy cabinet of metal, painted in bright colours. A light blinks above a small…

I’ve decided to archive the source code of my Ruby gems to make it clear that I’m no longer working on them; I’ve written this post to link from them in order to explain why. In an article published in 2000, Yukihiro Matsumoto (a.k.a. “Matz”), designer of Ruby, wrote, For me, the purpose of life is, at least partly, to have joy. Programmers often feel joy when they can concentrate on the creative side of programming, so Ruby is designed to make programmers happy. And as recently as a 2019…

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. II, Chapter 23, § 273 (tr. Adrian Del Caro and Christopher Janaway): The thinking minds, the people of proper judgement and the people who are serious about things are all only exceptions; everywhere in the world the scum are the rule, and they are always at hand and busily at work to corrupt and 'unimprove' in their way anything said by thinkers after mature consideration. Therefore whoever wants to inform himself about a subject…

How I use Bubbles to find the quirky stuff 🎲 It always warms my heart to read kind blog posts with interesting ideas for making Bubbles even better. Of course I can't just keep adding features: Bubbles is already packed with stuff, and I want to keep it minimalistic and intuitive. The main purpose of Bubbles is to find interesting things to read, and what counts as "interesting" is very subjective. To find posts they like, readers either search for blogs and topics, or they filter out the…

This is for Valeria who asked about hirelings and got me to spend most of the day writing this. Love. I love hirelings. They're one of my favorite parts of old dungeon games. Yet I feel like some people have trouble wrapping their heads around them, thinking they're either too complicated or not worth the money. Let's talk about that. I'm just going to explain how I handle them, which may or may not work with some bespoke rulesets that love to make things complicated by throwing lots of numbers…

Actual rain on Friday. Cool breeze, blue skies and sunshine this weekend. Invigoratingly autumnal. Three gyms. I’d simply stopped weighing myself for a couple of weeks. I did it again this week and the news isn’t good but at least it’s focused the mind. Good god my arm was sore after my COVID vaccination! That part is not fun. I’ll be getting the flu (jab) this week, after which I’ll be invincible. I made it to LRUG on Monday for the first time since… my weeknotes suggest April 2024, which…

I just heard a radio ad for Hackensack University Medical Center’s cancer treatment, featuring Dr. Michelle Denato, the doctor who treated me and saved my life. Surreal.