Let's get this out of the way first - this is a terrible idea! I want my two-factor authentication codes to be easily accessible to me, so I've built a watch app which will display them. That's really convenient for me - but makes for a terrible security posture. Anyone who steals my watch will be able to see my one-time code. If they're clever, they can decompile the app and find the secret which powers the code generation. You should absolutely not do this and, if you ignore my warnings, you…

While the days of optical media are somewhat behind us, it’s amazing that through a combination of luck, generosity and diligence that I can still make new discoveries and experience using different sorts of rare media. This post looks at a now-defunct company, King Disc Technology Corp. (KDT), their 8x DVD-Rs with KDTVVV media ID. Aside from the uncommon MID which is not universally supported amongst recorders (and which I have not previously seen), KDT also had a surprising strategy to sell…

What's been happeningThe week started with Sydney amping up the grill to max — we got a taste of how our summer might be when the temperature shot up to 36 degrees out here in Western Sydney.I’m not looking forward to it. Thankfully, the rest of the week was pretty wet and cold - not great from a humidity point of view.A round of thanks to Rushabh who asked me why I haven't written the weekly notes in a while - it turns out that the www version of my site was still pointed to the older Hugo…

Shaping up to be a great book.

Colleagues Cyril Hédoin and Pablo Paniagua are running a symposium on “PPE” (philosophy, politics, and economics) over there. They follow James Buchanan’s classic question, from 1964, of “What should economists do?” Given that Crooked Timber is, arguably, situated at least in part in this field, I thought I’d repost my response to their introductory essay here, with their permission. ——— PPE for Embodied Creatures on a Finite Planet There is much to applaud in Hedoin and Paniagua’s views on…

A history of how I have evaded my own privacy on the internet, and maybe some of my sense of self as well.

A friend and I were talking about organizational behavior recently, and one of her observations stuck with me. Public markets are unforgiving. When performance slips, the market notices, and that pressure, assuming reasonably mature leadership, tends to force a culture of accountability. Take that pressure away, and the opposite tends to happen. Without real consequences for weak performance, culture drifts toward the performative. The result is inevitably more politics and more energy spent…

This week, I spent a little time refining Field Notes. I also spent time (slowly, on and off) this weekend rewriting the case studies on my portfolio. Lot of work. I also finished The Secret History and picked up The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, though I haven’t gotten past the first couple of pages. I was quite keen on reading it, having heard a lot of good things about Rilke’s poetry. I skimmed through a few lines from the introductory chapter and, admittedly, found them quite…

Michael Okuda designed Star Trek’s LCARS screens. In an interview with Adam Savage, he tells how Marina Sirtis found the bridge’s control panels intimidating on the first day of filming. His answer to her: the panels are software-defined, based on your user profile, so the button you hit is always the correct one. I’ve been exploring that idea with a journal app of my own. It has a crew of AI agents, and when I want something changed, I tell them and they change the software itself.

Core Conceit Ooh, Scary Rebuilding Archetypes Rites of Passage Thumbnails Rumors and Legends Scaling Up Remind Me Who I recently discovered that the BBC requested proposals for a presumably post-Disney Doctor Who ©. The deadline passed on October second, so I can’t do much about that, and presumably they don’t want more American interlopers, especially of the sort that won’t shut up about Star Trek. Instead, I’d like to think about what a Free Culture version of the Doctor Who franchise might…

Waiting at the ruby diadem of the traffic light, scarfing down a bread roll so soaked in industrial-grade butter I can feel it insta-coat the inside of my mouth, a sudden film of fat across the entire tooth-studded half-sphere, and this doubling of sensation—the meaty, constellated texture of my inner cheek, now coupled with this cow-jolted, oiled, palatable surface—forces a vivid realization, that I am just a thing with many openings. Holes, you could say. A hole for dirty looks, another for…

📷 In Brittany, France, there’s an area they call ‘La Côte du Granit Rose’ – the Pink Granite Coast. I was happy to find a corner of the New South Wales coast that’s really quite like it. Birubi Point at Anna Bay, NSW.

An apartment house in Greenwich Village, looking rather outer-boroughish: Something funny at the corner…oh, it’s a whole bunch of cell phone antennas painted to be look brick: The population density in Manhattan means a lot of cell antennas are needed. Given the lack of interest on the part of the phone companies to spend money unnecessarily, the two choices seem to be this kind of fake facade, or a crown of white rectangles on the roof.

Sunday Asides #117 So, the Apple Homeview looks cute, and I want one for my desk to replace my 10-year-old Google Home, but what do you mean it doesn't play video yet? Maybe I should just get the new HomePod mini instead. It would be cheaper, and the new version comes in green! Sonic is currently selling a banana dirty Dr. Pepper, and I just want to know what the fuck is going on in here on this day. "That Neptune square Mars" song hits a little too close to home because I have Neptune square…

The latest batch:

I think most of us in the world of nature observation have tales to tell of dodgy identifications from the various apps. The Merlin is great if you sort of know what you’re listening to, but it can throw you off course and suggest birds that would be pretty much impossible. Sometimes it will claim to have heard such-and-such a species, an Eider Duck, say, far inland, when you can definitely tell that the sound it’s picking up was actually some farm machinery. And, it’s notorious at…

People say that language is for communication, and every day Hacker News proves these people wrong. I mean, it’s not just Hacker News, but it’s the place I encounter this phenomenon most often: Somebody will be discussing something, and then somebody else will respond with a short sentence that’s mostly acronyms. The fascinating thing about these responses is that if you know what the acronyms mean, then what’s being stated is often trivial. And if you don’t know what the acronyms mean, then…

There’s a good reason why I included the phrase “thank goodness...” in that post.I built wdlite two years ago. Yet breaking changes could happen at any point, and sooner or later, something was bound to stop working.As of 10 October 2026, the app was still working as expected. However, when I tried it again last night, on 17 October, I finally encountered a problem.Well, it wasn’t entirely broken. It still worked on desktop, but not on mobile.After some investigation, I discovered that the…

Went to Konsztrukting Soundz last night, for what turned out to be an abbreviated session. Here’s Lev Dudas, the creator and organiser, finishing the setup for what he did not expect to be a ninety-minute evening. The first set, with Lev and Lawrence Casserley, was incredibly good, and later in the event Viv Corringham did a frankly magnificent vocal improv. Going offline aside from messaging apps for the rest of the day, as I have lots of house stuff to do. And then Monday begins another very…

Following my previous post, about my running plan for this week, I thought I’d write a follow up and explain how my training went… Monday - Planned Rest Day Tuesday - 0km RunI actually felt rather ill on Tuesday and had a headache that I just couldn’t shift. I made the decision to leave today’s 8km run and see how I felt the following day. Wednesday - 8km @ 5’53” /kmWoke up this morning feeling much better and opted to do yesterday’s 8km run, rather than the planned 5km.In the evening I had my…

Hello again! We're back, and yet another fortnight has passed without me losing the last shreds of my sanity while trying to distinguish between the shoddily assembled AI rubbish piling up in every corner of this little hobby and the good stuff that I delight in sharing with you all. Check back in two weeks' time for another exciting update! Oh, right: There's still a newsletter to do. Well despite being weighed down by said winnowing process, I've cobbled together some cool stuff for you,…

Every acquired book offers the possibility of entering another’s mind. An empty notebook offers the chance to discover one’s own mind. In These Spindrift Pages, Theodore Dalrymple’s observations of his reading encounters, he writes: Simenon bought notebooks without knowing what he was going to write in them or use them for. I have immense quantities of notebooks bought in the same way which I probably could not fill if I wrote for twelve hours a day for the rest of my life, but if I pass a shop…

After a discussion with Joel and James, the latter had a bright idea. Guess what? Yet another fun blogging questions challenge. This one, as the title suggests, is about food. If you have a blog, I encourage you to also participate, and notify James when you publish. (And me, too, for I’d love to read it!) And if you don’t yet have a blog…perhaps this is a sign? My answers are as follows. The Questions What Was Your Favorite Food Growing Up? Great question! I can’t do this question justice with…

Evening on Downtown Galveston, Texas. The post Island Cityscape appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

I wish people would stop using the G-slur (g**fball) already. the proper term is "person of ridiculous demeanor"

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Yesterday was a fairly easy travel day, a pleasant surprise. I decided to go the way my phone directed me, which took me across I 40, the 2 lane part that's under construction. It's much easier early in the morning going from east to west. But I focused on breathing and staying focused on the patch of pavement ahead of me, not the drop off to my right. I was glad I was in my small Prius.I stopped along the way at an Artisan's Center in Berea, KY. I had stopped on my way up, but I was trying to…

Who woke the dogs up?

I hear a lot of GMs on various forums say “I wish my players would give me feedback,” and a lot of players saying, “I wish I could give my GM feedback.” Generally what holds people back from giving feedback is the fear that they will wound the other party. Players by and large hold their GMs in deep affection even when they dislike some aspect of the game – sometimes to the point of being willing to leave the game without ever speaking to the GM about it. That’s how deeply they fear the wound…

Daily Drawing 1022