Radio Free Aquarium Drunkard :: October 2026It’s about that time … again! I’m back on the dublab airwaves this Sunday at 4pm PST with a fresh edition of Radio Free Aquarium Drunkard to help you relax and float downstream as the weekend comes to an end. This particular episode of RFAD is bittersweet, because my brother-in-internet-radio Chad Depasquale is taking a break after October; he’s got a kid on the way and will need all the spare time he can get. It’s been a blast sharing some space with…

I've been getting weird e-mails for quite some time now, and this got me thinking about the future of the internet. LLM-generated e-mails are becoming harder to spot, and some of them are landing in my inbox. We are at the point where generating such messages is cheap, and a lot of people think it is a cool idea to spam you with personalized messages that were not written by a real human. Their agents gather some info about you from the internet and make them look personalized. What happens…

I’ve blathered before about how hard it is to do traffic stats these days — AI scrapers run full browsers via VPNs with consumer endpoints. So you can’t distinguish them from real traffic, really. I mean, none of this matters, but… One trick that really helps weed out scrapers from the stats is to just not “count” a web page visit until the page has been open for more than ten seconds. Yes, you lose real readers that bounce fast, but whatevs. However, there are scrapers (as shown in the above…

Something that I've hit time and time again over the years - but seemingly have never blogument'd - is that when you add a required status check on GitHub (in branch protection or a Ruleset), it needs to report back as successful before you can merge a given Pull Request. This is absolutely reasonable, and I don't think there are many complaints folks would have about this requirement. That is, until you want to consider how to handle checks that you don't necessarily want to run all the time.…

I recently read JP’s article, “Things Are Still Worth Doing Yourself”, and while I agree with some of what he’s saying, I think he’s placing AI usage into one rather narrow category. I agree that there’s value in creating something yourself. I also agree that relying on AI to do everything for you, without understanding the process or learning anything along the way, can be detrimental. Particularly when we’re talking about creative endeavors like writing, art, music, or game development. But I…

I recently read JP’s article, “Things Are Still Worth Doing Yourself”, and while I agree with some of what he’s saying, I think he’s placing AI usage into one rather narrow category. I agree that there’s value in creating something yourself. I also agree that relying on AI to do everything for you, without understanding the process or learning anything along the way, can be detrimental. Particularly when we’re talking about creative endeavors like writing, art, music, or game development. But I…

Jeremy Avigad, Kevin Buzzard, Johan Commelin, Rémy Degenne, Kim Morrison, Oliver Nash and Adam Topaz have written a blog post over on Kevin Buzzard’s blog entitled “How to Formalize All of Mathematics”, regarding recent proposals to automatically formalize the entirety of the mathematical literature. The issues regarding formal mathematics are parallel to those regarding informal mathematics, in particular the tradeoff between speed, scale, and understanding when one prioritizes the production…

My blog a few weeks ago talked about the 3 book swaps I've visited in my home county over the last few weeks. Two are housed in old red BT phoneboxes. There is also a fantastic website that tracks all these old boxes, categorises them on location or current usage (book swap, defib etc). Check out the K6 project; https://www.thek6project.co.uk If you're interested in seeing what your own county has to offer in terms of old phoneboxes. Anyway, I'm also still spending time looking at (previous…

Hot on the heels of reading and enjoying The Mountain In The Sea, I picked up Ray Nayler’s next work, this tightly constructed novella. Once again it deals with inter-species communication. This time it’s de-extincted mammoths. Once again, it’s set in the relatively near future. Many of the same gadgets reappear in this book. It may well be set in the same world. There’s a tangible atmosphere to this story. But despite it’s high-tech premise, it’s not escapist. The narrative is driven by the…

There is no way we can quit social media now. We are too entrenched in it. Just as we cannot live without smartphones, we cannot live without social media apps. There is no point in debating it anymore. That discussion was relevant a decade ago; now, it’s pointless. There are generations that have grown up on social media and have no clue what it’s like to live without it. We can improve the way we consume content, though. Instead of consuming everything through video, we can train our brains…

Some kind of Weird experimental wire device constructd with a spinning objects suspended in the moddle with a large construction nail balanced between coils. Your guess is as good as mine. Early Boy Scout elecrical spinner? Merit Badge for perpecual motion machine? Weird Science Project circa 1950 (?) Collection Jim Linderman / Dull Tool Dim Bulb

This is the first time that I’ve read a Sherlock Holmes novel. I’d seen several film and TV adaptations over the years, but they never particularly grabbed me. I thought I’d give one of the books a go since I’ve got a new ebook reader and loaded it up with public domain books. The device is an Xteink X4 Pro, which is a tiny little thing. I bought it to keep in my pocket in the hope that I will reach for it over my phone. I want to stop ending up on Reddit reading things that just make me…

I’m completely in love with my Remarkable 2 – in fact I have slight cold sweats about the fact it’s now discontinued, and the closest replacement is £370. But – that’s a worry for another day… The point is, I love sketching and writing and reading on the Remarkable. I’ve built (well, me and some robot friends) a whole bunch of tools for the Remarkable that I use all the time – a parser for my journal entries, a weekly “newsletter” that arrives with my unread articles, and other bits and bobs.…

Read the full post at - 5 Notes On the Cohutta Wilderness The Cohutta Wilderness is the largest designated Wilderness area east of the Mississippi river. It is only about a 2 1/2 hour drive from Atlanta, so I have been able to spend quite a bit of time there. The Wilderness Is Huge Aldo Leopold once said that Wilderness should be “big enough to absorb a two weeks’ pack trip”. The Cohutta + Big Frog Wilderness are maybe that big (100+ miles of trails). But in context – it is massive and an…

This post began as a thread on X last night. I’ve edited the thread to turn it into a blog post, making some additions and corrections. I’m watching 2010: The Year We Make Contact. The movie opens saying the monolith is located at the Lagrange point between Jupiter and Io. I got nerd sniped and wondered where that was. There are five Lagrange points, but presumably the movie refers to L1 or L2 because these are near Io. Lagrange points L3, L4, and L5 are essentially in the orbit of Io, but 60,…

I rode my bike along the cycle path that parallels the Thames. I can't see it, but it's there as I ride through the mist hogging the river. The geese signal my passing in the morning and I can hear the river in various places sometimes as I ride. The river is still lower than it should be, but that's bad river authority management. Heaven help us if the state takes it over. I'm in no hurry, and stop in the early mist to listen and see; the atmosphere changes in pockets of density where the…

Learning about Taiwan's history through period dramas. Growing up as an American kid in the 90s, Anne of Green Gables (1985) was one of the period dramas I enjoyed watching. I read the book first, so naturally I enjoyed the episodes I caught on TV. Later on in high school, a friend lent me her entire VHS collection of Pride and Prejudice (1995). I watched them all, but decided that I had enough of period dramas. Most of the period dramas that my peers watched were about World War II or British…

A recurring problem in many organisations I've worked in is that a project is set up by a few developers, and from then on they are "the project's devs". Later, one leaves, another goes on holiday and the last is off ill for the day. This is the bus factor in action. Then a ticket comes in. Another developer on the team clones the repo and discovers: They don't have the .env file. They don't have a database. They have the code, but none of the very specific, undocumented things needed to…

Can this really be true? The Economist of 10 October insists that Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel Jane Eyre is wildly popular with the Chinese government; apparently it was recently decreed as compulsory reading for all students in Chinese secondary schools. The Economist attributes the official popularity of the book to the nation’s falling birth rate. Having abandoned a single-child policy the Chinese government is now encouraging as much and as early marriage and child-bearing as they can…

As most of you who have followed me for any length of time probably know, I have an alt problem in just about any MMO I play long-term. This includes FFXIV, even though most folks will tell you that alts are not only not required, but fairly useless (aside from giving yourself more work to do in the game).

Charles Issawi, quoted in Bernard Lewis, Notes on a Century: Reflections of a Middle East Historian (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), page number unknown (chapter 10): There are five ages of professors—tireless, tiring, tiresome, tired and retired...

About 14 years ago, we moved out into the rural suburbs. I loved the quiet, the abundant wildlife, and our proximity to farms. I didn’t realize just how often doing anything at all would require a car. The Sprawl Absolutely nothing was walkable. We lived at the very top of a very high hill, so things weren’t really bikeable either. Groceries, restaurants, entertainment, friends, the library, and so on… you need to get in a car and drive at least 15 minutes for all of it. And as a result, we…

“Journaling gives you such an appreciation for the good things in your life, while also helping you improve on the not-so-good things in your life.” –Steve Cicco On a cold October day fifteen years earlier, I published my first post to this blog. The post was appropriately titled “Hello World”, and I wrote that this […]

In the annals of movies (and merchandise) about Mythical Beasts—Mothmen, Chupacabras, Big Foot (is the plural Big Feet?), Loch Ness Monsters (though I think there’s only one), even the occasional Elvis sighting—we can now add a found-footage film, titled Frogman, about this very large…Frog monster, which supposedly lurks in the scenery around Loveland, Ohio. Loveland, OH, incidentally, is a real place; and the Loveland Frog Legend is, qua legend, also ‘real,’ its few, dubious sightings going…

If you've known me IRL, you know for a while I've tended to dress pretty monochrome. Mostly wearing black, or if I'm feeling daring a white tee or dark blue something. My iPod is black, my DS was black, my wallet, you get the point. Something shifted in my brain recently, like within the last year or so, where I kinda started to hate everything being black. I have a desk that's black, so of course my black devices blend in like a fucking chameleon. It was starting to irritate me. My clothes…

At The Guardian Tom Gauld lays out in graphic form the algorithm which AI will need to follow to give us more Jane Austen novels. © Tom Gauld, The Guardian

It’s time for something a little different. Or rather, time to do something I haven’t done in a long time. I’m going to just write off the cuff, straight into a CMS today. Into WordPress, in fact.