Such a simple thing brings me so much joy. I recently bought a hummingbird feeder just like the one we had when I was younger. So many birds are showing up around my window, and some are even brave enough to come inside and fly around the house. The species I’ve managed to spot at the feeder so far are: Amazilia fimbriata, Eupetomena macroura, and Coereba flaveola. (Just to be clear, I am not a bird expert, so I may be wrong) I was in the living room, lying in the hammock, and saw quite a few…

Jeremy Stern introduces his fifteen-thousand word essay, published in Colossus, about Meta CEO, and Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, with a lede so succinct it must be the envy of any writer: There they are. The Zuckerbergs. Ledes, also called hooks, are a brief sentence that entices someone to read a newspaper or magazine article. The longer the piece, the more important the hook. They were something I struggled with during my extremely short career a freelance newspaper writer. I was…

Every time I go to write a story I describe the genre as scifi with a side of romance and then have to confront the reality that it's an 80k romance with two sentences referring to a time machine. Historical romance and romantasy have this covered. I'm not entirely sure what the definition of romantasy is and I don't really read it but I respect it. I read Priory of the Orange Tree. Obviously. So, romanscifi. In my head it's pronounced similar to romantasy - romancify. It's incidental scifi.…

I talk to you when you sleep tell all the secrets every worry that weighs me and then all the sweet thoughts that flood my heart with warmth I talk to you when you sleep and wait for the day you hear and respond

Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger is to get a surprise remaster and re-release. The space combat game was originally released in 1994 and remains one of the most popular and lauded games in the venerable franchise.The remaster was apparently made possible during a project to digitise all of Electronic Arts' copious assets still on tape. During this process, it was discovered that most or even all of the FMV sequences shot for the Wing Commander franchise had survived intact, allowing it to…

A new tuner for my FT-891 and Rybakov Today, October 11, 2026, I activated Minute Man National Historical Park (US-0745) with my Yaesu FT-891 and my Rybakov antenna for the first time. The difference was a new LDG Z-100A automatic antenna tuner. It was easy to use and I had a great day. Why I needed a tuner Unlike my Xiegu G90, which includes a great tuner, the FT-891 has no tuner. If I want to use non-resonant antennas like my Rybakov, one of my favorites, I needed a solution. My 5 watt…

Sitting conspicuously on a 4 seated table in a traditional German restaurant in the woods typing on my laptop. My headache is active - the still hanging hangover from two nights previous - not that I drank an extreme amount but the conference the day after pushed my headache over the edge. Very much struggling with my German and probably my English too and I somehow manage to switch to French. I’m probably very tired and my brain is has just not realised it yet. “Salad Bar” “Folgen sie mir”…

Poem: A bittersweet tribute to the golden age of public transport, capturing the quiet echo of wheels, bells, and memories left behind.

Since starting this blog, I have found it hard to sit down and write. Bear Blog is a place primarily focused on writing, and I have wanted to live up to it. However, at the end of the day, I want to build. At the same time, while browsing the many other amazing personal sites on Bear Blog (along with NeoCities, through peoples blog rolls, bubbles.town, etc), I have discovered the personal web 1. I find it so fascinating that people are building their own spaces, tools, and communities in ways…

What could an internet that didn't start out in libertarian culture look like? What if it did not develop in an isolating direction? How would computers that center community function differently?

This fun little mini-zine of poems wound up being included in our library collaborative Grimm Project in 2018

I tried taking photos with my Sony camera but the lens kept steaming up in the humidity, so these photos were captured with my iPhone 16 Pro. No editing.

I’m writing in response to Derek Thompson’s fascinating discussion about AI as normal technology. I believe that we human beings are going to turn more and more things over to AI. There are four data points that illustrate this. The first is my own personal experience. Like many, I have access to AI that can explain documents and RFCs to me, and I often use it to do so rather than reading these from first principles. It does depend on the length of the document and whether I’m reading it for…

It's been over a year since I mostly broke up with GitHub. In that year, I've been running my own public Forgejo instance for my personal projects. It's important to stress the public part, as most of what I'm going to discuss is directly correlated to that. This isn't a post to critique Forgejo vs. alternatives, either. I found Forgejo to be great. My only gripe is that I very much prefer GitLab runners and AWS CodeBuild to GitHub Actions, which Forgejo Actions is modeled after. With regard to…

I always loved the Frasier title cards and Leonardo De La Rocha made a design case study on them: Most of the cards are titles bent into puns. A few are perfect, and those are the ones that outlived the show. The post A design case study of Frasier title cards appeared first on Cultrface.

Inspired by Chatscape's Leaving Algorithm-Driven Spaces. As someone spending a lot of time on places like Bear Blog, ooh.directory, and Bubbles, maybe I'm better served by reducing that spend. What if I migrated to more social places where less "feed annoyance" posts and other common negative blogging themes arose? That could lead to finding and accepting more bids toward positive interpersonal interaction instead. Prioritizing blossoming friendships over demonizing algorithms or other…

One night this week Kim and I had a brief chat on whether AI alignment frees us as a species to go further out or brings an end to us in one way or another. Later that evening I talked it through again, this time with an AI. Progress on these systems is compounding while we chat about it casually, life is a juxtaposition.

After a terrible night that's led into a terrible day, I found an urgent care that's open on sunday. It may be a bit more expensive, but I need this to stop. This is what credit cards are for I suppose. Just make me better pleaseeee

The first part of the long-gestating Star Citizen video game project has finally gotten a firm release window, for the first time in its existence. The single-player campaign, Squadron 42, will be released in Q2 2027 (April-June) and has a Steam wishlist page, as well as a new trailer.Early work began on Star Citizen in 2011, with the game hitting Kickstarter in 2012. The developers continued accepting donations via their own webpage after the Kickstarter ended, and as of today the game has…

Many students now study with AI chat apps such as Claude or ChatGPT. A common approach works like this: you open the app, upload your study guide, and ask the AI to write practice questions from it. The AI reads the guide and quizzes you on your own material. For a single study session, this works well. The approach feels good in the short term- but it fails to support you in the long term. Three weeks after the midterm, the final arrives. Your earlier conversations are buried in the app’s…

I was fairly certain that I am done with Apple, Xcode and their developer experience. Yet here we are, having a CI job that needs to sign a binary. One thing I noticed using mostly web apps for my personal assistant is that I actually miss native apps. They just look and feel nicer. So, given that I cannot delete my dev account, why not use it and get a little app for my coding assistant going? I did most of my work for macOS and iOS in Objective-C, but I was there when Swift was released and…

"Jolene" by Dolly Parton Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. The Dolly Parton song that means the most to you. I like this song because I heard it performed on the first season of the American version of The Voice by Vicci Martinez. I honestly thought she was going to win. That season allowed the contestants to perform their own songs on the show. I enjoy talking about the subject of the song as well. I emphasize to my children that if someone is in this kind…

Info Date: 2026-10-11 Distance: 38 km Elevation Gain: 990 m Moving Time: 2:57:13 Elapsed Time: 4:49:53 Surface (OSM estimate): Paved 33.4% · Gravel 28.3% · Dirt 6.5% · Unknown 31.8% MTB downhill (public route): No tagged grades · tagged 0/13793 m (0.0%) Downhill trails ridden: None identified MTB uphill (public route): No tagged grades · tagged 0/14130 m (0.0%) Uphill trails ridden: None identified Map Tap map to interact Description Lepa nedelja v Vipavski dolini!

This is sort of a continuation of the post about what generative AI boosters are missing about art, where I expressed an opinion that even if generative AI eventually becomes capable of creating legitimately beautiful texts or images or musical tracks, people would still treat generated works as “slop” and not want to engage with them. I believe that the opinion I expressed there is, overall, a harsher opinion than the one I hold on AI-generated software (which I dislike, but can tolerate in…

Bad ideas will consolidate if they circulate inside a group of people. Individuals will fear losing their membership in their group. An idea does not stand for itself. The identity of the person plays a big role in keeping a specific idea at the center. If you would overthink this idea from a neutral standpoint, you would probably come to a different conclusion after some time has passed. But because other people repeat the same points, you keep on believing. You don't want to sacrifice things…

Ten minutes now saves you a weekend in April Picture next April. You sit down to do your taxes, and the form asks what you spent last year on electricity, trash, water, and gas. Four companies sent you roughly twelve bills each, and all 48 sit scattered through a year of email. Digging them out by hand costs an afternoon, and a missed bill puts a wrong number on your return. Today your bills land in your inbox with everything else. After the work below, each bill files itself into a single tax…

In my household are four licensed drivers and four vehicles. Each vehicle has two sets of keys; my wife and I each get one. My two driving teens borrow them regularly. Keeping track of the keys is frustrating. Enter Apple’s AirTag. AirTag the keys, you must. I only have one AirTag for now. Maybe some new AirTag 2s will be gifted to me for Christmas this year? The one I have was living in my wallet, which never moves or changes hands. My car keys though? They frequently move and change hands. We…

Its true. In a manner of speaking. If LLMs had not reached Fable / Mythos tier of marketed intelligence, I'd probably still have a job with the place I used to be at. For a short while.It wasn't that Fable was better at my job. As the last engineer, Fable was cheaper than my compensation. Evidently, it gave enough confidence to the last vestiges of leadership that they could coast until M&A.I've been through layoffs driven by budget cuts. I had to mechanically justify "I need this person…

Pete Millspaugh has a lovely article over on WIRED that peers into the world of domains. (If you’re as interested in the esoteric details of domains as I am, follow Pete’s writing at Dot Com Press.) You should just read the article, but here are a few things that stood out to me. The .com Registry Did you know who the registry for .com is? I didn’t. The registry that owns .com, Verisign, makes a billion and a half dollars every year just by keeping the lights on. To Verisign’s credit, the…