Justin Cormack, who worked on MirageOS and Unikernel Systems back in the day, has been noticing what I've been noticing: people are discovering (or rediscovering) unikernels again. He's running a series of conversations on the topic for his newsletter, and I was first up. He emailed me, and five minutes later I was talking to him from the pub with a stein of beer in hand. We went deep on Mirage, Orleans, Haskell, Nix, Cursed and a whole lot more.Here's the gist, written up properly, with…

I snuck a picture of the best girl ever.

Want to explore the night sky? Two new interactive maps offer very different ways to do it. Skyviewer lets you explore the vast astronomical survey being created by the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory, while Stargazing for Beginners helps you work out what you can actually see in the sky above you.Skyviewer is an interactive window onto Rubin Observatory's survey of the cosmos. Located in Chile, Rubin will repeatedly scan the sky for the next ten years, creating an enormous time-lapse record of…

If you’re using Azure, there is a fair chance you (or some consultant) have implemented an Azure Landing Zones-architecture to split your workloads into a bunch of different subscriptions. it’s also a pretty good guess that you have done this with either Terraform/Opentofu or Bicep. And if you’re really unlucky, you (or the consultant who did the setup) pinned the version of the module and haven’t thought much about it ever since.

a different body by Lean Borlongan, translated by Eric Abalajon (self-published, 2025) If only he could stopthe involuntary movementsof his handsalways shakingleft and right, if onlyhis tongue and lips were not twistedif only his headhadn't filled with fluidif only he were born full-termhe would notwrite poetryabout failed loves.["The Poet"] By page 30 of this collection, one reads a

Barnacles All Closed Up One of the most interesting and enigmatic little critters we find at the seashore are barnacles. They cling to rocks at the waters' edge, closed to our curiosity, their domed mounds like little closed beaks shut to the water and the world. They choose their permanent homes as larvae, sticking to hard substrates that will become their permanent homes for the rest

I wrote a while back about how I use Tally to track my calories when I’m not ready to enter them into FoodNoms (for example, out at our beloved Bellview Winery). Weighing your food and tracking it with an application like FoodNoms can be a cumbersome process, but one which will help you lose weight if you stick with it. It’s also a great way to learn about how much you’re eating, as we’re all prone to magical thinking about food and drink. And at the very least, tracking carefully in controlled…

Novels Casual by Koji A. Dae (2025): The horrors of this book are understated and pedestrian: poverty; limited opportunities for work and travel; enduring environmental damage; mental health struggles; repressed memories of childhood trauma; a bad relationship; the physicality of pregnancy; legal constraints. It’s a small story of an imperfect woman, Valya, struggling to do her best. Pregnancy brings underlying issues to a head and she is beset by efforts to control her and her unborn child.…

It seems good to transport every place with you, until no place becomes sacred. Spaces bleed Earlier this week I fixed up a link to an older post about taking book notes in a notebook and was asked if I distinguished between reading a book and reading some online article. One of the things I was excited about when I got my first "smart" phone was that I could do anything anywhere. I could read an Instapaper article on the porcelain throne, or when standing in line. I could answer email from…

A haiga Source

Top wrap v Tune-O-Matic guitar bridges: You can get into a mess of trouble here. There’s a perception that the intonation flexibility of the old-style lightning bolt design is inferior to that of bridges with individual or partial string adjustment screws, such as the Tune-o-matic. I’ve been wrestling with this somewhat idealistic theory for a while, but I’ve finally come down off the fence.I’ve been experimenting with an LP Junior and an SG Junior, trying different wraparound bridges but…

While I may not Hobonichi SZN myself, I always get excited to Hobonichi SZN for you! I have a planner and cover pairing for one winner this week, which includes the 2027 Hobonichi Techo A6 Planner and the A6 - Folio: Ocean Blue. The winner is: Congrats Brandon! I’ve sent you an email to collect your shipping address.

Long ago, back in the days of @Play on GameSetWatch, I did an interview with Keith Burgun about his mobile roguelike 100 Rogues. 100 Rogues was lots of fun, but the thing about app store apps is, if you don’t keep them updated and pay their access fee, they eventually fall out of publication. This is an awful fact about mobile gaming, and because of it 100 Rogues has been very difficult to play for over a decade. Well, no more: it’s now available on Steam for $7 from Paw Games, and it’s…

The rigidly taciturn manager-cashier at the one good Chinese grocery in town, who tersely speaks in minimal Portuguese, and who doesn't know a word of English.... One of the first signs of a newbie traveler is the expectation that Chinese people speak some English, like the oldsters in Chinatown back home. ...rigidly declines to show any indication that he recognizes me, though I know that I am a VIP customer, being the only one asking for holy Thai basil or fermented tofu or obscure Chinese…

Hiding inside this page on “user-driven UI” by Brad Woods are two useful things. The first is the concept of “zone of proximal development.” The idea, as I understand it, is that possible tasks you face span a few categories: stuff you already know how to do, stuff you can learn to do on your own, stuff you can learn to do with assistance (e.g. from a teacher), stuff you simply cannot do or imagine doing. The space between these things is a zone. A good book or a teacher would help you navigate…

The stalker of the marshes and creeks invited myself and the venerable (older) Bully down to cash in on the return of the mullet and bass in numbers to is local haunts armed with a bag of rag and static fly gear. Coffee and yarns over we set off to the local mark to fish to the bottom of the ebb for the bass and to see if the mullet would turn up in numbers for later. I'd forgotten my rod rest (Loafer had bagged his favourite seaweed encrusted old piling) so made do with this finely whittled…

Sometimes, what I write for here ends up “not working”. That can be for any number of reasons: It’s simply too garbled or too many ideas at once, I realize I’ve already written essentially the same thing, the situation that I’m writing about no longer exists, I realize that I’m trying to make a specific annoyance of mine into some kind of generalized experience when it’s not, or what I’ve written ends up evoking the opposite effect of what I was hoping for. Those often don’t see the light of…

It’s been over a month since I last posted Saturday Morning Coffee. I have no idea when I’ll have time to do it again. 🤣

Sun through thin clouds at mid-morning. A suppressed burble of wren-song from the woods’ edge. Yellow leaves festoon the reddening stiltgrass in the yard.

Find all previous and future episodes listed here or in your podcast app under “Barbican Station”. This episode I speak to actor Tom Brooke about his performance on Slow Horses as JK Coe. We talk about what exactly Coe is listening to and working with showrunner Will Smith. Plus how River ended up sitting in the back seat and his interactions with Mick Herron. Finally, will Coe’s hoodie end up in the Slough House Hall of Fame? All that and more in this episode! For more on the slow horses,…

After yesterday’s post, I expected a note or two full of hate in lowercase, but instead I got an email from a burner account calling me a “larping incel”. I wanted to send my compliments for the creativity, for taking the time to message little old me, but alas, they’re a coward. I told my wife I’m an incel now. She acted confused, but her eyes said, “Oh, thank god.”

Tuesday morningOther Hy — my partner for life and chauffeur for the day — is trying to figure out how to make her phone play her brand-new mixtape. My inner monologue demands I tell her to start driving already, and I demand my inner monologue to can it. I want to listen to her work. Besides, there’s plenty of time; it’s 9:55, my flight leaves at 11:40, and the Denver airport is about an hour away by car under normal conditions. This sort of blind obeisance to calendar-time keeps me comforted…

Book Corners has grown quite a lot since I introduced it earlier this year. Today it has 37,238 approved public bookcases, and the map is the page people use the most. A few days ago I looked at how much data the map endpoint was sending and I didn’t like what I found. The problem The map page loads its markers from a GeoJSON endpoint: /map/libraries.geojson. The page always sends the current zoom level and the visible area (the “bounds”), and at low zoom levels the server already groups…

— What are the conditions for creativity, for blooming? Is the library a bloom space? — I wrote about the bloom space in this post. — We are living in a moment in history. We live in possibility. We dwell in possibility. We are in something. The future threats act upon the dreamer ongoingly, though. It affects our thinking, our dreaming, our creativity. As I quote in the bloom space post, we are dreamers experiencing the sound of a prolonged fire alarm, which impedes, negates, our REM sleep. —…

Updated October 2026 Back to Basics was the first Ina cookbook I ever bought, so it will always have a special place in my heart. More than that, it’s the book that taught me how to cook. So many things that feel second nature to me now, or would seem obvious to a more experienced cook, I learned directly from this book. That’s why it’s still one of the first Ina books I recommend to anyone just getting started in the kitchen and looking to build confidence quickly. I decided to buy Back to…

Venues where you may encounter loose animals on the course or in the meeting area. For example, some people may not want to visit places where they could be in a field with loose cows (scary / potentially dangerous / many other reasons). At the opposite end of the scale I'm sure there are also people that would actively seek out these interactions. Hopefully the list below will be of use.My idea is to cover venues with cattle, sheep, deer or any other animal you would not usually encounter…

Truman has been hanging out in my office a lot this week. I’ll be working away and he’ll tap my leg to get my attention for some attention. If he taps harder and slams his paw on my leg., he wants treats.

A session of fairly unremarkable dungeon delving as the group map out the south-western quadrant of Floor 3, searching for were-rats. Party Members Tina the Titanic - Level 8 Fighter Vaco Adjacent - Level 6 Paladin Tobias Little, a.k.a. Lil Toby - Level 7 Cleric FollowersTiny Tina (Cleric 7), Princess Pizzabones (Thief 5) and Rutger (Robot 6) Session RecapWith a smaller group and missing their Lich, the party decide to stay away from the Weird Magic Wizard Bullshit going on in the eastern part…

A world that doesn’t need new software is a world without ideas.