The Texas State Fair is now in season, and one of the hallmarks of this annual celebration of Texas culture is the food. While there are a host of vendors... Source

My husband put The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth in my TBR shelves with some caution, as he only gave it two stars, but we do not have the same taste in fiction. I loved it. The title is audacious, and I may also have been influenced by seeing the 2024 Italian documentary Architecton, which … Continue reading The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth, by Adrian Duncan →

This week on the podcast: Federico talks about pixels, Myke talks about Steve Jobs, and Stephen talks about scratches.

08 Stinky | INDEX | 10 Mystical There are at least five different meanings for the word ram: animal, computer memory, hit, force, truck brand. Two of these are depicted in this surreal, mixed-perspective illustration. Self-imposed constraint: Use the letters of the prompt word inside a 2-inch square to illustrate its meaning. Hongdian Black Forest fountain pen, EF, black ink on 120 gsm paper.

For the past few weeks I’ve been exploring the use of NetBSD as a desktop OS. If the X sets are chosen during install, NetBSD includes an X server and the lightweight CTWM window manager integrated into its base system. There is, however, another window manager I’ve long had a soft spot for, and that is Openbox. Its very bare bones to start with, but its an excellent foundation for crafting a desktop just the way I like it! Most of the details below are equally applicable to setting up Openbox…

I’m staying in a greek restaurant about 8k north of Kaiserslautern in a “dorf” called Otterbach. I’m drinking a fast-food-kebab-house-pizza and eating inferior German beers in the spacious room that smells of smoking. I was “welcomed” by the waiter who barely said a word to me before returning with a key. “Wo kann ich mein err, mein Fahhrad, wo darf, kann, …” I struggled to remember how to speak German “Was!?” “Stellen. Wo kann ich mein fahhrad stellen?” He suggested I tie it to the railings…

If you have played Factorio, you know that every factory has a shape. A smelter line is long and straight. A circuit factory has loops. A train station has buffers. You can tell what a factory makes just by looking at it from above. I’ve been using pstack, a plugin by poteto that turns a coding agent into something closer to a careful engineer. After a while I noticed the same thing: every pstack playbook has a shape. A bug fix has a loop back to the start. A refactoring has a gate that throws…

Exit Party is the seventh novel by Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel, and was published last month. But savour the trademark mind-altering synopsis: 2031. America is at war with itself, but for the first time in weeks there is some hope: the Republic of California has been declared, the curfew in Los Angeles is lifted, and everyone in the city is going to a party. Ari, newly released from prison, arrives with her friend Gloria just as a fragile new era begins. But there are people at the…

caniname CLI output preview Whenever I build a new tool or custom element (like <show-keystrokes> or <rich-input>), I always end up doing the same manual dance: checking if the package name is still free on NPM and if the matching <name>.netlify.app subdomain is still unclaimed on Netlify. To automate that check, I built caniname. ~ # The need As the classic saying goes, there are only two hard things in Computer Science — and one of them is naming things. And once you have finally found a good…

Aw. This video is nice. I never saw it at the time. It’s a tribute to Margaret Hamilton who died today.

How is September already over? I feel like it just went by way too fast! To be honest, I spent a lot of time this month pondering whether or not I should keep going with my blog and bookstagram. Over the past few months, I felt like I had lost that spark to create. Writing book reviews and putting in the effort to make content and post felt like such a struggle. But during the rare times that I do post, so many of you continue to interact and engage even when I go radio silent. Slowly but…

“Enterprise AI strategy” pulls about 720 searches a month, and almost everything written for that term assumes a dedicated AI team, a data science department, and a multi-year roadmap. If you’re running a business in Denver, Boulder, or Golden with no such department, here’s the version of AI strategy that actually applies to you. The Wrong Starting Question Most AI strategy content starts with “what’s your AI vision.” That’s backwards for a small or mid-size business. The right starting…

It's hardly fair that a positive frame of mind is precarious as a house of cards, but a negative one is as stable as a brutalist car park.84 words · 2 images

I use Feedland to manage my RSS subscriptions and it’s where I start to review my feeds in the morning. I have feeds categorized and I like the visual format for how I see the feeds. One thing I have noticed, however, is that Feedland groups the updates by site rather than presenting all the updates in a true reverse chronological order, so keep up during the day I have been using River5. Recently I learned about a new RSS sync service called Birchfeed. It’s intended to be an RSS sync host for…

Last year, I created a new map projection, the Asymmetric Monstrosity, designed to make somewhat of an artistic and educational statement about projections in general. I also made a physical world map to demonstrate it. Click to go to the original announcement, which has a free download. My thanks to the dozen or so of you who’ve chosen to put a copy of this in your home. Of course, there is a huge difference between a projection and an individual map that uses that projection (a distinction…

A new top-tier metroidbrainia has arrived! Read the whole thing.

I've learned quite early on to avoid jumping on the hype train, but the lesson truly stuck when I started working in web development. I got burned a few times and quickly grew a healthy distrust for any fancy new name that would draw the attention of the tech news sites, especially when it had to do with frontend work.1 I vaguely remember dismissing Web Components as yet another trendy buzzword and lumping them with all the fancy revolutionary frameworks that seemed to be coming out every week.…

That draft of the simple spec for tape.deck that 6.1 Sol generated is “pretty good.” Not perfect, but pretty good. Some things I would have excluded for initial tighter focus, but also, whatever. Some of it represents a sort intellectual archaeology of how the idea and the process have evolved too, so don’t want to cut too much of that out. But neither do I want to overwhelm potential readers with TMI, which is incredibly easy to do when your workstream involves generative AI as an essential…

After teams tackled difficult tasks in Morocco, The Amazing Race 39 episode 3 decided to Project Runway us into next week. Ugh!

I was planning on attending Fujikina in Cologne on Saturday with my dad. Unfortunately he is down with the flu, so he won't be able to join me. I am still considering going by myself. Will any of you fine readers of this here blog attend by any chance? Let me know! Ah yes, images above from yet another (routine) doctor's visit. 👉 View one more image

Yesterday I popped to the allotment with my sister for a bit. Had fun getting the scooter to go up the muddy hill — it’s really not an off-road vehicle, but it made it. Was a nice sunny afternoon after the morning rain. We talked about her plans for it now it’s all set up to her liking (due in part to my condition she’s pretty much taken it all on from Fi and myself) it’s probably time to let it mature and see what works and doesn’t work. That said, I’m wondering about a geodesic dome fruit…

In this edition Customers not given key plan information Ranco clearance application lodged Latest MBNZ shows satellite plan changes Spark, 2degrees cut consumer informationConsumer NZ’s 2026 review shows a significant decline in mobile transparency at Spark and 2degrees. While One New Zealand did not go backwards, nor did it improve.Nick Gelling, the Consumer NZ journalist behind the mobile transparency review, wrote: “This year’s results are the worst we’ve seen in five years of the review.”…

From Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta (Vintage, 2013), pp. 231-234: On the morning of August 27, 1941, a group of graduate students at the Total War Research Institute [総力戦研究所, Sōryokusen Kenkyūjo] gathered at the official residence of the prime minister of Japan. The atmosphere was subdued, even gloomy, a mood made even more so by the on-and-off late-summer rain. In a grand chandelier-lit hall, the researchers, whose average age was a mere thirty-three, came face-to-face with the…

Last weekend was my favorite event of the year, RinCon in Tucson, Arizona. More specifically, my favorite event is the Indie RPG Arcade at RinCon, a Games On Demand-esque “pitch and find a table” type thing that runs parallel with all the scheduled tables. I never bother with the tables and pretty much live in the Arcade for three days. I ran one four-hour event each day. It’s a great chance to run things that don’t always fit well with my home group, so I got a chance to dig into lots of new…

I'm on my third year of trying to finish my accounting degree. I'm also 29. I have to work while doing this degree which means I can't fully take all five classes per semester. I'm probably gonna need an extra year to finish it if I even land an internship. It's tough for me. Sometimes I feel like I'm not enough whenever I hear classmates younger than me getting internships left and right, or having no trouble keeping their 4.0s. Comparison is the thief of joy, I know. I only see surface level…

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TL;DR: Around 2002, I listened to an internet radio station on Live365 called Signal Decay. With no surviving playlists or recordings of my own, I went digging through the Wayback Machine and pieced together 143 tracks from old HTML snapshots, three songs at a time—eventually turning them into a playable 137-track mixtape. A mosaic of album covers from the 137 tracks recovered from Signal Decay. Around 2002, I spent a lot of time listening to an internet radio station called Signal Decay on…

Autumn arrived without announcement Yesterday’s sunshine Was Summer’s goodbye Rain now beats on windows Homes glow cosy and warm As grey skies soak into darkness It’s time For big jumpers Giant blankets Steaming cups of tea Warming cold hands Cold fingers Tired bodies Tucked safe inside Far away from out there As this world Slowly moves From the sun

It is great to hear about efforts to teach AI literacy, particularly for non-technical people. There is ongoing academic debate on whether one can teach AI literacy to undergraduate students across majors, and if yes, how. This article reports a case study: a three-week midterm project embedded in an undergraduate “AI-for-all” course. Students designed reasoning tasks, ran controlled comparisons across widely used chatbots, and evaluated both answer correctness and explanation validity. Through…