I’m pushing to complete a first draft of OpenZFS Mastery in the next few weeks. Here’s a bit on ZFS and lightweight virtual machines. Lightweight virtualization like Linux containers, Illumos zones, and FreeBSD jails are the most efficient way to isolate virtual systems from the host. Rather than making the virtual machine deploy its own networking stack, memory cache, and filesystem, the main host’s kernel handles those tasks and reduces the virtual machine to an isolated process space. Some…

I’m in th last final parts of opening up a local bank account for my business. And as me were signing on Monday, they ask “I just need your company stamp.” And of course I’d forgotth to get one. “What is it?” you ask. It is a stump w/ th company name. That’s it. Nothing special, 100% reproducable. So £18 later I go back to th bank with th stump.

Not a bad day with some sunshine. A bit cooler. Did H car, Doc, T in the week making 131 to date. A calf in to burn. Cleared all the lab bins out. Brushed down B Room.

Eastern horizon on the evening of Monday, October 12 as seen from Adelaide at 20:54 ACDST, 90 minutes after sunset (click to embiggen). Saturn is the brightest object above the eastern horizon. The asteroid Vesta is at opposition and 1s easily visible in binoculars on the 12th. unfortunately there are no bright guide stars to easily get to it. The insets shows the telescopic view of Saturn and the binocular view of Vesta at this time. Similar views will be seen elsewhere in Australia at the…

FactMap is the latest map game to be a little like GeoGuessr. However instead of guessing the locations of random Street View images, in this game you need to point to the locations of five daily historical or geographical facts.FactMap gives you a fact and asks you to work out where on Earth it happened. The answer might be the place where a famous person died, where a treaty was signed, where a band formed, or where a particular animal lives. For example, one question might ask: Where did…

I've done a flight of three Sopwith Camels in 1:144 scale.The prints are not the best; there's some distortion in the trailing edges of the lower wings, but it's not severe enough to make them unusable as gaming pieces. These were among the last things I printed on my old Mars Pro before it went bung.Another issue is that the wing decals on two of them are ever so slightly too large, so they wrap around the wing edges a little bit. If I was truly dedicated I'd scrape them off and redo them with…

Reader H shares with us this letter from Kurt Vonnegut to his father, as seen in the 2021 documentary Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time. Aged about 28 and working at General Electric, Vonnegut Jr. writes to Vonnegut Sr.: I sold my first story to COLLIER’S. Received my check ($750 minus a 10% agent’s commission) yesterday noon. It now appears that two more of my works have a good chance of being sold in the near future. I think I’m on my way. I’ve deposited my first check in a savings account, and,…

Hello autumn! Let's celebrate the new season with a new monthly round-up of quick first impression opinions, collection updates, etc! New Music Immediate ImpressionsBeck - Ride Lonesome Sea Change was wonderful - it found Beck subverting all the expectations that came with his musical trickster persona by creating an album that was earnestly vulnerable and emotional, while also having a sense of class to its lush production. But a part of Beck's charm is that he's an entirely different artist…

I was speaking to someone the other day - while I've been at Open Source Summit (Europe) - about the great Custom Properties that GitHub added in ~2023. However, they weren't aware that they're available to anyone with read access to the repo - which means for a public repo, that's everyone! This was something we found at Elastic while we were rolling out something that sounds pretty juicy called security_level. This was a mandatory field across all our repos, which was set to a reasonable…

I used to think that example.com is a non-existent domain. As per RFC 2606 (1999) it is a reserved name, and I always thought that it doesn’t resolve at all. example.com todayI recently learned I was wrong. Actually, it’s been served since 2002, according to the Wayback Machine. Probably, I didn’t check after that 😂

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions. Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align. Tracks are added to…

It's a 3-day weekend for Taiwan's National Holiday. For the past few weeks, Taipei has had the country's flags decorated all over. It really is a beautiful flag, I love seeing it adding its colors all over the city. Top 10 flags list coming soon?

I don't trust any quoted statistics by default because I've (anecdotally) realised that pretty much every study is sloppily done or misinterpreted when quoted. The only time I trust a statistical analysis is when I have personally looked into it and seen that they did things right. I'm not even a stats pro or anything, the bar is in hell and any AI model, when given sufficient data and reasonably good prompting can debunk things pretty well.The other day, I spoke to a data scientist who worked…

Fantasyland has always been the most "Disney" of all the lands, with its movie-themed dark rides right near the Castle. It had lots more to offer as well, as we can see in this first great photo, taken (I presume) from a Skyway gondola as it backed into the Fantasyland chalet. There's the beautiful Chicken of the Sea Pirate Ship, the Mad Tea Party, the Carrousel, Casey Jr., and even the Matterhorn is part of Fantasyland. At first I thought that this was taken during the early part of the day…

Roll Bounce (2005)

After the dramatic events of our recent visits to Heian-kyō, in which we found out Tamakazura’s fate and explored the fall-out on those around her and her new husband, today’s leg of our chapter-by-chapter cruise through The Tale of Genji is a rather more sedate affair. However, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing of interest to be found, and those with a passion for Japanese traditions will be especially happy. Come with me, then, as we get ready for a milestone celebration, and return to a…

I felt I lost my vibe with blogging by the end of September. I felt disheartened. I could see that sadness and restlessness weighed me down, but that didn’t help much. I reflected on what happened in the past with these feelings. Every time, no fail, I quit my blog and started all over again, because the weight was just too much. I thought to myself, “What if I just start another blog without nuking my current one?” A week and a bit after that thought, I’m back here, posting as usual. I’ve…

A look at how to use the Gamepad API to drive a website with a game controller, and some tips for designing for the big picture.

That moment when frustration overcomes the in-action, where procrastination’s cruel fog lifts enough to make the first cut. Yes, we have progress on Defiance…This latest IKEA Mosslanda based cameo project has evolved quickly over the past few weeks but has hung, frozen at the mock-up stage. I suspect I’m not alone in finding sticking points, usually the energy of a fresh new project has dissipated and what remains isn’t quite enough to overcome the mental block or reluctance to move on to a…

For the better part of the last year I have been playing the tabletop game Commonwealth by Michael Hansen. I recommend it! It's a kind of sci-fi fallen-earth aristocrat simulator - its creactor describes it as "social climbing simulation inspired by En Garde!, The Book of the New Sun, and Barry Lyndon." We played very slowly for the first few rounds and are now moving fairly fast. This is because everyone is now able to self-direct their gameplay and operate turns themselves without much help.…

Yes, I totally did not draw an ogre.

"This is slop! Prove it is not!". The latest comment on the latest blog post published on IT Notes. And, often, on MyNotes too. In other words, there is something in what I write that seems to be a distinctive trait of LLMs. It's becoming quite common, lately, every time I publish something. Sometimes, unfortunately, in an aggressive way too, especially in private. The trial is already over, they are sure. And you have to come clean. It's LLM. There can be no doubt. The first few times, it…

This was not on my bingo card for… well, this decade, given the relative success of their more recent gear like the KO II. Sure, there are some really strange things in the line-up, like the medieval flavour, and their UX can stray well beyond quirky into cuckoo land. But they’ve always been a source of whimsy and musical creativity–my OP-1 being a case in point. Then again, things like the M-VAVE FM-1 are vastly cheaper these days (and arguably have better hardware features). They’re hackable,…

The hotel wanted to know if we needed help with reservations so we reel them off, one-by-one, from the list on Sophie’s phone. What we get back is mostly advice; we’ll need to get to Manteca early, and same with Chef del Mar, and La Marea should be fine, but just book it when you get to the beach in the morning. El Chato? We will need to book El Chato and you’ll need a taxi because it is too far to walk. Fast forward four days and we are back in reception, thirty minutes earlier than our taxi…

The clocks going back is one of those annual events that looks perfectly innocent on the calendar but is, in reality, a coordinated attack on the mental health of the river angler. One minute you’re wandering around in glorious evening sunshine pretending you know what you’re doing, and the next you’re commuting to work in pitch black, returning home in pitch black and beginning to suspect that you’ve been sentenced to a life underground with the moles.This is when the old SAD disorder kicks…

Currently available in Obsidian’s Settings > Community plugins: Note Gallery (alpha) Displays notes or images using a masonry gallery by defining a code block in your note. [ 📌maadhattah ] Callout Manager An Obsidian plugin that makes creating and configuring callouts easy. [ 📌aleksip ]

I feel like I’ve been super busy (in a good way) and have so many things to share, and I sat down with the intention of doing a rapid-fire check in list of all the things, but before I knew it found myself writing several paragraphs for the first item alone. So my list turned into a Games I’ve Played Lately post. What can I say, it’s been a great month or two for gaming. I finished Strange Antiquities, and if you liked Strange Horticulture, it’s an easy rec, though I found some of the puzzles…

Rough start to the month: new school year started (Nev’s last before kindergarten 😭), but within the first two weeks we had a hospital visit (Nev scratched her eye in a way that presented as a potential brain injury) then both kids caught COVID. We recovered in time to make it down to Lake Norman for Labor Day, then celebrated my 44th birthday with a sitter (rare for us) and a night out at Red Phone Booth and Little Bull (delicious). Construction on our new deck started in earnest. The old,…

Air travel is on track to account for almost all our emissions by 2050. So why aren’t we working to reduce demand? By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 3rd October 2026 If a third runway is built at Heathrow, what will be the impact on the wealth of the nation? It will cost us somewhere between £23.4bn and £62.5bn. These are not my figures; they weren’t calculated by environmental groups, but by the Department for Transport. For decades, government ministers have told us that airport…

AI image is for illustration purposes only. USDA researchers in South Texas built a battery-powered sprayer, hid it at a fence crossing where wild nilgai antelope squeeze through the wire, and loaded the tank with billions of microscopic parasitic worms suspended in water. When an antelope walked through the gap, an ultrasonic sensor detected its movement, an onboard computer started the pump, and the machine sprayed the animal’s belly and legs with living roundworms that kill ticks. The target…