So I think a few of us got punked by Nongshim. Why do I say this? Well, the US Nongshim came out with two ranges of the KPDH – one that had three different flavors and one that had three different images on the packaging. I ordered three on Walmart’s website – and got three Shin Ramyun regular style. So here’s that. I’ve got all three versions of the Zoey cup – the Korean local version, the US Shin version, and the US ‘burger hero’ version. Confusing, isn’t it? Well, here’s the regular Mira.…

Yesterday I was looking at the ticket cost and regularity of service of the ex-Thalys, now Eurostar, Bruxelles - Paris service.In terms of the speed of the service and the quality of the infrastructure, this route is excellent - more than 90% of the trip is on high speed lines where 300km/h is possible, and the line is 100% electrified.But the problem is how often the trains go (not often enough), their capacity (many single rather than double units), and as a result the high cost of taking…

2002 Randy Linden Platform: Nintendo Game Boy Advance Quake Advance is an impressive proof-of-concept created by veteran programmer Randy Linden, exploring the possibility of bringing id Software’s classic Quake to the humble Game Boy Advance. Randy was certainly no stranger to squeezing first-person shooters onto unlikely hardware, having previously been responsible for the remarkable Super Nintendo conversion of Doom. For the Game Boy Advance, he went a step further and created his own engine…

I recently got a massive volume of Sherlock Holmes stories: Sherlock Holmes in the Fullness of Time; or Adventures on Three Roads Less Traveled by Thomas Kent Miller. This volume collects three stories that have Sherlock Holmes in tales that also involve characters by H. Rider Haggard (and others). Strangely, in most of these stories, […]

It is October! It's Witchcraft Wednesday. I have been spending a lot of time discussing various topics like the Witches of Appendix N, my upcoming Advanced Witches & Warlocks, and my various campaigns of Jackson, Carbon Vale, and Sunny Valley. All of these share a very interesting point of intersection: 1970s occult horror. And 1970s occult horror is detailed rather nicely by the magazine Coven 13.Coven 13Published by Camelot Publishing Company out of LA and under the editorship of Arthur H.…

I’ve seen some of these weird little messages (34 minutes), edge cases that appear when you talk to someone or witness an event at an unexpected time in The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask’s three-day cycle, or do it while one of the game’s many masks. A few of the cases covered: Tatl the fairy’s information on a couple of the bosses changes as you progress through their fights. The guards blocking the exits to Clock Town usually use the presence of your sword to determine whether they will let…

Karmacoma by Anomalia Paris: A divorce from everything you used to call “normal” — from habits, permission, and the version of you that learned to behave seems like the perfect motto for entering autumn and the new academic year with flair. Karmacoma is inspired by the aesthetic of a blank canvas, where we boldly script our dazzling and magnificent future. This is also the autumn I'm

I don't know how to start these posts. Another meetup event with notes that follow. No Sakari Nahi today in the meetup. Over the two breaks - one before and one after the first two talks were done, I managed to talk to four different sets of people. It's never easy. I am not this person who goes out and cheerfully talks to people. But I do like getting diverse perspectives. So, of course, even though it's not pleasant (in the sense I would very much enjoy being at home on my PS5) I still want…

Even now, seventeen years out from any educational setting, I think that September is the true start of the year. The sluggishness of summer is shrugged off and work can begin. It's a good time to take stock and figure out what I want to prioritise for the rest of the year. It also helped that the weather dropped from far too hot to bearable but hot for this time of year. Life I went to a small cabin the middle of nowhere by myself and wrote poems for a night. It was lush! I got quite a bit…

In software development, we collect anti-patterns to recognize common traits that lead to poor outcomes in our software. I thought it would be helpful to do the same for software blogging, so I’ve catalogued the most frequent mistakes I see from beginner bloggers. The meandering intro Preamble still counts as meandering “The reader knows everything I know except this one thing” Overreliance on links The sequel injection bug Excessive formality Fumbling on the basics of rendering HTML Page…

[There are just so many unnecessary emails.] I recently spent a night in Kristiansund, Norway, which should absolutely not to be confused with Kristiansand, Norway. The two cities are much farther apart geographically then lexicographically: I wonder how many people wind up in the wrong one each year. I am confident the number is not zero. Anyhow, I stayed at a lovely little apartment found on Booking.com run by a kind woman named Annette. She managed things so nicely that when Booking…

I am embarrassed to read this kind of “human slop” describing the sentencing of Michael Smith, who ran an automated artificial streaming ring to the tune of $8M: “Michael Smith exploited super intelligence technology to generate a fraud,” said U.S. Attorney Jamie McDonald. “By flooding music streaming platforms with automated bots in the place of consumers, and fake songs in the place of creativity, Smith robbed millions in royalty payments from genuine artists and their fans. This Office is…

I have been a live performing musician for over 40 years now. I started in my teens, and here I am at 60 still doing it. A couple of things got me thinking about this. First, I am slowing down... big time. A 3-4 hour show locally is usually more like a 7-8 hour show if it is local. I have a gig this Friday from 9 p.m.-1 a.m. that is slightly over an hour away. I play more of these because there aren't very many local gigs to play. This means I'm loading gear at 5:30 p.m. and heading out at 6…

A couple of years ago, having just finished some work to help de-extinct responsive HTML video, I posted a short list of related improvements that I hoped to see next, each paired with tickets filed against the HTML standard. That list went untouched until last fall when a few Squarespace coworkers joined me to take one of them on as a Hack Week project, which went well enough that the company supported our work to finish the job. That work, standardizing and implementing HTML video…

I think I left it in the car. Update: Yep, found it.

From the sudden increase in high prices for technology, thanks to AI, to the push of storage-consuming LL models, thanks to AI, and with the general over-hype and fear-mongering of AI companies, there’s never been a better time to NOT upgrade your tech devices. People are holding off and pushing back, voting with their dollars. I’m glad that my 128GB iPad with 6GB RAM can’t receive Apple Intelligence. Do not want AI.

Likes 📑 llamafile by Aaron Davis. I am also not exactly sure which models I should be using. From that perspective, it was a useful reminder to be clear about what my purpose is. Ironically, having waited an hour for a response to a task associated with a series of documents, I was left wonder if this is what it felt like using punch cards? Not sure where this will take me, but it is interesting to at least tinker. I got quite confused trying to hook up llama with WordPress studio. Gave up in…

I recently came across the podcast series called Silicon Spiritualities, hosted by Christopher Watkin. The podcast addresses the issue of what it means to be human in “the age” of ai. Here are my reflections after listening to episode 2 with Michael Keller (who I naively did not realize was Tim Keller’s son and thought it odd that he kept referring to his dad). I’m listening to Episode 2 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j45x3ZVFFnA&list=PLUMQNpCV-Crg&index=6) and reflecting how plain it is that…

How awful to wake up this morning to the sad news that one of the last living links to Hollywood’s Golden Age has left us. Actress Eva Marie Saint has died. She was 102. This one really hurts. We can be grateful that she had enjoyed such a long and happy life though. She died at home in Los Angeles yesterday, surrounded by her family. Until her death she had been the oldest surviving Oscar winner. Eva Marie was born in Newark, New Jersey, on July 4th, 1924. She originally wanted to become a…

A roundup of interesting links I have enjoyed recently. A kanji learning application: wanikani.com RSS tools: toolbox.rss.here.now A guide to chopping up your books: attainablefelicity.mattkirkland.com Kids encyclopedia facts: kids.kiddle.co A Wikipedia guessing game: catfishing.net Where to start if you’re learning to bake: sohla.substack.com A backyard bird-identifying frame: github.com Private, account-free online tools: normaltools.com A habit tracker that looks like a terminal:…

Two years ago, 343 Industries rebranded to Halo Studios. Here is what I had to say: "A name and engine change aren't enough to save this languished franchise... At a certain point, maybe the author off these 'new' chapters needs to step down, not change to a pen name. " Two weeks ago, Xbox continued its consolidation and a part of the announcement was that Activision was taking over the future of Halo. "Activision will also be developing the next Halo title, led by a new, purpose-built team…

This is a draft lecture notes written under my guidance for today’s lecture. Blue text represent my further comments.) The lecture will be on Oct 7 at IAS, at 3:30, in the Seminar room. I will speak at the IAS about the wonderful theory of intersection homology, introduced by Mark Goresky and Bob MacPherson, and some of its connections to combinatorics. This post is an extended description of the lecture and a set of notes toward it. I would like to explain the basic definitions, then discuss…

Eva Marie Saint has died at the splendid age of 102 and I know I’m not the only person whose immediate thought on hearing the news was not of Eva Marie Saint in On The Waterfront, but rather the line “She looks like Eva Marie Saint in On The Waterfront” from Lloyd Cole’s song ‘Rattlesnakes’. And yes, I guess I’m a wee bit nostalgic for the days when a pop songwriter could casually toss in a reference to an actress from a golden age and not expect blank looks. That said, there were only 30 years…

A history of the Evil One, from the earliest times to the present.

VERY cursory reviews, be warned ;: Metal Lavender : I don’t know; I love lavender but am incapable of accepting any synthetic notes that don’t suit my aggrieved, neurasthenic system in recent times and this perfumer – Aurelian Guichard – really plays to the market for brash chemicals. All I want to do is roll in the hay of a French lavender farm – I need no electrified undercurrent. Figue Erotique : plugged up with coarse aureoles I don’t ever personally need : why must ‘figs’ be so damn…

Office software rarely sparks excitement. For most of us, opening a spreadsheet feels a little too much like bringing work home. Still, whether you are planning a budget or writing a letter, a dependable word processor or spreadsheet remains a modern necessity. Those documents are also more sensitive than they look. A household budget, a school form, or a letter to a doctor is not something you necessarily want copied to someone else's servers. Microsoft 365 and Google Docs make an account and…

We have MCM’s on Sense and Sensibility‘s men, but wait, we haven’t done the ladies!

I thought I should clarify, after saying God is inefficient.

Last month, I built an AI agent that could search the web before answering a question. While working on the article around that project, I got another project idea and that was around the visibility of a website in the world of AI-powered search. The idea essentially revolves around the fact that whether the AI-powered search mentions your website in its answer or not or whether it cites your website as a source or not, and lastly, compare these resulst with the regular Google search results.…