My current reading is Han Kang’s much-lauded novel Greek Lessons; I’m finding the protagonist irritatingly self-absorbed (as is the case with so many novels in these self-absorbed times), but (as might be predicted) there’s quite a bit of linguistically interesting material. For one thing, she throws in Korean terms with no explanation, trusting the reader to look them up as needed; I consider that a laudable practice, especially now that explanations are a moment’s click away, since it…

I recently worked on a background job written in Python. It takes many ordered lists of items and combines them into a single ordering, with a measure of confidence for each item. In the real container, a job with 2 lists of 100 items took 15 minutes. Today, that same job finishes in 50 milliseconds…

Cataphiles. Inspired heavily by the tunnelers campaign. Paris, October 6th, 2026, 11:00 AM. Jean-Pierre, Ingrid, Alain, and Beverley are gathered in the communal space of their shared student accomodation. Their roommate, the affable Miguel Camion ('Mike Truck'), has gone missing, along with the majority of the flat's supply of baguettes and salami. If there's one thing that lad loves it's salami sandwiches. Heading to ⠀⠀⠀⠀1. Be back in 4hrs or less. Don't tell anyone, especially not my mom.…

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others. Sébastien Dulude’s first novel Asbestos is as moving as it is inventively written. L’Humanité wrote of the book: “In the land of asbestos mines, two boys build a paradise bound to be lost. A…

My goal of creating a healthy and purposeful lifestyle took me to reread Brain Wash by David Perlmutter and Austin Perlmutter. Brain Wash is a science-based guide to reconnect with our brains. Each chapter shows the science behind healthy habits and how they affect the brain. Being a fan of 10-idea lists, here are 7 ideas I learned from it: #1. Disconnection syndrome. Big corporations and our bad daily habits have hijacked our brains. We live disconnected from ourselves, from people around us,…

Visual process processingA significant portion of my work life is defining, maintaining and enforcing process. Ever since Obsidian released the Canvas function, nearly all of my process building became visual. Each step is a note detailing that step. Arrange those steps in order. And now you're cooking. I even use it to map out the arcs of a pesentation.... A B M

August 2015 For this walk I was staying in Llandudno, a town I have always liked and the hotel I was staying at (The Travelodge) even had a sea view, just about. I had come down for the August bank holiday and my plan had been to walk up Mount Snowdon (which I did yesterday), do a new walk along the coast (the plan for today) and do a trip on the Snowdon Mountain Railway and Ffestiniog railways, which I did the following day. As this was the closest part of the coast to Llandudno I hadn’t yet…

My forearms were completely shot after this. Unknown location (probably inside)

Christy Doran’s history with ECM traces a restless path through the guitar’s expressive possibilities, from OM’s combustible blend of rock and free improvisation on sister label JAPO to the intimate experiments of his later collaborations. Throughout, his playing reveals an ear equally attuned to abrasion and delicacy, finding unexpected colors where acoustic resonance meets electronic transformation. A quintessential example is Red Twist & Tuned Arrow, recorded with fellow guitarist Stephan…

I spent years becoming the engineer people reached for. Now they still reach for me, but for different reasons.

. “Here is communitarian euphoria combined with ambling and essentially damn fine playing, putting me in mind of Ornette Coleman’s Friends And Neighbors or the blissed-out devotional groove of Alice Coltrane. The Air Contains Honey is the kind of band you’ll want to sit cross-legged with, drink tea and wine with, share books and bike rides and late autumn mornings with. If that sounds whimsical, it is, wholeheartedly, in keeping with the record. The project is a loose collective of multi-genre…

James was kind enough to have me on his podcast, Wonders of Web Weaving. The audio version will give you the best experience — go listen over there — but if you’re more of a text person, I’ve lightly edited and annotated the transcript below (originally transcribed by Zachary Kai). I’ve broken it up with topical headers, made some addendums / corrections as sidenotes, pulled out some quotes I liked, and added additional links to related blog posts I’ve written. Recorded late June 2026. My…

Having been on Bluesky fairly casually for a while now, I largely just use the home feed which I mostly keep to Pokemon and a secondary feed that was a list of Nerdfighters. But for October's NerdfArter drawings one of my dear friends from Nerdfighteria requested a custom feed to compile the posts to easily follow the tag without needing to click through to the tag search each time they wanted to peruse. As the saying goes, "We did it not because it was easy, but because we thought it would be…

Back in mid-September, I wrote about reconsidering my Apple Watch use, in large part because I don’t like the promised upcoming “Audio Intelligence” features. And, I thought, it could be good to have one less always-on computer screen with me. Right? Well, I went ahead and ordered that Fitbit Air, and I’ve been wearing it instead of—not in tandem with—the Apple Watch for the last two weeks. (Actually, getting closer to three now.) The good It’s light and I don’t have to charge it often. They…

It’s possible to save a dramatic amount of memory (close to half for programs with pointer heavy heaps) and also speed up programs by a modest amount (by way of more data fitting in cache) by using 32 bit pointers on 64 bit systems. The Linux x32 ABI lets you do just this, but it’s tragically underused and overlooked. It’s disabled by default on Debian (though you can enable it with a boot flag) and not even compiled in on Arch Linux. Most software compiles just fine for x32, but there isn’t…

We watched The Lighthouse. Although I love me some monochrome and most scenes were quite stunning visually, the… non-story of it all was not really my cup of tea.

Visiting the Kunstpalast, "Deine Freunde" concert, beer and bike riding at Frankeninferno, a work trip to Belgium, and school singing at the Tonhalle. (66 photos)

Hey everyone. I’m back to podcasting for a spell. I’m running a 10 episode season for Pop Goes the Cryptid – Exploring mystery creatures in popular culture and the people who love them. Please check out and subscribe. It’s published via Substack but feeds should be on all your typical podcast platforms. Apple podcasts Substack RSS feed Questions and comments can be submitted on the substack page for each episode or to popcryptid(at)proton(dot)me. I’d love to hear from you.

I run my own analytics on this site. It's straightforward, collects as little as possible and gives me some basic counts, referral info and a list of 404s to (potentially) fix. Server-side analytics are noisy, so most of this is reported from a simple client-side script. What is surfaced from the server requests are 404s. I use these to find links I've broken, near-miss paths and anything else I might want to tidy up. The annoying part of tracking 404s this way is that the panel fills up with…

he lives by the river she's born of the bog his hair is ash and silver her curls a coppery glow his eyes are the colour of moss hers like lake water blue he smells like a burning church and she of flowers of marsh

Hi friends, In September, Scour scoured 1.2 million articles (up from ~880,000 in August) from 28,568 feeds. Also, welcome to the 116 new users who signed up since my last product update email! Here's what's new in the product: 📚 Library and Article TabsYou can now find all of your saved, loved, and liked posts, as well as your full reading history, in the Library section. Also, if you click Read on Scour for any article, that page now has tabs for the article's content, other posts that it…

Recently I’ve been struggling with my sleep. Two nights without sleep took a toll on my sleeping habits and mental health. That’s why I’m resurfacing some of my posts on the subject. As a reminder for my future self. #1. Without rest, all Notion dashboards are pointless. Resting is the only productivity tip that works. #2. I bet you wouldn’t like to miss an important meeting or appointment. Well, you already have one—with yourself. Schedule rest just like you schedule any other meeting. Even if…

I’ve been putting off upgrading from Jekyll 3.10. Partly late-adopter habit, partly because my setup worked fine, and a version bump seemed simple enough. I should know better by now. It mostly was. I run Jekyll on my NAS, in Docker, with a Gemfile shared by the GitHub Pages deploy. I don’t use Jekyll’s incremental build locally, so every time I saved a post I was writing, Jekyll did a full rebuild before I could preview the change. This year that’s added up, the best part of 90 new posts and…

Geralt took a break from questing to go on a Gwent tour! Today we played every Gwent player in the lower Velen area.

With just one more official post till the end of TWD BWD, I am squeezing in my final Rewind recipe on an unsanctioned Tuesday. Now, after next week, I can say I’ve truly baked the whole book before BWD goes from the spot it’s occupied on my kitchen table for the past five years over to the bookshelf. This Twist Bread is a braided take on cinnamon-raisin bread, and I must say that it looks majestic! I wish I could updo my hair as nicely as this. After all the multi-day brioche-based recipes…

The third part of a series about bare-metal programming for x86 PC-type computers, using Linux for development.

Josh Dzieza, in a Verge feature about Kevin O’Leary’s data centre in Utah and the citizens protesting its development, has a small update on how things are going for O’Leary’s proposal in Alberta: For developers, this presents what [Paul] Palandjian, the CEO of O’Leary Digital, calls a “chicken-and-egg problem.” In order to finance construction of a data center, you need an anchor tenant, but all tenants care about is speed, so the best way to attract one is to get everything aside from the…