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…

Weekly cleaning and home improvement series, with some thoughts in between. Yesterday's trip to the doctor's and then some has caused me to have severe lower back pain. One hour using the EMS didn't do anything. This morning, I applied supposed pain-reliever creams and a heating pad. It barely helps. The only thing that can relieve some pain is by shifting my body in a way that's super painful and then holding it. Stretching, pretty much. While it's the most effective, the pain persists. I'm…

There's a place in Skyrim, right outside the capital city, Solitude, where if you cast Magelight at the top of a mountain, you get tons of XP in Alteration — enough to level you from 15 to 25 in just one cast. But why?

Watched: Materialists 🍿 Watched this for date night while the kids were asleep, and it was pretty good! It follows the usual romance trope of “emotion versus logic”, but did it in a way that felt fresh and interesting.

It’s been a busy day and I haven’t the energy for anything strenuous so I thought I’d put up a cute problem I was thinking about (for some reason) on the train home from Friday’s concert. You may have to refresh your memory about units as well as the geometry of ellipses. The following picture will help: According to Kepler’s First Law of Cricket, the boundary of a cricket field is in the shape of an ellipse, with the two middle stumps each marking one of the foci. These are 22 yards apart,…

This series of poems inspired by gothic governesses was included in MARRY KISS KILL this past summer, but you can check out the poems and their accompanying collages as a free e-zine published a couple years back. https://heyzine.com/flip-book/93d24b3bac.html

[A.I. certainly isn’t going to take the jobs of falconry professionals anytime soon.] Pigeon poop is a persistent problem for passengers on public ptransit. Raptors might make things better.Link: https://mass.streetsblog.org/2026/09/28/wild-idea-raptors-could-help-the-t-make-its-stations-less-crappy

The internet, smartphones, and artificial intelligence (AI), are among the three most significant “epoch-defining shifts in technology” in about the last fifty years. In the late 1990’s I embraced the internet with relish. Within weeks of hooking up my cumbersome, multi component, desktop computer to a dial-up modem, I had four websites. A personal website, an online magazine, an web fiction series, and since I thought I knew what I was doing by then, a web design venture. I stumped up the…

Hi Folks! I love this lesson, brought to us a while back by teacher Jennifer Tobin of Whitby, Ontario. I welcome any more tales from teachers or principals who have used Free-Range ideas or Let Grow’s free independence-building materials in the classroom…or outside it. Thanks! – L. Dear Lenore: I had wanted to do a Free-Range project with my students for a long time and I was inspired by my 8-year-old son. I am a teacher and I volunteer with Scouts Canada as a Beavers leader. My son recently…

This post went to Patronizers at the beginning of September, and to the public at the beginning of October. Not a Patronizer? You could be! Despite my nature, I am committing socialization once a week. It’s either that, or pillage my next book title from the Simpsons. So I’m visiting friends a few weekends ago. We’re looking through their movie library for the evening’s entertainment, because nothing says “hang out with introverts” like a social activity that requires no interaction with live…

So last week Victor and Hailey and I went to socialize feral shelter kittens and the kittens were all like, “fuck you guys” and hid but there was this lanky, black teenage cat who was like, “PICK ME UP. LOVE ME. LET ME CRAWL INSIDE YOUR CARDIGAN.” I’ve never had a black cat before soContinue reading "Filling a void with a cuter void."

I’m in my surprisingly spacious but undecorous €45 hotel room in Vitry-le-Francois with a take away pizza, two 500ml cans of strong beer, a packet of 3D bugles and a chocolate bar. I’m probably hungry. The Amsterdam beer was €1.80 while the Leffe was €2.50. They’re chilled. Today was somewhat challenging but also somewhat easy - at least in as much that I reached my destination with fuel in the tank - which was surprising considering that I hadn’t eaten significantly over the 10 hour day.

Do you ever do this? You carefully type out a command, like this pytest one: $ pytest tests/test_checkout.py -k discount --reuse-db -x …then, just before pressing Enter, you remember that something will stop it from succeeding, like being on the wrong Git branch. What now? Maybe you run the command anyway, to put it in your history, letting it fail or cancelling it with Ctrl-C. Then you can run your setup command. Or maybe you press Ctrl-A to jump to the start, and add the setup command first,…

The first challenge of discussing US rural areas is to define them. I remember once reading a poetic definition that a rural area is a place where the shape of the land matters. But the US Census takes a different approach. It classifies each of the 3,141 counties in the United States as metropolitan, micropolitan, or neither. The “neither” category does not have an urban area of at least 10,000 people and is not in the commuting area of a nearby larger city. The “micropolitan” counties have an…

The day arrives every year. Reminding me of my eternal fear. Life inches closer to the end. As it is to be meant. People celebrate it as an event so joyous. The day you were born, the festivity so contagious. But alas, it is yet another year gone. I'm afraid this thought is what I mourn. I realize I'm a year older. Fearful that such a thought is so much colder. For what is there to celebrate? Just yet another year that's gone to waste.

Gödel’s incompleteness theorem illustrated the need to distinguish between what is true and what is provable. There are true statements that cannot be proven. Let □p denote the assertion that p is provable in Peano arithmetic. The logic with this interpretation for the □ operator is the Gödel-Löb logic, also called provability logic. This is a normal modal logic with the additional axiom □(□p → p) → □p, known as Löb’s axiom. A couple days ago I wrote about topological models for modal logic. Is…

Though we didn't set out ten years ago to buy a motorhome, it somehow came to pass. Beware when your spouse says: "Lets see what they have....I'm just curious". Here's the post of that fateful day: LINKOver the last ten years, Umarang (so named by Thing One because like a Boomerang, she'd always bring us home) or Uma started off as a way to extend the range of my Ural Sidecar riding. Along the way, she acquired the designation of URRV (Ural Recovery RV) due to several "incidents". Uralisti out…

“It’s made for people who film their trips: motorcycle tours, cycling, hiking, road trips and sailing. Draw the route or use your GPX recording, give it a look, and get a video clip that shows where you went. Everything happens on your own computer. Your projects are stored in your browser and your videos are made in your browser, so nothing about your trips is sent to us.” A while back when I was looking at doing some travel map animations, I noticed all the reasonably good ones seemed to be…

And finally, something crude, raw, direct, and honest in the way it shouts at full volume. Every track is an angry complaint, blown wide open by the guitars. The drums sound great too: the tone, sure, but above all the sheer drive. An album that stays well clear of the mainstream rhetoric of “transgression, but within reason,” while also remaining far from those experimental fringes everyone keeps talking about — like Plato’s cave dwellers returning to spread the gospel of the avant-garde…

A flower on a dying bush.

Some cases duplicating code is a valid option to consider.

I like this essay from Baldur Bjarnason: Software developers are not okay

“The Greatest Benefit to Mankind – A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present” by Roy Porter was published in 1999. It’s a magnificent 848-page book that I’ve now read. Many people, I’ve discovered, own a copy but have dipped into it rather than read it through. I hope that I might do medical history, the world at large, students of medicine (surely all of us), and Roy, whom I knew and who died suddenly aged 55 in 2002, a service by posting extracts of his book on my website.…

More progress (before above, after below)…

This weekend, I took Ella to her cousin's birthday party at Laser Storm on McKnight Road north of Pittsburgh. The small structure is now dwarfed by much larger, newer chain stores, but entering the doors transported me to the same amazing world my cousins and I would visit as tweens. Behold its majesty: Just look at these wall paintings: Outside of the laser tag arena is the arcade area, equipped with many of the classics. For my money, things like this need to be protected at all costs. Sure,…

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

Hear that? That’s the sound of the Kickstarter for the new Microscope escaping into the wild. I talk about this in the Kickstarter, but I think in this age of AI it has never been more important to sit down and make things together. I can’t wait to see what you create with this with new edition of Microscope.

I've played Léon Phal on here before; this is his latest, which just came out a few weeks ago. Like his last album, it's a very fun blend of jazz, downtempo electronica, house. Excellent start to the day and excellent mood.