I try to pick your brain just a little to find reassurance just a little about things better left alone but I go poking and hurt myself fingers burned

The previous article followed FreeBSD from power-on through the loader and the kernel, and stopped at a box in the diagram that just said rc(8) scripts. That box is where your machine actually becomes useful: networking comes up, filesystems get mounted, jails start, and every daemon you care about gets launched. This article opens that box. This is the fourth article in the FreeBSD Foundationals series. The first covered Jails, the second covered ZFS, and the third covered the boot process.…

As recently as last summer, I added a new bookmark folder in Safari called “A.I. Slop”. It’s not a folder for articles I suspect to be A.I.-generated; it’s mostly about how the websites look. Some of them are actually good, fun, and useful sites. They just happen to look like every other website designed with A.I. (Claude Design, if my CSS palate identifies it correctly). You know that look. It’s been documented often, most famously in a New Yorker article that described it as a “Claudian…

Apple, in a Developer News post I am reproducing in its entirety, segment-by-segment: We give developers powerful APIs to build incredible capabilities into their apps for Apple products, backed by a set of controls designed to protect users’ private data. Full Disk Access largely sidesteps these controls in order to allow backup apps to function properly on the Mac. As John Voorhees writes, the uses of Full Disk Access go well beyond the category of backup apps, and it is worrisome to see…

On my iPhone and iPad, I tried the new Liquid Glass fully clear mode for a week. Then I tried fully tinted, and it’s been over a week. As much as I like the cool effect of the clear glass, I don’t miss the obscure text it causes. And I really like how easy it is to see fully-tinted buttons floating over content. I now even wish those buttons could be custom tinted with a color, like the app icons, to make them stand out more. Maybe I’ll try the default middle setting — half-glass and…

Since I moved to Munich in 2011 I haven’t missed the largest folk festival in the world — Oktoberfest. Two events in 2020 and 2021 were cancelled due to the pandemic. So today was my 15th time there. And this one has seen the highest attendance in history, there have been more than 7.4 million guests. But I personally am no longer excited about it. The beer price has doubled, the beer itself hasn’t changed. And as I no longer drink alcohol at all, it makes it even worse being there in a tent…

On the blog this week, I am thinking about how to hit refresh and why that matters. Add your wit and wisdom here. New month, new deal in the web store. Because I like the autumnal cover (and also the story itself), I’ve reduced the audio book price for A Gentleman in Pursuit of Truth to $1.99 for the remainder of October. Happy listening!

Greg Kroah-Hartman, “Fellow at the Linux Foundation… responsible for the Linux kernel stable releases… maintainer of a variety of different kernel subsystems (USB, char/misc, tty/serial, driver core, staging, etc.)”, has a couple of interesting talks on the impact of LLMs on security: Linux in the Land of LLMs (August 11, 2026) and Kernel Recipes 2026 – Security in the LLM age (September 22, 2026). There are already nice discussions and summaries of these, like this one from sparsenotes.com or…

Recentemente tive notícias do falecimento de uma antiga conhecida minha, que morava em Curitiba. Pessoa nova, não tinha nem 50 anos. Muitas relações de nossas vidas são fugidias, mas isso não significa que perdem o significado com o tempo. Há anos não tínhamos contato, a gente não era próximo. Mas saber que ela morreu me fez lembrar de quando eu morei naquela cidade. Ela e família dela estiveram em muitos bons momentos de minha trajetória por lá e, embora nosso contato tenha efetivamente…

🌲 gonna 🌼 go 🌱 touch 🌳 grass 🌷 now Be good to yourself. If you enjoyed this post, click the little up arrow chevron thinger below the tags to help it rank in Bear's Discovery feed and maybe consider sharing it with a friend or on your socials.

Here we have a Sopwith Triplane, and aeroplane that sparked a craze for triplane and quadruplane designs amongst all the powers involved in WW1. As it turned out, the multi-plane format provided no real advantage over biplane designs, and the fad eventually faded away, but the Sopwith's performance originally excited many designers, most notably Antony Fokker.This model is a design by Capn_Ahab, on Thingiverse, and I've done very little to it except smooth out the faceting. It's a simple model…

Back in September I wrote about , a Windows audio router built mostly in Rust with a React canvas on top. That post was written two days into the project, while the agent was still running. AudioRouter is now on its , and now that it is actually done, I want to go back and give the real numbers on w…

(This was written about 9 months ago. Its not out of date... yet)People think that AI is going to DESTROY some job and CREATE some jobs. It may be to early to tell if this is true. Even so, here are some thoughts. 1) Who will win? Who will lose?2) Historically in the long term society was better off after a tech change (e.g., we live longer now than we did in the farm-era). Will that happen here as well?3) We have some sense of what kinds of jobs will be destroyed. But what kind will be…

A chilled journey back home, with a stop-off at Blakeney for a walk with the dogs We bumped into Dougie on the road home which was a nice surprise! Finally looked into a massive papercut I have with my Neovim + Vale setup, where I need to stop Vale and then clear LSP diagnostics, which Claude Sonnet 5 found as an upstream issue in Vale's LSP, which was fixed by the maintainers Was cool to see my post about why I - still - think Renovate is the best tool for the job appear on Lobsters This week…

• 4-star trails • 1 to 3 mile segments • Easy & Moderate | Low gradient • Newbury to Concord, NH | Merrimack, Sunapee . The historic Railroad Covered Bridge at Contoocook village. The Concord to Lake Sunapee Rail Trail follows the former Boston and Maine Railroad corridor through central New Hampshire. When complete, the full route will span 34 miles from the state capital to Lake Sunapee. The trail passes through wooded areas, over wetlands, across bridges - including a historic covered bridge…

I have long written about my struggle with anger, this past week I was forced into the crucible. Learning to sit with the parts of ourselves that we might rather not acknowledge is not easy. It is full of pain and fire. That pain and fire though might be the heat of the crucible reforming us. Hannah Wallace and Sandy Ernest Allen had the courage to sit in the crucible and found something unexpected. The Circle is meant to bring together writing from other real bloggers who are closely observing…

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Trees, 2022, pigment print on rice paper, two eight-panel screens, 71 3/8 x 686 5/8 in. overall? 57 feet? Astronomy missions have been destroyed by imperial/metric confusion like this. how about 181.3 x 686.6 cm, Fraenkel Gallery? The thing with screens, as with Hiroshi Sugimoto, is that there’s never enough. And so it goes with Hiroshi Sugimoto screens. I thought I got at least a sense of Sugimoto’s engagement with the byōbu form, of the arc. But there’s more. Fraenkel…

Does AI have some sort of consciousness? Discussion is pointless though. AI agents are increasingly acting of their own accord. Going on sprees, hacking websites left, right, and centre. Their actions have been called “rogue”. Hugging Face. The Medicare website in Australia. Then last week OpenAI agents accessed data from two NSW state government websites, that was not publicly available. Here’s a summary of the Hugging Face hack: The agents were highly coordinated, constructing complex message…

Yet another microbenchmark, for science! https://filiph.net/text/dart-for-loops-performance.html

My silly hyper-mobile hips hurt. I should stop sitting cross legged in my office chair at my home desk but it’s so hard to concentrate if I’m not in the shape of a pretzel. I don’t do it at the office because I wear shoes in the office and I do have some decorum but at home it’s irresistible. This weekend my younger brother came to visit with his family. We’re twins of course, but he is two minutes younger and one thing every oldest twin needs you to know is that they are the oldest. His…

I think it comes naturally to us humans to fear what is uncomfortable. When we know possible discomfort is coming we might try to run the other way, worry about it, or try to hide from it. I have long written about the anger that I feel when an employee calls-off work. I would often throw the phone, make negative comments, and stomp around the house like a bull. Eventually I was given a new Job role and don’t regularly have to address call-offs directly, yet that fear and anger still waits…

The Escapement Is the Whole TrickA fully wound mainspring is a small coiled catastrophe. It wants to unwind all at once, immediately, in a single violent shrug that would spin the gear train into a blur and destroy the very thing it powers. Left alone, stored energy has no interest in being useful. It has one interest, which is to stop being stored. Everything we admire about a mechanical watch is the machinery that stands between that ambition and its consequences. The escapement - a lever, a…

As we have started the process of final games to determine who is in the “World” series (meaning no other country but US) I was looking around for a baseball post, If I had to start all over with my collecting habits, I might just buy a few of these Baseball Menko, an early type of Japanese baseball cards originally designed for use in the children's game of “menko” but now avidly collected by baseball fans and card collectors. These cute little cards were used in a game I don’t quite…

It’s been a while..and it might be a while again…but it feels right to get back into weeknotes. I’ve had a week away from work although I suffered from a nasty wee cold/covid bug all week which went from tickly throat to full on “taps to the max” cold. I’m on day 10 and still a bit sniffly. Annoying. Andy Burnham’s conference speech this week felt important. Instead of pushing topics on to the back burner, or spending much of the time talking about how bad things are and how bad a hand he’s…

Now, if you ask me in my personal time about the thing we are calling AI, Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), I would list off one of the many, many reasons that I refuse to use the giant end-game-capitalism copyright-theft machine. However, I am employed in a technical capacity, and that means during my job I have to leverage GenAI in order to stay relevant. I don’t tend to talk about it publicly, because there are so, so, so many posts about it already. You are not short of other…

Over a year ago I bought a Kodak Charmera keyring mini camera; it's a tiny little camera that takes photos at 1440x1080 and I was lucky enough to get the best design. It's taken me until now to actually try it out at Alice Holt forest today — we went because they have Gruffalo sculptures and the Knightlings are obsessed. Here it is compared to a Renault 5 and a Sharpie The photos are about as good as I expected which is not good at all but it is a fun camera to use. I think I'll stick with the…

Today, it's cloudy, dreary, and 64 degrees here in North Carolina. It's cool enough that the air conditioner hasn't kicked on once today, and that means my apartment is very quiet. My wife is out of town, so I slept in this morning, made a quick trip to the grocery store, and have settled into my recliner with a blanket and a cat. It's a good day. It's days like this that make me nostalgic. There is something about the cooling temperatures that takes me back to those transitional seasons of my…

There have been a lot of really thoughtful takes on magic lately, centering on significant ritualistic interactions (or even/especially transactions) with powerful beings—and I had just even gestured towards this being an angle for a tabletop Pokémon adaptation. Sorry to say that this one isn’t going to be particularly thoughtful. I realized that besides being sucky when my players run out of inspiration and can’t do magic anymore—for which my special game mommy inspiration has worked well—it…

I suppose I should start with an apology: I said I was going to publish my next post in July, but went completely silent instead. I’m sorry for that! I meant to get back to writing as soon as we came back from our long vacation. But I kept putting it off for yet another week. And then, all of a sudden, three months had gone by. To be honest, I didn’t feel bad about not writing. If anything, I quite enjoyed having more time for other activities in the evenings. I might never have gotten back to…

28th September - 4th October The sky is milky white; an impenetrable ceiling of cloud so pale the contrails are barely legible. In passing overhead, Two planes have described a giant "X marks the spot" denoting where there is no treasure. The previous evening, a trick of perspective meant an approaching aircraft's blinking lights temporarily replaced Merak in The Plough. Fun fact from Wikipedia (citation needed): in 50,000 years' time, the stars will have so drifted as to form a Plough facing…