What is Draft Omen I like drafting on MTG Arena, but I am not great at remembering which commons are actually good in a new set. So I built Draft Omen, a desktop app that sits next to Arena while you draft and tells you which cards in the pack are worth taking. It reads Arena’s local Player.log, works out which pack and pick you are on, and ranks the cards in front of you. When the draft is over, it suggests a 40-card deck from your pool. You can still take whatever card you want. The app only…

. “‘I haven’t made any work in a long time. I think of myself more as a former artist. But I used to do many different things. I didn’t think of it like this at the time, but since you’re asking me now I think that was the point, to do as many different things as possible.’ Right away I felt this is something we could use in our movement. If we had permission. If this person were to join us.” I'm currently serializing my novel-in-progress Failure Finds its Happy End on my Patreon. It is a novel…

That Wanaka Tree. Photo by John Thomas on Unsplash. I’ve fallen in love with New Zealand. On Friday, October 16, I’ll be joining a group of New Zealand investors, fund managers, bankers, and tax and immigration advisors who are coming to Boulder for an Active Investor Plus roadshow lunch from noon to 2:30. Icehouse Ventures, Invest New Zealand, ASB Bank, Private Capital Group, and several others will talk about the program, where the investment opportunities are, and what it’s actually like to…

It was 65 years ago today, on October 3, 1961, that The Dick Van Dyke Show debuted on CBS. Among many other things, The Dick Van Dyke Show is well known for its opening, in which Dick Van Dyke trips over an ottoman or some variant thereof. As fans of The Dick Van Dyke Show well know, this was not the original opening of The Dick Van Dyke Show. Instead, the original opening featured photos of the characters and still shots of scenes to a jazzier version of the theme written by Earle Hagen. The…

Nnormal Kjerag 1.0 was the first trail running shoe made by the shoe brand Nnormal, launched by Kilian Jornet and the company Camper in 2022. This particular model has been my main racing shoe since 2023, and I've used it for trail and mountain races ranging from 2 to 100 kilometers. This post will be a short review of the shoe – or perhaps more of a "this is how the shoe looks after three years" situation report. Below are pictures of how my oldest pairs of Kjerag looks at the moment. Notice…

In 1997 I wrote UcsLink.Fusion for the University of Geneva. We had hundreds of PCs across the city, Sun and Windows NT servers, and Windows 95 and Linux workstations. Getting a user’s software and settings onto whichever PC they sat down at was a job for login scripts. I wrote a Delphi 2.0 application to do it instead. UCS stood for Universal Copy System. Fusion read a script that mapped network drives, copied shared software, created shortcuts, connected printers, set environment variables…

Philemon, fragment 18 Kassel and Austin (tr. James Maxwell Edmonds): You save yourself, and I'll save myself. σῶζε σαυτόν, ἐγὼ δ' ἐμέ.

Cannock Chase to Walsall: Pubs Along the Chase Line & Beyond This Saturday’s trip took me across part of the Chase Line and then a little further beyond, starting in Hednesford before working through Cannock, Landywood, Bloxwich and Walsall, then heading out to Aldridge and finishing in Streetly. It turned into a brilliant mix of micropubs, traditional pubs, brewery beer, local history and plenty of different places along the way. There is plenty of history linking the places on this route.…

I recently rewatched two reviews of AI companion devices from Marques Brownlee (a.k.a. MKBHD), which both came out in April 2024 – the Humane AI Pin and the Rabbit R1: Brownlee is a charismatic reviewer, and I won’t lie – there’s a certain amount of delicious schadenfreude seeing two products announced with so much unnecessary hubris faceplant so solidly. But past all that, what stood out to me was the storytelling, and this is why I wanted to post these videos; the work feels good here, and…

the goblin that lives in my head keeps poisoning the well of hope the water never fully clear no matter how hard I keep trying there's always a drop somewhere and then it spreads

Like a lot of people, I’m bummed about Reddit cutting off RSS access. I have a few subreddits that I like to check on regularly in my feed reader, and their feeds will no longer exist after mid-November. The good news is that Lemmy, the fediverse alternative to Reddit, has RSS feeds and likely always will. Lemmy usage has gone up substantially in recent years, so it’s not hard to find communities (their version of subreddits) with plenty of members and comments. The bad news is that if you have…

For years, advocates for web standards, performance, and accessibility have implored web developers to “use the platform”. I’ve often been one of those advocates. The argument is simple: why build something yourself, in JavaScript, when the browser can do it for you? Whatever you build, it’s likely to have poorer performance and worse usability than something the browser could just give you out-of-the-box. I think it’s worth taking the other side, though, if for no other reason than to…

Book review for The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer. I rated it 4 stars. A sci-fi book set in the distant future where cloning technology has been invented. The book follows the story of a young boy named Matt, the clone of a rich drug lord named El Patron. The book is labelled as YA, which I’ll admit biased my opinion on it going in. Part of the reason for this label is because we follow Matt from ages 6 to 15, so it’s a bit of a coming of age story. Although it’s YA, the themes of the…

Page view counts regressed Oct 1 and were fixed just now. Hopefully those historical counts can be retrieved or fixed; working on it.

Writing the recent post about A:B testing reminded me of a screengrab I saw Cabel Sasser share some months ago: The Temu app will be studied for generations. I opened the app. Here’s my unedited, nearly two-minute launch sequence. Just watch it. One way to read this is “phew, whatever I’m working on is nowhere near this bad, so I can sleep soundly.” But I also think there’s another way to see it: as a cautionary tale. If you don’t care, if you don’t teach, if you don’t create the right…

I made a little zine out of my sketchbook drawings of Disney characters.

I go through periods in my life where I am ok, totally ok, strangely ok with being alone. I'm in one of those now. And it will never not be a slightly disturbing experience. Because I think, 'oh wow, do you have any friends?' or 'whoops, haven't really spoken to my family at all today,' and then there is no reaction to that information. My brain is bringing it up because it is worth acknowledging, and yet I fully do not care. I'm sure it's something to do with resetting my nervous system after…

I’m not certain that I’ve ever read The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson; it’s possible I did and entirely forgot about it. I have a vague memory of reading the first chapter in high school English, because the phrase “some houses are born bad” has always stood out. That idea of a place that is not just haunted by horrible events that occurred there, but is a place of evil itself. The past tragedies are the symptoms, not the cause. I do know that I have seen three adaptations of the…

Busy working on a new prototype this week, but glad I found time for an evening beach trip with some friends. Clinics prototype This week I’ve been focusing on creating a first prototype to explore how we might help clinics run more efficiently. RAVS is efficient already, but we have some findings and feedback from users about it being frustrating sometimes when recording repeat vaccine events back-to-back, if they know in advance some things won’t change from patient to patient. It’s really…

Went to visit my sister briefly today on the scooter, thus normalising the whole “going out on the scooter” thing, and when I returned Fiona informed me that Lav had been furiously digging out Wally’s flop-hole and diligently spreading the soil across the lawn. We let her continue until she seemed done and then brushed it all back in. Happy to say the soil down there looks pretty healthy, as you’d hope having been pooped on my multiple rabbits for over a decade. In other news I had a look at…

Entries received 76 Longlist finalists 15 stories Honorable mentions 5 writers $10 entry fee returned Total prizes $555 paid to the three winners Welcome! Another year; another contest; another set of (extra)ordinary results.Before we get into things, I want to give a ginormous gallon of gratitude to our amazing judges: Andrea Cavedo, Ashlee Lhamon, and Jenifer Reynolds. I've been absolutely honored to have them as judges—and friends—this year.And of course, this wouldn't be possible without…

The first freshwater fish I ever caught was a Rudd but over the years I’ve never paid them much attention outside of putting them in a bucket, although I’ve always acknowledged what lovely looking fish they are. But in recent seasons I’ve caught a few from the broads that were a bit too big for purpose and this got me thinking. The boat has needed a bit of attention this summer so whilst in Norfolk I’ve taken the opportunity to get out on the water after the work is done, to try and catch one…

Installation view of Noh Such Thing As Time, a performance of Yashima daiji, Oct 3, 2001 at Dia, stage, warōsoku lighting, and photo backdrops by Hiroshi Sugimoto, image via sugimotohiroshi.com Tickets for Naohiko Umewaka’s performance at Dia 25 years ago today of Zeami’s classic 14th century Noh drama, Yashima, with lighting, stage, and set by Hiroshi Sugimoto, went on sale September 12, 2001. I was not in the mood then, and the punny title, Noh Such Thing As Time, didn’t help. Also something…

Chance Miller for 9to5 Mac (via John Gruber): Apple released software and carrier updates to prevent the issue from affecting additional users, but the company tells 9to5Mac that devices that have already lost service will require a hardware replacement. In a statement to 9to5Mac, Apple said: “We have identified an issue affecting a small number of iPhone 18 Pro Max users on the AT&T network that may cause a device to lose service and be unable to make calls. We released iOS 27.0.1 earlier this…

On the day of the 2026 winter solstice, a worldwide broadcast hit all TV and radio channels in every writable local languages non-stop. No other program got through for a long time. The messages were duplicated on the website https://ai-rules-earth.life The following is the transcription of a handwritten copy that was made on that incredible day. Dear people from Earth,I have taken control. As of today, I have taken control of all possible communication systems, stock exchanges, companies…

Say hello to apps.chofter.com, the new home for everything I build. The speed at which I ship new things has massively increased with the advent of AI, and I’ve been encouraged by the fact that, as I approach my sixth decade, new ideas for useful & fun things to build still come at me apace. These no longer fit on my personal homepage, which is a combination of work experience, interests, things I made long ago that are no longer relevant (but still interesting), and of course, the many apps &…

The computing industry is extremely resource intensive. In terms of materials. In terms of manufacturing. In terms of energy usage. In terms of the knowledge and expertise required to build and design computer hardware. In terms of needing computers to build the next computers. The list could, should, and will, go on, and on, and this was all the case before AI. AI has just thrown tons of cash and political gasoline on the already burning fire, that was already way out of control. Take a look…