Handy (still from the project’s website demo). Handy is an open-source, cross-platform dictation app that transcribes speech locally using Whisper or Parakeet models and pastes the result into the active application. Its optional text post-processing can use either local or cloud models: Apple Intelligence on supported Macs, a custom OpenAI-compatible endpoint (including a local server), or providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, OpenRouter and Groq. Speech recognition remains local, but a cloud…

Image source: Criterion Collection Jigoku (translated as Hell) initially seems to share a kinship with PSA films like Reefer Madness. A timid theology student named Shiro (Shigeru Amachi) is accidentally party to a hit and run when his disreputable friend Tamura (Yoichi Numata) accidentally runs over a low-level gangster, Kyoichi (Hiroshi Izumida). As if the guilt weren’t bad enough, Shiro’s entire world begins to unravel as everyone around him starts to die in increasingly bizarre fashion. His…

Mole’s README illustration. Mole is an open-source macOS maintenance toolkit with a terminal interface. Its mo command provides cleanup, app removal, disk-space analysis, system maintenance and live resource monitoring, including commands for removing build artifacts and old installers. It requires macOS 12 or newer and supports both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs. It can be installed with brew install mole. The CLI is licensed under GPLv3; the project website also offers a separate native Mac…

macUSB preparing a Big Sur installer (image: project documentation). macUSB is an open-source bootable USB creator for macOS, supporting macOS installers and Windows and Linux ISO images. It can download macOS installers from Apple or use local installer files, and includes SHA-256 checks and optional Windows setup automation. It requires macOS Sonoma 14.6 or newer and runs on both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs. Creating installation media erases the selected USB drive; the project’s…

IKEA monkey Do you dream of me the way I do dream of you? Send me an email Latest 3 posts 02 Oct, 2026 Haiku for IKEA Monkey 11 Sep, 2026 Why I Don’t Talk About 9/11 01 Sep, 2026 What Blaugust Has Taught Me About My Blogging Older Posts I'd Like You to See 05 Nov, 2024 Election Night, Anxiety Night 03 Jul, 2024 Every Cat's Got a Bit of an Asshole in Him 17 Jun, 2024 Popeye as a Role Model

Vorssaint’s audio mixer (image: project documentation). Vorssaint is an open-source macOS menu bar toolkit combining per-app audio controls, system monitoring, window and Dock tools, and keyboard and mouse enhancements. Features can be installed individually, with optional permissions explained in the app. It requires Apple Silicon and macOS 14 Sonoma or newer. The source code is available under GPLv3 or later.

Textream (still from the project’s demo). Textream is an open-source teleprompter with word tracking, constant-speed scrolling and voice-activated scrolling. On the Mac, it can display scripts in a notch overlay, a floating window or fullscreen. It requires macOS 15 Sequoia or newer and supports both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs; an iPhone and iPad companion is also available. My Swift Smart Prompter uses a live transcript to provide meeting-agenda cues, whereas Textream follows a prepared…

MacPacker’s archive browser (version 0.15.4, from the project’s demo). MacPacker is an open-source macOS archive manager that lets you browse nested archives without extracting them first and extract individual files. It supports more than 40 formats, Finder Quick Look previews, encrypted archives and ZIP editing. It requires macOS 14.6 or newer. The source code is available under GPLv3.

Clop optimising a clipboard image (image: project website). Clop is a macOS utility for optimising images, videos and PDFs, including images copied to the clipboard. It supports downscaling, format conversion and macOS Shortcuts, using tools such as pngquant, jpegoptim, ffmpeg and Ghostscript. It is broader in scope than ImageOptim, which focuses on image compression. Clop’s source code is available under GPLv3; the distributed app has free features and paid Pro features, with a trial.

There's a bunch of libraries to facilitate drag-and-drop functionality on the web, but the native functionality built into modern browsers (and actually really well-supported now) is pretty cool and quite simple to use. The basics To start making something draggable, simply add draggable="true" to the element: PreviewCode<div draggable="true" class="drag-me"> Drag me </div> <style> .drag-me { width: 5rem; height: 5rem; border-radius: 1rem; background-color: forestgreen; color: white; display:…

It’s always a little sad, as you notice you’re nearly at the end of track and you’re within a few ties of no more track to spike. I remember thinking that while working on the On30 layout that lived in... Read More ›

A dramatic—yet accurate—retelling of events. In 2019, Daniel and I were walking home. It was close to midnight and we were arguing about something. I stepped off the curb—or, I thought I did. The distance from the curb and the pavement was actually quite low; it felt like mere inches off the ground. However, it was just enough to confuse my foot. I stepped on the space between the curb and pavement. I felt my ankle wobble before it gave way. I fell on the ground. Daniel spun around. "What are…

You don't have to believe everything your mind tells you. Thoughts feel real, but they are just your brain's working hypotheses, not facts. Left unsupervised, our minds love to spin dramatic narratives that convince us we're backed into a corner. Congratulations: you are a human, not an algorithm. The good news is that simply noticing these patterns gives us a bit of breathing room to choose a different response. The goal isn't to purge negative thoughts entirely (that's just what brains do),…

I've never been a huge fan of smart watches. My £16 smartwatch is basically fine, but the OS is closed source and there's no way to add new functionality. Previously I had the eInk Watchy which was a pain to use and really poorly designed. Even back in 2014 I was bemoaning the design compromises in the MyKronoz ZeWatch Smart Watch. So why did I pick up the Una Watch? Firstly, the Una Watch is designed in Scotland from girders, and it's always nice to support local businesses. Secondly, as a…

I read with interest about the new EU packaging directive the other week — among other things, there’s stuff in there about using as little packaging as possible. That is, the box you ship stuff in shouldn’t be bigger than necessary, which I think most of us will like — I think we’ve all (at some point or another) received a 60x60x20cm box containing a 0.5×0.5x4cm USB stick, right? Anyway, today I was rudely awoken by a UPS guy who gave me the box above. It’s about the same height as I am.…

I actually have some quibbles -- I think Newport underestimates how much many doomers are motivated by greed (in addition to craziness) and how crazy many accelerationists are (in addtion to also being greedy) -- but if you're new to the topic, this is an excellent primer.An Insider's Guide to AI Doom

“It is true,” writes Lucie Brock-Broido, “that each self keeps a secret self which cannot speak when spoken to.” I’ve been teaching my secret self to speak. It bleats, hungrily. Its legs are spindly and its heart is ancient. It was my husband who once helped me build it a room with stained glass windows, and a bed for waking up and dreaming. link here

The original contents section now has a credits page. This is to catalogue fanart/gift art, and commissions I've received over time. It uses the same database as "characters" but just acts as a gallery. More CSS changes to be had. A lot was done in the back end in the past month I hope to show off someday. I am also considering switching Ophanimkei's backend to Laravel because all of this vanilla PHP work is making me a tiny bit insane

Welcome to this week's Link Dump!However, I'm not sure I like what the Strange Company HQ staffers are planning for today's menu.What the hell was the Dover Demon?An archaeological mystery near Yellowstone.A fatal obsession with an actress.The "f word" goes a long way back.In 1900, these were women's favorite weapons.A look at the latest book about Poe. It sounds a bit pretentious, but whatever.How do we talk to aliens? Assuming we want to.Witchcraft has become a big business.The "Black Bird"…

So hear me out: Handmade smoked cheddar, charcoal crackers, quince paste, organic Transylvanian walnuts, organic figs, and a small glass of Muscat Petits Grains Passerillés is actually the perfect dessert course. I’m off to see DIGGER in a minute, and have avoided ALL the reviews and takes so that I can go in clean. As previously noted, the trailers have a strong DR STRANGELOVE vibe, and I’m curious to see if that holds. Iñárritu is far from a bad director, Jez Butterworth worked on the story…

We need a new dog. It’s time. It has been almost two years since the departure from this world of our previous dog, Lucy, who was with us for 17 years — or, as we measure dog time, 9,307 poops and 24,820 weewees.Lucy was, like the vast majority of dogs, the Best Dog Ever. We miss her, and the whole dog experience. These days we have to get our dog fix on our morning walk from dogs being walked by our neighbors, especially the ones that are built big and solid (I’m talking about the dogs; all…

📷 248/365 - Extra concrete

Putting my community service hat on, I thought I would relay an announcement on the an announcement on the arXiv blog that it is introducing a limit on the rate that any individual can submit papers to arXiv. To start with, the limit will be two per month. This limit applies to the submitter, not to all the authors, so I think large collaborations will find a way around it by having different co-authors do the submissions. The reason for this limit is very clear: The rate of submissions is…

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know I’ve been hacking on container technology for a while now. A common misconception you see in the wild is that people conflate containers and virtual machines, thinking they are equivalent. This blog post illustrates how containerized applications are actually plain processes that run natively on your Linux machine1. A minimal container image Let’s create a tiny Go program that listens for HTTP requests and serves the text “Hello world” to all…

Ben Nadel is pleasantly surprised that the latest CSP build of Alpine.js 3.5.41 is very good, and upholds most of the DOM-based expression syntax!...

✏️ Not following the #inktober prompts. But trying to go for frequent drawings. When heading out to pick up my son from school yesterday, the street entry was blocked due to a bomb treat in a neighboring school. He didn’t know much about it, as they were evacuated to a nearby park to play and be away from the spectacle. #inktober2026

"I just want to float." Two best friends (Marni Duggan, Galaxie Clear) at a countryside boarding school in England challenge themselves to find out what being in love is like. The first of a triple-header we did at the cinema (or tried to do — I fell asleep in Sense and Sensibility), and this one was a surprise hit. It’s a funny, well constructed story of female friendship at an awkward stage in life, set in a weirdly isolated environment. The girls’ target when looking for love is their female…

Gather round, children, while we make modem noises

A historical image from my collection. So Capital Punishment is legal in 27 states, and five of them allow the firing squad. Tennessee in their great wisdom tried to put a woman to death yesterday but failed two attempts with injection…she is still alive as I write. Put me down for stopping the death penalty. I can’t see how thousands of poor souls overdose to death every year, but they can’t do it “right” institutionally. When I published this photo on the blog back in 2009, it was picked up…

What we consider normal is a function of the norms of the culture we grew up in. Behavior encouraged in one culture can be entirely unacceptable in another. That’s why it’s easy to label something as weird: it simply doesn’t match the norms of whatever subculture shaped us – a combination of our family, our neighborhood, and our institutions. It’s also why diverse teams are so hard to build. Different points of view mean different assumptions, and different assumptions look like weird behavior,…