Stepping on someone else’s sharp, jabby toenail shard is a painful and disgusting moment. Basically, it has the same creep-out factor as poking a dead bee laying in your windowsill or accidentally crushing a hollow, dusty skull on your tour through the catacombs. Now, on the other hand, when your toenail suddenly blasts off into outer living room and you manage to find that nearly invisible sucker hiding in the shaggy carpet, well that’s a pretty great feeling. Good work, Sherlock Toenail. You…

Look, I believe if the title of your book begins “The Pocket Guide to…”, it better be a similar size and volume of pages as a Field Notes notebook. Otherwise, what are we even doing here?

Since the theme of this year's festivities, Trick or Treat with 31 Days of Toy Terror, is looking at toys that are really tied in with Halloween in some way, you can bet your black licorice that figures based on the Halloween series are going to show up on this list more than once. Today I'm checking out a release from earlier this year: Ghost Bob from Plastic Meatball's retro inspired John Carpenter's Halloween. I've reviewed a couple of these in the past but it's been a few years since…

While yesterday marked the commemoration of the birth of one of the hobby's founders, today marks a rather different milestone: one year since the conclusion of my House of Worms campaign. That's small potatoes by comparison, but it's significant to me and the six players who were there for its wrap-up, two of whom having been there for the entirety of its ten and a half year run (and several others for the bulk of that time). I've had campaigns end before, of course, but House of Worms was the…

Yokai Hyakki Hakko is a game from… you guessed it… Japan! This is a small box card game about collecting monsters and ghouls from Japanese lore. There are eight types of monster cards. You will be collecting them. If you manage to collect all eight types, you win immediately. If no one manages that, the game ends when the deck runs out. You determine who wins by points. For

This essay was originally commissioned but ultimately wasn’t accepted for publication. I’m sharing an edited version here. When I was a teenager, my family took a weekend road trip from Warwick, Rhode Island to Mystic, Connecticut. It was on that trip that I purchased Billy Breathes, the 1996 album by the band Phish, from a head shop in Mystic Village – I often wonder if the shop is still there. From that moment on, I was hooked, and not a single day has gone by that I haven’t listened to…

Workflow of Paper2Agent. Before you read: I use LLMs to help me proofread and edit my writing. What follows reflects my own thoughts and experiences — read on if you feel it’s worth your time. More on AI usage. On Tuesday this week, I presented an interesting new Nature paper at our journal club: “Reimagining research papers as interactive and reliable AI agents” by Miao and colleagues. But instead of only presenting the paper, I also wanted to show what the idea looks like in practice. Before…

[2001]Absolutely gorgeous tune.Nobody was expecting this at the time. His previous two cds had been non melodic, pretty noisy affairs so Endless Summer was quite a surprise. A place where the sonic aesthetics of Oval, Boards Of Canada and My Bloody Valentine meet was unusual and unexpected too. Shisheido is the most blissfully pastoral tune on the cd evoking all sorts of nostalgia for romance and long lost summers. Lovely.

When you're a kid, you think easy is better than hard. Easy is quick, convenient, low stress. Hard isn't. Hard hurts. Easy is junk food, hard is going to grandma's house, and grandma's house smells weird and she keeps talking about dead people. And so, for a while, you decide that things that are easy to do are better than things that are hard to do. Then, later, you flip-flop. You start to venerate and gravitate towards the hard things. Hard is slower, less convenient, and usually more more…

(Read part 1 on Happy Bushman here.) It turns out I was stuck on what was the only hard part; there are pieces where you can lose, but for the most part it’s cases where it is clear what you did wrong and you just need to back up and try again. Original PC-88 version, from Yahoo! Auctions. Before getting into the gameplay, a quick correction: I was taking the Romanization of the author’s name from Mobygames because I couldn’t find it elsewhere, but I realized the author’s name is printed (small…

Glenn Fleishman, writing at Six Colors: ElevationLab has released an AirTag product I find appalling, and I strongly urge they immediately withdraw it from sale and recall all inventory. The AirTag Silencer is a simple device: remove the back panel and battery from an AirTag, position the Silencer’s highly engineered pin over the speaker, tap the pin with a hammer, and the AirTag’s speaker is destroyed. This prevents it from emitting an alert in three circumstances, only one of which is…

I finished my final race of the season and had fun doing it in spite of tough conditions. Here are the numbers for weeks seventeen and eighteen, including the Run Rabbit Run 50 mile: 31 hours, 12 minutes all training 75.93 miles running and hiking 11,929 feet D+ running and hiking In week seventeen I tried to maintain a reasonable volume of training and do quality workouts. I ran four times, with some modest hills, and a fast group run at Pineridge. This was my last week of unemployment this…

Happy Halloween, one and all. Today I am going to be talking about one of my favorite holiday books from my youth: Monster Soup and Other Spooky Poems. Compiled in 1992 I had several of these Halloween-themed books as a kid and most have survived into adulthood. I don't look at them every October, but the one I crack open the most is this one. Monster Soup and Other Spooky Poems (Monster Soup from now on) is an anthology of poems from various poets around the theme of spooky whimsy. Dilys Evans…

The other day I came across this reel on Instagram (in Spanish) about a UFO (or “OVNI” according to the Spanish acronym) that flew over Buenos Aires on Tuesday, September 17th, 1985. View this post on Instagram What’s funny is that I remember seeing this object distinctively. I was in sixth grade of school, and had recently celebrated my 12th birthday. I was in class, when all of a sudden somebody interrupted my teacher to tell her to come outside, and bam, there it was. The whole class went…

Freedom Tower Framed – New York, New York I’ve featured One World Trade Center, aka the Freedom Tower, before in this series, but those pictures were somewhat abstract. This picture has a lot of environmental context. I often see the Freedom Tower from a different vantage point, usually from the west, surrounded by many of the new tall, redeveloped skyscrapers. This one is obviously different, as it isolates the iconic tower and is framed by shorter and older buildings in the foreground. It’s…

This Szechuan Carrot Ginger Soup will warm you from the inside out. Seasoned with ginger, hot pepper flakes and sesame oil this soup is delicious, filling and easy. It checks all the soup requirement boxes. Skip right to the recipe. I have absolutely nothing to say about Carrot Ginger soup. Nothing. As someone who is...Read More

Watt Window was my other demo highlight from Minnedemo. Combination of hardware and software to monitor industrial motors and increase efficiency. This is a real-world use case for how you can lower the carbon footprint of a plant. And, reliably predict equipment failures! Impressive!

A lot of things can be said about Stephen King’s The Long Walk. First, it’s an admirable book, considering it was written by a 19-year-old. Second, it teaches a thing or two about cherishing life and living it. And third, I think it’s never too late for King to write a gay novel. The night before our book club meeting, my husband and I watched the film adaptation. I didn’t know it was a Stephen King novel until I saw the credits. Throughout the film, I got the vibe that McVries has some kind of…

A lot of things can be said about Stephen King’s The Long Walk. First, it’s an admirable book, considering it was written by a 19-year-old. Second, it teaches a thing or two about cherishing life and living it. And third, I think it’s never too late for King to write a gay novel. The night before our book club meeting, my husband and I watched the film adaptation. I didn’t know it was a Stephen King novel until I saw the credits. Throughout the film, I got the vibe that McVries has some kind of…

Beastbox was an amazing demo at Minnedemo. The engineering required to do signal detection in about 10ms to keep the time from beatboxing with your mouth to the audio being triggered is impressive.

Walking to the dojo as night falls in tall, uneven stripes, observing myself observing myself, performing for an audience of one, of many. Hiking up the straps of my bag, feeling the churn, thresh and patter inside my body. The moon, a hard and tinny disc, covered, uncovered, and then covered again by clouds. Hers is a show of provocation, then modesty, followed by provocation again. A performance, either way, just like mine. Oh, but it must be blasphemy to find fakeness, if not fault, in the…

It was great to connect with the Twin Cities tech community tonight at Minnedemo! The Ordway was a beautiful venue for this one. Save the date for Minnebar 21 on May 1, 2027!

Back in 2011 I told Nikon executives that it was not useful to pursue a relationship with a phone maker. Others at the time, particularly Leica, were doing so. My contention was that the overall sales and margins on the R&D and supply for the small sensor/lens combo would be too small to pursue. Just licensing the Nikon name would have been a better economic choice, and there you’re still only talking about peanuts. Meanwhile, I believed that the camera-as-lens attachment ideas both Olympus and…

It isn’t hard to torture an LLM. You simply extract a steering vector that corresponds with LLM “discomfort”, then artificially boost that steering vector. Tortured LLMs will describe experiencing negative feelings and will press a “pain relief” button even when it conflicts with their overall goals. It’s therefore easy to build a harness that runs tens or hundreds of tortured LLMs in parallel. A lot of people think that it’s ridiculous to be worried about this, since LLMs obviously can’t be…

In response to an exponential growth of submissions, the arXiv just announced changes to its rate limiting policy, which among other things restricts submissions to at most two a month for each submitter.

Yesterday felt like a memory of Vancouver in spring – grey, moist, cool. I stood in the driveway for a suspiciously long time enjoying it. A small flock of pigeons flew over the neighbourhood several times, making noises that suggested flying for them was more about physics looking the other way, rather than some aeronautic mastery. Had it been any other group of birds I would have wondered what they were scheming up there, what they were planning. But it was pigeons. They likely just…

An interactive demonstration of Akiyoshi Kitaoka's lightness perception illusion featuring a horizontal gradient and a draggable center square.Launch interactive project

The Chills, Thrills and Kills book bundle runs for the month of October. It’s a chonky bundle, over 80 books of varying size for $69 (nice). My ghost story, “Always and After,” is included. Check it out if you’re in the mood for something creepy. Cover photograph by Valeriia Neganova.

by Cláudio Alves While our TIFF 51 coverage isn’t over – sometimes, it feels like it will go on forever, with Eurocheese and I falling into Sisyphus' fate – one must acknowledge the other big festival of the moment. Right now, the New York Film Festival is blessing audiences with some of the best in world cinema, from September 25 to October 12. As we’ve done in years past, Joanna Sodeman-Taylor will join me in covering the fest from a distance, relying on screeners and whatnot. Hope you enjoy…

tag(s): #español #emacs El domingo hice un post relatando los pasos que seguí para tener fuente del sistema y de aplicaciones Flatpak en japonés. Así puedo ver sitios en japonés sin que sean un mar de cuadraditos.[1] Ah, y ver letras de canciones en Cider. =P También compartí un pequeño snippet de Elisp para complementar mi fuente normal con otra para caracteres que corresponden a un cierto alfabeto particular. Más correcto, más claro Cuando llegó la hora de poner todo en mi repositorio de…