I’m really excited to try this one. The last two of these varieties have been incredibly good – the balance of cheese has been really quite nice. How’s this one gonna go? Read on. Otoki Stir-Fry Cheesy Ramen Spicy Chili & Cheddar – United States Detail of the packaging (click to enlarge). Looks to be meat free but check for yourself. To prepare, add room temp water to line and microwave 4m30s at 1000W. Add in liquid and powder bases. Finally, stir and enjoy! Detail of the lid (click to…

273 days of photos, one every day

An ongoing series A very zen, oddly inspiring video showing how Blackwing pencils are made. A fun digital collage maker that pulls in magazine and public domain images you can clip and assemble. Explore 20 years of characters, passing obsessions, and everyday life through kids’ drawings. Two stories about Terrence Malick going to extremes to achieve verisimilitude in his movies. Use Bastardica to mix two different fonts into truly based combinations.

In the Maghreb, in that area of Northern Africa so frequently contested and conquered by a succession of empires, there are a number of fortified cities built to withstand such invaders. But cities of any size and age in the region will have a walled section called the Medina (اَلْمَدِينَة), or the Old Medina, an Arabic word with a simple meaning: “the city.” The Medinas are the ancient, beating hearts of the Arab world, the stone walls and open atria and dark narrow passages we might imagine…

As part of writing Stay SaaSy we speak with and advise a fair number of startups, and one of the most common topics of conversation is how many people they should hire. The most important factor to consider when expanding a team is that the usefulness of incremental hires is not linear. Sometimes an additional person helps a lot. Sometimes they don’t help at all, due to structural overlap or the quality of the hire (and keep in mind that for some roles, quality is much less reliable). The key…

Recently I wrote about how we use Jev in There There to detect spam, bounces, and automatic replies. Jev reads an incoming email and answers questions we define up front. We keep the probabilities and decide in our own code what counts as a match. The cheap checks on mail headers still run first. That post ended with a promise that we'd find more uses for Jev. Here are two we have since added to There There: smart conditions for workflows, and automatic assignment to a team or person.…

Another lousy day with showers. Lou and Less came. Brought Dot and Jane with them and went back about 4.30. Had a nice day with Jane. Stayed in at night.

Well, I guess I’m a glutton for punishment, but here we are with round three. Some time back, I did a review of the first two Alchemy Press Book of Pulp Heroes volumes. And I was a bit disappointed. Well, a lot disappointed. I was very much on the fence about whether I was going […]

There are a couple of inventions that have made my lived experience less pleasant, and I'm not talking about smartphones or AI.The first is the telephone answering machine. Prior to the answering machine, if you wanted to talk to me, you had to keep calling until I answered. The moment I got my first answering machine, people started asking, "Why didn't you return my call?" Suddenly, the onus of making contact could be placed on me by anyone at anytime, even by people I had no desire to speak…

I have been sitting on this one for a little bit. But when you see why, you will understand.So it is my pleasure to announce another upcoming book: Advanced Mystics & Mentalists.The art is by Eugene Jaworski. The same artist as my upcoming Witch book.As you can see this new book will be a companion to my Advanced Witches & Warlocks. I have been sitting on this image for a bit. The subject is "Morgan Highstar," but he is really my old DM, R. Michael Grenda. I want him on the cover because while…

You wanna know something? I think everyone should learn to program. I don’t mean using some, the word I usually use is cockamamie, “AI,” that will produce brittle, inefficient, unmaintainable code if it doesn’t mess it up, but actually code. I think most of the difficulty with coding is actually in the languages. Woe betide the person trying to learn to program in C++ from scratch these days. C is much better, but still obtuse. Python is better, but also not great for systems or performance…

Last December, I gave a talk at EmacsConf 2025 called “Zettelkasten for Regular Emacs Hackers”. I announced it back then, but never pointed to the recording. Here it is. Zettelkasten for Regular Emacs Hackers, EmacsConf 2025 (23 minutes) The pitch: writing improves the quality and depth of thought, and a Zettelkasten is an environment for thinking through writing, not merely a place to store notes. Nobody can hand you a finished thinking environment the way they can hand you an email client.…

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a somewhat earnest post warning about some of the difficulties you can encounter when using the dplyr::ntile() function to construct quantile-based groups in R. I was somewhat pressed for time, but still wanted to follow my usual practice of including “interstitial” graphics, which I usually do by repurposing my own hand-written generative art code to create nice looking horizontal separators. As I said, I was pressed for time, so rather than using my own code, I…

I read a post recently (Domains Cost More, Blogs Disappear) about personal sites going quiet. The owners don’t announce they’re done. One day, the site just returns a 404. The author wondered if it came down to burnout, social media, hosting costs, a lack of readers, or an aging community. They guessed many people still blogging are over 40, but called that an observation, not a finding. I went looking for data. Some of the hunch holds up. Some of it hasn’t been measured. Pew Research looked at…

Despite my best efforts to prevent it, another month has come and gone. Here’s all the cool stuff I’ve found since… well, if we’re being honest, it probably includes content since August, since I never did the August version of this post. I just be like that I guess. I was looking into the abbot of a zen temple that’s near enough to where I live to matter and I found an old article he wrote for Lion’s Roar about the Five Remembrances. Dominic Szablewsky of Phoboslab made an N64 Game called…

My kingdom for a horse . . .This comes from Shakespeare’s King Richard III when he said, “A horse, a horse. My kingdom for a horse.”I suppose a horse would be of great use, or perhaps this might come at a greater expense. But more, I suppose wealth and cost is all relative when it comes to the different levels of supply and demand.And yes. Of course!I have my own demands, but perhaps now is not the time for to express them. I think about myself and then of course, I think about my old and…

Snapkin went live in the App Store on September 24th. It got there on the sixth submission. The first five came back rejected, with seven different reasons between them. 😅

8699/21618My last day of filming on Zak The Ripper with a call time of 8am. I had fancied that I could make this if I had stayed in Htichin and got a very early train, but the production had wanted me there for sure, hence my night of haute cuisine in the Premier Inn.I was picked up and taken to a remote cottage. As I was being driven up the track to the location I wondered if this whole project had been an elaborate plan to kidnap me and maybe/hopefully turn me into some kind of sex slave.

“we are not hedonists, and were not created merely for our own happiness or pleasure”

[City] were similar to Abramovich’s Chelsea or even Sheikh Mansour’s City. In the eyes of many, they were a side with ‘no history’ that had appeared from nowhere to challenge the establishment. City in 1905, by a City fan.

I’ve decided to make a code drop release of nihav-movrender just for the completeness sake. If you look at nihav.org you should be able to find its git bundle among the rest. One of the hardest parts was to create some documentation for it, so I’ve put something into README.md, hopefully that will be enough for all zero people who want to try it. Essentially if you provide it with the name of input MOV file and output directory it will try to decode the former and create some files in the…

Sunny and still at mid-morning, with backlit leaves at the woods’ edge looking even yellower than they are. The throb of a distant engine. Squirrel teeth chiseling open a walnut. A common yellowthroat pipes up.

Sendgrid is bad at spending their marketing money

And Nissan huts – home for my family when they reached Australia (before my time, was exploring some in the Cantonment of Barrackpore recently though) Bardot with Marston Mats Mưa đỏ: Still more Marston Mats Marston Mats Tank Mats 1945 Mats Matty Mats One more on Marston Mats (perhaps my favourite so far because of the Melbourne Demons’ Keith “Bluey” Truscott link) More marston mats Elemental structures of memory: Marston Mats in Vietnam and beyond – preprint

Latest collection of essays.By David SedarisRating: 3.5 / 5.I’ve enjoyed reading Sedaris’s essays since a roommate turned me onto them in college, so I was eager to dive into these for reliable wit and laughs. While there were some hilarious and surprisingly touching moments in this latest book, I found myself less charmed than I have been reading past stories. I’m not sure whether that has more to say about me or these essays. Still, there were plenty of lines I delighted in and could hear him…

Productivity content is pretty fun. It’s really enjoyable to watch people build elaborate systems in which they can track absolutely every aspect of their lives, plan every day to the minute, and achieve their wildest dreams. At least, that’s what I used to think. Now, I think of myself as a recovering productivity enthusiast. I went deep into the pit and climbed out the other side. And now, when I see someone making content about their beautiful, elaborate productivity system, alarm bells…

Here’s a round-up of some news from the last couple of months. Mathematical discoveries Lerch primes are defined as odd primes that divide their Lerch quotients (obviously) and until now we only knew four of them existed. This month, Veljko Vranić has found the fifth Lerch prime: it’s 42,447,347, if you were wondering. (via the SeqFan mailing list) Ruslan Mizhaev has written about an octahedron of genus 3 which is equivelar (all vertices have the same degree and all faces the same number of…

I am sorry that the blogroll has disappeared. I had been meaning for some time to update it and strip out the dead links. When Astronony Picture of the Day changed its web address I decided I would at least update that one. So I did, and found that the entire list had gone. Some research suggested that WordPress has changed its policies so that you can’t put such a list as a widget on the sidebar if you are on a free plan. So my apologies if you found this list useful and are wondering what…

Michael writes about blogs disappearing due to rising costs in domains and I agree with him that this is an ongoing issue. My previous blog was available at antoniosantos.io and the primary reason I moved to this domain was the .io TLD renewal price increasing to over $51 dollars. That was just way too much to pay for a single domain when there are cheaper options available. I don't plan on renewing antoniosantos.io so unfortunately when the renweal period comes, that blog is disappearing. I…

It began with a bloom, Florissantia quilchenensis, its petals splayed across a creamy, beige-brown matrix like a fossilized whisper from a warmer world. This precious bloom was hard-earned. Covered in dust and sweat, I grinned and held this elusive beauty to the light to take in its exceptional preservation and dusty beauty!It was day three of my travels. I was hiking the hills around the