I get fan mail, which I think is awesome. Also, in the world we live in, which includes “AI”-generated scams and other phishing expeditions, it’s necessary to set some expectations as to how I handle fan mail and also requests from fans. Here’s how I’m going to manage it going forward. For the purposes of this document, mail from folks I don’t know with general queries (about writing, publishing and other topics) will be handled similarly, even if they are not precisely “fan mail.” 1. I am…

Sponsor support is very important to me here at The Pen Addict. My sidebar advertisers put their faith in me to deliver good value for them month in and month out, and I want to shine the light on the best of the best for you. If you are shopping for pens, paper, inks, and more, please check out these great companies and see what they have to offer. Some recent highlights: Dromgoole’s is now carrying the Menmin Made Ultimate Stationery Bag in Aqua, Black, and Cream. Vanness Pens has all of the…

Lavander goes through phases of digging and we’re happy to encourage it. Then we fill in the hole so she can start over again. Psychotherapy day today, alongside a need to rest, so mostly pottering in the garden. Sister came over to borrow something from the shed so we had a brief catch-up. I mentioned my therapy had moved onto some quite specific family stuff and she reacted in a way I couldn’t quite pin down, so I guess a chat is on the horizon! A friend with Long-Covid emailed about my CFS…

After visiting the Dove a couple weeks back I was pretty keen to get back on the river and try to track down a double figure Barbel, that task ten years ago may have been deemed a simple task but the Dove has had it tough in those intervening years and now a double off here will require some more time, how much time god only knows. On Sunday morning I woke up at 4am and out the door by 0420 after loading the car the evening before, I set about breezing through the 180 miles of tarmac that lay…

Remembering Peasants is an intriguing book. It is a study of peasants and their culture, mainly through a sort of comparative study of Irish, southern Italian and Polish peasants and agricultural communities. Patrick Joyce places himself at the heart of the story - he is a "London-born child of Irish rural immigrant parents" and the book is his "homage to my own".It is both a personal and a

four whole years of website-ing!

The email Back in July, I received an email from a long-time reader of this weblog (allow me to use the old-school spelling, which I always loved), and there was a specific bit that made me go, Hold that thought — I will get back to it. But this past summer has been exceptionally hot and unbearable, and slowed everything down — my response time, my thinking throughput, my work (creative and otherwise), my correspondence, and so forth. I hope my interlocutor has assumed a comfortable position to…

As quite evident by looking at my brand new reading page, I haven't read very much this year. Going forward I will do my very best to finish the books I'm currently reading and find some new exciting books to read. Currently only finished three, the goal is 10!

Some links don’t call for a full blog post, but sometimes I still want to share the good stuff I encounter on the web. ❧ Talking Watches: Pusha T On Why Rolex Is Worth The Wait – Let’s be real, I’m sharing this video mostly for the perfect coffee brand name Pusha T is launching with Lavazza (and promoting in this video). Bonus points if you guessed it. Repairing a 100-Year-Old Camera – Beware, this video will take 60 minutes of your time, and you won’t get those precious minutes back. (via…

As I limped home from Physical Therapy, a man walking in the opposite direction suddenly planted himself directly in front of me and slammed me in the head with a heavy bag. It was a cloth bag, like a backpack with only one strap. I’ve no idea what was inside it : a beat box? a toolbox? Whatever it was, it was heavy and hard and it struck the top and side of my head with stunning force. The man kept walking past me. I said, “Hey! What the fuck?” I’m usually more erudite but my head was buzzing…

CMYK is on a hot streak. Get it? Hot streak? Fine, I’ll just tell you about this other board game. Grabble is a remake of Naoki Fukuda’s Nuts a GoGo!, which probably doesn’t tell you much. Imagine a bunch of people scrambling around a box for mismatched components. Shortly thereafter, they wage a sudden-death competition with their foraged traffic cones, dice, and metal pigs. In and out, five minutes. That’s Grabble. It’s fast, it’s silly, and then it’s over. Unless you play more than once,…

It does not sound particularly sublime: four massive concrete pipes, parked on a crusty desert in rural Utah. They sit at the end of miles of scruffy gravel roads, looking from a distance like abandoned infrastructure left to bake in the sun. But I had traveled nearly 2,000 miles to see them. Two years ago, I was on the edge of the Great Salt Lake visiting Spiral Jetty, Robert Smithson's much photographed work of land art. It is sited in a sublime landscape. The day I was there, the sky was…

I was browsing for stationery news headlines this week when I found an article in Publisher’s Weekly announcing that Barnes & Noble has acquired Levenger. Levenger is a lifestyle brand know for its stationery products, writing instruments and office and desk decor. So I thought it merited a mention on a blog dedicated to desk space. I don’t know what my reaction is though. On the plus side, Barnes & Noble has always had a nice selection of journals and planners in it’s physical stores. I don’t…

Couple of red things today.24 words · 2 images

In case you missed it, and I envy you if you did, Facebook/Meta recently unveiled "Muse," its new AI agent that's supposed to help you do things like craft emails, make dinner reservations, sell products on Facebook Marketplace, and offload mundane tasks to a massive and violently-unethical online ad monopoly. It's real, you know, cutesy, and represented by a cartoonish avatar Meta calls Jolly:These agents, if you've not used them, basically have access to everything on your computer and can…

Agentic coding lets me move very fast. A feature gets built in days. A design gets implemented in a matter of hours. Changing a layout, updating a template, reworking a flow: all of it happens at a speed I couldn’t have imagined a year ago.

It might be possible to create pesticides repellent to honey bees that reduce the accumulation of the sub-lethal chemicals that have a long-term detrimental impact on colony health.

I wrote this song1 in 2018 or 2019 and kind of let it sit ever since. We did fool around with it with a couple of friends, but I figured I'd try my hand at recording another version just to see if I learn anything in the process. For once it didn't take ages: only 3 days. So that's a record set.2 There are some rough edges, but those don't make my ears bleed like they usually do. I'm sure I could spend some more time to polish the arrangement, but I kinda like the quick demo vibe, so here goes:…

First things first, the Kindle is a godsend to me when it comes to reading. Being visually impaired, there is no way I can read for entertainment a regular print book. Even large print ones can be tough, and there is not a good variety of large print available. Maybe I could look into the Free Library for the Blind if that is still a thing. Not only is the selection poor with large print books, but they are also pricier. My favorite kind I had was the paperwhite. That was the easiest to see for…

TL;DR: What started about ten days ago on a whim as an experiment in horizontally scrolling terminals across an ultrawide monitor turned into wideboi—a terminal multiplexer with animated cards, an embedded web UI for phones, a desktop app, and a headless control surface for AI coding agents. This really didn't need to get made, except that I wanted to make it. Overlapping live terminals go zoop zoop zoop The Ultrawide Problem I have an ultrawide monitor on my desk. Most terminal…

Felipe De Brigard, professor of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience at Duke University, principal investigator at the Imagination and Modal Cognition Lab, and core faculty of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences and Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, has been selected as a 2026 Fellow by the MacArthur Foundation. . MacArthur Fellowships, commonly referred to as “genius grants,” come with an $800,000, no-strings-attached award. In the prize announcement, the Foundation says: Felipe De…

After many failed attempts, I am finally comfortable doing all of my computing using Linux. In case you haven't heard, Linux is good now! And yet, I'm back on my Mac...for now. The short version? It's the software. Linux is loaded with pretty good apps, many of them free. Thing is, nearly all of them also run on macOS. This means that on a Mac, I can use all the great macOS software, and most of the great apps I use on Linux.. I've spent the past year recreating the dozens of little workflows…

On capacitors, queues, and the strange conviction that people are the one component in the universe rated for continuous operation at maximumThere is a small, boring, deeply unglamorous act of engineering humility that happens millions of times a day inside the objects you depend on. Somewhere in the phone charger on your desk sits a capacitor stamped 50V. The circuit it lives in never exceeds 30V. Nobody made a mistake. Nobody over-ordered. A grown adult with a degree deliberately paid for 50…

Warner Brothers has finally greenlit its long-gestating Game of Thrones movie. The film will by directed by Owen Harris, written by Beau Willmon and will hit cinemas on 6 June 2029.The film will tell the story of Aegon the Conqueror, the Targaryen warlord who invaded the continent of Westeros with his two sister-wives and their three dragons, and merged the warring Seven Kingdoms into one (apart from Dorne, that's a whole other story). HBO had long mooted whether to adapt this story into a…

We have a nice kitchen vent hood over our range. We had it installed in 2018 as part of our kitchen remodel. I’ve been cleaning out its grease trap from time to time, but I’d never removed the housing and cleaned the actual blower until last week. I didn’t realize I was supposed to until I saw it mentioned somewhere. Wow, that was way overdue. When I got the blower out and could see it clearly, it looked like it was growing fur. Apparently that’s a combination of aerosolized grease, household…

When compiling our giant assembly of clips from the whole I would have to say panoply of silent comedians who followed the Harold Lloyd path of dangling from skyscrapers, which started with Randy Skretvedt’s exhausting but not-claiming-to-be exhaustive list, I was aided immeasurably by the mighty Dave Glass, who has seen everything I haven’t. But […]

In January 1998, a classmate and I wrote a game. It was called “Bolongas zBalls”, and it was a Java applet. You click to start, then move the mouse, without clicking. Touch the dark ball to blow it up, and the next ball turns dark. Clear them all and the next level doubles the number of balls. Touch a plain ball and it spawns another one, so if you’re sloppy, the balls multiply until you lose. Each level has a time limit. The intro music is the theme song from Capitaine Flam, the French version…

Eyewitness Books Witches & Magic-Makers by Douglas Hill, 1997. I always liked the children’s nonfiction Eyewitness Books because of their fascinating historical details and, especially, their pictures. I have to admit that I used this particular book for a college essay about witchcraft trials because, not only did it provide a good beginning overview on the topic but because, for some reason, books intended for adults tend to skimp on or forego pictures entirely. That always bothers me because…

gonna rank from worst to best song ranking system 😇- need to have a looong conversation with whoever made this song 🥹- teared up a little 🥰- i love love love 😊- very good 🙂- good with some issues 🤔- i would let it play in the background ig.. 😪- not feeling it 😠- no this is bad. 😡- this is really bad. 🤬- play this around me and im taking a gun out. for both of us. fire 🤬 IM NOT LISTENING TO THIS. epilogue: young forever 🤬 no seriously what is wrong with these people...heard v's lines and lowk…

Over the summer AWS announced S3 Tables buckets were natively supported by QuickSight (yes, I’m still calling it QuickSight, not Quick). This meant simplifying a process I talked about earlier on using Athena as a middle-layer between QuickSight and S3 Tables when creating data sources. I just got the time to give it a go, and I think the AWS docs could use some clarifying. The S3 docs, Quick docs and the announcement blog all list out slightly different steps for getting started. Here’s a…