An interview with Zach on what influenced my indieweb carnival theme in April 2024.

Morning headlines:another ration of grief.I turn off the screen.The world will keep spinning roundwithout me watching it bleed. Stoical Geezer

Dating back to 1824 when it was a free library founded specifically for tradesmen, the Brooklyn Museum is a magnificent repository of 140,000 pieces of art spanning ancient Egypt to contemporary America. But beneath the museum at the grimy subway stop that takes you directly in front of the Beaux Arts building (which took 29 years to finally complete in 1926) are intentionally placed relics of another kind. Inside the station is an underground mini-museum of salvaged relics—from corbels to…

Marcin Wichary, in the latest post, talked about apps throwing up a splash screen while the rest of the software loads, versus making things fast enough that no splash screen is necessary. Which reminds me something I don’t quite enjoy on iOS. Some apps will launch with an image of the last screen while loading. I’ll start reading what is shown in the image when all of a sudden, boom, a splash screen is shown or a different user interface takes up the screen, surprising me and, sometimes, make…

Sixth Avenue above 14th Street is a hodge-podge stretch of Manhattan, with enormous buildings that once housed the great shopping emporiums of the late 19th century interspersed with seen-better-days walkups. And then there’s this curiosity on the northeast corner of West 16th Street. Just four stories high, with a crowning cornice and a floor-to-ceiling show window across the second story, it’s a tender jewel box that managed to survive intact on this stretch of the former Ladies Mile. If…

Domenicus Monegarius was the sixth doge of Venice, following the deposition and blinding of duke Galla, who in turn had blinded and deposed duke Deusdedit.

Last night, I was having dinner with a group of friends, and the conversation drifted to a hot-button cultural issue. My friend was trying to find the right approach towards a group of people, and he showed us a video, wanting to get our feedback on it. The video was an Instagram reel (or whatever you call Meta's We-Have-TikTok-At-Home) of a "street preacher" publicly rebuking and denouncing a church group because he felt their opinions on a social matter were wrong. I'm not going to get into…

We've just enjoyed the post-TINGS club open day. With a stand at a major show, it seems sensible to follow-up by offering people the chance to visit our not that easy to find clubrooms, in daylight. We lay on tea, cake, and lots of working model railways. All very nice, but it was the team behind our modular project who really pulled out all the stops for this event, with some stunning modelling. All products of the 3D printer, plus an awful lot of work painting and finishing the basic prints.…

One more coffee like that and I'll be as jazzed up as a war boy spraying chrome into his mouth and yelling unintelligibly about Valhalla. (Yes, I've been watching all the mad max movies in order.) #madmax #coffee #film #movies

One of the issues that I have with the current generation of “AI” products is that they do not appear to take their own premises seriously. I look at a plethora of obsequious chatbots claiming to be serious tools for problem solving, and I think, this is not what a problem-solving tool would look like. Even before we get to the tremendous ethical problems with the frontier labs, it is this impression of their composition as a product that makes me feel, constantly, whenever I am interacting…

Klaus Kinski as a wide-eyed, energetic spymaster. Sami Frey as the equally dedicated but dead-eyed terrorist bomber. In between both is New York actress Diane Keaton smuggled in by love to act as a spy for Israeli agents and find the elusive bomber. All of this is shaded through the cold, detached world of a John LeCarre novel that exemplifies my type of spy film. There's a ton of exposition..... acts of kidnapping and play-acting that aren't immediately explained,,, and lengthy scenes of…

Princess! There’s… not really as much backstory to talk about with this one? From what I can tell, It's a game that was originally built as a joke based on, not Madoka, which hadn’t come out yet! That’s how old we’re talking (though the edition I’m reading IS based on Madoka; I’ll explain in a second!), but instead, it was based on a popular fanfiction at the time, Sailor Nothing. Kinda just generic edgy slop, if I’m being honest, not particularly worth reading. Now, the version I’m reading is…

In the capitalist empire, there is no value to be generated by contented people. Our minds must be continually prodded and diddled to manipulate us out of our natural serenity so that we are in a constant state of toil and dissatisfaction, at all times reaching for the next fix of the next product. Clever manipulators have figured out how to generate vast fortunes by harnessing the restlessness they deliberately stir up within us. We are psychologically hammered with advertisements and…

Random thought of the day: Housecats are so much more consistent in size than dogs. I’m not saying there aren’t big chunky cats but they aren’t anything like Chihuahua vs Great Danes. Apparently dogs just were needed for a lot more jobs than cats. Cats were mainly kept for mice so they weren’t selectively bred the same way.

Sorry, you need my email address? Sure, no problem open house real estate agent, clothing store mailing list, or random membership-required website. Hit me up at idontcheckthisaccount @sorryaboutthat.com AWESOME! Sign-up to receive new awesome things each day: Photo from: here The post #584 That one email account you use for all your spam appeared first on 1000 Awesome Things.

If David Heinemeier Hansson’s opening keynote at Rails World 2026 felt like “the most confusing funeral I’ve ever experienced,” Aaron Patterson’s closing keynote was the raucous Irish wake that brought the corpse back to life, handed it a pint, and told everyone to get back to their laptops once they’ve sobered up. The tl;dr table To appreciate how thoroughly Aaron answered DHH, lI put together a table comparing the two keynotes: Metric / Stance DHH Opening Keynote Aaron Patterson Closing…

The special sauce in Echoes of Time is how the cards you play usually only take effect in the future. Every player has a player board that is divided into five time slots. You have tiles on your player board representing the passing of time. When you play a card, it is usually placed on one of these tiles. All the tiles slide right at the start of every round. Cards come

VoxelScope decides whether one outcome-blind MRI source can advance past acquisition and NIfTI geometry checks before GPU inference.

A. Merritt ★★★☆☆ I don’t remember why I downloaded The Moon Pool when I first discovered Standard Ebooks and set about grabbing a bunch of books to read later (as one does). I finally got around to reading it. The opening chapters are moody, creepy horror, set on and around an archaeological site at an isolated Pacific island. The locals refuse to stay during the nights of the full moon, and of course the white archaeologists want to know why, and find the secret door, and the hidden pool, and…

unbearable

On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all. ▰ Drumcorps (aka Aaron Spectre) has been bashing together drum’n’bass and metal and whatever happens to be in his spam folder for at least 20 years now (my first item on him is from October 2006), churning out head-banging glitchmetal, or grindcore, or breaknoise, or whatever amalgam…

today i lit exactly 6 sticks of incense i had 2 meals and a snack i drank coffee and the air feels fresh i went outside three times and spun a hula hoop around for 5 minutes and drank 8 cans of diet root beer i charged every device i owned read part of a book read part of a visual novel worked on a piece of art and listened to three mixtapes

i miss being animals and running in the park and nuzzling my face into your hair and laying in the sun with you afterwards; not that we ever have but... i miss the future where we did 🤍

Today I read an article explaining why it is that many New Zealanders' experience of inflation feels worse than the headline numbers might suggest it should feel. Very topical, since there's an election coming and the cost of living is a big, big issue. And in this article we see how an increase in the cost of living can be quite different from an increase in prices generally (inflation). The gist of the article is that although wages and salaries have grown a little more than the overall price…

We just celebrated my son's 6th birthday. We somehow made it work despite our family situation right now. We visited a dinosaur-themed park and booked a hotel for one night. The birthday boy seemed happy with his day and the whole extended family also had fun. It was funny that my son wanted to go to a dinosaur park but was not really fond of dinosaurs. He was scared of the large robot dinosaurs at first, but got used to them as the tour went on. One of the memorable moments from the trip…

The STOC conference (and likely others) are requiring that a submission says how much AI was used. I can imagine the following options:1) AI was used for proofreading and tightening prose (I think in this case you do not need to disclose).2) AI was used to shorten the proofs.3) I came up with the questions but AI supplied all of the answers. However, I have read it and take responsibility for the content.4) AI came up with the questions and AI supplied all of the answers. However, I have read…

On this day (28 September) in 1821, Juan José Espinosa de los Monteros, secretary of Mexico’s newly-created “Provisional Governmental Board” (the first governing body of independent Mexico that administered the country from 28 September 1821 until 24 February 1822), drafts the Acta de Independencia del Imperio Mexicano (Declaration of Independence of the Mexican Empire; pictured below), the founding document by which Mexico declared independence from the Spanish Empire.

This one is for the fellow sceptics. There are hundreds of free online tools to remove password protections from PDF. I’m not able to trust them with bank account statements and private files. I used to pay for an app to do just this. But a few months ago, it got infected by AI fever. I looked around the internet, and it turns out there is an open-source tool for that. Meet pdfcpu. You can download it from GitHub or get it from Homebrew: brew install pdfcpu It can do a lot of PDF operations,…

Credit: Photo by the author The Blåhaj Rocket 2026-09-28T03:29:00+00:00, by Emma Humphries, from Infinite Wishes 🏳️‍⚧️🚀 I’m not going to explain the thing about IKEA’s blue stuffed shark toy. There’s a lot of text, some of it written by actual people, on it. I’d bought a second Launch Lab Bullet Bobby XXL kit1 because the parachute on my first one failed to deploy2 and had landed hard at a farm outside of Fresno. The hard landing broke a fin and put a dent in the airframe.3 Rather than…

Everybody knows I like Halloween. It's my favourite holiday next to Christmas and Taco Tuesdays. Halloween is only a few weeks away. Eep. Here are my very Art of Doing Stuff picks for the season. A couple of years ago I couldn't find an appropriately creepy doormat in stores or online so I made this...Read More