My glaze of “Iron Man”.
Scribed by Sandre the Giant Released: 10th June 1986 Rediscovering earth-shaking debut records is the bread and butter of the Anniversary Series, and few shook as much earth in the doom genre as Swedish icons Candlemass, and their ‘Epicus Doomicus Metallicus’ debut from 1986. An album whose name you’ll never forgot, paired with songs that once you hear you’ll never forget, this was a real epoch altering record. Forty years later, this is still an album that resonates deeply within the doom…
A few days ago I suddenly developed an impressive case of laryngitis — utterly painless, but incredibly annoying — which I attributed to a change in my medications (a huge increase in the dosage of the steroid prednisone). And so it might have been. Then after breakfast this morning (around 4:30 am) I was visited by the unmistakable intestinal symptoms of cryptosporidiosis, crypto for short — notably uncontrollable watery diarrhea, dammit. Some days earlier, when a widespread US outbreak of the…
From volume IV of On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle: The world is not a calm sea, where all you have to do is refrain from rocking the boat… The world is a rocking boat, a ship in a storm, and when you’re capsized, that’s why. Because the world is a place that throws you overboard.
On our way to Porto, Portugal 🇵🇹 by way of Amsterdam. ✈️
Sally Sax, writing for the Association of Research Libraries: Twenty-five years after the US copyright office’s first DMCA review, libraries operate in an increasingly non-competitive digital information environment. A lack of digital ownership rights remains a critical barrier to libraries serving their missions as memory institutions. The closest libraries can get to ownership of commercial digital content is a perpetual access license (PAL), and the marketplace may be deciding that PALs are…
Review by Sandre the Giant Released: 26th June 2026 I hadn’t realised it had been three years since the first record from Costa Rican death metallers Astriferous, and ‘Pulsations from the Black Orb’ was a firm favourite of mine (check out my review of it here) from that year, but apparently time is a flat circle and we’ve had to wait all that time for a follow up. Well, Astriferous are back with ‘Atavistic Unraveling’, an album ready to test the psychic bounds of your mind once again with its…
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai and Zack Whittaker, TechCrunch: Under current U.S. hacking laws, a human can face criminal charges for breaking into someone else’s computer without permission. But when an AI agent autonomously hacks into a company’s computers, determining who is liable is much murkier. The surprise admissions by OpenAI and Anthropic that their unreleased AI models autonomously hacked into several companies have upended our understanding of America’s computer hacking laws,…
The main tool I use for to write this blog is vim (specifically Neovim. “Vim” at this point is not really a particular program, but a clade of software.) I have been using it for many years now, so this is not surprising. What is surprising (to me) is that I do not write (or at least draft) more posts by hand. I like writing by hand. I have quite a collection of analog writing instruments and I certainly am looking for ways to justify that. I have fountain pens, I have typewriters, I have far…
Have you attended a theatre or cabaret show in Paris? We, sadly, have not. That was something we missed on a trip to Paris many years ago, even though there was much else to enjoy. We were reminiscing about that trip the other day when we re-watched the Doris Day musical April in Paris (1952). Day stars as a chorus … Continue reading →
Posting these things is a hostage negotiation. This stuff I'm making this week has been a for real internal battle. These things so rarely look like what I think they will and only sort of feel like I want them to feel when I look at them. There are naught but a dark council of internal dreads, with increasing sharpness and derision, just laying into me as I scratch and scratch and scratch. It's loud in here. The voices have more stamina than is reasonable for being as old as I am. The shitty…
This was a trip to see family we hadn’t seen in awhile and meet a new baby niece. I didn’t get too many non-family photos in South Dakota but we did go to an indoor butterfly hatchery and habitat that was a hit with our toddler who got them to land on her finger. Then we stopped by to see the Sioux Falls downtown and checked out a nearby fair. Missoula, MT# Missoula was fairly smoky when we were there due to nearby wildfires. The night we got there we checked out another fair and watched a dirt…
I discovered today that my blog post from yesterday didn't post automatically to my Mastodon account—which I assumed was due to an error made. But instead, I found out that Robb Knight's EchoFeed is shutting down. The reasons he lists for discontinuing the service make a lot of sense, but it still makes me sad. Not because of the service I'm losing, but because EchoFeed was one of the first IndieWeb projects I came across after joining omg.lol, and it has always worked effortlessly for me.…
Zsh glob qualifiers can select files by many built-in attributes: type, size, modification time, and more. But when no built-in qualifier fits, you can bring in the e or + qualifiers to run arbitrary code, making globs a fully programmable file filter. With great power comes great responsibility! The e syntax looks like this: extend your glob, like *, with (e:'CODE':), replacing CODE with your Zsh code to run. : is an arbitrary delimiter, and the quoting is needed to stop Zsh from expanding…
We chatted about chicken tenders, Madonna's new album, short shorts, and municipal water systems before going through his stack of sketchbooks...Currently Listening: Madonna & Lola Leon “The Test”Reply via email
Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash🍕 I’m JA Westenberg. I write essays about technology, philosophy, productivity, and what it means to be human. If you like ideas that take their time, you’re in the right place.While you’re here, a few things I’ve built: Kerouac, a writing app | Post Through It, a solo microblogging tool | Distributism.ai, my MCP platform | Laterware, all the AI news you need | Studio Self, a thought leadership agency for founders x VCs.You can buy my book Permissionless…
The Last Museum, according to the website’s “About” page, is a search engine for museum art. It features a searchable database of over 5 million artworks, and intends to grow well beyond that. You can choose sections like “Artists”, “Museums” or “Cultures” and search from there, or simply enter any terms in the general search box. It may be difficult to see in my small screen capture above, but it’s the returns on a page for which I’ve searched for “landscape”, and then used their date filter…
The first recording today starts with the end of Jakers: The Adventures of Piggley Winks. There’s a trail for Dani Day. Then it’s Shaun the Sheep – Fetching. Bitzer does a bit of frisbee fetching. It goes over the wall, and Bitzer notices an attractive dog next to a tent next door. He uses the frisbee to have an excuse to get closer. They get friendly. But while he’s distracted, the sheep spot their chance, and with the farmer away, they invade the house. Shaun brings Bitzer back to sort them…
Magical musical musings care of the marvellous John Matthews. Music To Watch Seeds Grow By is an ambient imprint, curated by Ran$om Note’s Wil Troup and Tia Cousins, that aims to provide a soundtrack to gardening, plant cultivation and to assist in unwinding the mind. To quote Tia from an interview with Ban Ban Ton Ton’s Kristen Caryl, “I was given a lot of seeds for my birthday, so that became a hyperfixation for a while. I get really excited seeing the seeds sprout for the first time and even…
Nota bene: Today’s post contains the next installment of my multi-part review of Adam Smith’s 1784 pamphlet Additions and Corrections to the First and Second Editions of Dr. Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. We revisited Adam Smith’s brief history of the Royal African Company in my previous post. Today, we will review Smith’s survey of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which appears in paragraph 21 of the last part of his 1784 pamphlet (Smith 1784, pp. 62-63).…
To list all files in your repository as they were at a given commit, use git ls-tree with its -r and --name-only options: $ git ls-tree --name-only -r <commit> Replace <commit> with any commit reference: a SHA, a branch name, a tag like above, a relative reference like @~ (the commit before last), and so on. For example, in a repository documenting puppy breeds: $ git ls-tree --name-only -r v1.0 README.md hound/beagle.md hound/dachshund.md pastoral/corgi.md sporting/golden-retriever.md…
(updated: 7 Aug 2026) As part of Code Trek, I just created 2 user scripts for Hacker News: HackerBrain – pulls comments into a sidebar for any item of interest. HackerTrain – shows an expandable ladder/train of newest best comments. As “new and unique ways to view static content dynamically on webpages” I reckon these scripts are presently still patentable – sort of like how infinite-scrolling could have been patented, but wasn’t due to the early proliferation of the user experience, whereby:…
On holiday in Algeria, I've been going frequently to some coastal rocks called əṣ-Ṣṭuħ الصطوح, from the plural of ṣṭəħ صطح "flat terrace roof", and occasionally eating šṭiṭħa شطيطحة "stew". I haven't done any dancing (šṭiħ شطيح) - not really my thing. But if I go into the mountains where they speak Kabyle, I might hear someone call something aməšṭuħ (amecṭuḥ) "small"; if they ask me whether I understand, I might reply šiṭṭuħ kan (ciṭuḥ kan) "just a little." Can all these words be…
I have been writing about the limitations of audits and compliance systems for several years. In Accountability and Transparency in Modern Systems, I wrote about systems producing evidence continuously rather than assembling it periodically for an auditor. In First Principles for Root Store Management, I looked back at the decision to require WebTrust for publicly trusted CAs and argued that, if we were designing the system today, much more of the trust decision should be based on continuously…
Flying Saucer A light suspended from the ceiling over a dining table. Quote of the Day ”Fashion is the performance of leisure.” Thorstein Veblen Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Richard Wagner | Prelude to Lohengrin | Simon Rattle Link Mesmerising. Long Read of the Day The Heated Debate In Europe Over Air Conditioning Given the heat dome that we have been living in, this essay by Nathan Gardels is interesting and timely. Recently, Elon Musk stirred controversy across a sweltering…
Click here to book for The Gentle Author’s tours . In 1930, basketmaker and artist Henry Silk sits alone in his sparsely furnished room in Rounton Rd in Bow surrounded by few personal possessions. He glances in the mirror and realises that he is no longer young. Yet the pair of medals from the Great War laid on the table remind him how lucky he is to be alive. He wakes in the camp bed in the early morning and the empty green room is flooded with light as dawn rises over the rooftops of the East…
Had an errand in Downtown and wasn't going to meet up with a friend until later in the day, so after my errand I got back on the bus and then got off in KaimukiWanted to see this street artAnd checked out The Local General Store to have a little something until I met up with my friendI tried their everything twist: creamed leeks, herbs & cheddar schmear topped with everything seasoning (their
From Marton Barcza at TechAltar, a good 12-minute video analyzing what went wrong with the famed Live Tiles that Microsoft was pushing throughout most of the 2010s: Now, among Windows Phone fans the pervasive opinion is that Live Tiles have failed because Microsoft did a poor job with them, which I think is at least partially true – after all, even many key Microsoft apps like Skype had broken Live Tiles half the time, the Windows 10 start menu was filled by Microsoft with Live Tiles that were…
Likening customer service to purgatory is extreme but it feels like it some days so I'm working with the melodrama. For many reasons, I'm in a much better situation than most. Still, this line of work can't be my life forever. At least, when I leave, I can say that the way I view customer-facing workers has shifted drastically. For the better. Don't get me wrong, sometimes they suck, sometimes I myself will withhold help because I've been pissed off or I don't have the energy to attempt the…
I’ve never actively tracked this or cared to, but if I were to nominate my favourite and most cited quote of the year, it would have to be: “The purpose of a system is what it does (not what it claims to do).” — Stafford Beer I’m obsessed with this quote, and people have started to get that here he goes again look on their face when I say it. My obsession is due to how that statement informs my thinking and how I increasingly view the world around me. Broken or built that way? Before coming…
