The thinker, traveller, and writer Ivan Illich, who was always hoping for a surprise, had a unique—some might say impenetrable—way of writing, and perhaps if he’d been clearer he’d have had more influence. Although, it’s also possible that clarity might have reduced his influence: he was always hovering on the edge of mysticism. “When I speak in metaphors,” Illich says, “I engage in a deviant discourse; I am alert to my special, odd, startling combination of words. I know that I cannot be…

Lady of Rain came to the Justice Hall bearing unhappy tidings. She told Wise Vengeance that some of his folk had stolen food from her farms. She gave him demands, these people must be apprehended and sentenced. He told his sister the guilty would find themselves pressed by his justice. Wise Vengeance summoned his People to meet together in Justice Hall. The People knew not why they assembled. Why came Lady of Rain here? Wise Vengeance thanked them for their attendance and gestured to his…

digiKam with some of my drone photos. My typical photo editing process is the MacOS Photos app for managing the library, then Photomator for editing, or Pixelmator Pro for more involved edits. If I’m on my phone, I’ll use Photomator for iOS. When I tested out NixOS I installed it onto my specifically-for-Linux-testing ThinkPad, which I’ve been using to try out some Linux photo editors. digiKam DigiKam seems to mostly be a photo library management system with basic editing capabilities. For…

One of my earliest projects is also one of my most popular: Beautiful Web Type. The original was built over one weekend in 2012, based on my hunch that there were high-quality open-source typefaces in Google Fonts, they just needed to be hunted down amidst the lower-quality ones. The original version went to the top of Hacker News, got me a private email of praise from a famous type designer, and plenty of recruiting interest from Silicon Valley. I did a refresh in 2018, but have mainly let it…

Today’s TDC says Remember, remember the fifth of November, Gunpowder treason and plot. We see no reason Why gunpowder treason Should ever be forgot! Do something to celebrate bonfire night. So here’s some fireworks:

I’m on my way back from RustLab 2026, where I gave a lightning talk about all the ways to create a String in Rust that don’t involve String::new. The talks were not recorded, so I decided to write it up as a blog post. Collect Some Characters One of the most obvious ways to create a string without calling String::new is to collect some characters into a string: let ferris: String = ['f', 'e', 'r', 'r', 'i', 's'] .into_iter() .collect(); Alternatively, you can start with the UTF-8 bytes: let…

Early morning A41. Love the glow! (Color again… this won't be a trend, I promise.)

It’s actually quicker now to make changes to my weblog’s functionality using Claude Code than finding, installing, and understanding WordPress plugins. No security issues either, it’s all flat files on the server. 🦾 🥳

Rugged seastacks in the Pacific Ocean surf at Northern California’s Gleason Beach. The post Norcal Coast appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

If you love a website, back it up By the way, for disclosure: the tools I’m going to mention in this blog post are made by the company I work for, but that’s not because they’ll pay my salary (most of them are free!). I just happen to think these are the best tools there are for personal web archiving. 😎 Note: I’ve started exploring the tools mentioned in the blog post. The free tools (Options 1 & 2) require manually browsing the site to be archived, and they both do the job. Option 3, which is…

The next document in my sample of Adam Smith letters is Order #134, which is dated __ Dec. 1784 (the day is cut off from my copy of this document) and is signed by Adam Smith (top signature), Basil Cochrane (middle), and David Reid (bottom). This order involves a disputed bounty on contraband gin (“Geneva”) as well as a series of decade-old expenditures made to three customs officers at the Port of Inverness: [*] “The Solicitor having by his Memorial of the 29th of September 1770, laid before…

Aka: Thank you, citizens, for going out there and voting, especially if you voted against fascism. My own personal life is still a fuggen wreck right now, but the giant sigh of relief I let out when I saw the election results come in was massive. It's not over. It's not over until every fascist is gone and all people are fed and housed and taken care of, and even then we must remain vigilant so as to not slide backwards. But for now, take a breath. Relax. And then, when you can, get back up and…

It's now been 266 days - 38 weeks exactly - since our house was damaged by a flash flood and we had to evacuate. I'd love to say that things are progressing rapidly towards a time when we can return home... but sadly, that's not the case. Today the builders are on-site installing doors and skirting boards: work that was planned to happen after other not-yet-started jobs that are holding everything up. There are two specific problems1 that make our chances of being home by Christmas look…

Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Ageby Eleanor BarracloughGenres: History, Non-fiction Pages: 384 Rating: Synopsis: A new and original history of the Viking Age, told through the objects that defined the lives of its people - from powerful leaders to naughty teenagers Imagine a Viking, and a certain image springs to mind: a nameless, faceless warrior, leaping ashore from a longboat, and ready to terrorise the hapless local population of a northern European country. Yet while…

Bild: Die S-Bahn-Brücke Zeppelindamm: Beidseitig mit Mehrzweckstreifen und mit Radverkehr. Es könnte so einfach sein: Straßen.NRW ersetzt die baufällige S-Bahn-Brücke 1:1 durch eine neue. Im Idealfall wäre die neue Brücke etwas breiter als die alte. Statt dessen entscheidet Straßen.NRW willkürlich und ohne jede Absprache mit der Stadt Bochum und natürlich ohne jede Beteiligung der Betroffenen: Die Brücke bekommt nur auf einer Seite einen gemeinsamen Geh- und Radweg. Hier entfallen die…

Since I wrote about it, I kept thinking about the topic of webmentions, quoting, embedding, screenshotting, and the overall idea of connecting content on the web. The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced this is two issues wrapped into one, and I suspect there’s no way to perfectly resolve the tension that exists at the core. The first issue is a technological one or how do we make sure content that is related can get connected in a way that’s convenient and can scale across million of…

There's been quite a lot of wallowing about the state of the internet lately. The internet is apperantly rapidly getting worse, and if possible we should search for a alternative, whatever that would be. I don't really get this sentiment, and I think it's because I'm a bit of a zoomer. The internet has always been corporatized and kinda shitty. I do remember surfing the web in the 00's, and that time was quite swell. Things weren't so serious, and I never even thought about the financial…

It’s not the usual sort of venue I’ve seen him at over the years but one of the function rooms in the rather plush surroundings of the Mount Country Manor Hotel on the outskirts of Wolverhampton is the setting for the official launch event for Dave Hill’s first ever solo album, Dirty Foot Lane. With a mix of music and chat, Hill is questioned by TV presenter and long-time Slade fan, Nick Owen, together with a specially-assembled band playing a selection of songs from the album and an old Slade…

They literally don’t build them like they used to. The future used to be faster: celebrate the art and style of Concorde‘Supersonic – 50 Years of Concorde’ is a one-off exhibition that puts the dramatic airliner back in the spotlightwww.wallpaper.com

Burn All GIFs-day was 27 years ago Today is the 27th anniversary of Burn All GIFs-day. Burn All GIFs-day On November 5 1999, Burn All GIFs day, people were asked to delete their GIF files. The LZW algorithm that made GIFs possible was actually under patent. The patent was owned by a company called Unisys Corp. The problem that caused the Burn All GIFs-day was a sudden requirement to pay a royalty for using an patented algorithm that made GIF possible. On A Brief History of the GIF, From Early…

Here’s a chunk from the caching chapter of OpenZFS Mastery. The ARC surrenders memory readily upon request, but freeing memory doesn’t happen instantaneously. While the process of releasing memory from the ARC has been accelerated in recent OpenZFS, it will always take longer than allocating free memory. On a host with a very large ARC, dumping gigabytes of objects from the cache might take a measurable fraction of a second. Depending on your host’s purpose you might need to restrict the ARC’s…

Image was taken with a Fujifilm X-T5 and XF 70-300 WR lens

We recently took a short train break around the Highlands: it was a great trip to a beautiful area we’d not visited before. When we travel, we carry medication that has to be kept cool. It can survive some period out of refrigeration, but generally needs to be kept at fridge-like temperatures. We were travelling on the Caledonian Sleeper: for anyone unfamiliar, it’s an overnight train that runs between London and various locations in Scotland. One of the great things about long-distance trains…

From iPads and vertical monitors to good mattresses, post-meal walks, and Facebook Marketplace, here are 10 everyday things I think live up to the hype.

A light overview of the book and my thoughts at the end. Last night, I finally finished Queering the Asian Diaspora by Hongwei Bao. I bought this book in London at Housmans Bookshop, known for their radical and progressive publications. Queering the Asian Diaspora by Hongwei Bao, published in 2025. The title was what attracted me. As someone who identifies with all of the above, the book felt like a must-read. I began reading early in the year and thought I would finish fairly quickly as the…

I ran out of time yesterday, or perhaps it would be more correct to say that time got away from me. I planned to write more about the election, of course. I planned to write about my online classes; the curriculum/tech/assessment experts revamped the class, and there have been surprises, like the video students posted instead of a written discussion post, which worked surprisingly well, except for how much longer it took me to grade them.What I posted just after midnight as election day passed…

Jen, la antaŭeniro. Fek al faŝismo. Usono vekiĝas de sia febra sonĝo. #lang_eo #esperanto #usono #usa #unitedStates #politics #uspol #politko #politkoj #meme #memes #memeo #memeoj #malcolmInTheMiddle #usmidterms

Since I’ve already said plenty on this subject, this time I’m just going to leave you with a link to a collection of earlier essays; remind you that all government is at best a necessary evil rooted in the idea that might makes right; and point out that there is absolutely nothing “conservative” about the current regime, and nothing “liberal” about the so-called opposition party.

A few things lend a particularly zeitgeist-y heft to this Graun essay about “cellular agriculture”, better known (perhaps to its due detriment) as “lab-grown meat”. One of those things is, of course, its being very much of a piece with the more general trend of disillusionment with regard to the brash promises of technological progress to be delivered by venture capital; that it has been (re)published in the immediate aftermath of the striking volte face of the US midterms serves only to…