The Googlebook is available for pre-order today. I gave the product page a look out of curiosity spawned from the hand-wavy announcement at Google I/O earlier this year. Seems like the final product is just as meaningless as the announcement was. There are three key points Google decided to focus on: Hardware: Crafted for performance Intelligence: Designed for Gemini Intelligence Better together: Synced effortlessly with your Android phone. It all strikes me as taking a Chromebook then taking…

Here's Sally wondering if using AI is ruining her brain. Her main point is that the more we outsource to the machines, the less we'll be capable of doing in the future. It's sad but true. There's a little nugget in this post that I think about every day. Sally enjoys knitting, and this part hits home: I like using my brain and my hands and figuring out solutions to problems. It feels amazing to respond to “I like your sweater” with “THANKS I MADE IT ALL BY MYSELF”. So! Much! This! Putting in…

Finished reading: Elite Capture by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò 📚 Clear-eyed and constructive. I zipped through this on a few flights and felt enriched by my reading for the first time in a while.

All too often on my computer, I’ll finish typing something, reach for my mouse, and have no idea where the cursor has got to. Not on the monitor I was looking at. Possibly on the laptop screen, but I’d have to turn my head and check. So I do what I always do, shake the mouse until macOS inflates the cursor to the size of a dinner plate, and carry on. I wondered at first whether this was a problem with my eyes. I’ve had two pairs of glasses for a couple of years now, one of them purely for…

The first batch of ward-by-ward election zines are folded and ready for distribution, with some already on their way to wards across the city. We hosted a zine folding party at Cre:8 on Saturday, September 19, 2026 and got to work folding approximately 50 copies of each ward zine. That's around 1200 sheets of paper folded into 1200 zines! The turnout was so amazing and a few folks brought snacks to share with the group and keep us nourished while we worked. Everyone was so generous with their…

Hi everyone. Today in Day One, Automattic’s personal diary app, the daily prompt was to talk about the simple pleasures you’ve enjoyed lately. I’ve always wondered why Day One’s prompts don’t align with the ones on WordPress, but oh well. I don’t like WP’s daily prompt today anyway, as it brings too many sad thoughts. As such, I’m going to share some things that brought me joy lately. And many of those things involve food, of course. First up are vegan pancakes. I sort of impulsively decided to…

Here's a rough and speculative outline of a psychological profile in software: Sensitive to bugs, but simply because there exist lots of bugs. Constantly pointing out problems, but not because they're a grouch or enjoy one-upsmanship. If the bugs weren't there, they wouldn't be complaining about anything. Optimistic and joyful about software, not in the sense of general techno-optimism but just in the sense of loving software. They have software they love and desperately want the world to have…

your head on my lap heavy, as you drift off to sleep my hand gently in your hair on your neck, on your cheek I smile but you don't see but the tenderness you can't help but feel

Everybody believes that people aspire to have an AI agent that will do their bidding -- book their flights, plan their trip, order their meal, etc. because the people funding it already have a personal assistant who has already been granted the permission -- trusted! -- to do everything on their behalf. But some of us just want to be able to do these things without having to turn the task into a quest -— I’m happy to pick the food I want, plan my trip… it’s part of the rich tapestry of life.…

I read note taking: analog and digital from lucky instar so I thought it’d be fun to write about taking notes. The question is: How do you take notes on things? Physical Notes The answer is it depends on what I need the notes for! For personal interests like books it’s always a legal pad and a pen. Before that I used a small Moleskine notebook but it’s cumbersome to lay flat on my desk and write on the left-hand pages, so I switched to legal pads and that’s what I use now. When I was in school…

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Monday, September 21, 2026 - 13:00 The Lesbian Historic Motif Project Although this book advertises itself as a history of non-binary identity, the initial chapters have a strong focus on "fictional" versions of non-binariness. While this can be uncomfortable reading for those looking for historic identification, it provides an important context for historic attitudes toward actual people whose sex or gender has not been easily categorizable. Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP LHMP #581c DeVun 2020…

On September 13th, I participated in CIGS (Chicago Indie Game Showcase), run by the local nonprofit Indie City Games. I love ICG, and CIGS was amazing! I showcased Divinuet there, and I also gave a talk about how Divinuet’s music system works with the inherent randomness of tarot. Here are some takeaways, in no particular order: Divinuet happens to be particularly well-suited for something like CIGS, because there’s no actual skill required to play, and a reading takes about 5-10 minutes, then…

On a forum recently the conversation drifted into talking about the innovations different Web browsers had introduced, over the years. Another participant called out Vivaldi for bringing us vertical tabs upon its release in 2015. Vivaldi certainly does a good job with its vertical tabs. But it wasn’t first. Vivaldi’s a fine browser, but it wasn’t first to add the option of vertical tabs. I’m pretty confident that was Opera 4.0, a decade and a half earlier in 2000. To check my memory, I spun up…

I made White Paper many years ago because I wanted a Jekyll theme that stayed out of the way. No busy sidebar, no heavy decoration—just a title, a few links, and the writing. This week I gave it a proper update without changing that idea. The theme now runs on Ruby 4.0 and Jekyll 4.4. I replaced the old Grunt setup with Vite and Sass, refreshed the dependencies, added automated builds, and kept right-to-left stylesheet support. Most of the visible work is deliberately subtle. The type is easier…

“Being good at one quiet thing at the end of a loud day is its own kind of medicine” SO I PAY ATTENTION. When I get home, I do not pour a drink. I do not take the edge off with a gummy. I do not, as my doctor once gently floated, pop a beta-blocker to ease the way my pulse climbs the stairs ahead of me at the end of a long day lawyering. Satisfied with the work but always trying to find a way to let the thoughts of tomorrow’s calendar rest, I go to the side yard instead. The summer sun comes in…

(9/21/2026) Cedar Rapids' new west side branch library opened this weekend. I was deterred from Saturday's opening ceremonies by pelting rain, but got myself there Sunday afternoon for a guided tour. The 40,000 square foot facility replaces the Ladd Library, which had been located in a former Target on Williams Boulevard.The tours started in the staff areas, which having been library staff in the 1970s and 1980s was mildly interesting and reassuring to me...Staff lounge...but I was mainly there…

State government ministers, MPs and spokespeople have not been backward in claiming benefits of the Big Build program of major transport projects. For example removed level crossings could reduce accidents, increase reliability and allow more trains to run. The renewal of old assets, provided the new ones were more reliable, was another potential benefit. The Metro Tunnel promised benefits not only for precincts with new rail coverage but also the rest of the network, including added capacity…

Reading I've managed to read every day for 51 days and I am well and truly stuck into the third Dresden Files book (Grave Peril) and I now understand what people said when they told me the series really goes up a gear here. Grave Peril — Jim Butcher Gaming I didn't play that much last week, and didn't play any of my 'active' games. Instead, I booted up Two Point Hospital. I played this quite a lot when I first build my PC a few years ago but never went back. I got a few of the first Hospitals…

A common feature in Linux window managers is the ability to have multiple “workspaces” or “virtual desktops” or whatever you want to call them. From the i3 docs: Workspaces are an easy way to group a set of windows. By default, you are on the first workspace, as the bar on the bottom left indicates. To switch to another workspace, press $mod+num where num is the number of the workspace you want to use. If the workspace does not exist yet, it will be created. The beautiful thing about these…

This is a follow-up to my September 10 blog post macOS Tahoe silently sabotaged the login keychain A subsequent addendum to the blog post noted that the change was introduced in a specific version of macOS Tahoe, 26.4, released by Apple on March 24. In brief, macOS 26.4 added a restriction to the login keychain that makes it non-portable, impossible to unlock outside of its original context. Consequently, recovery of login keychain data from backup has also become impossible in some critical…

organizational pattern This security envelope pattern features utility trucks; the side of the truck has a circle with a cross in it - ambulances. The pattern is skewed slightly and the images are flipped at the fold.

In I forgot webrings exist, Joel wrote: Last year I wrote a pretty extensive list of every blogroll, webring and site that links to me, but well, I always enjoy belonging to more of them, I guess. Checking his list out reminded me of my own private list of blogrolls and sites that link to me. I thought to myself, "Why not make that public?" After some reformatting and removing dead links, I ended up with the following list. If a link back to my blog exists in yours or someone else's blogroll or…

Nice bright light walking the dog this morning, lots of robins out singing.89 words · 2 images

The Oxford Traherne reports on their new digital collator: The Oxford Traherne in collaboration with the Visual Geometry Group, University of Oxford, has developed a new digital collator designed for the needs of textual scholars and scholarly editors. A major new version (3.0) has been released in September 2026. […] Collation is the process of comparing different copies of the same text in order to identify variants between them, and is a crucial part of scholarly editing, both for…

(Spoiler: TLDR) 👆 A website that looks like a desktop, where you mostly see a browser, but there's also a floating div that acts as a chat app. People can use the 'in-game' browser to go to community related things, one of which is a fake domain registrar, where people can 'buy' a domainname and have it go to their profile page. This idea actually came about roughly the same day I had my Zombie Town idea, but that was a bit more substaniated than this and had priority. However, with the same…

Imagine trying to tap a “Bookings” button, only for a “Subscribe to Price Alerts” banner to flash into existence a millisecond before your finger touches the glass. Suddenly, you’re on an opt-in screen you never wanted to see. This isn’t just an annoying glitch – it’s Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) at its absolute worst. A visual breakdown across 12 sequential screenshots of the Lufthansa user profile page perfectly captures a modern frontend nightmare: elements appearing, jumping around,…

Twenty-two years ago this month, I moved house.I’d been living in Edinburgh, an ancient city whose gothic architecture cuts into an expansive sky. Even the air felt apart from the rest of the country: there was a different sort of chill to it, and it carried a malt smell from the breweries on the edge of town. When the train doors opened at Waverley Station, I didn’t just know I was home; I felt it on my skin and in my bones.Edinburgh is famous for its support of the arts: the Festivals double…

I’ve been reading a lot of stories about how persistence and dedication toward one’s dreams can really bring them into reality. But what does fiction have to do with reality? One story had a fun view of the universe where every fictional story is actually happening in a parallel reality, and the author is doing nothing more than witnessing that reality through their mind’s eye. Lately, I’ve been too lazy to sit down and write out my thoughts, even though, in all honesty, nothing could be…