Toronto’s Queen Mother Café bills its Ping Gai as “the best chicken in the city.” I’ve only been here for about 22 hours, but I’m fairly sure they’re right.

The history of personal computers is something you can find covered in all manner of media. It’s beyond a cult following and well into mythmaking. What’s often lost is that there’s a history of computing that reaches much further into the past; most histories treat anything before minicomputers (and, increasingly minicomputers themselves) as a given and tell the story of the PC. But the minicomputer era relied on prior art, and this is what we hear about in IBM. If you ever wanted to know how…

Below are some of my favourite web comics. The top one was made by the Reza Farazmand who has the site: and the second was made by Tate Parker. What I like about them is that they are applicable to D&D, real life and many situations.

approximately 423.41 * math.log(udisc_score) - 1330.5 source simple calculator for it here

LEDE ONThe lede seems to never change now: expect price increases and product shortages for the foreseeable future. Camera company executives are becoming fairly frank about that with dealers, and it’s only a matter of time before we see them have to say the same thing to customers. Meanwhile, multiple card and drive companies are telling me that they see no change in their ability to get more parts and a continued upward pressure on prices. All of which is going to make for a messy holiday…

I’m raising money for St. Jude during the month of September, and as we keep hitting milestones, I keep adding items to give away to anyone and everyone who would like to enter.This giveaway is for a Carolina Pen Co. Downtown, which is their new Piston-filling fountain pen. The material is called Golden Sparkle in Suspended Animation, with Black Matte accents, and is fit with a Jowo #6 Fine Steel nib. Big thanks to Jonathon Brooks and Carolina Pen Co. for donating this pen to help us raise…

I made a note of it, but Bryan Cantrill wrote a post about the ex-Anthropic employee who pegged the probability of AI killing humanity in the next decade at >10%. The article is a good one and you should read it, but what I want to capture here is a side story from Cantrill on the Oxide and Friends podcast where he talks about how proud he was of this phrase from his post: “These ghoulish claims strike brazenly at the hearth…”. He notes that someone online commented on that phrase, saying it…

TL;DR: It's been nearly a month! I built a terminal multiplexer for ultrawide monitors on a whim, got trending topics working in my feed reader, shared a synthpop mixtape, 3D-printed an uncomfortable amount of hot dogs, and brokered a fragile peace treaty between the cats. Wideboi terminal management On a whim, I started a new project this month called wideboi to solve a very specific problem: trying to wrangle a stupid number of terminal sessions across an ultrawide monitor. I just want to…

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"Did you always want to become a teacher?" A teacher (Saoirse Ronan) struggles to control her class, with one of her students (Eddie Waller) constantly flying off into a rage. After an altercation, she locks him in her basement and keeps him imprisoned. This was always going to be a dark comedy, but what surprised me was this film’s reluctance to shock the audience. Instead the tone is quite muted and business as usual, and it makes its sense of humour almost darker somehow. It’s the ultimate…

Snug Cove a few hours ago, looking over the Queen Charlotte Channel to the east wall of Atl’katsem/Howe Sound. It’s a bright, warm September, and the light in the sound is softened by water vapour, condensing over the cold water. Humpbacks and seals are eating and resting and the birds are active, eating seeds and insects, preparing for, or stopping over on, their long migrations southward. Orb weavers are busy building their evening webs. Just Bowen Island things unfolding. This morning I…

Democrats just ensured that billionaire Trump ally Larry Ellison (a right wing oligarch who doesn't really believe in democracy) will be allowed to own the lion's share of whatever's left of U.S. corporate media.After months of growing lobbying, media, and political pressure, 12 state attorneys general have agreed to settle their antitrust lawsuit against Paramount/CBS with what sounds like flimsy conditions, allowing the company's unpopular $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers (CNN, HBO)…

It was a pretty lazy weekend, other than the interview on friday. Took it very easy and spent as much time with my partner as I could because I love them very much and they're my whole world <3 We mostly stayed cozy on the couch, brought all thr blankets and pillows from the bedroom to get extra cozy and relaxed. One night I played a whole bunch of Gloomwood, that game is neat, even if I feel like I'm missing a bunch of things. And we played a bunch more of our stardew x pokemon emerald…

I try to keep my email address from appearing on public websites to avoid spam. But I do like people to be able to contact me if they have something I might be interested in. The solution for this? A contact form! This site is mostly statically generated, but as it is currently built with Astro and hosted on Cloudflare Workers, I can designate an endpoint as dynamic, use it to accept a form submission, validate the data on the server, and send it to my email inbox using Resend. In this post,…

The president thinks that the US Navy should move the islands (the superstructures) on aircraft carriers farther back, apparently so that they would look better to him. It seems to me unlikely that this will happen.Robert Lowell's father was an officer of the US Navy, as were assorted family connections. Not all, perhaps, had the keenest judgment. One of the senior Lowell's Annapolis classmates said of a Lowell cousin that hewas really plotting to put aircraft carriers in square sails to stem…

I use Vim for presenting technical talks in markdown. But, code blocks in markdown don’t get syntax highlighting in Vim by default. Let’s change that!

This is an extremely simple meal, but it’s packed with nutrition. Lots of vegetables and good fats. The ingredients listed are for 2 portions, but it’s easy enough to scale to what’s needed. It’ll keep well in the fridge for a week or so.

I am still using my 10-year-old iPad Pro. It no longer receives any OS updates, and it definitely doesn't have Siri Ai. But for the iPad apps I do use, it is working fine, performance is still good, and I have absolutely no desire to buy a new iPad. If I have an iPhone Duo, I’m not sure I can use it for ten years, simply because the phone part is more demanding in terms of the number of apps I need to use. I hope it still have many more years of useful life. But, alas, I fear all the apps that…

The weather is still warm enough for bees to forage and they seek out what flowers there are. Rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis) is generally described as spring flowering but a late - or early? - flush of flowers often appears in autumn and even through the winter .

With Cadastre and RAM out the door, I've been noodling on which projects to push forward to something like completion this fall. Last week I sat back down with Hellbenders and, while it was a charming re-read, it is going to take more than some polish and templating to make it worth releasing. My copy of Reiner Knizia's New Tactical Games with Dice and Cards (link opens in bookshop.org) arrived a few weeks ago; I picked it up after reading Skeleton Code Machine's post about GOAL. I have been…

a particularly delicious chicken parmentier and (slightly overdone) glazed carrots i made late Sunday afternoon.

Late greeknotes this weekend because I spent all of the late afternoon and evening yesterday in a new taverna (Τσιπουράδικο «Tam Tiririm») in nea ionia eating meze and drinking beers in the sunshine. Very friendly, new and hip, on a quiet-for-athens street overlooking a big church. dakos, giant beans, honey’d cheese, politiki salad, chickpea thing at Tam Tiririm Well deserved, after a warm 15k run at lunchtime, from home in the north nearly to piraeus in the south. One of the few enjoyable…

They released a few new printed swoveralls. Many of them I see and think I like, but not enough to buy them. I was feeling too cheap to buy them. The ones that grabbed my attention were the ones with galaxies and planets and other space things printed all over them. At first glance I was like, I like them, but I’m not sure if I wanted them bad enough to buy them. They had a contest, and I really like the ones that won. Who knows when that print will be available? I have credit on my account…

I'm pleased to announce the release of Superpowers 6.4. This release adds new support for three coding agents: Meta's Muse, OpenCode 2.0 and Qwen Code. Every new model behaves just a bit differently than the ones before it. As the frontier models get more capable, they also develop new quirks. A lot of the work in this release is meant to help the latest models use Superpowers effectively. We've done some work on brainstorming and writing-plans to help steer your agents away from skipping steps…

Weekly cleaning and home improvement series, with some thoughts in between. Late start today. We didn't have breakfast food so we went grocery shopping first thing after we got up. Thanks to my budget, I've created a "Weekly Groceries" list in Listonic so it'll be easier to get through. Cutie Boba from this morning. Already received two rejections of the three jobs I applied to last week. Bleh. Weekly clean Clean/wipe down kitchen cabinets Clean hallway Clean windows I still have two drawer…

💬 “Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.” – Annie Dillard, ‘Write Till You Drop’. New York Times, 28 May, 1989. I’ve mentioned Annie…

In the morning, our alarm when off at 5:00, and we were back on the rocks before first light. Not being a morning person it was a bit of a struggle and the fishing was so poor, that I wish we hadn’t bothered. Switching to soft plastics fished on a jighead, saw them get bitten in half by the super aggressive yellow spotted puffer and when I tried isome on a drop shot rig, they were the only species I caught. Lillian taking a few photos of me as I fished before sunrise would turn out to be the…

In an uncertain environment, standard advice is to be adaptable. Jobs in the technology, media, and telecom sectors are experiencing the fastest pace of skill turnover, according to a June 2026 report on the effects of AI from the professional services network PwC. And the World Economic Forum’s most recent Future of Jobs Report, published in 2025, found that employers across all sectors expect 39 percent of workers’ core skills to change by 2030. What It Takes to Be an Adaptable Engineer, by…

After I posted “Confessions of an Unrepentant Slop Snob” on LinkedIn last week, with links to the Honeycomb AI norms and values docs, I got this question from Niklas Lochschmidt:I am curious if you could share more light on the process? Any guidance you would give people in companies that have the friction and internal debates, but maybe haven’t arrived at shared norms and values yet?That’s a great question, and I will answer in just a minute.I feel like this is a great way to kick off…

Blackeyed Theatre excels at bringing classic literature to the stage, breathing new life into various books such as Frankenstein, The Great Gatsby and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – this time they have turned their attention to Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. This adaptation was written by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm (Emilia) and is directed by Nicky Allpress; it begins its life at Dalston’s Arcola Theatre, before heading out on a nationwide tour which lasts well into 2027. The story…