La prière d'une vierge. Auguste Jean Baptiste Roubille, 1899. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons. A weird little book found me this week, thanks to a little free library. I’d never heard of Catalan author Irene Solà, but seeing that Graywolf was the publisher of her I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness, I grabbed the novel and took it home. The thing was, it was stuffed with sheets of paper larger than the paperback itself. Most were copies of individual pages of another book;…

Here’s just a quick note on some new items I was involved in as we get started in the spooky season. First, I was a consultant (editing and revisions) for this new book by DK for younger readers. It’s called The Unexplained: Mysteries, Cryptids, Ghosts, and UFOs. I wasn’t involved in the ghosts or UFO parts but I tried to give the most up to date info for the bits I was tasked with in the small space available. The visuals are pretty cool. I requested one for my local library. I hope you…

I saw this post going viral, “Why You Should Almost Never Use AI to Write Anything Substantive.” I’ve defended the use of AI in writing here and here. My reasoning is that writing competently is hard for the vast majority of people, and although AI-generated writing is still obvious or inferior, (despite rapid progress at AI-produced math), if given a choice between no writing and clunky AI-generated writing, I think the latter, despite its flaws, is a worthwhile trade-off. AI writing is thus…

TIL about OPFS, via a post on @duckdb.org about Persistent Databases in the Browser with DuckDB-Wasm and OPFS.

Words: Chris ArnsbyNicky Campbell: “Oh welcome to Top of the Pops and a classic show tonight. What more could you want? Great videos. Great music. Great live performances as well. What a great start. Brothers in Rhythm, both of whom have been DJs since about the age of thirteen, so they know a thing or two about infectious rhythm. Ah, one, two, three, four.” [25] BROTHERS IN RHYTHM: SUCH A GOOD FEELING. About two thirds of the way through this performance something small but significant…

In Lead Yourself First, the authors Raymond M. Kethledge and Michael S. Erwin emphasize “to lead others, you must first lead yourself” and “personal leadership comes through solitude.” They present the reasoning for their argument, not via qualitative research, but rather anecdotes, illustrative stories that demonstrate their point. In particular, they highlight the usefulness of solitude in providing space for reflective thinking to foster creativity, clarity and moral courage. The busyness of…

Happy "Football is Back" season to those of you who celebrate. I'm currently watching my Saints take on the Ravens (who are also a favorite of mine) and hoping for our first win. The last few weeks have been incredibly busy (I feel like I always say that, sorry) with a trip for work that then morphed into a short vacation with my wife and I which included my first Blizzcon (which is freaking cool as hell) and our first visit to Disneyland. (We've been to Disney World a few times.) I think we…

This is not Udaipur, it's a random building in some random narrow street in Surat. Life Michami Dukkdam Michhami Dukkdam to everyone 🙏 In short: If I have wronged you in any way, please forgive me as do I In long: This is something all the Jains say to each other after completing the Samvatsari Pratikaman, which is considered most important ritual of the year. After 8 days of intense spiritual activities, it is also expected to some extent that a devotee ruminates about all the wrong doings…

While the main Klonoa team finished up Lunatea’s Veil, Namco contracted out their frequent collaborators at Now Production to produce a sequel to Moonlight Museum for the brand-new Game Boy Advance. The result, Empire of Dreams, benefits from only minutely iterating on its predecessor, despite the addition of action-oriented auto-scrollers and bosses to break up the puzzle gameplay. The enemy roster, Moo blocks, and copious amounts of air vents all return, and the level structure retains the…

Visual of the build steps to take. Note that before running npm publish ./dist you need to prepare the files in ./dist (as detailed in this post) One detail that has always bugged me about publishing a package to NPM is how build output paths like dist/ can leak into the public API. Turns out, npm publish can do it, but to make it work seamlessly in a real-world project, you need a few extra pieces in place. Let me walk you through how it works. ~ The Need: Clean imports without leaking…

(Please Lord let me not become someone who regularly posts Daring Fireball metacommentary.)John Gruber:Why is it strange for an iPhone to have a similar price to a MacBook Pro? For many people the phone is their primary computer, the most important and personal device in their life. Not me. Not Oremus. Probably not you. But I bet there are a lot more people out there who would rather have a $2500 iPhone and a $700 MacBook Neo than who would want a $2500 MacBook Pro and a $700 iPhone.This is not…

I have not had much time to post new articles (long or short lately), but let us get the last full week of September off to a good start with a new edition of the Pook-Emu Bee. 1 | Linux 7.3 Adds Support For Victrix Pro BFG & Azeron Controllers (Michael Larabel for Phoronix. Sep. 20, 2026.) I have questions here. First, why is that controller $269? Second, why does it look like a hand with six fingers? I can’t weigh in on the new Linux support until those threshold questions are answered. 2 |…

A weekly recap of the articles and posts I’ve read that I think are worth your time. Everything Flows: The Koln Concert — I can play the piano, badly, with a lot of practice. So when I hear talent like this I am utterly captivated. Great post, with the back story almost as good as the performance. Watch Footage from the Psychology Experiment That Shocked the World: Milgram’s Obedience Study (1961) | Open Culture — Aware of this but not of the detail. Fascinating if scary. Prepare your “no” and…

I wrote previously about upcoming design changes to Apple’s 27 series of OSs, but I didn’t run any of the betas myself. From afar, the changes all looked great to me. After having installed the updates at launch on Monday, I’m very happy with just about every visual tweak. But, believe it or not, I still have more grumbles about Liquid Glass. Before I complain: I need to say that I absolutely adore the Liquid Glass effect in the abstract. When it’s in a clear mode, the refractions are gorgeous!…

It’s a bit insane that we’re past mid-September and my living room is still sitting at 29oC at 7AM, but such is life in the late Holocene, I guess. Regardless, the shift towards Autumn is starting to show, and I’ve had a couple of days where I suddenly realized I was working “late” into the evening and the lights started coming on automatically (never a good sign unless you’re having fun). I have had to split my free time between a bit of stress at work and working on my health (neck, posture,…

Where do these gamer company names come from? Attack Shark, Rabid Weasel, Bloody-Fanged Saber Tooth Tiger? OK, you caught me; I made some of those up. This is a 65% board. Hall Effect 3ish mm travel South-facing LEDs Wired only Carbon fiber case Four profiles QMK web configurator available I wish I could give a more positive review of this thing, but the keyboard mapping with the web configurator is flaky. It confirms some key settings, but other mappings remain present. Tested on a Mac with…

IntroductionIf there’s one component I distinctly remember frequently being asked about while working at Government Digital Service (GDS), it’s a maps component. You may wonder why that is, well, it’s related to Progressive Enhancement (PE). More specifically, GDS’s unwavering stance on the use of Progressive Enhancement, when building all UK government services. If you don’t know what PE is, then luckily for you, I've written about it before on a previous blog post Hack to the Future -…

That was lucky! We spotted three lovely American cars in a row then figured this was on.80 words · 11 images

Portrait of a Intergalactic Cockroach Post Nutrition Label Content Type: Text Read Time: 10 min Topics: Extinction, Schopenhauer, Fermi Paradox Where the fuck is everyone else? Enrico Fermi, probably The answer, the Schopenhauer pessimist in me says, is they've all self-destructed at some key technological age in history. Don't learn to run. No persistence running, no antelope chased to collapse in the heat: no big brain civilization. No penicillin. No germ theory: we all die of hyper syphilis.…

With a lot of help from ChatGPT I generated a little interactive animation to help visualize what is going on in the classic light-clock though experiment. You are looking at a profile view of two experimenters, Linda and Ralph, each in their own frame of reference. By tradition this is a train car, but it can be a spacecraft or a shipping container or an RV, it really doesn't matter. The

Each week in Refill, the Pen Addict Members newsletter, I publish Ink Links as part of the additional content you receive for being a member. And each week, after 10 to 15 links, plus my added commentary on each, I'm left with many great items I want to share. Enter Misfill. Here are this weeks links: Read: — Pen Rotation Transition (Rachel’s Reflections) — Sketchwaiting Stories (Fueled by Clouds & Coffee) — Ink Review #2910: Ink Institute Cat at Midnight (Mountain of Ink) — Planner Review: Owl…

Looking at lots of new blogs during Blaugust and Robert Birming's SepThemeBear and his blog theme building guide has got me thinking about themes, blog design, and such. Back in May I wrote about how I was having too much fun with CSS. And I really did, styling up my pages. Gridranger, Tabitha and JetGirlArt have a desktop style. re: nyman is an email inbox. Angry Bunnyman has a striking boxy layout. Sylvia at departure.blog and Olu have very vertical column styles. The Satyrs’ Forest has a…

I mean, maybe?? Read here.

🏃‍♂️ Run completed, but not completely according to expectations 😬 3 laps. First one good and strong, feeling completely destroyed in the second, and hanging on and speeding up in the third. Not exactly 10km, but it'll do as test for the marathon. No pictures 🫤 I loaded the wrong camera recipe and everything turned out like crap.

Ho SC-H, Lee IXY, Liu C, Yu M, Tan HC, Tan GSW and Liu Y-C (2026) Fenofibrate in ophthalmology: therapeutic efficacy and mechanisms. J. Pharm. Pharm. Sci. 29:16995. doi: 10.3389/jpps.2026.16995 I have genetically high triglycerides, and I have taken fenofibrate in the past. I think that’s what drew me to this article. There is some evidence that fenofibrate can have benefits in diabetic corneal neuropathy, dry eye, corneal injury, Fuchs dystrophy, diabetic retinopathy, and AMD. Fenofibrate is a…

This is something I’ve been thinking about recently. First, let me clarify that when I say software being done, I mean a particular feature. I don’t mean an entire package of software. A standalone application or SaaS software package is never actually done; there’s always new desires and demands from human beings, and all pieces of software must expand until they either send email or build their own messaging inbox because they can’t be bothered to interface with email. The most successful…

Lots of our software needs queue-like behavior. So, for example: Suppose every new user needs to be registered in four subsystems. You might do the registration synchronously in one subsystem, enqueue the information necessary to do the rest, and let asynchronous workers process those events. More generally, suppose you process user requests that don't need to be handled synchronously. Those requests tend to come in bursts, so you might enqueue those requests and let workers handle them. Your…

[Previously published at MeisterAchive.com. Published here with the author’s permission. For more of Meister’s work, visit MeisterArchive.com] September 15, 2026 by David J. Meister Damon Landor is a practitioner of the Rastafarian religion and decades-long adherent to the Nazarite Vow which requires him to “let the locks of his head grow.” Holy Bible, Numbers 6:5 … Continue reading "Supreme Court Deals Body Blow to Prisoners Religious Protections: Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections"

The University of Illinois, the University of Bologna, and Johns Hopkins SAIS regularly sponsor a conference series on Constitutional History: Comparative Perspectives. The next conference will be held in Champaign, IL on March 8-9, 2027. The theme of this conference is Constitutional Moments. The goal is to draw on experiences from around the globe to shed light on the theory of constitutional change famously articulated by Professor Bruce Ackerman. The conference keynote speaker will be…

Last winter I wrote a discrete event simulation framework in Python to keep myself busy, have something to put on my CV, experiment with LLM-assisted coding, and learn how async and await actually work. Over the summer, for similar reasons, I played around a bit with Lean and Gleam, thinking that I might translate the Software Design by Example books from JavaScript and Python into one or the other. Lean defeated me, and I quickly grew frustrated with the gaps in Gleam’s standard library, but…