Not a bad day. Rain at first. Some sunshine. No 2 on red. No 1 can’t light. Think X former is done. Rand Nuway. Stayed to dinner. Did all the T. Spew lot time on the burner. (I don’t understand much of this)

A fun video from Vidya James about a specific moment in The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask on Nintendo 64 that starts with a bug (similar to this thing we talked about once), and ends with a fun effort to find the perfect conditions to put that bug to some good use: This is in some way adjacent to the Mega Man glitch story, and also the Quake speedrun story, but there’s a few different angles here: statistics, brute forcing, and code analysis. But I also feel like this in a strange way talks…

I have a wonderful little family. Beautiful and caring wife and two unbelievably amazing children. They are my world. Our kids are still young and need us. To me, that need to protect, teach, love, assist, etc. overrides everything. I have no desire for career or excelling in hobbies. Sure, I have them. But that’s not my purpose for being alive. Having children has given me purpose in life. Those kids NEED me. And that’s what scares me. One day, faster than I’ll ever be ready for, they just…

Gale still blowing. Some gusts very strong. No cars. Did office and all the T. Cut some wood up for the incinerator. Cleared some old F.W. out of the library.

You know I love a Monstera. Charlotte is particularly skilled at cultivating them.152 words · 2 images

A scroll-driven walkthrough of LLM context and how tokens pile up.

A zine chronicling the Conquering the Barbarian Altanis D&D campaign. This issue includes sessions 126, 127, and 128. Adventurers battle the Flaming Eye. You can download the issue here. Overlord's Annals zine is available as part of the Ever & Anon APA, issue 17: #Zine Subscribe to get the latest post in your inbox. No spam. rootringPrev · Random · Directory · Next

While we await confirmation of the next 24-hour strike planned for Thursday 12th November, I’ve been making contingency plans for teaching. A recent article in the Irish Times states that the Government’s offer is worth about 7.75% over 20 months, which is so far short of the cost-of-living increase required that it is insulting. Given the gap between the two sides I think the strike is highly likely to proceed. On that basis I went out and bought some thermal underwear in anticipation of…

I actually took time out of my day to head out with my camera. I heard these migrating birds before I was able to see them. I had only the 50 mm lens, which obviously wasn't enough to get any details. 👉 View one more image

When I want to write something down, I have to decide where to write it. Currently, the choices are... My Tinderbox Daybook TheBrain TiddlyWiki My Org mode daybook.org Denote's journal entries Org-journal Baty.net One of 5 of my "current" paper notebooks The problem is obvious. The solution...not so much. You see, I refuse to give up any of the above. I've tried. It doesn't work. ✍️ Reply by email

The reason I dug into the translation settings in the first place was this popup – it keeps coming up after dismissing it. Not every time, but frequently enough to be really annoying. There appears to be no way to disable it.

I’ve heard about and thought about proxies for pkg servers for some time. Perhaps years, but definitely months. I never took action until I saw this commit in today’s FreshPorts new ports email: ports-mgmt/git-proxy Caching proxy for package registries, including FreeBSD pkg Today. This morning, during coffee at my local shop, I implemented one in my basement. The following shows you how I did it. Every host in the basement fetches packages: base from pkg.FreeBSD.org and everything else from my…

On this day 24 years ago at 14:07 I posted my first blogpost. This post is just a brief moment of reflection for myself, and a way to mark the difference or not with last year, when I was slowly trying to make space for my sense of wonder again. This after a long period of high stress and loss. A year on, I do feel better, but the need to further my sense of wonder is still strong in order to ensure I keep feeling better. I’ve written here less than I hoped, but I did write a few things more…

The first semester that I taught a (rather incoherent) course on computational history, the course was titled “Programming in History/New Media.” The then-current state of that wing of digital history was that graduate students should learn to code. (Witness The Programming Historian.) Even at the time, I think I was trying to articulate that programming was merely a means to an end and that what we were really after was a way to think about history through computation. A good thing too,…

It may be getting cooler as we fully embrace fall, but things are heating up in space! Author Curtis C. Chen is here with not only his Big Idea, but a science lesson that he says will better help you understand his newest novel, Kangaroo Forth, the fourth installment of his Kangaroo series. CURTIS C. CHEN: Hashtag shameless cross promotion: if you want to know about the very specific references to twentieth-century pop culture in the fourth Kangaroo book, Kangaroo Forth, go read the “My…

The Australian founded graphic design platform says it plans to retrench almost a quarter of its global workforce. Canva CEO Melanie Perkins refrained however from attributing the job losses to AI, instead citing “new technology” as the cause: New technology is transforming what people can create, how they create it, and what they expect from the products they use. Terrible news for about twelve-hundred Canva employees, as the company looks to consolidate operations to its Sydney base, and…

Every day morning, en route to school, I used to watch people clean their home’s front door area. They sprinkle some water, catch the dust down, then sweep, and then put kolam. I had always considered it a metaphor for hope and optimism. It didn’t matter what happened yday. Today is a new day. It shall be approached with good intent. It starts with an activity that makes myself and my community better - cleaning my home. It is a task that I control, I own and I can do my dharma. When you take a…

The Zeptoverse is an informal scientific term for the realm of nature explored at the scale of a zeptometre (10⁻²¹ metres, or a billionth of a trillionth of a metre), roughly 100 billion times smaller than an atom. [1, 2] Key Details of the Discovery The Breakthrough: In November 2026, researchers working on the upgraded LHCb experiment at CERN‘s Large Hadron Collider announced the first single-experiment evidence of an ultra-rare particle decay. [1, 2] The Decay Process: They observed a…

Ah, the classic hotel parking lot. Always a sight to see. Today! I am in Franklin, Indiana for an event sponsored by Wild Geese Bookshop, at the Johnson County Museum. It starts at 6:30 but doors open an hour earlier. Here’s how to get tickets. Please come see me! Tomorrow! I return to my old University of Chicago haunts and have an event at the Seminary Co-Op! Here is how to get tickets for that. — JS

If OpenAI has its way, AI data centres may soon be known as AI compute campuses. When a product or service develops a reputation beyond redemption — and data centres could hardly be any more abhorred than they are presently — don’t withdraw or cease production, rename instead. Who on earth is going to know the difference? I for one would much rather be living across the road from a compute campus than a data centre.

Long before Christmas in Bethlehem, something remarkable appears throughout the pages of the Old Testament: manifestations of God that hint at a divine mystery yet to be revealed. The Church has wrestled for centuries with a profound question: When God appeared to Abraham, Moses, and the prophets, who exactly did they see? The answer involves … Continue reading Christ’s Appearances Before and After the Incarnation Explained The post Christ’s Appearances Before and After the Incarnation…

Three years since original App Defaults lists have been shared by many people around the internet, some started revisiting them. I wrote one in 2023, and updated it in early 2025. I opened them today and realized that literally nothing has changed since then. I discovered some new apps after the first round, which I now use regularly, such as NetNewsWire RSS reader. Here’s my (almost unchanged) list 📨 Mail Client: Mail.app 📮 Mail Server: Migadu 📝 Notes: Apple Notes ✅ To-Do: Apple Reminders 🟦…

Craig Mod made a notebook. It started life as a paper and binding tests for the Japanese edition of Kissa by Kissa, and then got refined into his vision of what a perfect pocket notebook ought to be. This impressed me in two ways: You should have strong opinions about the perfect pocket notebook. Human agency is a wonderful thing and if you have strong opinions about the perfect notebook, you can just make it. Craig sells his perfect notebook, but he doesn’t sell MY perfect notebook. Refer to…

Waking up today to the news that US democracy seems to be on its way to recovery has changed my mood dramatically. All of a sudden I’m an optimist. The US will be all right. Even if the French do the same dumb thing we did next year, at the next election it will get fixed. The murderous racists in power in Israel will be toppled by the votes of the targets of their racism. As a result, the gates here at Columbia will open and the contract for the massive security force not renewed. On top of…

Woke is back on the menu, pronouns and free abortions all around! The democrats managed to pull it together and flip house and senate. There's reason to celebrate, but lets not get ahead of ourselves. We still have a lot of work to do. In all of this, I think of the intro video for Left 4 Dead after the survivors escape a massive zombie swarm: Louis: We made it! I can't believe we made it! Bill: Son, we just crossed the street... Let's not throw a party 'til we're out of the city. The democrats…

Book 39 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year – carrying on through the rest of the year! My link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there. Let’s talk about my final book read of the Halloween season, Widow’s Point (2026), by father and son duo Richard Chizmar and W.H. Chizmar! This was the third autographed book I picked up at the Belmont Literary Festival back in September, after Chuck Wendig’s The Staircase…

This was another film I knew all about but hadn’t seen. But we’ll get to that. “Regan” (Linda Blair) is the twelve-year-old daughter of film actress “Chris MacNeil” (Ellen Burstyn), temporarily living in Washington D.C. while Chris is filming a movie. Chris has a couple of hired assistants to help keep an eye on Regan and their rented house, but Regan is still kind of left to her own devices, and her boredom spurs her to play with an abandoned Ouija board she’s found in the attic, where she…

Just a small note today. I’ve spoken a lot in big and small rooms in the last few years and almost always I say the same thing…that kindness and decency and empathy still exist…that there are people fighting quietly for you but it can be hard to see them because the loud people are tryingContinue reading "Thank you"

John Lyons writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC): Many Democrats are now openly expressing their claim that the result of these midterms indicates Trump has become a lame-duck president. Nothing could be further from the truth. Some things might change, but some things won’t.

Executive Summary: Large clusters of Melbourne suburbs have only sparse public transport services. These are identified here. The good news is that many are fixable, in some cases without needing more trains and buses. All it needs is political will to embrace value for money service-oriented transport priorities. Melbourne is a city of haves and have nots when it comes to public transport. The inner suburbs have frequent trams while the typical outer suburban bus only comes every 40 minutes.…