The values. On a wall, in an onboarding deck. Be kind! Be curious! Be the change! Bring your whole self! Seek forgiveness not permission! Nobody argues. Then you say the thing that needed saying – and someone takes you aside afterwards.Feedback. You should know how you're doing. It beats guessing. Then it's permission to be unkind. Who gets to give it, who gets given it.Psychological safety. Say the hard thing, at no cost to you. Announced at the all-hands. Speak up, they say. They do,…

When a password manager detects that a user’s password has been leaked or reused, it can prompt them to change it, but the password change URL varies by site. The web’s answer to such discovery problems is the reserved /.well-known/ URL namespace (RFC 8615), home to machine-readable files and endpoints like security.txt. A Well-Known URL for Changing Passwords is the web specification that uses this namespace to fix password page discovery. It reserves the URL path /.well-known/change-password…

I enjoy daily mini-games. I play the New York Times ones (Wordle, Connections, and the mini crossword) and sometimes Clues By Sam if I am feeling extra smart. Recently I...

Observing lines.

There was a time when the weather apps were pretty good. Now, we have radar roulette. #weather #radar #kcmo #appstore #iphone

With the reveal of the new iPhone Duo1, I was delighted to see how iOS was adapted to accommodate the strange, shifting nature of a folding display. How do we communicate the weird turns and tumbles of the hardware not just to the system, but to the user, to prepare them for what their big cumbersome motion will do to the apps they’re interacting with? The answer seems to be a metaphorical separation between the true surface of the software, and the glass windows through which we see them. When…

This year, unlike 2025, I updated my computer as soon as macOS 27 Golden Gate was released. The positive feedback during the testing period was encouraging, and deep down I figured that the original Liquid Glass, from macOS 26 Tahoe, was so bad that it couldn’t get any worse. No surprise: macOS 27 looks better. Aesthetically and in actual use: buttons look like buttons again, there are visible dividers in windows, the comically rounded windows’ corners, and the sidebar no longer floats around…

Hi everyone. It’s been forever since I last participated in the Wednesday Hodgepodge. This is my third attempt at writing this post. If I believed in fate, it should’ve been a sign that I shouldn’t be taking part anymore, I guess. Either that or WordPress just doesn’t like me, since neither the block editor nor the classic editor work nicely right now. Anyway, here are Joyce’s questions. 1. How do you define beauty? Like Joyce, I think beauty comes mostly from within. I’m going to tease her a…

Repetition.81 words · 3 images

Common in the indie web is debate of the tools you use. Whether old or new, modern, or an antique, analog or digital, proprietary or Foss. Yet I don't think it should matter or get thus heated. You know, the fyn thing about digital minimalism is that it's the best tool for you for the job, not the best tool voted by a bunch of geeks and engineers online for the job. Ans to the same note, why must all writing be one 'job' to have 1 'tool' for? There is a difference between a journal/scrapbook…

When designing a downtime procedure for a long-running campaign, you want to know how involved you want the procedure to be. I’ve run campaigns where domain management is the main activity, even published a zine with rules along those lines, and seen people recommend still other books on the topic. But if you want downtime and “stronghold building” to be a complement to the main element of play, whether that’s dungeoneering or anything else, I’d recommend something simple and flexible. What I’m…

I picked up Georgie early this morning and we headed up to the Friendship Cafe in Gloucester for an event by Create Gloucestershire. The topic was how to get creativity into communities in Gloucestershire, and the format was an Open Space. This means the agenda is decided by the people in the room. People who wanted to start a conversation on something would put an agenda item under a session and claim a space to hold the discussion. I submitted a topic for each session, but no-one came to my…

Here’s something I only discovered recently: someone can still be homeless, even if they are not sleeping rough, or on the street. Couch surfing, living in temporary or emergency accommodation, and boarding houses or caravan parks, are also considered forms of homelessness in Australia. This even though a person has a roof over their head for the night. Connor van Helsing (Instagram link), a resident of Darwin, in Australia’s Northern Territory (NT), has experienced all forms of homelessness,…

I bumped into Kieron Gillen at Dragonmeet once but he looked busy so I didn't say hello. Anyway, he's been running through his 101 favourite role-playing games and the most recent instalment has a story about a WFRP3 game in which the players did one of those silly facepalm things players do sometimes, and it reminded me of something that happened when I was running Horror on the Orient Express

Last week I finished up a cutting board, made as a gift for a friend who just got married. I posted photos on social media and a few people asked how I did it. So here's a high-level view of the process on a new board I made this week.Ideally, if you want to build your own cutting boards, the best way to learn is by searching YouTube for cutting board tutorials, and watching a few of them. I describe my process here but I'm skimming over details you'd see better explained in most YouTube…

I break apart every night gather myself every morning tight knots over parts unravelling out of sight in secret from everyone but you

In May, I announced I would be a special guest at the British Origami Society’s Autumn Convention in Nottingham, UK. Now that the convention is over, it’s time for a short summary. First off, I enjoyed the event very much. We met at the University of Nottingham campus, with lots of greenery surrounding the building and squirrels popping up literally everywhere. I gave multiple workshops, most of them my own designs, but I also reserved a slot for Fujimoto’s stars as well as a presentation about…

Hello, I have nothing to say, really. Fall is here, I have even made tomato soup because my parents had so many tomatoes in their yard, that I had no idea what to do with them anymore. Next year, I am going to learn to can things just to can be able to deal with this. Anyway, recently, I've been doing more chores than usual, spending my oh so little precious free time after work to go buy groceries, cook, and clean even if the whole thing took me like 3-4 hours. Why? Out of spite. Why should I…

I replaced my old and bung Mars Pro yesterday with this, an Elegoo Mars 5. It cost me about $400 from Jaycars. I actually went in for a Mars 5 Ultra, but that's another $250 or so, and I didn't feel the pressing need for any of the fancy-schmancy extras.So far I haven't been able to get it to actually print anything, and what the exact problem is I do not know. Nothing sticks to the platen, though it does stick to the FEP.I vaguely remember having issues with the Mars Pro when I first got that,…

The AI brain worms have been spreading and I don't have a solution, I just want to get off this ride.

Camping at Sycamore again, it was hot and muggy until it wasn’t. It dumped sooo much rain so fast. The Creek has 6 feet of water in it, so not going anywhere. This post (Camping at Sycamore with rain and flash floods) was last edited 1 minute ago.

Villains. Love ‘em or hate ‘em? Love them, obviously. Way more than any hero. And if you know me at all, that’s not breaking news. I wrote essays about my fondness for both Loki and Deadpool back in 2014, proving this isn’t a phase I’m going to grow out of. I am a grown adult with a deeply consistent, slightly concerning pattern. I find the villains, the anti-heroes, and the generally questionable people vastly more interesting than the guys doing the right thing. I’m not sure why writers do…

I'm loving all activity around alternatives to GitHub for collaborative revision control. I've been curious about Cloudflare Artifacts, and now I'm gonna add @delta.dev to my list of these things to try.

About a year ago, I started doing this thing that the people who do it just call “climbing.” Basically, you go to a giant place where there are things strategically stuck to a wall, and you grab them with your hands and feet trying to climb to the top of the wall. The things combine to form “routes,” and you can climb short ones with no ropes (“bouldering”) or longer (thus, higher) ones with a rope running from a harness you wear, up through an anchor installed at the top of the route, and back…

Sometimes all you need to do is step back and put the right high-level data in one place so you can actually see what’s going on.That’s the idea behind this post. The chart I’m going to show you is simple. Yet, despite spending many hours in boardrooms with executive teams debating segment strategy, I have almost never seen all the relevant data brought together in a single view. Lord knows I’ve asked for it.What do I see instead? Seas of numbers. Live reports, spreadsheets, and dashboards.…

These days, while I’m having more and more difficulties appreciating software in general, I’m getting a lot more joy and delight from tiny apps and little utility programs that offer very few features. In the past couple of days alone, I’ve discovered — or rediscovered in some cases — a few of these that I thought would be worth your time. The first one is History Book, from Zhenyi Tan (of And a Dinosaur’s fame) that I use as my new read-later app. The twist is that it is not really a…

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss has some notoriety among fantasy fiction readers, as its volume one of a trilogy that at the time of reviewing only has two volumes. Nevertheless it is highly acclaimed among those who like this sort of thing and it was a fun read.It is also notable for its "story in a story" format. The open scenes take place in a classic fantasy tavern. The innkeeper

How far are we, as university teachers, allowed to create (or, to fail to eliminate) the possibility that students might be confused? As far as subject matter is concerned, it seems reasonable to say that we should normally endeavour to ensure that by the end of the class, or maybe the end of the module, students should not be confused, or at any rate should be less confused, but that it’s absolutely fine to confuse them – even to do this deliberately – in the course of getting to that point.…

All I play anymore is trick-takers. And climber/shedders. Are those the same thing? Some say so. Others disagree. I don’t take a strong stance on it. Which is why I’m lumping these three titles together. For this quarter’s roundup, we’ve got friendly oni, unfriendly gangsters, and some super cute monsters that might be friendly or unfriendly depending on whether you correctly guess their identity. Boo! We’re here to help! Welcome Demons If I were a Japanese demon, I’d be like the oni from…

Using the library is resistance. Resistance to the latest craze Netflix is pushing on you. Resistance to the idea that we can not share, we must rent from a private company. Resistance to a carefully crafted version of reality. Using the library, in an era where libraries are painted as relics, is taking back your attention, your cognition, your self. Go, get lost in the books and films and magazines and objects. You'll find yourself once again. #libraries #anticapitalism #leftism #resist