The Emu Café Social

Replied to Tadej Pogacar explodes the historic Alpe d'Huez record! (climbing-records.com) 1. 2026: 35:25 Tadej Pogacar 23.38 km/h. 2. 1995: 36:40 Marco Pantani 22.58 km/h. 3. 1997: 36:53 Marco Pantani 22.45 km/h. 4. 1994: 37:15 Marco Pantani 22.23 km/h. 5. 2004: 37:36 Lance Armstrong 22.02 km/h. I haven’t watched the Tour de France since 2016, mainly due to the fact I dropped cable and would need to subscribe to a streaming service that may or may not work with my all-Linux set-up. But I stay…

Replied to AI-generated blog post images are not cool any more by Panagiotis Vryonis (blog.vrypan.net) But AI-generated images in blog posts are no longer cool. Everyone does it. And with the exception when an image is a really good fit, it looks like a 2000 PowerPoint using animated transitions and WordArt. I read an interesting blog post by Panagiotis Vryonis titled AI-generated blog post images are not cool any more. My first thought was “they were never cool.” But I read on to see his…

Replied to Light Flip is a flip phone with minimalist design and features (plus a keypad and T9 predictive text) by Brad Linder (Liliputing) The Light Flip is an upcoming cellphone that looks like an artifact from an alternate timeline where smartphones never took off. It has a class flip-phone design with a small screen on top and a number pad on bottom. I have read some articles about the Light Phone and other “minimalist” phones. As someone who wrote not one but two articles on my “ideal”…

Replied to Cup Noodle unveils first-ever cold-water instant ramen in Japan by Oona McGee (soranews24.com) The new noodles were in development for five years, with Nissin adopting a new noodle-making technology that allows the noodles to rehydrate using chilled water. The patented “Cold Rehydrate” process was developed specifically for the chilled Cup Noodle range. SoraNews24, which covers news from Japan, is a long-time member of my feed collection and a regular article contributor to the…

Replied to AIM-ing For a More Open Platform Than Discord by Tyler August (hackaday.com) Do you remember AIM? It may [surprise] you to hear that AOL’s instant [messenger] was actually supported all the way up to 2017... Hackaday published an article authored by Tyler August titled AIM-ing For A More Open Platform Than Discord, wherein he summarized an article on running a self-hostable open-source implementation of AIM’s underlying OSCAR protocol (see Here’s how I host my own AIM server at…

Replied to An Opinionated Guide to Ranking Ethical NBA Championships in the 21st Century by Russell Samora (The Pudding) I believe there have only been five truly ethical NBA champions in the last 25 years: teams that don’t need an asterisk by their title. Writing for The Pudding, Russell Samora recently put together a list of the “most ethical” NBA champions, wherein he used a formula (with many entertaining graphs) to determine, going back to 2001, which NBA champions benefited the least and…

Two consecutive editions of Pook-Emu Bee daily links? What in the world is going on here? Seen here is the Brooklyn Bridge Park Marina on July 13, 2026. I lined the American Flags, so I took a couple of photos. To the left you see Manhattan and off in the distance straight away you can see the Brooklyn Bridge. 1. Sega Dreamcast driver fixes appear in Linux 7.2-rc3 — fabled console remains in favor while iconic computing architectures like i486 fall by the wayside (Mark Tyson for Tom’s Hardware.…

Replied to Using the Xteink X4, a minimalist e-reader by an author (Schemascape) I now find myself seeking out modern DRM-free e-books from more enlightened publishers. Here are some sources: For (mostly old) public domain works: Standard Ebooks Global Grey Ebooks Project Gutenberg For contemporary e-books without DRM: StoryBundle Humble Bundle (Books) Bookshop.org and eBooks.com when filtered to DRM-free e-books (e.g. from Tor Publishing) I read a blog post on Schemascape titled Using the…

It has been 12 days since I last published “daily” Pook-Emu Bee links due to some combination of being busy and not feeling my best. Both of those blockers exist today, but I have time to squeeze in a new edition. I photographed this bee hard at work in Brooklyn Bridge Park on July 5 at just after 7 PM. 1. You Can Now Play Virtua Racing On PC, Xbox 360, & Xbox One, Thanks To These Impressive New Emulators (Jack Yarwood for Time Extension. July 13, 2026.) This is very neat. But Virtua Racing…

Replied to Journal Prompt July by Laura Cameron (The Well-Apportioned Desk) I found a great list of July journal prompts over at BaronFig from 2024. The thing I love about this list is that there are 50 prompts to choose from ... A few of the ones I want to tackle? ... What is your favorite summer song and why? Laura Cameron at The Well-Apportioned Desk is wrote a post titled Journal Prompt July. She decided to tackle July journal prompts compiled at the BaronFig blog in 2024. While I do not…

Replied to Second Ship Sinks in Red Hook by Nick Bello (South Brooklyn History) Victory Chimes, a historic schooner beloved in the state of Maine and commemorated in a 2003 quarter, sank in Red Hook over the weekend. Victory Chimes becomes the second historic schooner owned by Crew to sink in less than a week, as the schooner Pilot sank last Wednesday. In late 2024, I wrote a research article on Victory Chimes, a historic schooner that was docked at Brooklyn Bridge Park and was in the process…

Replied to 2026 Nagoya basho predictions! The Isegahama takeover begins by Tim Edwards (Sumo Stomp!) My prediction for the 2026 Nagoya basho is a play-off between Hōshōryū and Atamifuji. If that comes to fruition, I think it’s a toss up between those two who takes it. Hōshōryū has more talent, in my opinion, but Atamifuji’s size causes him problems. The Nagoya Basho grand sumo tournament is about to begin. I watched the first three tournaments of the year (January, March, and May) and am…

I decided to step out to see if I could see the 4th of July fireworks from a cross-street in Brooklyn Heights. I took this video from Pierrepont and Willow Streets and then converted it into a gif using the same procedure I described for turning a pill bug video into a gif back in 2024. Independence Forever! I recorded some 4th of July fireworks from Pierrepont and Willow Streets in Brooklyn Heights. Independence Day Fireworks…

Replied to I Do Not Recommend Google Hardware by Marius (マリウス) For its first year or so, the Nexus 5 was actually a likeable phone ... Then the hardware started giving up. The battery, which had been mediocre to begin with, became unreliable and the phone would report 40% charge one moment and shut off entirely the next, and over time it began to randomly reboot and power off without any obvious trigger. The decline was not gradual either and once the battery started misbehaving, the device was…

Replied to You Don't Need the DuckDuckGo noai Subdomain by Chris Wiegman (chriswiegman.com) There’s a lot of hype about accessing DuckDuckGo via its “noai” subdomain. It works, but there’s a better way. Instead of using a special domain to access DuckDuckGo, a method that works, but not in every situation, you can just use the normal DuckDuckGo domain, without AI and customizable even further to serve your needs. Back on June 8, 2026, Chris Wiegman published a blog post titled You Don’t Need…

Quoted World Cup debrands mega stadiums by Matty Merritt (Morning Brew) It’s the first day of the World Cup, and in addition to sporting fresh new grass fields and extra tall beer cans, 11 stadiums across the US have scrubbed thousands of normal sponsors from their grounds. This expensive 'debranding' stems from FIFA’s requirement that stadiums be wiped clean to protect the organization’s multimillion-dollar marketing deals with companies like Coca-Cola and Adidas. I have never been a soccer…

Replied to [No title] by Rodrigo Ghedin (Manual do Usuário) Hot take: if you feel comfortable with Markdown, you don’t need an editor that displays the formatting. Any plain text editor will do. The rest is just fluff. Rodrigo Ghedin published a short “hot take” on markdown: “[I]f you feel comfortable with Markdown, you don’t need an editor that displays the formatting.” I largely agree, although I personally use using KDE’s Ghostwriter, which displays some markdown formatting and has some…

I have not published “daily” Pook-Emu Bee links since June 23. But today is the start of a new month. Let us turn over a new leaf in July with the Pook-Emu Bee. I took this photograph in Brooklyn Bridge Park on the morning of July 1, 2026. It is difficult to see here, but there were pigeons and doves on the stone path and ducks on the rocks, so we had a meeting of four varieties of birds by the water. 1. Nina Totenberg Sincerely Apologizes For An Inexplicable Error (Josh Blackman at The Volokh…

Favorited https://jonathanturley.org/2026/06/28/white-time-dutch-professor-argues-that-time-itself-is-racist/ by Jonathan Turley (Jonathan Turley) These authors largely cite each other with little attention to countervailing viewpoints. It becomes a closed, self-perpetuating system as academics invite one another to speak at their universities and feed off one another. Few academics are willing to challenge such scholarship. Indeed, as we have discussed, departments have largely purged their…

Liked Dear AI Companies: Stop the “Doom Trolling” by Cal Newport (Cal Newport) In my op-ed. I ask the leading AI labs to stop pretending they’re the reluctant stewards of an inevitable technology, and instead act like normal consumer product companies. This means that they should explain the benefits of their tools, justify their costs, and, of course, affirm that they have no intention of causing existential damage along the way. Cal Newport wrote a New York Times op-ed calling on big AI…

Liked Shiki (Anime Review) by Cabbage (Cabbage Sorter) I had Shiki on hold since 2013 ... When I first watched it, I couldn't get past the hair, it was too much. It wasn't just the hairstyles though, I clearly remember feeling overwhelmed by a gazillion characters being introduced at a lightning pace and that was also too much. I'm not immune to propaganda however, and after seeing a few positive reviews about it in quick succession I finally picked it back up again. And I really loved it! I…

It has been five days since the last edition of Pook-Emu Bee links. While I ordinarily publish links in the morning and it is now the evening, I submit some late links today to keep the backlog under control. Today (June 23, 2026) was primary election day in New York City. I did not have a primary to vote in, but I did take a photo. 1. Polymarket bet on deceptive social advertising: WSJ (Dave Lozo for Morning Brew. June 23, 2026.) The prediction markets aren’t upholding the highest standards of…

Liked Daily News Stuff 18 June 2026 by Pixy Misa (ai.mee.nu) Amodei is every bit as much of a weasel as Sam Altman. And while Altman is a sociopath and a compulsive liar, Amodei is something much worse: He's whiny. I look forward to reading Pixy Misa’s Daily News Stuff posts (seven days a week), which feature links to tech and political news with irreverent commentary. Pixy Misa is a pseudonymous Australian server admin (I think) who, in addition to posting on tech and politics, also sometimes…

Liked Nobody clicks your share buttons by Derek Hanson (derekhanson.blog) The UK government ran one of the most thorough studies on this. When GOV.UK added social sharing buttons, they tracked usage for 10 weeks across 6.8 million pageviews. The share buttons got clicked 14,078 times. That’s a 0.21% usage rate, which works out to about 1 in 476 visitors. The most telling part: the feature sat in their backlog for ages because zero end users had ever requested it. In their user testing, people…

I missed Pook-Emu Bee links yesterday and am late today, but we can hardly let a backlog grow… so let us link today. A black Cybertruck seen parked in Brooklyn Heights. I took this photo on June 18, 2026. 1. Peeved NYC students, teachers, parents beg mayor to cancel school for Knicks parade: ‘This is once in a lifetime’ (Asia Grace for the New York Post. June 18, 2026.) ‘It’s upsetting because, obviously, we’ve been waiting for this moment a long time,’ … a Brooklyn public school student,…

Time for a new edition of Pook-Emu Bee links on this very pretty (in Brooklyn, at least) June 16. I took this phone on June 14, 2026, to send to Victor V. Gubo. 1. SCOTUS To Newman: Drop Dead (Josh Blackman at The Volokh Conspiracy. June 15, 2026.) Say what one will but if applied broadly, chief judges being able to involuntarily retire other judges with lifetime tenure would be a very interesting new standard. 2. Neighbors in posh neighborhood fume about wild antics inside OnlyFans home next…

Replied to ☕If you want to buy me a coffee by Simon (Firesphere.dev) Just black coffee please. Or a double espresso. In the evening, I might like a black liquorice tea to fall asleep to. But, in general, just a black coffee. Simon at Firesphere.dev wrote a short post titled If you want to buy me a coffee in response to a hot take post on the IndieWeb against “Buy Me a Coffee” buttons on blogs or capitalism or something. But instead of joining the button debate, he stated what kind of cofee he…

Monday is a fun day. One reason Monday is a fun day is because it marks the return of Pook-Emu Bee links after the weekend. Speaking of the weekend, I published links and commentary to enjoy in Saturday’s Newsletter Leaf Journal 284. My photograph of the intersection of Carroll and Bond Streets in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Taken on June 15, 2026. 1. Historic Carroll Street Bridge in Gowanus reopens after 5-year renovation (Aaron Ginsburg for 6sqft New York City. June 11, 2026.) The above photo is from…

Liked AI review: Time Witnessed by Fake History Hunter (Fake History Hunter) Also woman is merged with a table, although the witch fear wasn’t that big back [in Medieval London] (yet) I’m pretty sure someone walking through tables would be in trouble. I was linked to a site called Fake History Hunter a few weeks ago. The author, a former historical consultant, uses her site to debunk fake history in media. In AI review: Time Witnessed, she takes apart, frame-by-frame, some AI-generated TikTok…

Liked 9.0.0 — Growing Up by Matthias Pfefferle (ActivityPub for WordPress) One piece was missing, though: other people couldn’t add your WordPress blog to their lists, because your site never told their server who is allowed to do that. ActivityPub 9.0.0 fixes this with the new Default Starter Kit policy setting: Anyone, Followers only, or Just me. ActivityPub for WordPress version 9.0 was just released, and a blog post by lead developer Matthias Pfefferle goes over the new features (you can…