Thu Oct 22
The first kind of application you could try after setting up Reticulum, or with it, is messaging. I think Reticulum protocol designer Mark Qvist knew that without a practical example of the protocol’s use, people might not use it. Messaging seems obvious. LXMF (Lightweight Extensible Message Format) is a universal...
From ‘Camera Obscura’, by Enrique Vila-Matas, which will be published this month by Yale University Press. Translated from the Spanish by Valerie Miles It’s midnight, and in the corner of the patio, where a party is in full swing, Violet asks me if I remember the Denver-7s. Of course I do. They’re artificial people,...
It's that time again, when I feel various projects piling up; Andrew Marvell said it so much more eloquently, "But at my back I always hear / Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near." Of course, the speaker is trying to woo a woman--or maybe just get sex. I am trying to grade papers and write poems and send work out for...
This headline, tho: Reuters: Trump's tax-exempt diesel draws skepticism from farmers, eludes others Click for details if you like, but I'm not actually here to discuss those.(FN1) I'm thinking about all plans that fall under the heading "exempt diesel fuel from taxes for a short period to deal with current economic...
By: Iain M. Banks | Rating: 4/5Some great short stories of the Culture. The exploration of various themes is quite engrossing. The discussion on whether to destroy Earth or not is excellent. The ending chapters were too confusing for me to understand.
First of all, I wanted to send a thank you to everyone who ever sent me an email or a message. I read all of them, but can’t always respond timely – andsometimes not at all – but I enjoy receiving those, and learn a lot from them. I wanted to excerpt a few things I received in recent months, so that you can enjoy...
This is an entry from my journal. Minimalism seeks to approximate frugality in the face of abundance. It works with the understanding that the human condition is optimised for conditions of scarcity and is geared for a life of incessant struggle. Where there is plenty, where there is no attendant incentive to be...
On Halloween day in 2024, I published an article titled Inflatable Halloween Pumpkins, Ghosts, and Spiders. That article featured four photos of inflatable decorations seen that year, with the second of four featuring a clever inflatable ghost positioned as if it were bursting through a ground-floor residential...
I started this other post but pretty much gonna replace it or not write those things. Some things come in on a Friday morning and I sit at home and instead wonder why this long type C to lightning cable stopped really charging. It’s disappointing because it’s lasted a good while but it has been having little issues....
The author of MacMD recently reached out to me, offering a free license key in case I'd like to review the app. On paper, it looked like a useful tool, and I rarely say no to free stuff, so why not?
In 2015, Aurynn Shaw wrote about Contempt Culture. And it is still happening. Sadly. I find it painful to watch/read at times.
Started taking my camera with me more often. Trying to snap more "whimsical" photos.
People use the word just a lot when talking about problems. If people would just drive slowly near schools. If people would just pay their taxes. If people would just follow the rules. It's a sentence that sounds reasonable as it's true that most problems would go away if people just behaved. The thing is, they...
October 2026. Thaxted. Essex. And finally in Thaxted, time for tea, after admiring the almshouses one last time. I’d walked the bounds, hoping one of these half-timbered beauties had a Chinese menu pinned to the wall, but intensive investigation found “only” an Indian restaurant, so Thaxted can’t be considered a...
Looking out over London from the Duck & Waffle at 110 Bishopsgate My boss retired on Friday. In one form or another, I’ve been working for him for most of the past 16 years. Looking back, deciding to move to this company and having the good fortune to meet and work for him feels like one of those extremely...
I haven’t been posting much lately, but not for lack of trying. I’ve put many hours into various drafts over the past few weeks, and it’s making me realize that I should stick to shorter-form posts if I want to get these things published. If a post takes me longer than an hour end to end, it’s going to land in the...
A spectrum of intimacy. A long time ago, I realized the concept of a best friend was flawed. I had “best friends” in high school, people I resonated with deeply and was inseparable from. We gravitated to each other, did things together, and shared interests or were willing to learn each other’s. I lost that after...
I used to write these lists of random thoughts on my blog to get my creativity flowing by emptying my mind, and I thought they were a perfect fit for wordwrap, as they are too random for my blog now. I realised something as I wandered to the bathroom this morning: I’m becoming better accustomed to cold weather. Over...
“The mystery is revealed, and after a breath or two, becomes just as great a mystery as before.” “One can’t write directly about the soul,” Virginia Woolf wrote. “Looked at, it vanishes.” This is true of any soul — our own, that of another, that of the world. It vanishes because whenever we look, we see not as...
引最近做了一个满足个人需求的小工具 QuietSearch，是一个可以部署在 Cloudflare 上的轻量搜索界面，支持接入 Kagi 和 DeepSeek 的搜索 API。 在设置中选择引擎、填入自己的 API Key，就可以搜索。配置 DeepSeek Key 后，在问题末尾加上 ？，还可以生成带来源引用的回答。 可以先试试我部署的版本，调用费用由你自己的 API 账户承担。Key 请自行妥善保存，网页只在当前页面内存中保存，但请求会经过网站后端转发。用完可以移除；如果不放心，也可以到服务商平台撤销这个 Key。 自行部署也很简单：Fork 仓库，在 Cloudflare Workers 中导入，构建命令填写 npm...
💡Go read The Devil You Know now!Do you think you’d be good at convincing others to sell their soul to the devil?I am not a good sales person. If I were, I would probably be better at marketing my novels. I think there are telemarketers and people who have jobs they do for a living who would be better at this than I...
“There are, I find, things I want philosophy to do that it cannot. Or that I cannot do with it.” That’s Amy Olberding, professor of philosophy at the University of Oklahoma, on the limits of philosophy that life sometimes makes vivid. The guest post by her, below, is an excerpt from her truly remarkable book, Kill...
I had some thoughts about bubbles last week, and that post had some impact. /2026/10/impact.png For example, you might notice that posts on Top are no longer only a couple of days old. This is because Ben adjusted the algorithm to ignore the age of the post. In theory, this sounds good. Why should a post get...
If social media/social network platforms were compared to planets, then X, previously Twitter, would be the Pluto of the solar system; a dwarf planet. Because unlike its peers, X, twenty years after launching in 2006, is still well short — make that a long way short — of joining the one-billion-member club. Should...
I've just made a very small update to blogmore.el to fix a small bug, and also to update some deprecated code. The blogmore-new command inserts the result of expanding a template into the buffer when making a new post, and I've not touched that template since I started writing blogmore.el. This includes not updating...
A Message For Myself§It feels liberating to step up for myself and make a decision that is focused on my well being and mental health. Even though it was a difficult decision to step away from the familiar, the self-inflicted pressures was not worth it. I would like to think I grew a bit wiser and future me will be...
So this website is old as heck. I think some folks who are stopping by might not realize that. I launched it in 1996, and started this blog in 2001. So, y'know, thirty and twenty-five years respectively. Because of that, this site has gone through a lot of different stuff on the backend. While it's true that until...
So. Hooman. Are you ready for our meeting? Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.
I got them cheap on ebay, and they’re from around 1999-2001. These issues are almost tabloid size, so I had to scan them manually. Like an animal. Where you can learn exciting news, like — Is DC finally going to publish the final issues of Rick Veitch’s Swamp Thing run!? Nah, never gonna happen. These issues are, of...
capslockday.org: JUNE 28 AND OCTOBER 22 ARE SEMIANNUALLY OBSERVED AS INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY AS A PARODY HOLIDAY CREATED IN OCTOBER 2000 BY DEREK ARNOLD, A USER ON METAFILTER. Came across this one today on IRC! One of my most used keys, as I have the Caps Lock mapped to Control :-)
22 Beacon | INDEX | 24 Bake Self-imposed constraint: Use the letters of the prompt word inside a 2-inch square to illustrate its meaning. Hongdian Black Forest fountain pen, EF, black ink on 120 gsm paper.
I was perusing the always lovely website of one mr. V.H. Belvadi and stumbled my way onto a post titled “Webmentions, copyright and privacy” and from there quickly landed on Kev’s post titled “Privacy and Webmentions”. I find the topic very interesting because it sits at the intersection of two things I care much...
I'm using CachyOS with GNOME, but after watching the KDE documentary, I kind of feel like switching from GNOME to Plasma. But Linux Mint is winking at me again, especially since it brings new programs that are well integrated into Linux Mint. If the Mint team introduces a service for connecting and syncing between...
I encountered the same suspicious MSIX installer in two unrelated managed client environments. Antivirus successfully quarantined it, which was good to see. I still wanted to understand how it had arrived and whether there was evidence that it had run.Those questions led me into browser download history, a...
At least once a year I try to go on retreat for a couple of days to clear my head by becoming a hermit for a little while. I try to get off the grid far enough that I can walk around, explore, take pictures, and have a little time to hack around with stuff for the fun of it (usually tools I haven't had a chance to...
I didn’t consider getting an iPhone Duo (I like my iPhone 17 Pro and its cameras too much!), but I was certainly curious about how it would feel to use. Gruber’s lengthy, detailed review has answered all my questions, and then some.It’s something of a hatchet job, but this quote stood out and made me chuckle:It’s a...
Everyone knows Alien, the movie franchise with countless spin-offs and prequels and sequels. But not everyone knows that the designer behind the… well, alien monster of the first movie, was a Swiss artists called H. R. Giger. (Somehow it seems to me that to make a dent in the world of fantasy one has to be...
I’d been to Glacier in 2003 and zipped through the park because I was short on time. It still stuck with me as one of the most beautiful places. I remember passing these Red Buses thinking how neat it’d be to be a passenger. Pretty darn grateful that it eventually happened, and it was indeed neat. When the Red Bus...