Arcana Labs
Arcana Labs
Zac Adam-MacEwen
A personal/hobby site from a writer turned software engineer turned generalist maker.
Latest Posts
As is tradition - but equally delayed by a few days because of The Circumstances - I’ve kept a hold of the most interesting things I discovered on our wild and occasionally-wonderful internet in April, and now offer them up to you as a...
I’ve had a particularly lucky break in my professional life, and I’m going to be starting a brand new position with a new-to-me company in a few days. One of the practical upshots of this, though, is that it’s suddenly practical to...
I know we haven’t done it in a couple of months, but in actual fact I have been stockpiling links for you anyway, as though it had been the plan to do it all along. To be honest life has just simply been just enough madhouse lately that...
I’ve been toying for a few months now with the idea of a pithy aphorism, something along the lines of “the curse of sentience is its desire to be self-indulgent”. It’s not a commentary on craving chocolate, but this idea that somehow, in...
It’s 9 AM on a Saturday morning and somehow I am already an hour into having learned that the looming US strike on Iran has finally happened, and that they’ve only gone ahead and gotten Israel involved too. The US has named this...
For some reason, after spending the best part of a decade in the tech industry, I’ve begun to feel a certain kind of way about the state of enterprise in the highly industrialized parts of the world. I can’t begin to imagine why. “Growth...
Last October, I took the time to share some updates about PETI, which at that point was more a project-in-concept than something I was hands-on-keyboard “working on”. That’s not really true anymore; over the last couple weeks, I’ve been...
As is increasingly our tradition around here, I wanted to take one final opportunity this year to round up the fun and interesting things I found this month and share them with you! But first, a more important message: If you’re on the...
Passkeys are undergoing a major adoption push at the moment, as a replacement for the more traditional username/password authentication model. And while they do carry significant benefits, the way they’re being adopted makes me a bit...
It’s not the most pressing thing in the backlog, but it’s time again for the monthly post of what has struck me as interesting from around the internet. Since we’re not starting off in the middle of the month like last time, this month...
For arcane (hah) reasons known only to me and my browsing history, I’ve recently taken an interest in alchemy, and to that end, was tipped to Titus Burkhardt’s Alchemy: Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul. I’ve made no small...
As part of my mission to find, discover, and expose cool things, I’ve decided to start sharing the cool stuff I have found on the internet once a month with the rest of you. Unfortunately, in October, I had this idea rather late, so the...
I’m usually the first to admit that the transition from late summer into autumn is one of my least productive periods of the year. This isn’t to say I’m doing nothing, but it’s a time when my thoughts tend toward gathering rather than...
In a tale as old as time, it’s common among people in my rough age cohort - the Millennials and younger end of Gen X - to lament the pre-“social media” internet. I think the key problem with that is just a matter of phrasing, and a...
There’s a genre of mastodon post that I occasionally enjoy recapitulating, and I call it my “tin cup sermon”. It’s never quite the same twice, but it usually goes as a lament that socially, our conception of what I’m going to call the...