I was just randomly looking through some medieval books, as one does, when I discovered that a bunch of these French books for some reason had lots of pictures of bridges with people going over them.They’re so funny and fascinating to me, the art seems to depict regular, common people during their daily activities.No heroes, no royals, no adventures, just another tuesday in the past.So many details, so much to see.I became obsessed, so I made a thread of it on social media and now I turn that…
Of course, for my first post of Blaugust, what would I be writing about other than blogging? In all seriousness though, this is far more about UI/UX and accessibility, and I think it touches on something both important and neglected by the IndieWeb community. In some webweaving circles, you'll see websites created that only work properly on a desktop screen. Sometimes this is due to coding difficulties—I've been there many times myself, media queries in CSS can be a difficult beast to tame! But…
Wombat sent me the above picture: A physical ad by Apple on a big canvas. Pictured is a person hiding their face with their iPhone, but therefore actually pointing the camera at the people seeing the ad. It says: "Safari. A browser that's actually private." and "Privacy. That's iPhone." It's accidentally perfectly demonstrating the limitations in current popular privacy discourse and movement: The fact that devices or software may claim to keep the users private, but not people in general,…
It's the final day of July, and I'm in a contemplative mood. Tomorrow begins Blaugust 2026, a fun event where bloggers are challenged to write 31 blog posts in 31 days. Will I participate? Well, every month has been Blaugust for me since November 2025, as I've written at least 23 posts every month since then. Although I haven't yet had a month where I've successfully blogged every single day, so maybe I will. What I want to talk about, though, is not blogging. At the start of the month, Dan Q.…
Some books are heavy. Others have weight in them. I just finished a book of the second kind, a book I’d been meaning to read for a long time, a book I waited to buy a copy of even though my college library had it so that I could mark it freely with my pencil, a book I’d started reading yesterday. Even before I’d turned to the last page, I’d started feeling the weight of it settle into my chest, my head, my heart. Coming back to the real world to drink the evening tea, to have dinner, was…
In this post I mentioned two series which I denoted t(n) and c(n). The former is the number of unlabeled rooted trees with n nodes. The latter is the cumulative sum of the former, i.e. The sequence c(n) is also the number of constrains on an n-step Runge-Kutta method; that’s how I became interested in it. Now the t(n) sequence has been cataloged as OEIS A000081 and OEIS gives the asymptotic estimate of t(n) for large n as where C = 0.4399… and α = 2.9557…. The cumulative sum of t(n), what I’ve…
🤖 This post includes some LLM-derived content 🤖 I've been recently thinking about how Open Source maintenance seems to be becoming a little more a slog recently - largely with the increased amount of contributions possible with AI agents - and how it impacts being a maintainer. I'm very fortunate that my literal job is to be an Open Source project maintainer (among other things) and that it's a privilege not many others have. That being said, it still doesn't mean that undoes the amount of work…
After Iceland, we traveled to Oslo, Norway. Summers can be hot in Atlanta, so we wanted to visit another country with cooler temps. Norway is amazing! So much natural beauty and quiet. We took a tour of the islands in Oslofjord (and learned it’s not technically a fjord because it was created via tectonic plate separation rather than glaciers). Here we learned about cabin culture in Norway: I think it’s around 80% of people either own or have access to a cabin. July is the main month for folks…
I want to leave the internet. This site, reddit, my banking app, the cloud service, Youtube, my music streaming app, my email, Whatsapp, iNaturalist, pornsites, Google Maps, OSMAnd, the local DOT app. I want to forget about VPN and DNS providers. Microsoft Teams, Outlook for work. I don't want to leave the internet. Wikipedia, the learning side of Youtube, this site, informative websites, OSMAnd, iNaturalist. I want to stop spending my life in this hologram, even more now that it feels so fake…
While I mainly used the PDF reader integrated into Firefox on Android to view PDFs on my phone so far, I now have a new favorite PDF reader. What bugged me about the reader in Firefox was especially the performance when viewing big PDFs like newspapers. It always took a second or so to rerender when zooming or going fast between pages. Not so with MJ PDF. The app, which isn’t available on the Play Store but is available using some alternative download methods and is fully open-source, is…
IBM training manual from 1979 When LLMs were really hitting their stride I started experimenting with them, like many others, to see where they could help me. I wanted to see how I could leverage them at work and in my free time. I’ve learned a lot since then, but I especially remember something I started doing, and that I’ve seen other people do as well: push responsibility onto the LLM. I would say things like “here’s some research Claude did” or “the agent added this function”. Also…
In the last post, I wrote about Forever Goals, which are outcomes I will always want. It’s something I can approach or maintain, not achieve. They are not SMART goals (i.e. Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound). For example, a SMART goal is phrased like this: “losing 5 pounds by the end of the year by doing 4 hours of cardio per week and tracking calories.” A Forever Goal is more like “be fit.” A Forever Goal could have a logo. It should make a good tattoo. I think a SMART…
One of the abiding problems in working on strategy is that people like to set goals for complex problems. In my experience the hardest part about accepting complexity as a real thing to be wrestled with, is that one really, truly doesn’t get to set goals. What happens instead, is that one can decide on a direction of travel and then look for the different ways one might move in that direction. It’s deceptively simple, and the hardest part is stopping oneself from measuring progress against…
I thought this was poison ivy because I'm a west coast idiot at heart We moved to our New England place in the fall of '21 so it wasn't until the following spring that these vine plants with three leaves in the pattern I'd thought was a shoe-in for poison ivy danger (which I'd never seen before, coming from the west coast) started growing in the yard...but that's when I learned that despite having oil that will fuck me up, poison ivy will never have thorns. I idly wondered what this thing was,…
I’m on holiday so I shouldn’t really be writing a weeknote but I’m getting lots of designers reaching out to me on Linkedin who have never worked in the NHS, wanting to work there. This is my personal view and not my employer’s. Being a designer in the public sector might not mean a public sector job. It’s important to understand that an opportunity might not come directly to you as a freelance person. Public sector bodies like the NHS and others both hire people directly and procure services…
I spent two months cloning almost every OS posted to r/osdev and running the code through an analyzer. Almost everything was a reskin of a reskin of Linux, and almost nothing boots on real hardware. Then I said so in public, and 137 comments taught me more about the AI hobby economy than the code did.
Yesterday I wrote that a lot of the special functions that pop up in mathematical physics are solutions to second order linear differential equations with polynomial coefficients. More generally, holonomic functions are defined to be those functions that are the solutions to linear differential equations, of any order, with polynomial coefficients. Most special functions are holonomic. To quantify that statement, I went through the special functions covered in Abramowitz and Stegun. The large…
I have had the Arch Linux linux-hardened kernel installed on my Qotom fanless server since I bought it a couple of years ago. The Qotom has had kernel panics on the last two linux-hardened updates. I changed to the plain linux kernel. It was pretty easy, even though I had a case of the nerves about it.
As some readers of this blog may know, or remember, I used to operate a pizza company that was sold in 2018. We had 14 units and did about 10,000 pizzas a week at our peak. 300 people. We knew what we were doing operationally. And I would say on the human resources side too, but that’s not what this post is about. Since I was from the real estate world, and knew about that, and knew a bunch of people, I would get sent folks looking to get into the restaurant business--the restaurant curious. I…
I'm bullish on AI, but I also feel this pull to leave tech behind entirely, and I've been struggling to figure out why. This is my attempt to crystallize my feelings.
Bruce Schneier has a great post about separating “work” tasks from “gym” tasks when it comes to AI usage: At work, if your job is to move a bunch of heavy things from one side of the room to another, you should use whatever assistive tech you have on hand: a wagon, a forklift… even an AI-powered robot. But at the gym, it makes no sense for that robot to lift weights for you. The point of weightlifting isn’t to move heavy things across the room; it’s to actually lift those heavy things. The same…
The old Postville Courthouse in Lincoln, Illinois, via The Library of Congress. Abraham Lincoln practiced law there from 1847 to 1859. Well, as a surprise to me, my silly little Gravatar article was posted to Hacker News. This has called a lot of attention to the post, and made for some interesting comments. The most interesting of this is the claim that I have “cognitive dissonance”: We live in a world with cognitive dissonance. We have to because if you don't you'd go insane. This article is…
Happy Birthdaversary to all whom celebrate (it's us, we are celebrating) 21 years ago today, my now-partner Della was celebrating her 21st birthday with only her camera and film, a pair of jeans, a shirt, a pair of chucks, her passport and a $10 white dress with black polka dots that she bought at target (we'll get to that in a few) because everything else she owned was in a suitcase causing security upsets at Heathrow due to it having arrived from across the Atlantic without a passenger. 27…
A kid was turning away to return to his group of friends, but pauses. He then turns around to the viewer, asking "Wait a minute. Who are you?"In a bid to try and be more active on Blacksky, I agreed to be asked a bunch of questions about my blog, like who my target audience is. And it kept stumping me because I don't really have one in mind. I mean, I guess if you like nostalgic navel-gazing 40-plus people, you should sign up! But I'm not after a specific demographic. I'm just a nostalgic…
“A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people. It is a never failing spring in the desert.” — Andrew Carnegie Our local Clark County Library Photo credit: Clark County Library website Have you visited your local library lately? We absolutely love the Clark County Library. I don’t know what we’d do without it. We don’t go as often as we used to… because we don’t have to. We rarely buy books anymore, but we definitely read a lot. No matter where we are, we have…
On our particular Mastodon instance, Electromagnetic Field (EMF; #EMFCamp on the socials), a festival held every even-numbered year, is not something you could miss becoming aware of. Hence, we (that is James and me) have known it exists since its last outing in 2024. But it’s got to be the ultimate of fediverse influence to actually take that one stage further and buy tickets. And then some imposter’s syndrome started to set in about it. To back up a bit, EMF isn’t a music festival, although…
Yesterday, Coyote wrote about the problems with Bubbles.town and more generally, feed aggregators that sort by popular vote. Coyote uses the metaphor of nature here—Bubbles being a “bioindicator for the local ecosystem” and its “popularity [telling] us about the state of things in its region of the blogosphere?” Coyote isn't the first to reach for the natural world to describe how we read and write online. A decade earlier, Mike Caulfield described two competing modes of the web as the garden…
The first time I saw Michelangelo’s David in person, I wept. Never in my life have I witnessed a more beautiful piece of content. I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. Museum patrons all around me were looking up from their phones to admire David as well. Despite it being legacy content, David was so scrollstoppingly captivating that it generated stronger engagement than TikTok and Instagram combined, despite those platforms offering fresher, more personally relevant content.
They don't gotta burn the books, they just remove 'em. Rage against the machine - Bulls on parade There's been a lot of discourse on my remaining social media this week about certain AI companies purchasing what used to be called 'long tail' books when I worked in a book data company (admittedly it was a long time ago). The purpose being, that these books of all types are a form of undigested, pre AI information/sentence structure ripe to be absorbed.…
NASA has released a new 3D model of the Earth’s gravitational field. “The geoid is an equipotential surface that can be thought of as the shape an ocean surface would take due to the Earth’s… More
