Not quite a month later and our little hedgehog is back home, off nesting somewhere in the woods that border our creek. Wildlife Rescue Cork got in touch earlier this week to say he’d made a full recovery and to ask if I wanted to help re-home him (easy YES!). I’m grateful the little guy chose to leave himself on our patio, as it seems that without a helping hand he wouldn’t have recovered from whatever it was he got into. I drove up to Whitechurch on Tuesday to bring him home. And while I’m…

It saddens to see parents (dads and moms alike) lead their online bios with the quantity of their offspring – much like academics lead with their list of earned titles and degrees. It turns me off and signals to me that This individual wears their quantity of offspring as a badge of honor deserving of praise and awe. You have 6 children? Or 2? Or 12? Great – but don’t wear one of the most ordinary and basic pieces of what humankind has always done as a badge. At least don’t lead with it.

Intent ⬇ Preparation ⬇ Execution ⬇ Post-processing ⬇ Result The smartphone killed the idea of intentional devices. It is every device that you need and more. A phone, an iPod, an internet device. A phone, an iPod, an internet device. A phone, an iPod… you get the point. Having everything at the tip of your fingertips has removed the intent of certain devices and objects around us. Remember when going online was an intentional act? You needed to have a computer, go to it, wait for it to turn on,…

Introduction Sigh, I hadn’t wanted to jump in on this whole saga, but it seems that it’s about time that I got off my arse and said a few things. I’ve been watching lately as Unstory has gone after numerous people in the IndieBlog world, including Brennan, Manton Reece, Gordon McLean, and Korin. I’m sure there are others, but honestly, I’m not invested enough in his style of mockery to make a habit of reading them routinely. However, I think everyone is overcomplicating this situation. The…

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] This video Matt Parker posted a couple of days ago really pissed me off: It’s cheating to say that a result arrived at through classical mechanics—in this case, that 12mv2 is the kinetic energy of a particle—is wrong because it’s only an approximation to relativistic physics. Of course that’s the case, and I swore at my phone when the “reveal” came. By the…

Last weekend my wife called me over to show me something on her phone. She was going through her old emails and came across some emails we had passed back and forth, from when we first met. She and I met in a club and went on a couple of dates, but then I deployed to Afghanistan with the Army. We continued to converse via email mostly, and phone where possible - this was before the days of FaceTime etc. - and the rest is history. That was in 2006, and 20 years later we're still very happily…

While at work today, debugging a weird edge-case where some emails to Outlook have some unexpected padding, I learned something weird: Microsoft Outlook still (kinda) supports WordArt. Wait, what’s WordArt? If you’re too young to remember: when Microsoft Office ’97 came out, it shipped with a feature called WordArt. Basically, these were a somewhat-customisable set of on-demand clip-art-esque text styles that you could apply to your own text. Most of these were as unhinged as PowerPoint’s…

I don't believe anything coming out of frontier model CEOs mouths. Their stakes are extremely high, and they have incentives measured in $ trillions to lie, blow out of proportion, or hide information. We are in the middle of a misinformation war. Assume everyone is lying.

I am a better person without my phone. In fact, I would go so far as saying there is a negative correlation between the amount of time I spend on my phone and the likelihood you would want to be around me. Last Saturday it was hot outside. I was bored and in a state of malaise. So, I picked up my phone. I used my browser to check a few news sites. Then I "surfed" over to X to see how "people" felt about current events. As if I couldn't predict. I spent an embarrassing amount of time scrolling.…

We first discovered the wonders of burger chain Lucky Pierrot while staying in the city of Hakodate but decided to come back for a second visit to the store right next to Onuma Quasi-National Park - their Togeshita (峠下) store. As it turns out, this is their flagship store, and it was huge. The Japanese call clowns ピエロ or “piero” after the French/Italian pierrot clown, hence the name and clown mascot. Each of the 17 Lucky Pierrot stores has a different theme, and this one was birds. More…

There is a particular feeling some old software has that is hard to explain without sounding sentimental. You open it, it appears almost immediately, and it does the job it was built to do. The menus are where you expect them. The file is yours. The program is not asking you to sign in, sync, subscribe, accept a new policy, dismiss a promotion, or wait while it talks to six remote services before showing a blank document. That does not mean old software was always better. Plenty of it crashed.…

While researching topics around relatively niche subjects, mostly cats, I’ve needed to access certain websites that block traffic from the UK, namely imgur and civitai. These platforms are global in nature and otherwise accessible to most people, who will have little reason to cater to my geographic circumstances. The most common, but inconvenient, workaround is to turn on a full VPN, visit the pages, and then disconnect and resume normal browsing. A more seamless approach would be to route…

I’m back on schizogram again. The posts are all different, but all the same. A man hides in the bushes from the authorities. A shirtless old woman yells obscenities at her camera. A wild-eyed college burnout shares his discovery that we’re living in a 300,000-year-old simulation. Each video has millions of views, and the comments range from concerned to encouraging. “Keep talking to the AI, it’s working.” “Please get help!” “I think bro is onto something.” In any case, the audience shares a…

Scrolling through the timeline, these are only a few of the things I’ve seen today, people on different perspectives and paths, perhaps someone… That finally managed to fix their printer after a system update Talking about seeing someone else make a funny typo Sharing their progress on a software project Letting everyone know about a cool update on their favourite game Celebrating being done with the work day and going home Coming up with a random pun/name for a pet Criticizing people in power…

After two nights in Hakodate we drove about an hour north towards Lake Onuma. It's in Onuma Quasi-National Park - kind of a funny name, but I suppose it's not quite a "real" national park, whatever that means. One of Onuma's claims to fame is that it is one of the New Three Views of Japan. Basically there was the original set of three, decided in 1643, and then the "new" three was decided via national election in 1915. Considering that Mt Hakodate is considered one of the top three night views,…

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…

White people, and especially Americans, tend to hold some pretty weird beliefs. But top of the list may be the belief that we have a basic right to permanent emotional comfort. This is a confusion of basic human rights with elitist privileges. A particularly bizarre dramatization of this belief is that paying audiences for the arts have a right never to experience any emotional discomfort. Another is that our lawmakers and other celebrities seem to have an extra-special right to be buffered…

Learning new things every day! (We're ok btw) Around 7:20pm Sunday night there was an incredibly loud sound in our yard and my youngest kid shouted from upstairs "UHH HEY A TREE JUST FELL ON THE GARAGE" (Great way to start a wind down Sunday evening, fwiw) We went out (with many neighbors who'd also heard the sound) to investigate and yea. A neighbor's tree had fallen on our (thankfully) detached garage. Before we could do any damage investigation however, we noted that part of the branches had…

People often confuse freedom with disorder, and predictability with trust. Autonomy threatens something psychological that obedience doesn't. Human ability to predict the other person. People generally build a mental model of someone: "He's this kind of person. She believes these things. He always reacts like this. She's the funny one. He's conservative. She's difficult. He's against this." Once that model exists, interaction becomes cheap. You don't have to encounter the person anymore. You…

I've been keeping up with the blogosphere, and there have been a couple of posts that have irked me enough to write a post about linguistics. And that's saying something. A good example is from itsme, who wrote a blog post asking people to please learn how to write. And it received over a hundred uptoots. I'm afraid I have to pull rank here and say I studied English at university, and although the majority of my classes were about reading books, I did also take classes on the meta-disciplinary…

so i was reading through my apache logs just nowi like going through and seeing what rss readers people are using since its not fancy or anything enough to return location dataits also interesting to see what bots are hitting my feedunfortunately, it seems like some aggregators have found it somehow? maybe from scraping bubbles or somethingi dont usually mind, since its usually just a smallweb thing and maybe i could get some new readers off itthe one i found today is not. one of those. at…

Yes, I am on Reddit every day... I think I am addicted. But honestly, I think it is time for a detox program. There is still good content there, but it is getting harder to find, and the reasons why are worth talking about. Years ago, Reddit used to be something I heard about, saw in search results, and then one day found myself scrolling thinking that's interesting or finding something I agreed with (or disagreed with) vehemently and jumping in. I always thought there were so many subreddits…

I drove my son to school this morning. Not something I do often since he catches the bus. But as part of class, they are going fishing and he wanted to bring his fishing rod.1 After dropping him off, I made my way home. Thirty seconds later, I was off the road, forced off by a mom in a white minivan in a school zone.2Not exactly something I had on my bingo card to start my morning. The most ridiculous part of this entire story is the fact this all took place in slow motion basically, at 25 MPH.…

When I recently whined about modal editing feeling clunky, I think I was being impatient, as I’ve been hitting Vim and Neovim pretty hard lately and have not been feeling that way. That’s also because I’m learning some more stuff and getting more efficient. Scenario: I’m dashing out a sentence, I typo something or change my mind about wording, and then want delete the last one or two words. I do this all the time because I’m a fast-but-sloppy typist. With the macOS defaults, I use Option-Delete…

A big screen carries with it different UI expectations, and how that manifests itself in Apple TV’s Settings app, is that there’s always room for an additional hint about the thing you’ve just selected. So yes, I have been exploring Apple TV’s Settings after the recent update like any normal person would, and I have noticed how well-written those are. They help navigate difficult technical things, and they’re not afraid to get conversational, or offer advice, or even commentary… but they always…

LibreOffice 26.8, released on August 26th, became the software’s most popular update. LibreOffice is a free alternative to Microsoft Office that’s been around for nearly two decades. In one week, the installer was downloaded more than 1 million times — not counting updates via Linux distribution repositories. Someone might say the improvements to the writing system and typography are a hit among NGOs, government agencies, and offices that use LibreOffice. I’m putting my money on a…

Bonus: It has great effects on automated spam emails. Published 10 Sep, 2026

Since writing my article on DHH, I've been getting an above-average number of emails in my inbox decrying my stance and public advocacy. And I have to be honest, I find it so weird, more than anything. It's confusing to me how many typical people—men of the same ilk as myself—want to play defence for the handful of millionaires and corporate executives and weird little guys. A lot of the time, religion will be invoked, specifically Christianity. I'm a Christian myself, I've written my testimony…

I’ve been away so missed this until today. I’ve read a few posts from this blog in the past few months. Originally I thought they were just being written to deliberately provoke. A low level trolling kinda thing. The consistency of it all has me thinking though, and I think their kind of constant criticism is less interesting than the writer seems to believe it is. We’ve all come across them before, that a particular kind of internet critic who seems to derive status from being the person who…

Reddit used to be a good source to find real recommendations. Well, not anymore. Years ago, I used to append "reddit" to my search queries to find real discussions about products. If you search for managed Postgres on Reddit, you may stumble on posts like this: If you look at the profile of the person who created it, their posting history is usually private: u/xxx likes to keep their posts hidden, but check out their stats to learn more about them. But when you do some research and look at…