I've been reading the letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Today I was delighted by Letter 54, written to Christopher Tolkien in January of 1944. Christopher was in the air force at that time, fighting in…

When dealing with big numbers in the news stories, consulting AP Style's numeral rules can help make sure you get them right. The post AP Style has Debated Numeral Rules for Headlines appeared first…

Foldable phones are all about trade-offs. Samsung’s new Fold8 just has some different ones. Samsung’s new Galaxy Z Fold8 is a reminder that you can’t have it all.

A three-week August itinerary through Finland, Estonia, Sweden, and Denmark, with notes on ferries, saunas, hotels, and a bicycle hazard nobody warns you about.

Translated from French into English by Mark Hutchinson. This book isn't out yet, but will be in November 2026. I received a digital ARC from the publisher (thank you!). I was excited to read this…

Read about how BurgeonLab.com came to be and how it has transformed to become Naty’s de facto home on the Internet after discovering the IndieWeb.

I was browsing youtube on my TV a couple of months ago and the HPA Live Webinar: Introduction to EFI popped up and I had a watch, and Andre (the good salesperson he is of his tuning courses) was…

Learn how to use the React 19 cache() API in the Next.js App Router to optimize performance and avoid fetch waterfalls when using React Server Components.

The Daily Create this morning is about constellations and I was remembering a fun, cool project we did in CLMOOC in which we invented new constellations and the origin stories, and then created a…

What about nonchalance is so enticing to some? The act of pretending to not care? Isn’t it human experience to love and feel? To me, it seems these people are giving up their agency and their…

This is still very early days, but Sifa is a professional network built on the AT Protocol. It’s meant to be an open alternative to LinkedIn which, let’s be honest, has always been a bit…

I was in Denver last week for work. I managed to get out to Red Rocks on my final morning. It was fantastic during the day—I can only imagine what it would be like seeing a gig there at night. 🔗 ∙…

"The Flight 93 election" was a term used by conservatives in 2016 to justify voting for Donald Trump. The basic idea was that, even though Donald Trump was essentially everything we, well, knew he…

OTD in 2008, I began blogging about family history. I was a decade into my genealogy research and my first blog post was about great-grandpa Meyer Elias Mahler (1855?-1910). In the 18 years since…

R&D engineer with 30+ years building real-time signal processing and estimation systems that run unattended, in the field, for years. Deep expertise in C++, Python and SIMD; recovering timing and…

A one-page machine learning cheat sheet

Apparently a script has been written for a Tintin sequel to be directed by Peter Jackson. I had given up on this, as it had originally been announced when the first movie came out back in 2011. I…

Tried to see what Chatgpt says about the 2019 Gutenberg-Net analogy. Because Nov 2026 is very close. Gutenberg–Net correspondence: a reconstruction through 2026 I reconstructed the sequence using the…

| Read on LessWrong | Comment on HN | Large language models often take actions running on one computer (via an agentic harness such as Claude Code or Codex), however the LLMs’ responses to prompts…

Much of the Indian philosophical tradition shares a fundamental concern: understanding the nature of the reality in which we find ourselves. Traditionally, these classical systems are taught as…

Source: The Oil We Eat – How Our Food System Depends On Oil and How Fragile It Makes Our Food Security Preface. Even though this article was published in 2004, it is still true today, only…

Your executable is a SQLite database Turns out you can make an SQLite database file into a valid ELF object. Crazy hacks Tags: hacks nix sqlite elf file-formats

The OG wayOne of the key design initiatives for

(This is my twenty-fifth post in a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.) The Hechinger Report has some great writers who hit important points as they cover news…

Today I e-filed a consolidated position statement and umbrella memorandum with the National Labor Relations Board, Region 32, in support of all ten of my pending unfair labor practice charges against…

Talking about music in a game I hold dear.

Everything has a last time. We just don't know which time it is.

I keep a note of sentences that are harder to read than they need to be. Most come from documents that are otherwise careful and correct: it is the writing that lets them down, not the thinking. Here…

“Opposites are complementary.” - Niels Bohr In investing as in life, labels are useful in small measure but potentially fatal if abused. Many labels are no more than marketing slogans, or some are…

Well, let me tell you a story. There's a race I don't particularly like... Look, I'm kinda hesitant to say that I don't like this or that running event. If you dislike the January gloominess, or…

How a home-lab AI console grew from a viewer into an instrument panel: live knowledge maps, review coverage, writable ideas, voice capture, supervised agent sessions, approvals, and read-only…

Like I did for the first half of the year, here is my list of events I attend from August 2026 on. Some of these I help to organise, some are run by good friends, and at some of them you’ll find me…

Turns out, a messy world demands fewer categorical (ha!) ideas on how our brain processes it! #A New Framework for How the Brain Compresses Our Noisy WorldAn updated view of categorization reflects…

Michael Faraday died 25 August 1867 at the age of 76. He … Invented the concept of the field — originally applied to electricity, but later expanded to magnetism and gravitation. Discovered…

Baikaju was another bargain I found on Kleinanzeigen. I bought it in mid-2025 with two other boxes of Japanese incense… Continue reading “Shoyeido – Selects – Baikaju · Plum…

Back in 2022 I announced a new Q# community project - a proper, standalone TextMate grammar for Q#, built with a real build pipeline, test suite and multiple output formats, rather than the handful…

A decade of good weather, unreasonable expectations, and things mostly working out

when life gets a little busier, or when life throws something at me that takes up a bit more headspace... the blogging and journaling slows down a bit. something I read regularly at roberts blog .…

Humans are arguably distinguished from other species by the extent to which we have transcended the temporal limits of natural selection through our capacity to adapt our environment to our needs,…

Paninaro.uno

This popular US R&B quartet were billed as The Original Coasters because they were led by tenor singer Cornelius “Cornell” Gunter who’d been an “original” member of The Coasters who had moved to…

Statement of Ashley M. Gjøvik, Charging Party, NLRB Case 32-CA-282142Five years ago, when I raised concerns about toxic chemical exposure in an Apple office, Apple's managers and "Employee…

The Vuelta a España goes to Andorra today and pleasant weather awaits, 26°C and sunshine. As a ski resort in the Pyrenees it’s an obvious destination for a race with climbs and hotels but…

I neglected to write about the hi-jinks at Skechers while I was trying to buy my shoes yesterday. (Was it only yesterday? Seems a million years ago. Vacations are nice like that, even one that's only…

The judgment gate assumed a fixed line: automate below it, escalate above it, and the humans above it stay as good as they were. They don't. Judgment at the escalation tier is built by volume at…

Years ago I read this attractive Pushkin Press paperback which, unusually for a 19th century novel, comes with no introduction or footnotes. The publisher's website provides a brief summary of this…

There is a childlike innocence in modelling prototypes we are less familiar with - and despite my best endeavours I’m still wonderfully uninformed about so much about Canadian railways in the…

Daily Drawing 968

I don't think it's going to work out the way everybody thinks it will. The current narrative, at least the one pushed by the companies selling the shovels, is that AI will become centralized.…

Welcome to the Symposium on Usable Security and Privacy happening in Hannover, Germany and being hosted by CISPA. Blog posts: Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Session 1: Privacy Notices, Permissions & Labels…