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I have always been a board game fan. But unlike most, I prefer games that offer interesting, unusual, and clever features, qualities, designs, and what Board Game Geek calls ‘mechanics’.…

"Treebeard" by Tomás Hijo'Hoom, hm, I have not troubled about the Great Wars,' said Treebeard; 'they mostly concern Elves and Men. That is the business of Wizards: Wizards are always troubled about…

I run several Claude sessions at the same time in herdr , usually one per repository, and some of them run on another machine. herdr already knows the state of each one (idle, working, blocked or…

we all have wishes, granted. But who has wishes granted?

2026 · A puppy app for two tired people. Tap a button on one phone and it shows up on the other in about ten seconds.

Wired headphones are making a comeback. Apparently. This isn’t a ‘year of the Linux desktop’ thing either, because an increasing number of people are embracing the cable once again. I’ve never…

Get out there and vote.

A quick greeting to my readers: after taking a pause from blogging back in February, I’m glad to say I’m back behind the DM screen! Thank you all for your patience, support, and kind messages while…

For readers in the USA or Europe, it can be a challenge to understand law enforcement policies and procedures in countries grounded in non-Western values and assumptions. In China, for example. The…

Source Barry Ritholtz posted this up-and-right chart, which is a classic of exponential extrapolation. Given the difficulty, delays, and cost of bringing the current generation of data center…

I am giving two remote talks this week: - "From Promises to Reality: Independent Verification of Web Privacy Claims" in CS5914/6604 (Securing the Modern Internet) at Virginia Tech on Oct 20th. -…

Every chili pepper in my illustrated field guide, ranked on the Scoville scale from the sweet bell to the Carolina Reaper, with the history of how pepper heat is measured.

The same headless samegame-engine that powers my Phaser 4 SameGame, unchanged, now rendered with NacatamalOn: Mega Drive dithering, a CRT tube and art painted entirely in code, with the full…

I'm writing this Thursday morning, but I'm probably posting it around...mm...Tuesday? Wednesday? After all, I had a series of five Cauldron posts to get up on Ye Old Blog. But right now, Dear Reader,…

Mini billet, just pour avoir une note que les 19 et 20 octobre 2026, j’ai travaillé du balcon pendant une heure en après-midi. La catastrophe climatique est plaisante une fois de temps en temps.

I visited Skogskyrkogården (The Woodland Cemetery) this morning. It’s an incredibly beautiful place, famous for its architecture and design, and included on the UNESCO World Heritage List. I was…

Google’s Gemini 4 Argon has given me another reason to revisit a question I’ve been exploring for some time: Are we approaching the point where orchestrating multiple AI models becomes…

Loving these crisp fall mornings and sitting outside for a cup of coffee while it is still tolerable.

Engineering leaders say AI agents write code much faster, yet their release cycles are no faster than before. Typing was never the bottleneck: here's where the time really goes, and what I'd change…

I’ve written before regarding the conflict between using Elm’s Html.lazy and extensible records. Today I wish to highlight a similar mild conflict between Elm’s Never type and Html…

French President Emmanuel Macron posed a question to the French people: “Looking at these images, we have all asked ourselves: What was going through their minds? How can French people do this to…

Working out loud is more than telling people what you’re doing. It has two halves, and each one on its own falls short. The first half is observable work: your documents, drafts and decisions…

The best software for editing a thesis, dissertation, or research manuscript yourself, compared on Word and Overleaf support, reviewable edits, long documents, academic checks, and price: Paperpal,…

The morning of October 19 didn’t start with coffee – but there was plenty of adrenaline. The first thing I saw when I woke up was Telegram alerts telling me that something had gone wrong with…

Last week, I needed to make some pretty major updates to a web component in a design system I use for clients. I’m a big fan of TDD, but I wasn’t mentally in a place to write my tests…

So I've posted before how I think ClickHouse is great. Its columnar storage is fast, it has amazing compression. I won't bore you with those details, you can see them all here:…

Chest tubes are a common tool in managing thoracic injury. Inserting them is relatively straightforward. However, there is considerable variation in practice around their management. Standard…

My lovelies, have you read The Secret Language of Victorian Jewelry, the new jewelry book by Amy Azzarito? Because I just did, and I could not be more impressed. Let’s discuss. The Secret…

Turns out, a Github based publishing workflow comes with its own headaces.

Hi there!🛡️ Security & PrivacyScott Helme rebuts the “passkeys are a trap” claim: synced passkeys send no attestation, and falling back to TOTP leaves you…

Complexity is a difficult beast to deal with. One of the core challenges of complexity is the strange independence between the parts and the whole. You may find yourself in a situation where learning…

The Ask LukeW feature on my website has been answering people's questions about digital product design for over three years. How well it answers depends on the content available to it. So in addition…

Merge a change, get a versioned Cults3D listing. How a catalog of printable models ships itself from GitHub, what a version number should mean for a thing you print, nine traps in Cults3D's API, and…

Normally I am not a fan of stacked bar charts. They do not allow users to easily compare the constituent elements of the stack. In spending a number of years working with economists I became familiar…

Buy a coffee, a tank of fuel or a bag of groceries in Portugal and the cashier will ask “contribuinte?” or “quer número de contribuinte na fatura?” before printing the…

Many users, including some large projects, migrate to nftables by running their existing iptables rules through iptables-translate and leaving it at that. It works, sure, but it only changes the…

On the 14th October, fifteen freelancers met up in the beer garden of the Battle of Trafalgar pub to talk freelancing, tech, AI and motor racing. This is some of what we talked about: Switching from…

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

James Carville finally admitted it.

There was a time when a reasonably proper, performant HTTP server was a thing that required a significant investment. Apache, Lighthttpd, Nginx. To make your own was a multi-year commitment, so you…

some people have hidden their up votes and I unhide them in dev tools just to upvote them when I like that Out of spite of course

You don't want to miss Dave's Interesting Assemble II. I've had a sneak preview and it's going to be great. it's free! Tickets are hereHere's a video (sound from the…

Hamburg has always been known for its wild nightlife, fueled by the St. Pauli red-light district. But Germany's second-largest city is having an urban makeover, starting with the Elbphilharmonie…

in which our hero emits

When I began my sex therapy training in 2000, I thought of myself as reasonably sex positive. I remember hearing a celebrated and renowned sex therapist/researcher say at a conference, that people…

Every year, browser vendors collaborate via the Interop project to synchronize their efforts on new HTML/CSS/JS features. This year, there’s a ton of super exciting features being considered! In this…

Interview recorded in 1980 and provided courtesy of York Oral History Society More information on the Mystery Towers. Transcription: VOICES OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR PROJECT INTERVIEW WITH JOHN TEAL.…

The Anthropic Institute’s newest report says that the company’s junior recruitment has begun to slow down. All block quotes below are from this report. Anthropic has been hiring for a smaller share…

In Code Complete Steve McConnell argues that software development is a wicked problem, one you cannot fully understand before attempting to solve it. I think most developers who have created software…