Curvise's Home Page I’m Curvise (they/them) and this is a new version of my public web site. On it you can learn some things about me and (coming soon - m...
Short post, I've just had these ideas bouncing in my head for a while and it keeps annoying me phones have never implemented them. First is a "guest lock". There's a better name for it somewhere but it's not my job to find it. Android and iOS should have a system-level ability to lock focus on the active application. This would mean you could open a concert ticket, a photo, or your digital…
In early April I went to Portland where I got two chances to look for spiders in park lands and found several more at urban houses. I have attempted to identify a few already and failed to reach high confidence in any of the species. So I will post highlights only to the blog until I do figure them out. Forest Park, Saturday Morning. The first spider I found in Forest Park was, in my opinion, one…
I've been listening to a lot of old music this year. No, not old necessarily. Rather, music from different periods of my past. Firs this began when I hooked up my oldest functional hard drive, a 1TB external HDD which I bought at the end of high school and used into college. On it was a lot of music that dominated my life over about 5 years - prog metal in particular. For fun I put some on,…
A Non-Update on the Site I still haven't gotten around to rebuilding the catalogue - I've had a lot of other higher priority tasks and meanwhile I was trying to figure out if Bear Blog somehow supported dynamic static site generation since I don't want to learn Jekyll again. So my most recent spidering achievement I can't post there, and I will instead post first as a blog entry. Phidippus Audax…
I use Mullvad VPN[1] on my daily driving devices (my phone, my laptop, and my PC). I am pretty much always connected to it when browsing the web. One of the consequences of this is that a lot of sites will break in different ways. It might be obvious, like Reddit being cute with an error page (I've considered writing a browser extension that deletes their annoying copy), or it might be secretive…
(Revised -- written out in full and edited, 2026-04-01) The Email I liked the reporting WIRED does and wish I could support the journalists who do it. However, Wired is owned by Conde Nast - which was weird to me straight away when I first subscribed, and which turned out to be a pretty big problem for me. This morning I got (sophisticated!) phishing emails telling me my Robinhood account (which I…
Recently I've been more proactive about Getting Shit Done that Needs Doing. These are things like getting my vehicle inspection (miserable), going to a new doctor and then reflecting on the visit/prescriptions after because I have time to (helpful), testing out some new Jellyfin plugins (enjoyable), or giving my cat extra time outside because I worry she's not getting enough stimulation (OCD is…
I recently bought four new disk drives. Two are USB HDDs for use with the server I'm running on an old MacBook Pro, one is a new SSD specifically for loading Baldur's Gate 3 in under 15 minutes (although I anticipate using it for more), and one is a large-ish new HDD for internal mounting in my PC, because I need more storage. Setting these up has been really difficult because: I don't know what…
This is a post about AI (actually just LLMs). There is a common phrase in the USA that says "A stopped clock is right twice a day." It is used to mean something like, "Even this idiot with terrible takes will sometimes say something true/right/agreeable." However, I can't stand this phrase, for a reason that many would think pedantic and pointless. But now, in the ChatGPT era, I actually think…