you can visit it on the "web", a "web" "site" if you will.
The human body, alas, can only store enough energy in the form of glycogen for about 2 hours of aerobic activity. If you're going at it for longer than that, as happens regularly even on my relatively laid back marathon training schedule, you need a plan to refuel on the go. You can buy premade gels for this, or rely on a sports drink like Gatorade, but I like to make my own "gels" instead.…
The titles that come to mind when I think of the best (American) comic books I read in the past few years are: Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen Alan Scott: The Green Lantern Absolute Martian Manhunter (and to varying degrees the other Absolute books) Flex Mentallo: Man of Muscle Mystery What do these all have in common (other than being all DC - sorry True Believers, I was raised in the Detective…
Some days the sheer breadth of possibility that comes with having my own website hits hard. For the first time in the history of our species, a random schmuck like myself can have a global platform, accessible to all, unbeholden by corporate gatekeepers (or less beholden anyway). But with that reach comes a unique anxiety - is this thing good enough to be seen by potentially 80% of all living…
A walkthrough for the video game Cave Story in the form of a rap album . I mean this with zero irony whatsoever: there are some legit bangers here. The most impressive part to me is how it refuses to compromise on being both musically good and an actually usable guide to the game. Austenland: The World's Most Immersive Austen Experience? . An exploration of a very strange (and now defunct)…
Team Fortress 2 is a 2007 multiplayer first-person shooter game by Valve, a company better known for Half-Life , Portal , and essentially all improvements to Linux gaming over the past decade 1 . It's the only game in my Steam library where I've clocked a four-digit number of hours 2 . It's also the only competitive multiplayer game in my top 20 Steam games and one of only 2…
There's a phenomenon at the intersection of self-selection bias and XKCD 2501 I've noticed in my own thoughts about my hobbies. Let's call it "enthusiast's bias." If you are interested in improving at some activity foo , you're likely to also follow foo-related blogs and newsletters, watch video guides on foo tips and tricks, periodically lurk on /r/foo, etc etc.…
This site first participated in the fine tradition of CSS Naked Day in 2024 , and it should have done so again automatically in 2025 if the script I wrote worked (I didn't think to check at the time). That CSS-less version was functional, but wonky and not especially nice to read. At the time I was using a heavily tweaked version of the no style, please! theme and leaning a lot on CSS to make…
As a rule, I don't like to announce my projects until they're already substantially complete. I'm susceptible to a failure mode where talking about doing a thing is close enough to actually doing the thing on some pre-conscious subjective level that it can crowd out my motivation to actually reach the goal, like the psychological equivalent of filling up on bread before the main…
Ergodic literature is "a mode of textual organization in which nontrivial effort is required to traverse the text, beyond ordinary eye movement or turning pages". Some examples you may already be familiar with: House of Leaves, Nabokov's Pale Fire, those Choose Your Own Adventure books with names like Prisoner of the Ant People. Think of those works as one end of a spectrum, rather than an…
The term "digital garden" was originally coined to describe a personal website where each page is an evolving work in progress that might be updated or changed as the author sees fit. This site does not fit that definition - I try to leave pages static after publication, mostly to keep the syndication feed experience as smooth as possible - but I've come to think of it as like a garden in…
Tailscale is an easy-to-use WireGuard VPN platform with a generous free tier that's popular among homelabbers. I use it pretty extensively in my setup. I've also granted access to a few hosts from my 'tailnet' (their term for your network of VPN-connected hosts) to my friends 1 , and tailscale makes that a straightforward process. Sometimes, though, I need to rebuild a host…
Twice now I have needed to add more space to my main home server VM, and twice I have needed to re-learn how to expand a XFS filesystem. Luckily it's not hard. I'm recording it here to make my life easier when it inevitably comes up once more. Expand the underlying virtual disk (I did this in the proxmox GUI) Use growpart to grow the partition to fill the newly available space. Assuming…
COSTCO FAHRENHEIT (Video) General recommendation for Matt Lakeman's travel blog , and specific recommendation for his most recent piece: Notes On Afghanistan . Whenever I see a post from Matt in my RSS client I know my next 2-3 lunch breaks will be well spent. Similarly, a general recommendation for Mr and Mrs Psmith and a specific recommendation for their most recent post on traditions of…
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Gävle Goat (Swedish: Gävlebocken , pronounced [ˈjɛ̌ːvlɛbɔkːɛn]) is a traditional Christmas display erected annually at Slottstorget (Castle Square) in central Gävle, Sweden. The display is a giant version of a traditional Swedish Yule goat figure made of straw. It is erected each year by local community groups at the beginning of Advent over a period of…
A cognitohazard is information that is directly harmful when perceived. To distinguish the term from regular negative memes, a cognitohazard must inflict its harm directly ; knowledge that the McRib is back is arguably a hazard for some people, but there's an additional step required between the knowing and the harm (going to McDonalds). For a true cognitohazard the knowing is the harm.…
( context ) When you've been in this business as long as I have, you learn to recognize trouble fast, and I could tell she was trouble from the moment she poked her freakishly large head through the door. "You're Spade?" she whispered in that intoxicating, low-fidelity baby talk voice of hers. "That's what it says on my door, baby." I waved my cigarette at the painted letters: SAM…
Web-safe serif fonts Cold, clear early mornings on the road Tor Books paperbacks from a secondhand store Dry white wine TUIs Soren Kirkegaard Lentil soup Meeting up IRL Art Deco Trail running Telnet Bodyweight exercise The Butlerian Jihad
Recently at $dayjob I encountered a scientific instrument connected to a controlling PC over IP; that's not unusual in itself, but what was unusual was the tiny little MikroTek router that sat between the two, connected to them and nothing else. Possibly there was a good reason for this at the time that I just couldn't see 1 , but more likely I think is that the (likely overworked and…
Here's a template for server daemon programs I've found useful. The example daemon implementation is in Rust because that's what I like to use for these things, but the idea is language-agnostic. use std::env::args; use std::fs; use std::path; use std::str::FromStr; use serde; use toml; #[derive(Debug, serde::Deserialize)] struct MyConfig { field1: String, field2: u32 //…
Like most of my generation, and the generation after me for that matter, playing Minecraft was a formative childhood experience, and while I haven't kept up with the many, many updates since 1.0 there's elements of the game that've taken up permanent residence in some deep cranny of my psyche. One of them is the main menu. The yellow text, splashed diagonally over the main title, is…
As I've worked on the ol' homelab over the past few months, most of my computer use outside of my day job has morphed to fit a general client-server model. In this post I'll go over what I mean by "client-server", why it's so great, and why you should maybe give it a shot too. The basic idea is to divide all devices into two catagories. Server devices are, for a given task, the…
This site now has an official blogroll! You can check it out here . In classic Me fashion, it took a lot of work and multiple dead ends to implement a niche trick most people will never notice or care about. But! I had a fun time and learned a lot about XML. The remainder of this post is to recount that odyssey. About a month ago, I got an idea. The standard way to share subscription lists, the…
My Own Private Binary: An Idiosyncratic Introduction to Linux Kernel Modules An excellent technical writeup of implementing a new executable format as a kernel module that avoids the twin traps of writing about Linux internals: neither too esoteric nor too shallow. My main takeaway, though, is that you can write define a new format for an executable as a module, load the module, and execute a file…
You know what's kinda weird? RSS. 1 On the one hand, RSS is ubiquitous . Youtube, the largest host of online video content by far, provides RSS feeds for each channel. Wordpress, the substrate of something like a fifth of the entire Web, generates RSS feeds by default. Every subreddit becomes an RSS feed if you append .rss to the end of the URL (try it!). Every blog on Substack , Ghost or…
It's early July, which here in the Pacific Northwest means the roadside blackberries are starting to plump up and ripen. We do have a native blackberry species here in Washington: the Pacific blackberry, rubus ursinus , a "prickly vine with slender trailing stems which grows in open to dense forests" as per the Washington Native Plant Society . I think I've seen a Pacific blackberry bush…
Imagine for a moment you are Miles O'Brien, Chief of Operations on Deep Space Nine, formerly Transporter Chief on the USS Enterprise , and all around stand-up guy. You're doing your job as usual, beaming some people down to Earth for a Starfleet shindig when - Oh no! It's the cold open of a Star Trek episode (DS9 S03E11 to be exact) and some certified Sci-Fi Nonsense is going down!…
The language our machines use to speak to us has changed. We wanted to humanize the computer. We wanted it to meet us where we are, with our evolved social primate brains, and simple declarative statements like "File Not Found" are just a tiny sliver of what we evolved social primates actually use language for. Language embeds a constant flow of metadata regarding the speaker's intent,…
You know when some rando on the internet makes a post to the effect of "I'm so sorry I haven't been updating recently, it's because of reasons X Y and Z, please accept my deepest apologies and I'll post something soon", as though they're pleading with a mob of rabid Content Consumers who just can't tolerate the thought of another week passing without a banger take…
Here's the lesson I've learned since my last post: making a simple ActivityPub server that implements the minimum subset of the spec is not difficult. But to have the server be actually usable and viable for federation ... well I don't think that's too difficult either, but it's more effort than I'm willing to expend on something that's only 25% of the overall…
After a few posts worth of preamble, it's finally time to get our hands dirty with ActivityPub! I started out by reading through the specification for ActivityPub itself , which defines the inter-server and client-server interactions, and skimming the specification for ActivityStreams , which defines the schemas (schemata?) used for messages in those interactions. I do recommend you read at…
Welcome to Protocolapalooza , my project to add support to this site for a bunch of wacky protocols other than the Web. We're starting with ActivityPub, but before we can get into the implementation there's some business to take care of. My general plan for this project is to use third party clients to validate my work as I go, but with ActivityPub that present a unique challenge because…
It's a new day, a new month, and a new era for the implicit dot computer weblog. I've been posting somewhat less frequently than I'd like (or than I need to keep my pace for #100DaysToOffload ) while I've prepared for the Network+ and Security+ exams. But now that I'm on the other side of that and beginning to ramp up the job search into overdrive, I need some kind of…
In the spring of either 2014 or 2015 I became a vegetarian - I didn't think to record the exact date - which means it's now been ten or possibly nine years. That's a good enough time for a retrospective as any, I think. Why? In a word, ethics. I do suspect vegetarianism has improved my physical health (although there's no control group, so that's just speculation), and…
A good chunk of the TV and movies I watch fall into the crime or detective genres, and are set and/or made in the early to mid 20th century (roughly the 30s-50s). The Early To Mid Twentieth Century Crime Fiction Universe (ETMTCCFU) is not unlike our own in some important respects - e.g. humans are still bipedal apes - but make no mistake, it is a universe apart. For example, their version of…
Friend-of-the-blog Wyatt has written on semantic drift for terms like demon and ghost. It's short and I think correct, you should read it before continuing here. Done? As I said, I do agree with the post, but I'm also sympathetic to the quoted perspective of "of course demons are real, look at the law of supply and demand." A good personification of an abstract system can be extremely…
ULTRAKILL does not advertise its unique strengths right from the start. With the first few levels set in that Id Software-style "hell, but industrial" environment, poking away at zombie-like mobs with a revolver and shotgun, you'd be forgiven for thinking, as I initially did, that this was just one more entry in the current "boomer shooter" trend. It wasn't until 5 or so hours of…
It seems like everyone these days is talking about AI. No matter where you scry- OnlyFamiliars, Hex, The Tome of Visage, Conjurer News, Medium 1 - all you see is how Arcane Intelligence is disrupting the very foundations of the mystic arts. Perhaps you've already received inquiries from your guildmaster on how to add AI to an upcoming grimoire release. Yet despite its dominance of the…
Python is famously an easy language to learn, but it's a hard language to really learn because there's just so much of it; Python's standard library has over 300 modules as of version 3.11! 1 Knowing a programming language in depth includes knowing how to effectively wield its standard library to solve problems, but for Python that's a tough ask. In practice, you learn the…
Greenery My mental image of Texas was informed by this airtight syllogism: cowboys live in Texas; cowboys live in the desert; therefore Texas is desert. I did see some proper desert complete with cacti while driving outside Austin, but the city itself and its immediate surroundings are really shockingly green. I think this has something to do with how Austin is bisected by the Colorado River - one…
Another travel mini-post, but it's time-sensitive that I post something today in particular. Literally less than an hour ago at time of writing, I learned about CSS Naked Day from a Mastodon post and immediately hacked together some Javascript to disable CSS here on April 9. I love this idea because (1) it's the kind of goofy unserious fun that you just can't do on a centralized…
For the 2017 solar eclipse, my house in Washington was within range for observing the transit. The amount of occlusion was something like 80%; that sounds like a lot on paper, but even 20% sun is enough sun that our eyes don't notice or care. Hell, I've since learned that 95% occlusion is still basically unnoticeable if you don't have a viewing filter. Overall I'd describe that…
Just a quick post today to avoid falling too far behind while I'm traveling. I'm in Austin, Texas right now, and it seems like a pretty chill place, but I haven't seen enough of it to write anything worthwhile. Instead, this is a more general bit of travel metacognition. One neat thing about maturing is noticing how your own mind works. Or maybe other people are naturally in tune…
Earlier this year, I decided to replace my old and trusty Thinkpad E480, now getting pretty long in the tooth and having some trouble with all these newfangled web apps, with some newer hardware. I'd heard generally good things about System76 , so I ordered a 16-inch Pangolin laptop, preloaded with Pop!_OS, and used it as my main workhorse machine for about two weeks. The experience was…
Here's a nifty pattern I use for making Rust error handling more ergonomic. Feel free to skip to the code at the end if you're already well versed in Rust error types. For everyone else, a quick primer/refresher - Rust takes a cue from the functional side of the isle for its error handling approach. In a nutshell: if an operation should produce a type T, but it might also fail…
There's a small park near where I live that was, until recently, called Numbnutz Park, named after the great [citation needed] community leader and semi-professional phrenologist Horatio Numbnutz 1 . A few years ago, coinciding with a major overhaul of its physical layout by the city, it was renamed to dxʷbaʔwiɬ, which is the name used by the indigenous Lushootseed-speaking peoples of the…
The Web is getting worse. I'm not going to enumerate examples of how the big digital platforms have gotten slower/more bloated/more invasive/generally less functional in the last 5-ish years, but I'm sure you can think of some. Much has been made of the concept of enshittification , which, again, I will assume you're already familiar with. As this process becomes more…
man pages are truly the best software documentation out there, with famously zero problems with formatting, content, or navigability. In fact, haven't we all at some point wished we could access the man pages in a form factor more suitable for cozy reading, so we might curl up by the fire with a mug of cocoa and the documentation for xargs(1) ? Good news, in this post you can join me as I…
Once upon a time, circa my middle school/high school days, I was pretty into comics, superhero comics especially. Superficially, I should be massively into the MCU/DCU/ICU/ BTU /what have you. But I'm not. That's not especially noteworthy on its face; if I hated the blockbuster superhero film with a passion we could chalk it up to the narcissism of small…
I use Anki a lot. In a nutshell, it's a spaced repetition program that works almost eerily well for memorizing certain kinds of data. Lately I've been using it to help study for the CompTIA A+ certification exam, which requires you to know, among other things, approximately a million facts about wireless communication standards -- exactly the sort of thing Anki is great at. Anki has a…
I recently saw two movies at the Noir City Film Festival . I won't get too spoiler-y in this post, but there's still a nonzero amount of spoilage below. If either of the spoiler-free plot overviews below pique your interest enough that you prefer to go in totally blind, you have the chance to stop reading and go watch one or both. Across the Bridge : Carl Schaffner, a wealthy financier…