Robin's notes
I've been moving away from big tech for hosting personal projects ( exhibit A , exhibit B ). One thing I regularly need hosted are cloud functions: basically small, isolated programs that need to run outside of the browser. You might know them as serverless functions 1 , workers or lambdas— Robin calls them "floating wisps of code". Big tech Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) solutions 2 typically run…
In the spirit of my recent migration away from Cloudflare for static website hosting, I decided that the source code for this website doesn't need to be hosted on GitHub. Unlike GitHub, Codeberg is a non-profit git hosting platform 1 . It doesn't train LLMs on code it hosts and doesn't try to push "AI" "features" down users' throats. Code is hosted in the EU, primarily on Codeberg's own hardware…
For the past three or four years, this website has been served by Cloudflare Pages . Until today. It's now hosted on a handful of refurbished servers running in people's living rooms. I initially started using Cloudflare Pages because it was free, easy to set up, powerful, and above all: extremely fast. Pages websites are deployed to Cloudflare's CDN, which spans hundreds of locations around the…
File:European settlements in India 1501-1739.png File:ARCHITECTURE ORDERS Greeks Etruscan Roman (Doric Ionic Corinthian Tuscan Composite) by Paolo Villa ENG edition.pdf
Dynomight on why countries win Olympic medals : Medal counts are not a measure of a country’s worth. Mostly, they measure (a) population, (b) economic development, and (c) how much money you’re willing to set on fire to make numbers go up on a magic billboard. (The whole discussion on whether countries that host the Olympics win more medals is also interesting.)
Everybody liked this musical film when it came out in 2021. I thought it was two and a half hours of painfully cliché events and characters. The whole thing felt so fake! Granted, it's a musical, so maybe I should have expected it, but I've seen plenty and the others didn't make me feel like this, at least not to this extent. I can't even give credits to the setting of a NYC neighborhood during a…
Slightly disappointed that throughout the whole series, the phrase "Mad Max", or "Max is mad", or any variation of it never come up in a line. 1 Mad Max (1979) A bit weird. Slow. 1970s special effects. The story doesn't really pick up until the last part after Max becomes mad. But there's definitely something there, and I can see why they made a second film. Also I didn't know that Mad Max was…
The Hulk, but make it an ambitious lesbian bodybuilder who gets embroiled in the dysfunctions of a local crime family in small-town New Mexico. And while you're at it, add enough violence (that borders on body horror) to fully deserve an R rating. How the film manages to be funny on top of all of this is beyond me. It hits just the right amount of Coen-brothers-like WTF comedy to balance out the…
2022 anime film by Japanese mangaka-turned-director Takehiko Inoue, based on his 1990s basketball manga Slam Dunk . We don't usually watch animes — this had been on our to-watch list mostly because it came highly recommended by David Ehrlich . It was good! I liked the film's structure: one long basketball game with flashbacks into each player's backstory. The stories themselves didn't really pull…
I like a lot of the ideas behind the BearBlog blogging platform: lightweight pages, RSS feeds, and "No trackers, ads, or scripts". But: in How Bear does analytics with CSS , the author explains how they came up with a new way to track unique page views without JavaScript. The main downside [of JS analytics], however, is that most adblockers block analytics scripts. And not just the bad ones, like…
Wanted to start embedding YouTube videos on Eau de poisson instead of just linking over (in rare, specific cases where a video is central to the content). On the other hand, letting Google track users through your site is not very nice (and the reason why we haven't been embedding until now). There might be a way out: Julien over at Artificial truth wrote about YouTube video embedding harm…
This is something I've run across a few times on the road: you're roaming (e.g. you're on a French plan but on the train in Germany) and thanks to the EU you can use your data as if you were back home, BUT somehow sharing data via the Android mobile hotspot doesn't work, so you can't connect to the internet from your laptop. Some carriers, like mine back in France (Lebara), will tell people to set…
First proper nonfiction I read in a while (as in not a memoir or biography, something more scientific). Listened to the audiobook: it was available on Libby and the title caught my eye. It's not bad I guess? The tl;dr is that if Nietzsche were a narwhal, he might have suffered less, and that more broadly us humans might not be as great as we think we are with our big brains that can lie and…
Christophe Blain, auteur de BD, rencontre Jean-Marc Jancovici, conférencier très médiatisé sur les questions climatiques. Le résultat est une BD sur l'énergie et le climat et le livre le plus vendu en France en 2022. J'étais totalement passé à côté et n'en avais jamais entendu parler (je connaissais Blain par sa série Isaac le pirate , mais pas Jancovici). Donc quand la BD est arrivée à la…
Weeks 50 and 51 (11–24 December 2023) This is likely my last weeknote in a while: today we're setting off on The Big Trip (!!) and updates will land on eaudepoisson.com (French). Hello from the scenic lakey/mountainy/snowy stretch of rail through the Alps between Zurich and Innsbruck! Leaving Joux Monday: bouldering Tuesday: tried to finish Le monde sans fin (French) before returning it to the…
Acheté en seconde main, sans connaître et sans attentes, au petit magasin en sous-sol de Terre des Hommes Lausanne. Après des mois sur une étagère je l'ai finalement lu il y a quelques semaines , dans le train pour Genève. Livres perdus, nouvelles chaussures est un petit livre autobiographique écrit sous forme épistolaire. L'auteure est une artiste d'origine tunisienne qui a étudié à la HEAD (la…
We really want seats for this play , but it's booked out. A number of seats occasionally free up, but there's no way to join a waiting list or anything. I could reload the page a lot. Or I could get a computer to do it for me. It was surprisingly easy—I just had to have: a Node.js script, hosted on GitHub (private repo), that scrapes a page using Playwright and, if conditions are met, hits the…
Doctor Who to me is another 2020 lockdown watch 1 , we watched basically all of seasons 1 to 12 (of the 2005 revival) and have been watching the new seasons as they were released since then. It's nice to see David Tennant, the Tenth Doctor, back in the 2023 specials, which makes him also the Fourteenth Doctor. The specials are three hour-long episodes released in November and December, and while…
Du super Étienne Davodeau, humain, vulnérable, touchant. Sur l'amitié, l'amour, la mort, une petite crise existentielle et plein de choses encore, la vie quoi. Dessins qui donnent envie d'aller marcher dans la poudreuse du Jura. Lue au bon moment 8/10
Six grands auteurs de BD visitent des grottes dans le sud-ouest de la France y voient des peintures rupestres. Ce livre est une collection de leurs planches inspirées par l'expérience, assemblées de façon assez lâche, sans vraiment un fil conducteur. Bien aimé la variété des regards et des traits, mais sinon pas particulièrement touché 5/10
Week 49 (4–10 December 2023) Fondue Fondue #2 with A. Fondue #3 with F. I am mostly fondue Last Last full week Met some friends for the last time (before 2025) Last multipitch climb, we'll try not to forget the techniques we learned over the year while we're away. We started climbing the Directissime du crabe in Mazet (4c/4c/5a/5a/5b/5b), but it seems to have been unbolted recently after the…
Moins aimé que d'autres Basien Vivès ( Polina , Le goût du chlore ). Toujours une atmosphère, on entre dedans ou pas. Provocant (à la Une sœur ) mais assez superficiel, pas trop compris les personnages. Dessin super. 5/10
Single note for the first 4 films, so excluding the new Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (2023): The Hunger Games (2012), by Gary Ross The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013), by Francis Lawrence The Hunger Games: Mockingjay (Part 1, 2014), by Francis Lawrence The Hunger Games: Mockingjay (Part 2, 2015), by Francis Lawrence I'd only watched the original film before (and never read any of the novels),…
Le Navire, Valence, 16h20, theater 3 (almost full). The film opens with House of the Rising Sun , and before Eric Burdon starts singing, everyone in the room thinks it's Le pénitencier by Johnny Hallyday (probably). Perfect Days follows the life of Hirayama, a man who cleans toilets in Tokyo, over the span of a few days (weeks?). The plot is pretty ambiguous, as in, it doesn't follow a clear…
Week 48 (27 November–3 December 2023) It's cold and birds are back. (They've never left, but now they're back on the terrace where they know they'll be fed seeds.) In French: rougequeue, rouge-gorge, mésange charbonnière et bleue, chardonneret, pinson. F also saw some verdiers. Back in Geneva for a couple of days, went by direct TER train from Valence (1h30 drive plus 3h train). Rainy, bought…
Minuscule BD de Aurel empruntée à la médiathèque. André-Gilles, confiné dans sa villa de campagne, décide d'écrire son journal de confinement. Bien aimé les 2-3 premières pages mais pour le reste c'est des références pas très drôles à l'actualité et la politique en France au printemps 2020. Ça va mal vieillir. Coïncidence, il y a une référence à Dans les forêts de Sibérie que j'ai lu la semaine…
Un Parisien part s'isoler 6 mois dans une cabane sibérienne sur les rives du Baïkal et se réinvente très vite ermite philosophe : oh que c'est profond de couper mon bois et pêcher mon poisson et regarder les mésanges qui sont maintenant mes amies, la vue est si belle que je ne m'en lasserais jamais, je ne pense pas du tout à ce qu'il se passe ailleurs ah non je vous promets je suis en complète…
Week 47 (20–26 November 2023) Busy ranting so this will be short: Sunny cold Sad news came midweek, heading to Geneva for a couple of days next week to be with family Olives all picked, most of them will be pressed for oil, I saved three samples (different varietals) to try to preserve "fachouire"-style but it's not really working so far Climbing: Monday boulering, Wednesday multipitch but it was…
Watched without C, very very good black comedy, pretty dark and very tense. Plot: Danny, a struggling construction contractor, is involved in a road rage incident with Amy, a successful but burnt out business owner. The 10-episode miniseries tells the story of their BEEF and descent into madness. I absolutely loved the characters, Steven Yeun <3. There's a comedic aspect so the plot is exaggerated…
Hey it's cool that millionaires digitize their map collection and share it with the world but why does the website, " Oculi Mundi ", have to be so slow? It's not like they haven't thought about it : Oculi Mundi aims to be as accessible as possible. It should run smoothly on different Internet speeds and has been designed to be used smoothly on mobile phones, tables, laptops, and PCs. ...it's not…