I like my city builder games as much as the next guy. I’ve played them since SimCity 2000 and earlier this year wrote about TheoTown already. Last week I stumbled upon this guy jamessimo on YouTube who’s creating the city builder of his dreams : a game with no grid whatsoever, with parcels of land of arbitrary shapes and sizes. Traditionally these games have been strongly grid-based,ā¦
The Thinking Machine by Stephen Witt outlines the rise of Nvidia, currently the most valuable company in the world, from the point of view of Jensen Huang, its CEO and one of the founders. Jensen, or Jen-Hsun, as his Taiwanese name originally was written, was sent by his parents to the United States in 1973 when he was just ten, along with his brother Jen-Chieh (“Jeff”) who was twelve.ā¦
In June, Alex Hsu hosted an IndieWeb Carnival themed “No way!?”. June is now over so Alex diligently wrote a nice roundup of the results . I have to hand it to Alex and all the other IndieWeb Carnival hosts: reading 25 wildly different blog posts, forming an opinion of them, and writing some kind words of each is no mean feat. š A few posts that I found interesting from the set ofā¦
The post “ Iād not buy a LG monitor ” by Beko Pharm drew my attention to this recent video by Gamers Nexus . Beko sums the video up nicely: It reports about LGās latest practise to add blatant spyware to a monitor. Or to be precise to the software application associated with that monitor. The icing is that Windows apparently automatically downloads this software by default and thisā¦
I read JTR’s post about em dashes and found it resonating with my own thoughts. The issue with em dashes these days is that AI is unproportionately fond of them, so using them is considered as a sign of AI writing by some. JTR quotes Sasha Putilin’s post twice: āBut what would people think of my writing if I ever used an em dash? What if someone points one out in my writing?ā. Bitch,ā¦
Mr. William de Worde has never cared much for his family’s traditions, which typically include privileged and arrogant behaviour as well as a foolhardy death in some stupid war. No. Instead, Mr. de Worde likes words. As the black sheep of his family, William has settled in Ankh-Morpork, where he edits a regular letter detailing local events for its few wealthy subscribers. The subscribersā¦
I consider myself quite lucky to have seen the time when computers were still pretty basic and the internet was almost unheard of. The first computer I interacted with had a small monochrome display and two 5.25" floppy drives. The family story goes that I broke its keyboard by hitting it very hard when I was just one year old. A few years later we got a slow modem which made it possible toā¦
Michael Harley recently commented on Thom Holwerda’s post commenting on Evangelos (Evan) “GeopJr” Paterakis’s post: Evangelos “GeopJr” Paterakis: Democratizing Abandonware ā¤· Thom Holwerda: Most slopcode projects are abandoned and deleted within months of release ā¤·ā¤· Michael Harley: Re: Most slopcode projects are abandoned and deleted within months of releaseā¦
Last month, June 2026, I participated in Robert Birming’s Junited 2026 blog post sharing event . Now it’s July which Robert has branded the JulyReply blog connecting month . The idea is quite simple: if you find a blog post that provokes some thoughts for you, you write a reply to it in your own blog, titled “Re: [the original title]”, just like in the old emailā¦
Ben R. Rich worked in Lockheed’s secret projects division, the Skunk Works , for nearly forty years in total, leading it for about fifteen years. During his career, Rich participated in the development of the top-secret U-2 and SR-71 spy planes, as well as the F-117A stealth fighter, all of which are prominently featured in this book. š The book is also, in its own way, a tribute toā¦
After finishing the excellent HBO Max show Hacks recently I was in dire need of something new to watch. I haven’t watched too many hospital series, but somehow I ended up selecting The Pitt – and pretty much binged it. šæ The Pitt is a show about the understaffed Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center and how the staff navigates the unexpected patients and events. It is a teaching hospital,ā¦
Last year, as I was rewatching the Star Wars movies I decided to write 100 word summaries of them. I managed to complete the following, in this order: Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope in 100 words Rogue One: A Star Wars Story in 100 words Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace in 100 words Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones in 100 words Let’s jump right into The Empire Strikes Backā¦
Junited is a no-pressure blog post sharing event that takes place every June. It was invented in 2024 by Robert Birming, and here is his index page for 2026 . While I usually consider my posts ready once published for the first time and only fix typos or such, this particular post I intend to update with new links throughout the month. To keep it light, I won’t be providing much context orā¦
When I wrote about the Titanic someone asked me what’s my next cheerful topic going to be – nuclear disasters? That came back to me recently when I found out about the IndieWeb Carnival topic No Way?! hosted by Alex Hsu. When it comes to nuclear accidents, everyone knows about Chernobyl and Fukushima, but there have been interesting cases of nuclear warheads getting lost as well.ā¦
Former stock analyst Dan Davies has categorized and compiled in Lying for Money various frauds that people throughout history have used to try to extract money from others. Some of the scams date back to ancient times, when, for example, seafarers would take out insurance on their ship and then claim it had sunk, simply painting a new name over the old one. The scams are presented in an orderā¦
How do you find good, authentic, personal blogs these days? Certainly not with Google! I’ve compiled a list of resources for that. Random blogs Kagi Small Web indieblog.page Feeds of posts Bubbles Bear Blog Discovery Feed Minifeed Lists of blogs ooh.directory Ye Olde Blog Roll An IndieWeb Webring PersonalSit.es The 512 KB Club Minifeed Search engines Wiby Marginalia With these resourcesā¦
In my previous Random Things Sunday post I linked to Matt Web’s article where he called for better discoverability of vibe-coded apps. A few days ago I learned that my favorite podcaster Scott Hanselman had created a site called Tiny Tool Town exactly for that purpose! A quote from the About page of Tiny Tool Town: Remember GeoCities? That glorious, chaotic, beautiful mess of personalā¦
A while ago someone was showing off their LEGO creation in my social media feed: a brick-built QR-code containing the credentials to their WiFi network. People rushed to tell them that they shouldn’t share this info publicly, but they appeared unconcerned, for who would actually even know where their network was physically located, right? Can’t do any harm to it if you can’t findā¦
This week’s main topic is vibe coding , but there’s an aasinsilta , , “donkey’s bridge” as we say in Finnish, to it first: Vincent Ritter put together neat API documentation for Micro.blog at microblog.dev . I’ve been working on my own client so this came in at a very good time. I’ll report on my new client some time in the future. The new clientā¦
I recently stumbled upon the IndieWeb Book Club , where Jo was setting the book of the month for April: Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (1987) by Douglas Adams. š I recall reading it probably some 25 years ago and figured it’s high time to read it again. I thought I remembered something about the book, but in reality I didn’t remember anything else besides a sofa stuckā¦
I’ve been tracking the number of visitors in my blog with Tinylytics . I originally went for a while without any analytics, but curiosity got the better of me. I didn’t want any heavy enterprise-grade stuff like Google Analytics, but rather some small and independent service, preferably hosted in Europe, so enter Tinylytics. It is pretty prominent in the indie web community, the basicā¦
Strava is the de facto standard of recreational cyclists for tracking their rides, and I use it too. I used to use Sports Tracker and had been doing so since their Symbian version in the 00s. Its features are absolutely crushing those of Strava’s free version but alas, they don’t have an API, which I wanted, so reluctantly I had to dump them and move to the very constrained freeā¦
A few random things I’ve found interesting recently: Michael Taggart hates generative AI, yet he recently used it to a great success when writing code. He didn’t enjoy it, but reluctantly admits it did help him a lot. A very level-headed writeup of a divisive topic. SkyOSINT is a platform for monitoring satellites, kind of like Flightradar24 monitors planes and MarineTraffic monitorsā¦
Technically it isn’t Sunday yet where I am, but it’s already Sunday somewhere on Earth, and who’s going to stop me anyway? It’s been a while since the previous Random Things Sunday, so let’s get to it. I have a couple of recent articles, one timeless web site, and an interesting YouTube video about movies. The US is running out of missiles due to its reckless warā¦
TƤnne minƤkin kuolen (“Iāll Die Here Too”) is the sequel to paramedic HautamƤki’s previous works Et sinƤ (vielƤ) kuole ("(Not) A Time to Die") (2021) and Nyt sinƤ kuolet (“Now You’re Going to Die”) (2023), this time published by WSOY . š In the foreword, the author mentions receiving feedback that his last book was too dark, but that he intends to write throughā¦