Recently updated blogs

The end of Summer is so close. We have a few days forcasted to be popping back into 30°c this week, but overall we’ve dropped down to the point where we can go outside without regret. We escaped out to Karuizawa to visit some friends. Karuizawa is a bit of a resort town. About an hour north of Tokyo. It’s an absolutely beautiful area filled with trees and views. And …

Setting up an 1825 game with all the Units has been an arduous task. I hoped to make it a yearly tradition in 2019, but then Covid-19 happened. After that, every attempt has failed somehow. Today, one of our players got stranded in Berlin, but as we had four players present, we made it. This time, we used 18xx.games as a moderator. This speeded up the game greatly. With the …

I look forward to this race every year—a chill fall half marathon at the base of the Tetons is usually a great way to close out my season before winter sets in, but at this moment the AQI in Jackson Hole is 235, firmly in the “very unhealthy” range. Instead, I’m reading a study on the impact of air pollution on running performance to reassure myself I made the right …

Matthieu (Pierre Deladonchamps) just received the call that his father died. The father he never met. The father he didn’t even really knew existed. The father he couldn’t meet in life but now must get to know in death. His mother always told him that Matthieu was the result of a one-night stand. But the affair was much more complicated than that. Matthieu travels from France to Quebec for the …

I like Charlie Stross in general, I really enjoyed Accelerando, and many people talked positively about The Laundry Files, so I decided to give it a go. I like the universe, where unspeakable horrors exist and governments have secret departments in charge of keeping the world safe. I like this premise already. But it’s a well trodden trope, and what differentiates this from, say, Hellboy, or Man in Black§ is …

I really appreciated Cory LaViska’s take on #WebComponents here. Especially this bit:You know what framework I want to use? I want a framework that aligns with the platform, not one that replaces it. I want a framework that values incremental innovation over user lock-in. I want a framework that says it’s OK to break things if it means making the Web a better place for everyone. Yes, that comes at …

It finally seems to be happening. The old hotel I worked at is getting torn down. It seems weird to see it go. I wouldn’t have had this website without that hotel. Here is a link to the Beloit Daily News article about the place getting torn down.

I’m trying to write a little bit about some of the materials, techniques and equipment that I use for my printing. These will be my personal opinions about what works for me and how well. Anything I say about cost, value and quality is from my personal experience and I’m well aware that the way we all work and our preferences and values are very individual. Out of all of …

Vincent Simonetti collected his first historic tuba - a ~1910 Cerveny BB-flat Helicon - in Boston in 1965, while playing tuba on tour with the Moyseev Ballet Company. Today the collection has grown to more than 350 tubas, and is now the largest private collection in the world that is dedicated exclusively to members of the tuba family. The collection entirely fills five rooms of a bright yellow house in …

Many things have been said about the Andromeda Galaxy, arguably the most majestic galaxy that amateur astronomers can image due to it's sheer size in the sky—many times larger than the Moon appears to us, but also many times dimmer.With the naked eye, even in dark skies it appears but a tiny little fuzzy patch. But once you start collecting those photons photographically with long exposures it comes to life.Total …

Last week I visited the University of Pennsylvania for a fireside chat with Roger Greenberg, a Professor in the Department of Cancer Biology, as part of the Wharton Undergraduate Healthcare Club (WUHC). I shared my personal history and answered questions from an audience primarily consisting of Penn undergraduate students. This inspired me to write down advice that I wish I could have given to my younger self. This blog is …

It’s a claim you will find repeated in dozens – possibly hundreds – of places: that the so-called “Hymn to Ninkasi”, a poem in the Sumerian language to the goddess of beer, at least 3,900 years old, known from three fragmentary clay tablets found in and around the ancient city of Nippur, which stood between the Euphrates and the Tigris, is “effectively a Sumerian recipe for brewing beer”, “the oldest …

Happy (belated) Equinox! In honor of Fall Equinox, I've made an updated list of popular lights. Days are getting shorter in the northern hemisphere. It might be time for a new flashlight. The best flashlight There is no best flashlight, so this is an amalgamation of what enthusiasts have been buying and recommending to others lately along with the author's arbitrary preferences and biases. Please take note that prices and …

What's a ktls I started work on ktls and ktls-sys, a pair of crates exposing Kernel TLS offload to Rust, about two years ago. kTLS lets the kernel (and, in turn, any network interface that supports it) take care of encryption, framing, etc., for the entire duration of a TLS connection... as soon as you have a TLS connection. For the handshake itself (hellos, change cipher, encrypted extensions, certificate verification, …

Fuck Time Fuck Space by Spooky Jaguar