Recently updated blogs

Programming note: Bits about Money has been a bit irregular recently.I’ve recently booted up the Complex Systems podcast. It is now up to more than a dozen episodes, including interviewing my dad on real estate development (which is something of a BAM deep (curb) cut). The podcast features Bryne Hobart and other guests you’d probably enjoy on a weekly basis. Since I am more of a writer and very plausibly …

One specific activity kept me pretty busy during September – getting the Fleurieu & Kangaroo Island Sound Map up to date! Over the years, every update has taken a little longer to pull together. This is because of a few factors: I record a lot more sites that I used to. These site recordings made over a given period are collated together for a large/annual releases. This year’s update features …

Today we observe that the Israeli state under Netanyahu has spent a full year “defending itself” by killing a child every 48 minutes.

1. Stem cells reverse woman’s diabetes - Scientists have achieved a breakthrough in treating type 1 diabetes by using reprogrammed stem cells. A woman was successfully treated by receiving a transplant of these cells into her abdominal muscles. Following the transplant, she was able to maintain stable blood sugar levels without insulin for over a year. This is the first time such an approach has shown to be effective in …

One of my favorite things about Go is its distribution process using the go install command. With go install, I don’t have to deal with the trouble of setting up brew, npm, pip, or any other package manager separately like I had to with some languages. It just works out of the box!Now a while back, I built a command-line (CLI) app in Go. I wanted to add a simple …

We don’t really know much about Tomas, other than what we can infer from the photographs and words he left behind. Oh, and there are the snippets of memories by his grandson Terje (Terje Abusdal, the photographer), who was too young to ask more questions around the time Tomas took his pictures. Tomas moved in with Terje’s family after his wife had died. He was already in his seventies. Even …

I caused a ruckus on social media when I pointed out that a Venn diagram commonly posted on Strong Towns and by American urbanists in general about taxes, services, and urbanism, is completely false: The truth is that the overwhelming majority of taxes and services are about things that don’t meaningfully depend on local density. The overwhelming majority of those services are not even locally provided. In the United States, …

What to do after if you accidentally lock yourself outWhen messing around with my NixOS config, I managed to accidentally log myself out of my system by setting my hashedPassword to a string that was not a hash. After a bit of searching and experimentation, I was able to reset my password by rebooting into single user mode. I set out the steps below for the benefit of my future …

This 2-minute podcast created by Google NotebookLM AI is worth listening to for it’s brilliant imititation and creatitivity. The NotebookLM hosts realizing they are AI and spiraling out is a twist I did not see coming

Welcome Visitors and New Subscribers. Link to YouTube short video. This Lincoln Town Car looks mysterious to me, like it’s waiting to pick someone up for some weird errand.I want to paint it faithfully, but change the lighting to make it look like a moody and mysterious street scene that evokes the mood of film noir. More about this strategy at my Substack.

It's only one month now until the release of the audiobook version of my book Pull to Open, which tells the story of the creation of Doctor Who in 1963. And here's a little bit of pre-publicity for it, in the form of BBC Audiobooks' Doctor Who catalogue for this autumn. Published on the Penguin website, as Penguin Random House are the company who release BBC Audiobooks titles.It's nice to …

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others. Amy Stuber’s story collection Sad Grownups is a stunning debut filled with marvelously complex characters. Morgan Talty wrote of the book: “If emotions …

This week’s blog nearly writes itself. It’s been a trip full of adventures, and I’ve only been away a week. Within five minutes of leaving home, I’d scraped the side of the car. I stopped at the nearest pillar box to post a letter. The side road narrows at one point, and I’d odged over to let another car past. Crunch crumple! I’d scraped the car against the front corner …

Hetzner has Object Storage in beta now. I got access to it, but one thing is holding me back from using it: A fixed price (5,95 € per month per bucket), even if there is nothing stored in there or way less than the included 1 TB. Why not bill based on actual usage, like most other services are doing it nowadays? I guess I will keep using Scaleway Object …

Rest in Peace, Robert Coover. You don't need to read Robert Coover's 1966 novel *Origin of the Brunists* to be astonished by 2014's *Brunist Day of Wrath* but you DO need to read *Brunist Day of Wrath,* the most American novel I've ever read, it's fourth read this coming 25 summer, might need to push up. I also recommend *Gerald's Party*, *John's Wife*, *Universal Baseball Association*, and of course *Public …