Recently updated blogs

Reading: Sea of Tranquillity by Emily St. John Mandel. It gave me scary dreams but I loved it. Audio: Christmas songs, from all my usual favorites, old and new. Video: The movie Conclave…great cast, gorgeous cinematography, plenty of plotting and scheming in a Vatican setting. (Tr)eats: Struffoli and panettone from our favorite bakery. Chocolates from Li-Lac (a gift). Drink: Sam Adams Holiday White Ale (nice citrusy notes!). Garb: A big …

Read more about Carville OLD COLONEL DAILEY lives in the midst of skeletons. More than that, he has built him a house of them. He has woven the great bones and the small bones into joists and rafters and beams. He has shingled with them and clap-boarded with them. They are his roof and his shelter. They are the skeletons of the great ships of the sea, the ships that …

Curveball is a server-side webframework for Node.js. I’ve been working on it for 6 years as a side-project, but it wasn’t successful and it’s time to let it go. This is a hard thing to do, because I probably have 1000’s of hours into this project, and there’s a strong sense of missed potential. I’m writing this article because my psyche requires closure in order for them to not take …

Just a little ways away from our house sits a tiny movie theater, a cozy spot with just three screens showing both modern releases and beloved classics. Recently, I've seen "Stand By Me", "Being John Malkovich", and "Halloween" there. Last night the line for "Nosferatu" stretched nearly out the door, the busiest I've ever seen the place.The theater's history stretches back to 1948, its bright neon marquee still illuminating the …

Not quite in the league of Loafer's big rudd boat but sometimes in the winter a real bonanza of a place. I'd packed the chub gear from yesterday as well as the pin rod and getting to the carp park and seeing swimmers and all sorts nearly set off up the path but in truth I'd rather give it a go up there with some regular baiting and the small …

In the ancient times, when I was old enough to know better but young enough to believe it didn’t matter, when LiveJournal was the central focus of my socialisation, at this time of year my reading feed was dominated by a popular end-of-year survey. The questions were fairly standardised, though there was some variation as people replaced or skipped those they didn’t fancy revealing. I was far more invested in …

What does it mean to improve skills? How can you move beyond the basics and keep getting better? Please continue to my website to read the post. Sorry about that. If you're a technical person and you know how let Astro render mdx to an RSS feed, please let me know.

Needle felting is a trick worked on dry fabric, which melds together woolen fiber. I say woolen because actual wool from the back of a living sheep really is the only fiber with with structure and body for this form of fabric-torture. And torture it is: as used in knitting, needle felting involves plunging very sharp barbed needles through fabric to draw wisps of the top layer down into the

He was born Jeron Criswell King on August 18, 1907, and his first words, spoken at age four during a thunderstorm, were also his first prediction: “The rain will stop!” (“And a valid one!” the prognosticator crowed.) When the rain did stop (as it always does), the little boy’s own future (where we will all spend the rest of our lives) was thus assured. For Lo!, a Prophet was born! …

Last year, I noticed that routine programming no longer brought me the same joy it did decades ago. So, my New Year’s resolution was to engage in more “useless” programming – coding small, fun projects without any specific end goal in mind. Of all the possible topics, the one that captivated me throughout the year was retrocomputing. I didn’t have a computer until I was 14, but I remember seeing …

Who This Is For There may be a time, especially in the upcoming presidency, when you find yourself wanting to use online resources but not leaving any sort of digital “paper trail” behind. People in China do this to read news on websites that are blocked by the Great Firewall of China — news content that may differ from the approved government-run news sources within the country. As the US …

I started using Twitter before the dawn of the iPhone. Back then, in 2006, it was a fun, funky, fully functional (if barebones) beta messaging service used mainly by The People of the Web—the kind of folks who attended the SXSW Interactive conference and probably spoke on the panels. You know. You were there. You were one of us: Designers. Developers. Pioneers. Writers of blog posts, trade books, and all …

Do you know that 2025 is a composite, deficient, evil, odd, square, and powerful number? I collect properties of numbers at my Number Gossip website, where you can also find detailed definitions of these terms. Provocatively, 2025 is also an apocalyptic power, meaning that 2 to the power of 2025 contains 666 as a substring. Recently, Tamas Fleischer sent me an email discussing additional fascinating properties of 2025. While I …

Here’s my 21st annual roundup. Despite pledging to reduce this obsessive cataloguing, I continue to go all in because exceptional new music just keeps on coming. Appreciate these roundups? I work on this roundup through the year, and the final post takes several days. If it helps you to discover new music and you wish to show your appreciation, you can buy my music or buy me a coffee. Thanks …