After months of saving and indecision, we’ve finally booked the hotels and flights: Flying into Tōkyō, and spending a few days there. We generally prefer flying to Kansai because Ōsaka is our favourite Japanese city, but we got some jaw-dropping rates with JAL. Maybe it has something to do with the Expo in Ōsaka right now. Taking the Hikari Shinkansen to Nagoya (it’s a bit cheaper than the Nozomi , and it’s pretty close) and staying there a week. I’ve only ever zipp...

Imagine an ice cube floating in a glass of water. Eventually, it will melt down to a tiny frozen speck before disappearing. As it shrinks, its surface gets smoother, and any irregularities or sharp edges gradually vanish. Mathematicians want to understand this process in greater detail, to be able to say exactly how the surface of the ice — or, say, the shape of a gradually eroding sandcastle… Source Imagine an ice cube floating in a glass of water. Eventually, it will melt down to a tiny...

"The Birth of Britain: A History of the English Speaking Peoples, Volume I" by Winston Churchill - yes, that Churchill :) While it was started in the 1930s, the writing of this 4-volume history of Britain and its former colonites was interrupted by WWII and Churchill's positions as prime minister. It was finished in the 1950s. The writing is very good, and the book appears to be well-researched, although occasionally the author resorts to pure speculation about historic events that weren't suffi...

Cadey Anubis is an AI scraper bot filter that puts a wall between your website and the lowest-hanging fruit of bot filtering. I developed it to protect my git server, but it's also used to protect bug trackers, Mastodon instances, and more. The goal is to help protect the small Internet so small communities can continue to exist at the scale they're currently operating at without having to resort to overly expensive servers or terrifyingly complic...

Most people think of machine instructions as the fundamental steps that a computer performs. However, many processors have another layer of software underneath: microcode. With microcode, instead of building the processor's control circuitry from complex logic gates, the control logic is implemented with code known as microcode, stored in the microcode ROM. To execute a machine instruction, the computer internally executes several simpler micro-instructions, specified by the microcode. In this p...

Random Numbers Included Mar 31, 2025 I’ve recently worked on a PRNG API for TigerBeetle , and made a surprising discovery! While most APIs work best with “half-open” intervals, for(int i = 0; i < n; i++) , it seems that random numbers really work best with closed intervals, ≤n . First , closed interval means that you can actually generate the highest-possible number: prng.range_inclusive( u32 , math.intMax( u32 ) - 9 , math.intMax( u32 ), ); T...

I'm still here and things are happening I'm still here and things are happening

Background im-promp-tu ( im-ˈpräm(p)-(ˌ)tü ) made, done, or formed on or as if on the spur of the moment: improvised composed or uttered without previous preparation: extemporaneous Merriam-Webster On March 18th, 2025, I thought I would look into self-hosted project management solutions — something kanban-y, but.. better? This one does not spark joy. After discovering that Teamhood was awesome (and EU-based), but had a 3-seat minimum on their subscriptions,...

This week I was supposed to write about chapters 5 and 6 of the feedback control book but I had a busy week and so wanted to talk about something a bit more familiar. Next week will be the feedback control chapters. I wanted to revisit the idea we talked about before of bounded queries . Queries that, to execute, only use O(1) space and O(n) time, with n being the number of rows being processed. I'm specifically talking about a query processing model based on Volcano, where every oper...

The Chandrayaan 3 lander on the Moon with its ChaSTE thermal probe deployed. Image: ISRO The Chandrayaan 3 lander touted a thermal probe called ChaSTE developed jointly by two ISRO-affiliated institutions SPL and PRL . The lander deployed and inserted ChaSTE almost 10 centimeters into the lunar soil to take pristine temperature measurements across the lunar day using ten spaced-out sensors. A new study published in Nature shows how the measurements are helping scientists learn exactly...

Every ending marks a new beginning, and today, is the beginning of a new chapter for me. Ten years ago I took a leap into the unknown, today I take another. After a decade of working on Sentry I move on to start something new. Sentry has been more than just a job, it has been a defining part of my life. A place where I've poured my energy, my ideas, my heart. It has shaped me, just as I've shaped it. And now, as I step away, I do so with immense gratitude, a deep sense of pride, and a h...

It’s April Cools! It’s like April Fools, except instead of cringe comedy you make genuine content that’s different from what you usually do. For example, last year I talked about the 3400-year history of the name “Daniel”. This year I wrote about one of my hobbies in hopes it would take less time. It didn’t. The video game industry is the biggest entertainment industry in the world. In 2024, it produced almost half a trillion dollars in revenue, compared to the film industry’s “m...

Loyal bytes toil in memory, on disk, across wires, etc. They crunch our numbers; we cast them to the garbage collector. Et tu, brutus computus. And so I've been thinking about "compassionate" compilation. How can we learn to love our languages again? How can we reduce our energy footprint? How can we tame the chaos monkeys? How can we reignite the joy of simple software? How can we share our abundance as if recycling air? The Modern Stack Modern web computing looks vaguely like this: ...

I no longer help friends and family with Windows issues 2025-03-29 08:50 For years, I was the go-to person whenever a friend or family member had a computer issue. Whether it was a slow system, mysterious pop-ups, unsupported hardware after system update, or software not behaving as expected, I would spend hours troubleshooting and fixing things. But not any more, at least not if the system in question runs Windows (or macOS). The primary reason I’ve stopped offering tech support for Win...

How diet and exercise influence health, confidence, and social skills, while exploring personal habits for well-being. How diet and exercise influence health, confidence, and social skills, while exploring personal habits for well-being.

Related Video: 11ty Meetup: Blog Awesome from WordPress to Eleventy Related Video: 11ty Meetup: Blog Awesome from WordPress to Eleventy Related Video: 11ty Meetup: Blog Awesome from WordPress to Eleventy Video: 11ty Meetup: Blog Awesome from WordPress to Eleventy Video: 11ty Meetup: Blog Awesome from WordPress to Eleventy 11ty Meetup: Blog Awesome from WordPress to Eleventy

Jesse Korosi , Thijs van de Kamp , Mayra Vega , Laura Futuro , Anton Margoline The journey from script to screen is full of challenges in the ever-evolving world of film and television. The industry has always innovated, and over the last decade, it started moving towards cloud-based workflows. However, unlocking cloud innovation and all its benefits on a global scale has proven to be difficult. The opportunity is clear: streamline complex media management logistics, eliminate tedious, no...

PDQ Shor PDQ Shor, Peter Shor's smarter brother, passed away last week. PDQ was a Physicist/Computer Scientist/Mathematician/Astrologer/Psychic at the University of Northern South Dakota in Wakpala. Dr. Phineas Dominic Quincy Shor III, PhD, MBA, BLT, received his education at Europa U. during one of his many alien abductions. He ended up in South Dakota after having fled every other state. He was most famous for the concept of unnatural proofs, collected in his anthology Proofs from the Other B...

For the past few months, I’ve been working on a book called Refactoring English: Effective Writing for Software Developers . I didn’t want to spend a year writing the book only to find out that nobody wanted to buy it, so at the beginning of March, I ran a one-month pre-sale on Kickstarter. I structured the project so that if I didn’t hit $5k in pre-orders, the project would be canceled, and I’d walk away with nothing. Over the weekend, I hit my goal. As of this writing, I’ve reac...

👋 You are reading Maker Stations — your Sunday newsletter featuring desk tours with makers and creators. This project runs on good desks and good people. A shout-out to Adam, our latest Productivity Patron — a photographer and filmmaker from Sacramento, CA. His extra-long desk is split in two: one side for deep digital work (editing, research, client calls), the other for analog thinking — mostly writing scripts by hand in a notebook. “It’s been super helpful to disconnect from di...

✍️ Written by: Dennis E Taylor 🏷 Genre: Sci-fi 🗓 Published: 01 December 2022 📄 Pages: 333 🧐 My rating: ★★★★☆ (4 stars) Jack Kernigan is having a bad day…a bad year…a bad life. After being booted out of MIT, he’s back in his Ohio hometown, working for the family business, facing a life of mediocrity. Then one day, out on a delivery, h...

Let’s make a list. I’ll start.  I’m eating a really good sandwich. Soft roll, rotisserie chicken, crisp lettuce, a little mayo, gruyere cheese, candied jalapeños. Yes and amen.  Also, what did we ever do to deserve mandarin oranges?  I got to lay on a hammock for a while this afternoon and it was warm and breezy and good.  Also look at these tree branches and the sky and how they’re all just existing. Pretty nice.  Know what el...

Lord Jago Branok is having a party at Loveday House. Truth be told, he has a party every month.  No two are ever the same.  But nothing is ever the same at Loveday, his lordship’s rambling mysterious (some say haunted) manse, perched on the cliffs overlooking the sea on Keun Island, off the Atlantic coast of Cornwall.  It’s a queer place, Keun,.  Three miles of mudflats and an ancient stone causeway connect the rocky island to the Cornish mainland during low tide, but when the tide com...