A few years ago, whenever I published a new article here, I would just announce it on Twitter, but since the Muskover its importance has declined, and now I post updates to several services. To compare engagement on these services, I've looked at reposts, likes, and replies to two dozen of my recent posts. more… A few years ago, whenever I published a new article here, I would just announce it on Twitter, but since the Muskover its importance has decl...

This post is, in a sense, a continuation to Unbundling Tools for Thought . It’s an argument for why you shouldn’t try to use a single tool to do everything, aimed at people who have been spent too much time shoveling prose into a “second brain” and have little to show for it. Software tools span a spectrum from domain-agnostic to domain-specific. Domain-agnostic tools are things like Obsidian. They have a small, spartan data model that can be made to represent most things. Obsi...

We spent a month across the pond last summer, from July 15 to August 15.   We started in Belfast and environs, where A KNIGHT OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS was being filmed.  From there we went on to Amsterdam, where I paid a call on my Dutch publisher, and then London to call on Jane Johnson and the good folks at Voyager, my UK publisher.  Oxford was next.  The Oxford Writers House had invited me to deliver a talk on fantasy with Philip Pullman, the author of HIS DARK MATERIALS.  I was really loo...

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...

"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...

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...

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...

Thinking about my next laptop and #Apple has been giving me the ick lately with some of what they're doing. Anyway, politics of it all aside, I'm thinking about a #Framework 13. Very expensive, but will hopefully last a lot longer. Anyone have one? What do you think of it? Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is great, and you're great for using it. ❤️ Reply to...

I have a few wiki-like pages on my website. Among the most frequently updated is my movies page, in which I list both the movies I have enjoyed and the movies I plan to watch. The movies page contains several sub-lists, each for a specific genre like comedy and romantic comedy. The list is not in any particular order. With that said, I recently found myself wanting to display the contents in alphabetical order. This would make the lists on the page easier to skim. I thought about using a scr...

Happy April 1st! This post is part of April Cools Club : an April 1st effort to publish genuine essays on unexpected topics. Please enjoy these true stories, and rest assured that the tech content will be back soon! The mouse started moving. Not the one on the desk, the pointer on the screen! First to the left, then down to the bottom corner. *Click!* The Windows Start menu came up. " cmd " wrote a silent hand on an invisible keyboard. It downloaded a file from a random-looking URL, then...

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...

I recently moved to NYC since I was accepted by the Recurse Center , and today was my first day at their hub. The day started by nerding out on the retro computers, hardware labs, and 3d printers they have; followed by the first breakfast bagel of my life. I feel incredibly fortunate to be surrounded out by so many talented programmers and am looking forward to the next three months with my new friends! As part of our first day, we had a workshop about pair programming. For those who d...

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...

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...

Last week I finally got to ride in the new NSW Mariyung intercity express trains on a beautiful (cough) drizzly afternoon! They entered service from Sydney in December last year, and while I’d seen some of them flying past, I’d never got to see one up close. Unlike the ancient V sets these trains are replacing, the dimensions and fitout of each carriage are more in line with standard Sydney suburban services. There are large doors at either end of each carriage that enter into a vestib...

The Orbital Index Issue No. 312  | Apr 2, 2025 🚀 🌍 🛰   ...

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...

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...

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...

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: ...