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Monthly recap (May 2021)

On June 12, 2021

Clay modeling “face” made around a spiky round seed ball that fell from a tree

Major updates

Not a lot, this month just flew by!

Minor updates

Some gardening attempts at home
A “terrarium activity” at work; got a hardy plant in the bowl to show for it
Weekend
Random play time: clay modeling, lego

Watched/read/played/made

Tools: spending more time in Doom Emacs
Tools: Found Roam too slow for my “life-log”, tried Tinderbox for a while, but settled back with DevonThink
Watched: The Last Days on Netflix

Generally interesting links – Apr 2021

On May 31, 2021

“Shipton’s Arch”

Science

The tallest natural arch in the world (taller than the Empire State Building), see the pic above.
Mathematica for Data Science

Watchables

I like watching all the “Beauty of …” videos, this is one on BladeRunner 49

The world

Chris Hedges is always hard-hitting
This old SNL bit on the 2020 Dem candidates is … on the money 😐
NFT, AI, and the concept of history

Readables

Something Pynchon wrote for the NYT Book Review in 1984
There was an actual trailer for Anathem (remember reading the book a bit over a decade ago)
When Douglas Adams made an interactive text game for Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
On the rise and decline of Slashdot (checking it was a daily routine for a decade!)

Computing

A view of Nvidia and Arm and … the coming era of specialized software-and-hardware
a Dvorak e-zine: https://www.dvzine.org/zine/22-23.html
“The last cool prank”
“Why not gpl, for scientific software?”
Ordering salads (from Sweetgreen) within Emacs (why am I not surprised)
A reality check on programming being both hard and easy

Monthly recap (Apr 2021)

On May 10, 2021

Some flowers I saw while walking

Major updates

Trip to Mendocino for a week
- Lots of eating and hiking

Minor updates

Tara began “full days” at school
Got the first Moderna dose at CVS
Experimenting with a new Tinderbox/Devonthink flow to replace Roam for a while
Playing with modeling clay instead of Play-doh (good riddance)
Sleep patterns not that great 😐

Watched/read/played/made

(Didn’t keep track ☹️)
Picked up Economix
Most of the way through “The Hobbit” with Tara
Completely weaned myself off The New York Times
Reading a lot more Substack, and a bunch of newer long-form content
Found a few dozen books to give away

Monthly recap (Feb 2021)

On May 10, 2021

Major updates

Hiking at Long ridge trail

Minor updates

Uneven sleep, gotta fix that
Tara had a “zoom lego camp” for a week, which was … not bad

Watched/read/played/made

Reading w/ Tara:
- Nightmare before Christmas (the “movie-as-graphic-novel” genre is quite nice)
- Madeleine collection (
Playing with modeling clay (upgrade from Play-doh, lol)
Watched on Netflix:
- Planet Earth
- The Dig
- episodes of Blown Away (we started watching a baking show last year, and this is similar but different)
Finished a 1000-piece puzzle I’d been working on
“Fairy garden” (picture above)

(For some reason I forgot to hit ‘publish’ on this a couple month sago ….)

Generally interesting links – Mar 2021

(Note to self by Douglas Adams)

Books

Damn, Douglas Adams didn’t enjoy writing either 😟 (pic above)
Math in Moby-Dick
Pynchon’s piece in the NYT Books section

Tools and practices

In which I develop an unhealthy obsession with small mechanical keyboards: The Planck
- They can be ergonomic too
On bringing back the old git email flow
VSCode is really, really big
Why Mastodon isn’t the full solution to the problems of Twitter
Keeping my eye on the development of the Lem editor

Misc

Unlike the 90s and before, the government is trying hard to report UFO sightings, but no one cares
The fascinating account of Walter Pitts (never knew about the connection with Norbert Weiner and the earlier beginnings of what came to be known as Cybernetics)
A counterpoint tale from academia, on certain ideological forms
David Suchet on how he speaks like Poirot
Chris Hedges sounds the alarm
Some Tom ‘n Jerry for you: Cat Concierto
Meeting the “soul guards” of Gengis Khan

Systems

Un-intuitive performance trade-offs
Sussman on flexible systems
On biologically-inspired computing
Another fun Gilad Bracha talk
On Smalltalk
On Unison
On Tuple Spaces
Looking at some good ideas that were forgotten with Joe Armstrong, a short while before he passed away
A manifesto on Protocols, not Platforms

Programming

A take on Async programming in Rust
Apparently, Python includes Tcl
The continuing relevance of the Solid principle
The Linux kernel is nothing like what it was 15 years ago when I last mucked around in it … here’s a look at the intersection of bpf and io_uring

Monthly recap (Mar 2021)

On April 10, 2021

A plane flying in the clear blue sky

Major updates

Weekend trip to Carmel

Minor updates

Got a haircut after a long time, lol
Trying out Fastmail as an email provider

Watched/read/played/made

Re-started reading Against the Day (on and off over a few years now …)
Started reading The Hobbit with Tara
Experimented with a “Crystal growing kit“
Watched a bit of How to train your dragon with Tara
Watched Can’t get you outta my head (Adam Curtis’ new docuseries)
Invented “Scooter Polo” where she kicks a ball while on the scooter (good, dumb, fun)

Generally interesting links – Feb 2021

On March 7, 2021

(A short list this time)

On the “insane biology of the Octopus” (there’s always an Octopus link here, right?)
Somewhat extremist (in a minimalist sense) take on how to write for the web to outlast tools and trends that come and go.
On the library of Nineveh
Looking at coastal areas at the end of the ice age
Stonehenge was … moved from Wales, apparently
A brilliant overview of Cuneiform
Some thoughts on Emacs
The Fed’s official position on decentralized finance

Monthly Recap (Jan 2021)

On February 12, 2021

An arrangement of leaves and twigs

Major updates

Well, a new year and a new adventure for me at Sigma Computing (bit more on that soon)

Minor updates

Played a bunch with silly-but-fun air-pump “rockets”
Switched to a new phone after three years
Doctor visits for Tara, not fun
Haircuts for everyone, after a long time
Poor sleep patterns for me

Watched/read/played/made

Cloudy with a chance of meatballs (I had missed this earlier, it was surprisingly good family fun)
David Attenborough’s “A life on earth” (good, but depressing)

Generally Interesting Links – Jan 2021

On February 7, 2021

Science

The Greenland crater (this is old though, before the discovery of the second one)
I had no idea about the Neolithic bottleneck
On “Mycelial Connections”

While it’s true that humans and animals tend to spread the spores of the mushrooms they make off with, thus aiding mushrooms in propagating genetic offspring, I sometimes wonder who’s cultivating whom here.

Tools for thought

Getting beyond paper and “linear media”
The “computer revolution” might still be a ways off
Going down a rabbit hole with Emacs
Someone’s “computing museum”

Thinking

An introduction to Rene Girard
The Moldbug is back, this time on Substack

Mediums

The concept of a young people’s concert is worth bringing back
Randomly came across an indie artist on YT (video above)
I’m coming across all kinds of new concepts these days: Solarpunk

Programming

Optimizing Clojure
On how Programming Culture is broken
… and on the state of performance and quality
Demonstrating conditions in Common Lisp
Programming languages as objects in nature

Monthly recap (Dec 2020)

On January 10, 2021

Sunset at Pacifica

Major updates

A stay-at-home end-of-year vacation
- Lots of driving around or walking around locally

Minor updates

A day trip to San Francisco (chocolates at Ghirardelli, having coffee outside Ferry Building)
A trip to Barnes & Noble (the only one in the whole year!)
Tara’s first (and second) tooth came out
A “christmas drive-through” at Tara’s school
(Finally) got a ergonomic setup going at home for a protracted WFH period (more on this later)

Watched/made/played/read

Queen’s Gambit
Tenet (!)
Several episodes of Hinterland
Read up to the first four Magic Treehouse books with Tara

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