Art museums are a holy place for me, like good book stores and record stores. Little bubbles where we curate our attempts to communicate, to make others feel something. Or, simply, to create. Art museums are where yesterday and today meet, and the dead tongues and hands of our past selves live again for a moment. Stand here, look. Gaze into someone else’s heart and mind for a time. If humans have a purpose, surely art is a crucial part of it. ...

While startups are busy trying to put (more) people out of work writing or doing artwork, how about turning some attention towards the DMV?

I’m probably late to the party, but Distrobox has to be one of the best open source projects to drop in the past few years.

Whether the Dune series is your cup of tea or not, anybody who’s spent more than a little time in the sci-fi section of a book store is likely familiar with the series’ book covers and the unusual typeface. I caught a link off the Orange site to a story on Fonts In Use about the history of the typeface that graces Frank Herbert’s series, and it’s right up my alley. ...

It’s been a few months now since the Twitter Takeover, and Musk’s gutting of the Twitter workforce and various antics. I haven’t deleted my account, but I set it to private and set up shop on Mastodon in mid-November. Curious about what others have done and how your habits have changed (if at all).

Need to make a presentation, but don’t like using a GUI app? Take a look at Marp, the Markdown Presentation Ecosystem.

Spent some quality Sunday time today refurbishing some older mini PCs that had been gathering dust so I could run a few personal projects. One of the projects I’ve had on my to-do list an embarrassingly long time is to set up Pi-hole for ad blocking / filtering. If I’d known it’d be that easy I’d have done it a long time ago! I installed Pi-hole on an ancient Core i3 NUC with 8GB of RAM running Debian. It took about two minutes, five if you count reading some documentation and maybe seven minutes if you count logging into the admin interface and quickly setting my laptop and phone to use Pi-hole for testing. ...

You remember Space Invaders? You remember the Hampster Dance? Get ready for Hampster Invaders.

I’ve recently upgraded a few laptops and have some NVMe drives and spare RAM on hand. Rather than letting them gather dust or try to sell them online, I’d like to match them with inexpensive mini PCs for use in my home lab. Suggestions on the best way to backwards-match this?

Some observations on a Friday evening about the realities of home offices and technology. Fa A laptop’s cabling will always be located on the maximally inconvenient side. Especially power cords with bulky connectors. Internet only fails before or during an important teleconference or the most suspenseful part of a movie or show. This is also true of power outages. Hotel internet is most reliable at mid-range hotels. Fleabag hotels and swank resorts have uniformly crappy internet. The most aloof house cat will only want cuddles when you’re trying to focus. The dongle, connector, cord, or other item you know you own and see frequently when unneeded goes into witness protection when it’s wanted. It will resurface when a replacement is obtained. All deliveries and service calls happen while in meetings. UPS and FedEx only ring the doorbell when it’s inconvenient. Otherwise deliveries are made with maximum stealth. Packages requiring signatures will be announced in a whisper from across the street. After troubleshooting a system or application extensively it will turn out that the problem is a faulty cable or coincidental internet glitch. However, you are likely to have introduced a new, unrelated problem in an attempt to fix the symptoms. Technology: The solution to, and cause of, most of life’s problems! ...