- The Uncomfortable – a collection of deliberately inconvenient objects
I quite want a bunch of these. Useless but lovely.
- Hue new? Scientists claim to have found colour no one has seen before | Science | The Guardian
Do not create The Colour Out Of Space in remaining eye!
Author Archives: Alasdair
Bookmarks for April 16, 2025
- Inside Elon Musk’s Texas Compound – The Onion
I was a fan of The Onion, back in tha H-Dog dayz. Then I sort of drifted away. Over a series of owners, their content became… thinner. Funny, but insubstantial. But since the sale to Global Tetrahedron, they've been absolutely firing on all cylinders again. Wonderful to see.
- Homeland Security funding for CVE program expires • The Register
Well, this is deeply, deeply bad news. I'm just about old enough to remember doing IT work at a time before the CVE program, and I do not wish to go back.
Bookmarks for April 15, 2025
- Raycast
I may be late to the party, but this looks like something useful to streamline jobs I do a dozen times a day.
Bookmarks for April 13, 2025
- Dismay as cross-border library caught in US-Canada feud: ‘We just want to stay open’ | Canada | The Guardian
An incredibly depressing sign of the times – a building that is physically split by the US/Canada border is being closed off to Canadians – or at least made much harder to access. Something that should be handled with goodwill and common sense for the benefit of the people who live there is a casualty of politics and bureaucracy.
Bookmarks for April 12, 2025
- Internet 3.0 and the Beginning of (Tech) History – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
This is a solid bit of writing from a few years back that explains a lot about the stages of growth of the internet and how we've arrived at the current moment. I think that four years later, his conclusion that we're headed back to a more open and decentralised internet is optimistic – but thinking about Bluesky, and the idea that independent writing plaforms (or, as we used to call them, blogs) are having a resurgence in response to everything, maybe not totaly unfounded.
- LLMs can't stop making up software dependencies and sabotaging everything • The Register
Fascinating new exploit wrinkle, and a very strong argument for not using LLMs to generate entire applications – it'll literally decide to try and pull in dependencies that don't exist, and if the app runner doesn't notice, then a bad actor can simply occupy that space with whatever they're like, and completely co-opt the AI-generated app.
Bookmarks for April 11, 2025
- Bookmarks
Amusingly recursive: if this works, the first bookmark in my new bookmark manager will be itself. I finally got my linkdump posts working again by building an entire application to grab them Pinboard and post them to wordpress. There's something wrong with me.
2024
Well, the two really big things this year have their own posts – a honeymoon and a new kitchen. Both amazing. I started doing a one photo a month thing on Facebook last year, and have just put 12 photos on there, and I’ll stick them on the end of this post, too.
2024 was pretty great, all told. A year I’ll look back on with more or less unalloyed delight. Sadly, 2025 is looking less promising, personally and more globally. I’ve had some (minor, treatable, more-or-less to be expected) warning signs around blood pressure and cholesterol that mean diet and exercise need to be a bit of a focus for next year. Globally, well, Trump takes office again in January, and I expect that to render things broadly worse, and let’s be real: they’re pretty shit already on the broad view.
Still, we’ve a roof over our heads, and things to look forward to already in the diary, so it’s not all bad. I hope 2025 treats us all as well as possible.
(January: Wassailing. February: Matt Smith in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People at the theatre. March: Dopamine Land for Miranda’s birthday. April: New Orleans. May: Disney World. June: QI Party. July: ???. August: Outdoor Shrimp Boil while the kitchen was re-done. September: Kitchen was finished. October: Visting the new Sorted Food studio. November: a proper Cajun food pop-up for our first anniversary. December: a particularly well mise-en-placed meal in the new kitchen.)
Before, During and After
We got a new kitchen – something I have wanted to do for about the last decade. Getting a kitchen with the specific equipment I wanted was obviously impossible while renting, and then after buying a house, there was a) other house costs, and b) getting married, and other stuff, we had to wait for there to be room in the budget, but we finally managed it.
The process was not without a certain amount of pain and fustration. We were told it would take about two weeks from start to finish (so we assumed that somewhere between two and three weeks is what it would actually take), and in the end it took over six. But in the end, we have a kitchen that is brighter, better equipped, has more storage, and somehow, feels much larger. I am delighted.
Honeymoon
We went on Honeymoon. My first proper leave-the-country-for-an-extended-period holiday in about a decade. (I’m not a natural traveller.). We took ourselves off to New Orleans and Disney World for slightly over two weeks, and it was exactly what a Honeymoon is supposed to be – the holiday of a lifetime.
We picked two incredibly touristy places, but I don’t regard that as bad, in as much as an alternate definition of touristy might be said to be “incredibly good at turning money into fun”. Because they both are, in different ways.
In New Orleans, we ate amazing food, listened to jazz, toured cemeteries and bayous, visited museums, art galleries and churches, and yes, drank bad overpriced “hurricanes” on Bourbon Street, and generally experienced culture in all sorts of ways. At Disney we, well, we did Disney things. Rides, merchandise, shows, and meeting disney characters. A bit of me wishes I’d kept a diary, but I’ve got hundreds of photos, quite a lot of them of food, and it was all basically stunning.
Having had the “holiday of a lifetime”, we’ve naturally immediately started working out how we might afford to do it all again.
2023
I am now a respectably married man. That’s all that happened in 2023.
Yeah, OK, other things happened. The world continues to be on fire, possibly worse. I remain in the same job, and remain happy there. I have not moved house. I failed to LARP, but I have done some very rewarding tabletop gaming, and am looking to continue that in 2024.
Plans for 2024 include a honeymoon, and, if I am very lucky, a new kitchen. I continue to appreciate my immense and undeserved good fortune, and can only wish that everyone was so lucky.