I hope this email finds you well
I hope this email minds you
I hope this email brings you in
And in the darkness binds you

Finally taking the time to set up Safari Profiles properly and bind certain websites like YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook to open in an ‘Undesirables' profile that I don't use for anything else. This feels like a better setup. [#Apple](https://toot.cafe/tags/Apple) [#Safari](https://toot.cafe/tags/Safari) [#privacy](https://toot.cafe/tags/privacy)

I wrote some ideas for how to actually make HTML documents a viable replacement for PDFs.

<https:willcrichton.net/notes/portable-epubs/>

[@octothorpe](https://mastodon.online/@octothorpe) [@dschaub](https://mstdn.social/@dschaub) [@atpfm](https://mastodon.social/@atpfm) [@siracusa](https://mastodon.social/@siracusa)

I love Elle Cordova and her clever, funny videos. This one is for all my writer and editor friends.

I think I'm becoming a fan of Christopher Ward watches. They have some very nice ones at the moment.
<https:www.christopherward.com/watches/c63-sealander-automatic/C63-39ADA3-S00K1-VC.html>

[@chockenberry](https://mastodon.social/@chockenberry) this is actually how you add more electrolytes to your diet

This product image on Amazon has the mystery of a Renaissance painting.

this one is so wild, thanks Mike Lee for the “Crazy Rose” version, <https://www.flickr.com/photos/curiouslee/3562599283>

It’s so pretty and yet I get so little information from it, perfection.

For all the [#neovim](https://mastodon.social/tags/neovim) and [#vim](https://mastodon.social/tags/vim) lovers out there that are also using [#firefox](https://mastodon.social/tags/firefox) - as we all should do - here is something to play with on this fine [#sunday](https://mastodon.social/tags/sunday)

<https:github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl> -- [#tridactyl](https://mastodon.social/tags/tridactyl)
A Vim-like interface for Firefox, inspired by Vimperator/Pentadactyl.

DIe Macht in Dosen, ich sags euch.

About 1 month ago I decided that I had slipped into some bad typing habits. So today marks to the 200th lesson of me rebuilding my typing skills.

app for the curious: <https://www.keybr.com>

Leslie Lamport, of LaTeX fame, is a very accomplished mathematician and computer scientist with a Turing award for his work on “fundamental contributions to the theory and
practice of distributed and concurrent systems”. He just published a draft of his new book:

"A science of concurrent programs"

<https:lamport.azurewebsites.net/tla/science.pdf>

True to his pedagogic approach to everything he does, "The book assumes only that you know the math one learns before entering a university." Even the appendices are fantastic. Can only wish I'll remain this lucid at his 82 years old.

[#multithreading](https://mathstodon.xyz/tags/multithreading) [#maths](https://mathstodon.xyz/tags/maths) [#LesleyLamport](https://mathstodon.xyz/tags/LesleyLamport)

I still don't have Covid, but my Apple fanboi test came back positive. [@sixcolors](https://zeppelin.flights/@sixcolors)

The FLIRC Skip 1S remote looks nice.

<https:flirc.tv/products/skip1s-remote-universal-remote-control?variant=43489094729960>

This is really nice. High quality text to speech from Python:
<https:github.com/rhasspy/piper>

You can also download the models locally, so they work on your own system, and with some Bash magic, you can have a better version of Apple's "say" command.

Git is a frustratingly useful tool that has many lesser known features that really should be on by default. Today I wrote about one of them: zdiff3. It makes merge conflicts easier to work through and frees you up for more important things.

<https:ductile.systems/zdiff3>

If you'd like to soft-wrap only the current time, this [#Neovim](https://hachyderm.io/tags/Neovim) plugin implements the functionality by using floating windows and virtual text: <https://github.com/benlubas/wrapping-paper.nvim>

Giving [@zellij](https://hachyderm.io/@zellij) a try as [#tmux](https://mastodon.social/tags/tmux) replacement…
And it feels so "done right", just like when I moved on from (neo)vi(m) after decades to [#HelixEditor](https://mastodon.social/tags/HelixEditor)
The fundamental stuff just works and doesn't need a ton of tweaking, plugins and config debugging.
Getting started is made easy by the fact, that the UI doesn't hide its functionality behind a steep learning curve, but instead shows contextual hints for keyboard shortcuts, actions etc.
Something both, [#zellij](https://mastodon.social/tags/zellij) and [#HelixEditor](https://mastodon.social/tags/HelixEditor) just get right!

Liking this Italian Microsoft 1995 ad against piracy which basically threatens you with all kinds of evil and illness if you are using a pirated Windows version: viruses, "contamination", data loss, prison, nervous breakdown, etc

Made a Dutch baby! SO GOOD (and easy)!! 😋

This is cosmic-term, a very WIP project that takes the alacritty_terminal crate providing the majority of terminal code but rewrites the renderer to support additional features such as bidirectional text and ligatures. It will support both software and GPU rendering, and will have additional UI sugar provided by libcosmic as they are implemented.

<https:github.com/pop-os/cosmic-term/>

Anyone have any good wireless or wired earbud recommendations? I'm not talking high-end here. We need to be able to afford 3 of them because they'd be for the kids. We're a heavily Apple household, but there's no way we can afford AirPods x 3 so it has to be something cheaper but also something that doesn't totally suck and would hopefully last awhile.

Great complete Goose live show, free on YouTube: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvhNRj13KrQ>

ok I made a quick survey about which git commands you use, it's literally 1 question (run history | grep -Eo '^(gits+[^ ]*)' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn and paste the output)

if enough people fill it out I will make some highly unscientific graphs

<https:forms.gle/fQjQVxhQrQdu4Cd8A>

(4/?)

This guy is a man after my own heart. [#DroidSlavery](https://hachyderm.io/tags/DroidSlavery)
<https:www.youtube.com/watch?v=WD2UrB7zepo>

Dang, it's a shame the Cybertruck looks so dumb and is headed by your crazy uncle at Thanksgiving because the tech actually seems pretty dope

Keyboard Shortcuts.

If you use a Mac, it's valuable to revisit this page at least once a year.

I can pretty much promise there's at least one thing here you didn't know you could do.

Yes. You, too.

<https:support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236>

Inspired by [@chriscoyier](https://front-end.social/@chriscoyier), I put together a little list of the apps I use pretty much every day.

<https:noahjacob.us/words/default-apps-2023.html>

[@jonafato](https://mastodon.social/@jonafato) [@glyph](https://mastodon.social/@glyph) Paperless-ngx might do the trick. I think it’s more targeted for mail, but I came to know about it from someone who used it to store manuals. It does OCR, the correspondant can be the product manufacturer, and it has tags. I run it in Docker on my Synology and I love it.

<https:docs.paperless-ngx.com/>

[@gedeonm](https://mastodon.social/@gedeonm) Having just watched Showtime’s “Billions” show and saw the storyline of Ax’s failure to organize a bank, I’d wager Apple would have a very rough time of it, if they even wanted to.

Yep, dinner turned out great. Roasted lamb w/ squash puree, roasted veggies, deviled eggs and crab beeey sauce. Happy [#Thanksgiving2023](https://mastodon.social/tags/Thanksgiving2023) 😄🖖

Made this just for fun.

Honest LinkedIn notifications: <https://codepen.io/collinsworth/pen/eYxMQbj>

Posted my weeknotes: DevDay, GitHub Universe, OpenAI chaos
<https:simonwillison.net/2023/Nov/22/weeknotes/>

Written news articles often have a secret language to them which hints at the underlying reporting process - language like "according to **two people familiar with** the board’s deliberations".

I don't think these are at all obvious to people who haven't worked in news, so I wrote an article about them:

Deciphering clues in a news article to understand how it was reported
<https:simonwillison.net/2023/Nov/22/deciphering-clues/>

"Evaluating LLMs is a minefield"
Arvind Narayanan & Sayash Kapoor
<https:www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/talks/evaluating_llms_minefield/>

"In short, many things can go wrong when we are trying to evaluate LLMs’ performance on a certain task or behavior in a certain scenario.

It has big implications for reproducibility: both for research on LLMs and research that uses LLMs to answer a question in social science or any other field."

Great slidedeck!

No, pair programming does not replace code reviews. That the reviewer(s) of a change is unfamiliar with the code is a *feature*, as that’s how *literally everyone* except for the author(s) will read it later.

A related concept I've been thinking about a lot recently is "data literacy" - understanding that useful data comes in the form of a collection of similarly shaped observations, for example a clean table of rows and columns

People with strong data literacy are more likely to understand why a PDF file of scanned paper forms split over multiple pages isn't a great way to distribute data!

My attempt at [@RecDiffs](https://mastodon.social/@RecDiffs) BFF

Best: 97: Invisible Work. Genuinely enlightening and a good example of how their two brains work together to say true things.

First: 12: Hobbit Tendencies. A good example of what makes John, John. And a label that has stuck with me for years.

Favorite: 16: Ancient Bird. Truly wondrous is the dream journal of Merlin Mann. _Permiso_.

Okay gotta BFF [@RecDiffs](https://mastodon.social/@RecDiffs)
Best: I think the people agree 102: Preparing the Way is top tier

First: I really think you should start at the beginning, but if I had to pick not chronological it would be 55: Dog-Shaped Dog

Favorite: Very difficult, I've listened to every episode (including the one from yesterday) at least twice but going with 113: Ambient Pleasure Generator for start of Secret Weird Things TM

Got Thunderbolt Migration Assistant working!

Had to do half of this: <https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253658404>

- connect Thunderbolt cable to both

On source Mac:
- create Thunderbolt Bridge interface
- assign it a 10.0.0.x IP
- enable Internet Sharing from Wi-Fi to the Thunderbolt Bridge
- run Migration Assistant

On destination Mac, never set up Wi-Fi. It’ll activate over that Thunderbolt shared-internet connection and never ask for a Wi-Fi network.

(This used to be as easy as “connect them with a cable”.)

do any of you use micro (a new-ish command line text editor)? do you like it?

I've been looking for a command line editor to recommend to friends who don't like vim/emacs and I'm curious if this is a good option. It looks like a big improvement on nano but I haven't used it much.

<https:micro-editor.github.io/>

Retrobatch turned 2.0!

<https:flyingmeat.com/retrobatch/>

Gus is a little slow at getting announcements out and such, but hey it's got a bunch of neat new features: <https://flyingmeat.com/retrobatch/releasenotes.html>

And for the first time, it's on the App Store.

A sobering thought! [#statistics](https://mastodon.social/tags/statistics) [#analytics](https://mastodon.social/tags/analytics) more at timoelliott.com/blog/cartoons

If you use game controllers on macOS, this is a (literal) game changer. There's a secret defaults command that will stop it from opening up the dumb "launchpad" UI to the "games" screen.

<https:apple.stackexchange.com/a/465104/26977>

Máquina de hacer aviones de papel, hecho con piezas de LEGO.

How Canadians are hatched:

Eggs are laid in early fall and hatch mid-winter. The pucklings then make their way into the forest to forage for syrup amongst the moose.

Hidden Bar - A Minimal Menu Bar Solution
<https:chrishannah.me/hidden-bar-a-minimal-menu-bar-solution>

A slide from a presentation I just finished.

Black phoebes are near me often but I still try to find different ways to frame them. This one was sort of dark/shade-based.

Howard Shore’s work on LOTR is some of my all-time favorite film scores. This helps break down just what’s so brilliant about it. Warning: if you watch this you’ll probably want to watch the LOTR trilogy (again). <https://youtu.be/XLj6zkmwsYU?si=MuMXKIAFqz0WmfBC>

[@dmnelson](https://mastodon.social/@dmnelson) [@iRalph](https://appdot.net/@iRalph) There isn’t necessarily a site for themes but here’s a link to mine:

<https:appdot.net/@Ronnie/110724369780779151>

Also follow [@chamona](https://mastodon.online/@chamona)

Airbus open sourced their new cockpit font. Make it the default for all your embedded projects, because it's REALLY good and has real testing in difficult environments!

<https:b612-font.com/>

Still just as funny today as this was in back in 2006. 😂 Frank Caliendo - Letterman - Impressionists Week <https://youtu.be/CqN8v5pZC54?si=9qD3YAg5ufdbIQGX>

My first proper album is released today! It's called Melodic Guitar Music.

Recommended if you like melodies, or guitars, or music. Now available on Bandcamp and streaming services:

<https:www.holovaty.com/melodic-guitar-music/>

Systems "SHOULD NOT require memorized secrets to be changed arbitrarily (e.g., periodically)."

Said another way way, if your organization requires regular password changes (every 30 days, 90 days, etc.), then you're making your organization _less_ secure.

This has been a PSA: <https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/sp800-63b.html#reqauthtype>

Just launched: the initial version of Postmarks, a new ActivityPub platform that lets you save, tag and share bookmarks on the Fediverse! More info on my blog: <https://motd.co/2023/09/postmarks-launch/>

A golden halo around the [#ELT](https://astrodon.social/tags/ELT)

What a [#stunning](https://astrodon.social/tags/stunning) [#picture](https://astrodon.social/tags/picture) of the extremely large [#telescope](https://astrodon.social/tags/telescope), currently under construction in [#chile](https://astrodon.social/tags/chile), with the [#Sun](https://astrodon.social/tags/Sun) perfectly aligned behind.

[#Astronomy](https://astrodon.social/tags/Astronomy) [#Space](https://astrodon.social/tags/Space) [#photography](https://astrodon.social/tags/photography) [@astrophysics](https://a.gup.pe/u/astrophysics) [#astrophysics](https://astrodon.social/tags/astrophysics)

credits: E. Garcés/ESO. Ack.: N. Dubost

read more: <https://www.eso.org/public/images/potw2336a/>

[#SIlentSunday](https://mastodon.social/tags/SIlentSunday)

Unfreezable! Oooooh, me likey. [#Zelda](https://mastodon.social/tags/Zelda)

I wrote 68 pages on Optimizing Python, but the tldr is five words.

<https:tyr.fyi/6>