> Notes...

“In the light of Easter, let us allow ourselves to be amazed by Christ! Let us allow our hearts to be transformed by his immense love for us! Let those who have weapons lay them down! Let those who have the power to unleash wars choose peace! Not a peace imposed by force, but through dialogue! Not with the desire to dominate others, but to encounter them!”

And:

“Enough of the idolatry of self and money! Enough of the display of power! Enough of war! True strength is shown in serving life.”

I am far from being a religious person. but the Pope’s message resonates in truth, and facts.

Today is Kathleen’s birthday. For reasons that escape my mind, I didn’t have it on my calendar. That didn’t stopped us from getting her cupcakes, and a birthday card. Because, you know, you are not 77 years old everyday, and because, as she said, “it is great to be 77 and still have my marbles”. She sure does!

I’ve got my Sony α7 II batteries charged now, so, what to do, where to go? It is an awkward camera to carry around: it is not big, but not small either, and its 28-70mm lens kit protrudes a bit, making it look bigger than it is. Some people will freak out!

There is also the fact that there is no much enticing scenery around me, neither natural, nor urban. Or maybe that’s just me, creating easy to overcome excuses?

These two cuties showed up today, right after the rain was over. Such tiny pigeons! They are nesting on our small tree near the front of the house.

Spent half of the afternoon replacing Horsie’s vehicle’s tyre. She got a really, really big screw precisely on the side edge of the tyre, which made it impossible to patch. A costly endeavour, indeed!

It also annoyed me that she would get a flat so soon. Of course, not her fault, yet, I battled the feeling. On top of that I worried about the shop damaging the rim, or something else. These days that’s a flip of a coin. Luckily—I think—it felt on the side that favours us this time.

Came across the UniFi Travel Router on George’s very well written post. What an amazing little device! I know I don’t need one because, sadly, I don’t travel often enough to take full advantage of it, but as I commented on his post, I am going to ask Horsie to budget for one, as a want (yeah, I am setting my expectations low 😜).

Because Mike Davidson wrote so high about it:

I don’t think I will ever purchase another brand of ice cream at the store ever again. It is the most perfect ice cream I have ever tasted. The creamiest mouthfeel, wonderful flavor combinations, and that little bit of tang which reminds you this is no ordinary substance.

I have added Hellenika to my list of places to visit, should I ever go to Seattle. Considering I have never been there, and that it is in our backyard, the possibilities are high.

This weekend I am planning to spend at least two hours looking for, and choosing, some postcards to send to my current, and future postcrossers. I have been thinking on crafting a rubber stamp to use as my personal “trademark” crossing. Too much? 🤭

“After careful evaluation, InCommon has decided to transition from our current platform provider, Sectigo, to CertiNext for our certificate authority (CA) services. This transition will better position InCommon to address changes in the certificate industry more broadly and will be completed by July 17, 2026.”

Wait, wut?! Do that sounds like something done carefully? It breaks everything we have built around certificate automation, and more. What an extraordinary clusterf*ck, InCommon!

If I were Satoshi, I would denied it too. For someone that has tried, and is still trying, to remain anonymous, denying it would be the first thing to do after being exposed. There can also be that he, indeed, isn’t Satoshi. Or is he?

I have been wishing, on and off, to dabble with infrared (IR) photography. I have not done it because of money. Converting my Sony α7ii to a full spectrum camera costs over $500, plus the filter ($100 for a 850nm). Even if was willing to spend that amount of money (I am not), Horsie is already pretty mad at me because I have spent money on more than one camera in the past, and ended up not using them. The Sony has been languishing in my office for the last 3-4 years, or more.

Images of an alien world (Mars is as alien as it can be; I mean, the Moon is, and it is closer) really touch me deeply. I imagine what will it be like being there, touching those rocks, letting that sand go through my fingers, looking at the horizon. But it goes further than that, hard to describe; it is a rather primal feeling.

Also, such a lonely machine. I know, it is a machine, still. I am not comparing humans to a Mars rover, but aren’t we some kind of machine too? As such, I can’t help but feeling sad for Curiosity.

I just signed up on Postcrossing, and have requested to send my first postcard. A little stressed out now, because the site shows tomorrow as my postcard’s departure day. What if I can’t make it? Hmm, I guess I could ask on the forum. Yeah, I will do that.

We have re-ignited our desire to go back to the Moon, and towards that aim we are going around it this time, just for giggles (kidding, kidding!). And, of course, the chosen for the task crew took pictures. Really great pictures!

“The Artemis II crew captured this view of Earth setting on April 6, 2026, as they flew around the Moon. As the astronauts flew over the Moon’s far side, the crew photographed and described terrain features including impact craters, ancient lava flows, and surface cracks and ridges formed as the Moon slowly evolved over time.”

What an amazing experience the Artemis II crew is having! 😍

“It is the giant African harvester ant queens, which are large and coloured red, that are most prized by international ant collectors – one can fetch up to £170 ($220) on the black market, which tends to operate online.”

I didn’t know ants were so desirable. It is mind blowing! It is also the first time I read about the environmental consequences for the areas from which the species are being taken, and not for the areas to which they are being introduced.

This is a sobering reality to witness, even secondhand. Everything has a cost in prison, it truly is dystopian. Want to treat an inmate to some food? Microwavable sandwiches and pizzas cost $7.95. Yoghurts parfait cost $4.50. Soda cost $3.50. All the food is of fairly rubbish quality, mind it. I don’t want to get into the price of food packages that can be send, up to four times a month. Families, of course, carry the financial burden.

I understand some people have done truly bad things; the degree of gravity varies from inmate to inmate. Yet, what I am describing is not correctional, it is pure profit-making at the expense of the innocent. Yes, nobody forces anyone to spend money while visiting, but as no outside food is allowed, it is almost impossible to avoid.

When watching movies, you ought to give them a try sometime, even when their title might not sound enticing. That was the case with “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” (★★★★☆) . At a little over 2 hours it was a long movie—by western standards. It has short stories making up for the entire movie, and while some were better than others, the movie was, overall, worth to watch.

Saw “The Ridiculous Six” (★★☆☆☆) last night because someone I care about quite a bit shed laughing tears while recounting portions of it. As you can tell by my rating I was unimpressed, yet, still a humorous movie to break away from the stresses of life.

The very first “Avatar” (★★★★☆) movie was the only one worth a lick in my opinion. Everything else in the franchise is beyond boring.

“Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.”

I guess someone we know is closer to the All Mighty than we thought:

“We’re going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We’re going to bring them back to the stone ages, where they belong.”

Oh yes. Certainly a religion of peace.

“Let’s run OpenClaw on the enterprise”, said no one. Until now. Oh dear, oh dear.

I took Ammu yesterday to buy a couple of chickens. This market place lets you select a live bird, and the vendor then kills and cleans it for you. It felt odd, especially for someone who eats chicken as much as I do, but I found it abhorrent.

It’s easier for me to accept the practice when I don’t see it happen or think about it too much. Instead, I like to picture the chickens we eat as dying of heart attacks after being pitted against one another in a marathon. Chickens are naturally competitive, often pushing themselves to their limits, and that can be the cause of their death. At least that’s the story I tell myself, and I will stick to it.

“When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.”

That quote from Futurama’s “Godfellas” episode resonates so true, specially after being asked for week’s accomplishments, or anything relevant, and otherwise noteworthy. More often than not “things worked, no complains were heard” is a supreme achievement.

Watched “The Thomas Crown Affair” (★★★★★) , for the, oh dear, I lost count how many times I have seeing that movie, over the weekend. Though I have watched it many times, I am sure I will again. Also watched “From the World of John Wick: Ballerina” (★★☆☆☆) which, on the other hand, I am sure to never see again.

Saw “Lady Snowblood” (★★★★☆) , on Tubi. It was a reminisce, kind of, of the Zatoichi movies I like so much, but with a female lead. If you are not used to old Japanese movies, they are bit of an acquired taste, but very rewarding. Their cinematography, specifically, is really, really good.

George is making the AI do coding wonders. And he is just starting, so I can’t imagine what the extremely advanced is doing with it. The times we live in!

Holy macaroni! Blue is back! I am glad to see them writing, and doing seemingly well. Let me pin this note, to see if they see it and reach out. I truly would like to know what happened!

I feel morally obligated to say I did not write the code in this repository myself. This project is an exploration of using LLMs to carry out tasks based on my direction. The majority of prompts I used to get here were derived using the socratic method, genuine curiosity, and a hunch that NVMe supporting inference is underutilized despite being a (slow but) perfectly valid form of memory.

Translation: I slopcoded this sh*t. Not that it is super bad, I just found funny the way it was written.

➝ Via Hacker News.

Several accounts on the online platform Polymarket laid bets on a US-Iran ceasefire over the weekend that appeared to show signs of insider knowledge, according to experts.

But of course there is insider trading. It has happened before, and it will happen again and again while the current regime is in power.

➝ Via Hacker News.

They push “120B” without explaining active parameters. They advertise 80GB without clearly explaining the split pool. They quote impressive local compute numbers while avoiding the architectural bottleneck joining the two halves of the system. They lean on academic research they did not originate. They present as a U.S. startup while the visible technical and operational trail runs heavily through China and Hong Kong. And they ask backers to fund all of this without clearly naming the people responsible for delivering it.

Yeah, no, I will pass, thank you. I saw their Kickstarter a couple of weeks ago, and it read as an April Fool’s (not that it is, it just left me kind of feeling that way).

Ubuntu (or maybe this comes from Debian) has the most backward, annoying, exasperating package management, in my opinion. Imagine the following:

apt-get update
[...]
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
42 packages can be upgraded. Run 'apt list --upgradable' to see them.

Then we run upgrades:

apt-get upgrade -y
[...]
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following upgrades have been deferred due to phasing:
[ list of all 42 packages mentioned on the update ]

And, of course, Landscape will report all those machines with phasing packages as having “package upgrades available” and, often, as having “security upgrades available”, but there are none—or nothing can be done about it, “due to phasing”.

By submitting Your Content on or through the Services, you grant Vercel a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, fully paid, sublicensable and transferable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, reproduce, distribute, display, publish, store, perform, and create derivatives of Your Content to provide and improve the Services, develop new products and services, secure and protect the Services and third parties from fraud, abuse, malware, malicious files or content, viruses and the like.

Wow! I wonder why people still uses this, with such draconian terms.

We watched “One Battle After Another” (★★★★☆) over the weekend, or was it Monday night? Anyway, can’t recall. What I remember, though, is being a decent movie, and I am glad the kid brought it up. I learned after watching it that it was an Oscar winner as well. Recommended!

Tonight is the night and I kid you not: I am going to bring two bags of popcorn—one for me, one for Ashlii—to it. It is going to the a HOA to remember.

Update: 17 Mar 2026 @ 19:18:01

Well, the meeting went much better than expected with the caveat that I ended up becoming the president of the HOA. That’s good, and bad but, hey, as it is an unpaid job, if it starts harming me I can simply quit.

Let’s take a unilateral decision, boast we can end it in record time, then ask for help. Oh, and threaten if no help is offered or received. And that’s just explaining the whole thing to a kindergartener. One really can’t make this sh*t up.

This one was too funny, and too good to pass. “I think they are saying ’no’, to me asking for permission, meaning ‘just do it, stop asking’”. LOL. Too funny!

➝ Via Hacker News.

Available for: iPhone 6s (all models), iPhone 7 (all models), iPhone SE (1st generation), iPad Air 2, iPad mini (4th generation), and iPod touch (7th generation).

An 11 years old device still receives security updates from Apple. Meanwhile Google:

Nexus devices get security updates for at least 3 years from when the device first became available on the Google Store, or at least 18 months from when the Google Store last sold the device, whichever is longer. After that, we can’t guarantee more updates.

How do you like them apples?

These release notes are painstakingly and lovingly hand-crafted by human Ghostty maintainers, including the full changelog. They take a combined 16+ hours to write, so please enjoy. 🥰

Just upgraded to the very shiny Ghostty version 1.3.0. In a world where almost any application update boringly reads “bugs fixes and improvements”, Ghostty 1.3.0 release notes are something to appreciate, and admire.

We have VIP designations at work, specifically when fulfilling service requests. As the acronym implies, they are higher up management, considered “very important people”. Then there is the rest of us. My approach when serving anyone is, everyone is a VIP. Granted, for the originally labelled as such, all tasks get dropped to fulfil their requests. So, there is a sense of emergency, but other than that, I treat everyone as if they were VIP.

Some colleagues’ approach would follow the adage “give someone a fish, and you will feed them for one day; teach them to fish, and you will feed them for a lifetime”. So they encourage, or often require, a service request before any work is performed. Now, would they do the same to the VIPs? Absolutely not. Thus, if a service request comes to me, excellent. If it doesn’t, I create one on their behalf.

The Human Em Dash standard introduces a new Unicode code point and an associated Human Attestation Mark (HAM) that allows writers to signal that the dash in question originated from a human cognitive process involving hesitation, revision, or mild frustration.

LOL. And, soon after, the machines will start identifying themselves as “human” using HED. Problem solved, right? 🤭

It’s not even April 1st yet. This is retarded. Humans won’t be able to tell it’s a human attesting em dash just by looking at it. And LLMs will just use it to trick people.

Indeed. Come on, really, what are we thinking?

➝ Via Hacker News.