Clouds over Florence
Clouds over Florence
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Apartment buzzer with camera
Apartment buzzer with camera
Hardening and hygiene. Admin password moved out of the web root (supports passw…
Hardening and hygiene. Admin password moved out of the web root (supports password_hash + legacy sha256); robots.txt disallows admin/API/tools; security headers are nginx-only (no PHP duplicates); homepage no longer sets a session cookie for anonymous visitors. /mstartpage/ permanently redirects to /startpage/. Shared head_meta on section indexes; locale dicts filled to parity; image budget scans startpage/gaming/computers and oversized assets recompressed; maintenance cron for backup, uptime, a…
Home Assistant Transplant
Home Assistant Transplant I have been running Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi 4 for about five years now. A short while ago, homeassistant was suddenly no longer responding. Neither web ui nor a SSH login worked. So I cut the RPi's power and rebooted it. That seemed to have fixed it and I didn't think about it. Then this weekend I wanted to update Home Assistant and create a backup as usual beforehand. But somehow this backup always failed with failed to perform the action update/install. Error…
Garbage for humans
unstory If this is the solution, I want my problem back. 2026-06-29 01:49 Few months ago Cloudflare introduced Markdown for machines: As a business, to continue to stay ahead, now is the time to consider not just human visitors, or traditional wisdom for SEO-optimization, but start to treat agents as first-class citizens. Feeding raw HTML to an AI is like paying by the word to read packaging instead of the letter inside. You get HTML, trackers, cookie banners, popups, and JavaScript. This needs …
Websites as anthologies of self
At this month’s Homebrew Website Club Writing Edition (notes to come; will be shared likely on July 12th), the topic of audience came up. Who is the audience for our website? Do we have multiple audiences? Do we think of audience at all? In amongst this discussion, I started to define a distinction between the author themselves being an “audience” and the audiences of others (a website can have many audiences that may be discrete or overlapping). This is an alternate framing of the idea of…
Reflection
Outside one of my childhood bedrooms there was a tree, a single tree. I see the tree vividly in my mind, and remember tracking it as the seasons changed – watching out for the first blossom, followed by the maturity of the leaves, then again by their browning as summer became autumn and autumn became winter. I saw the seasons while I lived them. In the moment I didn't think anything of the allure of the tree – why did the tree matter so much to me? Was it because there was only one tree that…
8× faster binary search: from compiled code to mechanical sympathy
How do you speed up computational Python code? A common, and useful, starting point is: Pick a good algorithm. Use a compiled language to write a Python extension. Maybe add parallelism so you can use multiple CPU cores. But what if you need more speed? Consider the following real problem, one of the steps in scikit-learn’s gradient histogram boosting algorithm: You have a large array of floating point numbers. You want to assign them to the integer range 0-254, spread out evenly. scikit-learn…
Winter
Speaking of trains, I tell a story of Winter to my friend, of the train that stopped in the village station on an evening so cold my fellow passengers and I could see our breaths. The local pub offered refuge to all those who wanted to sit in the warmth. I wanted to feel a bit more of the cold – to see my breath; to feel all the parts of me. Anxiety warms the cold, too. Reflecting on the story of Winter, in the cold, there was nothing but warmth. My hands were likely almost immovable, frozen b…
Joys
Here are a few moments that have brought me joy and have written down while wandering through the world. The Joys, of: Looking back on the year and seeing how many new things I have done.Seeing people start their day - of realising I, too, am starting my day.A friend pointing out an accessibility feature in the train station — of remembering that moment as I navigate my own environment in a different city. I think of the connections between where I am and where I have been; between places near…
I've just had a lovely restorative and action-packed couple of weeks holiday in Canada 🍁 (more on that over the weekend) - in the meantime, dare I ask "what have I missed"? 🫣
Lifting Terms: Making Well Scoped Syntax Dumber
I have been writing posts about Lifting Egraphs video as an intriguing way of adding variables and scope into an egraph. But pulling back a little, I can see that the simpler thing to talk about first is lifting terms.
Gardens
A pink symmetry on the peaceful pond catches my eye. “It’s a lotus!” I have made lotuses with paper before, but cannot remember the last time I saw one (have I noticed one before in the way I did today?). The vivid colours are striking: pink petals define the shape of the flower, with a yellow centre. “I can see why Monet painted lotuses and lily pads,” I said. Their beauty caught my eye at first sight. Around, there is a lotus emerging from green leaves. I wonder when it will bloom. A…
Now
<p>A <a href="https://nownownow.com/about" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">now page</a> : what has my attention this month. Last updated 2026-07-10.</p> <h2 id="building"> Building <a class="heading-link" href="#building"> <i class="fa-solid fa-link" aria-hidden="true" title="Link to heading"></i> <span class="sr-only">Link to heading</span> </a…
I don't want to be optimal
Word Count: 291 I don't want to be optimal. I am not a process, I don't need to be streamlined. I don’t want enough money to waive every single hassle a person experiences. I don't need to remove all distractions, to utilize every second of the day, even though it haunts me that I'm not productive all the time. My days are not always fruitful, and full of wasted potential; an optimized me, a perfect rendition, would be producing useful and creative ideas without rest, surely. And yet, that ver…
The AI Hype Reckoning Is Upon Us
The massive chasm between AI hype and reality is finally reaching the breaking point. that is an amazing idea and you are a genius, dave We're living in split realities. There's what modern software is actually capable of , and then there's the gargantuan pile of "AI" hype, fraud, and bullshit our biggest tech companies (and their lazy enablers in the tech press ) have shoveled down the public's throat for the better part of the last five years. There's useful automation software that makes it e…
Github repo pghqdev/OpenScreenShot
splitbrain starred pghqdev/OpenScreenShot · July 8, 2026 22:27 pghqdev/OpenScreenShot OpenScreenShot is a privacy-first, free, open-source screenshot extension — zero data leaves your device, no account needed, no telemetry, no third… TypeScript 9 Updated Jul 7
Nature
Breathe in. Breathe out. Standing in the fresh warm summer’s air, I found my breath slowing, and deepening. I wandered as I transitioned from the feeling of indoors to the Nature of outdoors. Trees and bushes and the light sounds of Nature accompany me as I put one foot forward in front of another. The fresh smell of Nature in the air permeates the air on the quiet country path. I hear a calm rustle in the leaves. A bird is quietly walking through the grass, in search of food. Families are out…
Sunset; music
The horizon is bathed in orange and a faint pink hue as the hills in the middle distance turn blue with the haze of the summer’s evening. Light white clouds are scattered across the sky. Looking at the clouds, I see art; looking around at the hills and fields I see art, too. I think of the colour Turner used in his paintings. How many times did he look to the sky to find what colour to use? How do I find the words to describe what I see and create an impression in your eye? The orange glow on …
75 reasons to start a personal website
I love having a personal website. Here, I share reflections, stories, thoughts, ideas, and more. Because I have a website, I always have the idea in the back of my mind that there is a place for my writing. I can write a story and share it with friends, and even the world. What I write might not be perfect, but it is mine. This is my home for my creative works. Earlier today, I read Kaia make an argument for having a personal website that really struck a chord with me: so this manifesto isnt ove…
Comment on Using AI to write better code more slowly by Radar Traits to Watch: July 2026 – O’Reilly -
[…] Lawson’s publish, “Utilizing AI to Write Higher Code Extra Slowly,” argues that there’s been an excessive amount of emphasis on producing dangerous code rapidly. […]
Proving to Fable I maintain the repo
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database built on SQLite and Raft. After my initial experience with Fable, it got me thinking. I created rqlite, I maintain it. Why won’t Fable help me find and fix bugs in the software? Why does it refuse to identify potential bugs? Because it doesn’t know for sure I am who I […]
scipy scratch
g = a * b / c ** d ` a = [ ... ] b = [ ... ] c = [ ... ] d = [ ... ] [((a * b) / c) ** d for a, b, c, d in zip (a, b, c, d)] L2: FOR_ITER 16 (to L3) UNPACK_SEQUENCE 4 STORE_FAST_STORE_FAST 1 (a, b) STORE_FAST_STORE_FAST 35 (c, d) LOAD_FAST_LOAD_FAST 1 (a, b) BINARY_OP 5 (*) LOAD_FAST 2 (c) BINARY_OP 11 (/) LOAD_FAST 3 (d) BINARY_OP 8 (**) LIST_APPEND 2 JUMP_BACKWARD 18 (to L2) import numpy as np a = np . array([ ... ]) b = np . array([ ... ]) c = np . array([ ... ]) d = np . array([ ... ]) g = (…
Kurze Notiz zu”politische Dimension von Daten und Infrastrukturen der Digitalität”
(Für ein Event wurde ich gefragt ein paar Worte zur politischen Dimension von Daten und Infrastrukturen der Digitalität” zu schreiben. Ich veröffentliche es auch hier kurz als kleine Notiz, weil es mein aktuelles Denken ganz gut zusammenfasst.) Die Debatte über Daten und digitale Infrastrukturen bezieht sich oft stark auf das „wer“: Wer designed solche Systeme, […]
Comment on Using AI to write better code more slowly by Radar Trends to Watch: July 2026 – O’Reilly - WordPress Blog
[…] Lawson’s post, “Using AI to Write Better Code More Slowly,” argues that there’s been too much emphasis on generating bad code quickly. Use human skills […]
I'm probably not a spendthrift but ever since I got myself into the world of fountain pens and inks, I'm starting feel like o...
@ayushnix@social.ayushnix.com made a new post: "I'm probably not a spendthrift but ever since I got myself into the world of fountain pens and inks, I'm starting feel like one. 😆 I remember coming across inks from Sailor and thinking that they're bland...
Leaning into agentic coding: (almost) a year in (short) review
Last year, while I was marooned in France, I wrote a bit of a reflection on my stance of using generative AI to write software . I don't pretend - in this moment - like it's a bit of a double edged sword: I don't pay for things like Antrophic or OpenAI, given their explicit involvement in being used for violence. However, there's nothing stopping the eventual transition of large government agencies to newer open models built from the ground up from the millions of documents used for public polic…
My Interview With Ludic
One of my main inspiration these last few years, especially for my consultancy, is Nikhil Suresh, aka Ludic . Last week, I spoke to him to ask him about his experience setting up Hermit Tech , consulting practices and pitfalls, and funny stories. I got permission to share most of my notes (except the parts that might be legally dicey) here. This reflects my own notes, paraphrasing and moving things around in order to make more sense. What prominent consulting advice should I take or not take? Ch…
Wonders of Web Weaving, Episode 9
The ninth episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out: In Episode 9, I chat with Rachel, the author of kwon.nyc and curator of "The internet used to be* fun *(It still is, but it used to be, too)". We talk about, among other things, metaphors for the web, creative mediums on the web, physical creative spaces, and more. I hope you enjoy the episode! Wonders of Web Weaving also has an RSS feed you can use to follow along from wherever you get your podcasts.
I have finished reading Tiamat's Wrath by James S. A. Corey Post details ( isbn:9780356510361 )
First impressions of Claude Fable
Today I tried Anthropic’s latest model, Fable, for the the first time. I asked it to run a full code review of the core Go code of rqlite. Fable reject my first prompt as unsafe – review the rqlite code base for potential bugs – and Claude Code fell back to Opus 4.8. I rewrote […]
It's Socially Acceptable to Bash Your Head Against a Wall
Or, Deep Work is Illegible Or, Everything Worth Learning You'll Have to Teach Yourself I remember quite clearly how I learned Git. Spring quarter of my second year of undergrad, I took Data Ethics, which was a required course in the Data Science major. This was a mistake. The intended path was to take Computer Science for Data Scientists after completing the introductory courses, and take Data Ethics a year later. Consequently, it assumed a lot more fundamentals experience than I actually had, a…
Dark mode with web standards
Respecting the user’s OS setting is straightforward: use the prefers-color-scheme media query in CSS. Arguably, that isn’t enough: users should also be able to customise their choice on a per-site basis. A user might want dark mode for the UI of an application, but light mode for reading long-form text on content-heavy sites, for example. We need to: Support the user’s system setting as the default for when the user lands on our website for the first time Allow the user to override their s…
The banal failure of 5G home internet
Hot take: the viability of home 5G internet in Australia has been destroyed by telcos deploying cheap, inferior modems that will cause most customers to blame cellular connectivity rather than the garbage piece of equipment that Telstra or Vodafone sent them. Back in 2013 Australia had an election and replaced its Labor government with the Liberals. Labor had started building out a National Broadband Network and one of the key parts of this plan was that the vast majority of urban residences and…
Bookmarks - archive, audio, conference, memory
These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week. 🔖 Opening Panel: Archival Poetics & The War on Memory This opening panel on June 11, 2012 entitled “The War on Memory” includes Eleni Sikelianos, Stacy Szymaszek, Steve Dickison, Steven Taylor, E. Tracy Grinnell, and Anne Waldman. Topics discussed include etymology of the word “archive,” the place of the poet in society, archives as historical documents, technology’s role in archiving, and narrative anthropology. arc…
Star
First star — in the sky next to the tall Gothic monument in the town square, a square with many outdoor restaurants — people laugh and take pictures, eat ice cream, stroll, enjoy the moment. I love watching the world. Of seeing colours and tenors and of hearing sounds that you can only appreciate when out in the world — the sound of a bike breaking in the cobblestone, manoeuvring with ease through the town square. Written in Hauptmarkt, Nürnberg.
What does a blog post sound like?
As I write, I hear the keys on my keyboard pressing down – the sounds are fast, rhythmic, comforting. I hear the whirr of a hard drive in the background, and the occasional car walk past. Every so often, bird song comes into the foreground; I hear the calls of birds in the distance now. I hear my breath as I breathe in and out. I take a deep breath. I keep writing. This week I wrote down a question in my notes: what does a blog post sound like? I reasoned that there are two perspectives from w…
Brainstorming a loginless web reader
At IndieWebCamp Nürnberg, Tilman worked on a “feedroll”, a collection of feeds aggregated on a single page that demonstrates the capability of following different websites with a web reader. This, and a discussion with friends, got me thinking about what a “loginless” web reader experience would look like for Artemis, the web reader I maintain. To see a site in the Artemis reader, you need to: Decide you want to use a web reader.Sign up.Add a website to your reader.Preview the correspon…
IndieWebCamp Nürnberg 2026
All of the participants of IndieWebCamp Nürnberg, lined up in three rows, one row behind the other. I am in the middle of the back row, wearing my green and grey microformats t-shirt. ALTAll of the participants of IndieWebCamp Nürnberg, lined up in three rows, one row behind the other. I am in the middle of the back row, wearing my green and grey microformats t-shirt. Last weekend I attended IndieWebCamp in Nürnberg, Germany, hosted at the wonderful Tollwerk offices. The two-day event was par…
Author/reader interaction on the indie web
Every so often I hear or read about the significance of readers as part of the indie web. Indeed, the indie web is about much more than making personal websites: it is a space where there are many personal websites to explore. You don’t need a personal website to explore the indie web. And while having a personal website is a way to participate in the indie web, reading is participating, albeit, but in a different way. There are also middle points: for example, being a reader and starting a di…
How do I know the system is working?
A few weeks ago, I received a bug report for Artemis that indicated a user’s reader was not being updated as expected. This error was caused by a feed that caused the polling code to error out and stop. My code assumed a value was present and, if it wasn’t, the program would stop running. To understand this bug, you need to know how Artemis retrieves feeds. Artemis polls feeds once per hour. A feed is only polled if there is at least one user for whom it is midnight in their time zone. This …
Forest
You look up from your bed of grass flowers, opening your eyes to see the layers of branches grown by the trees in the grove that surrounds you. The blue sky peeks through the gaps between the leaves. The sunlight that shines through and onto the leaves and branches leaves you with the feeling that, right now, today is both a new day and an aging day. Is it morning or evening? The air is warm, heavy; there is no relief from the heat except for the distraction that comes from your wandering mind. …
Kaizen #4: Overhauled homelab
I started this “blog-series” to force myself to write more about my set up, and my continuous iterations. But it didn’t happen… until today! This post has been a long time coming, and I have kept the ideas in my head and notes. I will walk through everything I did, in order: Previous setup Network situation What I self-hosted Networking Fiber adventure Wiring Wiring the garage The new server The new setup Debian Dokploy Media Jellyfin Immich Files Monitoring Miscellaneous qBittorrent Lin…
A week in Nürnberg
James’ Coffee Blog has been on a bit of a break while I went on holiday to Nürnberg, Germany. I set off last Friday and returned the Friday after, during which time I attended an IndieWebCamp, an in-person Homebrew Website Club at Technische Hochschule Nürnberg, and spent many hours exploring museums, coffee shops, and, of course, eating delicious ice cream and gelato (why does Nürnberg have so many gelato shops?). My trip was anchored around the IndieWeb events. The IndieWebCamp was hosted…
Retractable Cable USB-C Chargers (65W PD)
Retractable Cable USB-C Chargers (65W PD) Like all my other modern electronics, my Framework Laptop 1) charges via USB-C. When I got it, I bought a Ugreen Nexode charger, an Anker Powerline Flow III cable and 3D printed an oganizer for it. It works, but the result is a bit bulky and the cable is already showing some wear from being pinched by the organizer. So when I came across a 65W charger with a built-in retractable cable, I was intrigued. Could such a charger be a good solution? When I look…
Learn Core GNU Utilities
I believe that there are some things you just have to learn and memorize through repetition, and no shortcuts will help. One of those things is GNU Coreutils , a collection of standard shell commands that we all use every day. Do any of these commands look familiar to you? I'd bet most do: cat , chmod , cp , echo , ls , mv , pwd , rm , sort , touch , and many more. The coreutils collection/branding is 20+ years old, but the individual utitilies are 40+ years old. They have withstood the test of …
Processing feed items without URLs in Artemis
Artemis, the calm web reader I maintain, supports web feeds marked up with h-feed. h-feed allows you to create a web feed in HTML using microformats. A h-feed may contain zero or more h-entries, each h-entry representing an entry in the feed. For example, my longform feed page is a h-entry. I use Granary to convert the longform feed page into RSS. While h-feed is commonly used for marking up lists of blog posts, it can be used for anything. For example, Tantek has a “daylists” page on his we…
Deduplicating posts after URL changes in Artemis
Occasionally, sites that publish web feeds change the URL of a post that has just been published. This can be for several reasons. For example, I sometimes change post permalinks immediately after publishing because I notice a typo, or because the CMS I use calculated a default permalink that I don’t want to use and I forgot to change it. Until now, Artemis, the calm web reader I maintain, has done nothing if a post has changed its permalink. Importantly, Artemis considers the post URL as a un…
Small wishes, II
June 21st, 2026 — After my coffee, a thought came to mind: I hope that one day I can see the countryside from a double-decker bus. It’s a small wish. It may never happen but I hold onto the thought any way. I stood at the bus terminal today thinking that it was only a few weeks ago I had wished to go on a double decker bus. Today, it happened: a most delightful surprise. I arrived at the bus early enough that I had my pick of seats. I sat on the top deck in the front seat, where I had almost…
X.509 certificates
For document signatures and such, run this (only when you fully understand the command): s="$(mktemp)" cat > "$s" << EOF -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- MIIBzjCCAXSgAwIBAgIUaHmeGPiA6P9Uma8qBTFZKDzeAMkwCgYIKoZIzj0EAwIw GzEZMBcGA1UEAwwQUnVueGkgWXUgUm9vdCBDQTAeFw0yNjA3MDMxNjE1MDRaFw0y ODEwMDUxNjE1MDRaMDIxETAPBgNVBAMMCFJ1bnhpIFl1MR0wGwYJKoZIhvcNAQkB Fg5tZUBydW54aXl1Lm9yZzBZMBMGByqGSM49AgEGCCqGSM49AwEHA0IABPWVIU7B w8nikZuu5TNoOwLNjK2XGFejxEqFYZPn0hihlT3a5rCKbLj79UPBMRFvrETioJK8 GsHOYhXokz/NsAmjfzB9MAwGA1…