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Published | eli.li
Inspired by conversation at a recent Future of Coding event, I decided I’d write up a little something about the programming language I’ve been working on (for what feels like forever) before I’ve gotten it to a totally shareable state. I have a working interpreter that I’m pretty pleased with, but I don’t yet have an interactive environment for creating, exploring, debugging, and running code — I have this idea for a Smalltalk-flavored infinite canvas dev experience that’ll...| Oatmeal
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A friend online recently replied to something I wrote about awk by saying: […] it’s a danged shame [awk] didn’t continue to evolve the way Ruby,| eli.li
I am hesitant to wade into the tumultuous waters that are the discourse around generative AI and LLMs, but this morning I came across a thing that| eli.li
Lately I’ve buried myself in reading fiction. Stand outs from among the crowd are, of course, Middlemarch but also a lot of sort of scholarly fairy fiction; works that follow the scholastic adventures of studious professorial types in vaugely magical settings. Namely Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries’, Heather Fawcett and The Ten Thousand Doors of January, Alix E. Harrow. I’ve also been working on a handful of personal utility programs. I continue to try to reimplement Apple’s...| Oatmeal
My dad is an electrical engineer and physicist. Measuring things is a core part of his professional life, and something he seems to spend a lot of time doing around the house. This is all to say my dad is relatively expert in the ways of measuring things so I think it’s hilarious that he calls absolutely anything he is using to measure anything else“my measurer.” Measuring tape, oscilloscope, scale, volt meter, bubble level, table spoons, whatever. They’re all“my measurer.”| Oatmeal
“…for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” George Eliot, Middlemarch| Oatmeal
I read A Court of Throne and Roses this weekend. Not my usual fare but what the heck it was there so I read it. I found it to be an unremarkable, relatively conservative romantasy. What stood out to me, though, is that everyone is so stinky. The main character is always describing how folks smell, smelling them before they round a corner and stuff. Even if they don’t like smell bad, this setting seems overwhelming perfumed.| Oatmeal
This morning I set up our new composter. This entailed shoveling a lot of compost from the old one into the new so that it can actually finish cooking. Shoveling 4 years worth of mostly kitchen scrap compost is a very very stinky endeavor. Despite wearing gloves I don’t know if my hands will ever not smell again.| Oatmeal
While everyone is up to their eyeballs in puzzles playing Blue Prince I’ve been playing some Fire Emblem: Blazing Sword on the Gameboy Advanced.| eli.li
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I self host a lot of stuff — these days, mostly weird little utility scripts and toys that run in the background, but also some web apps like plex, calibre, and a suite of irc things. For a long time I ran such things on a VPS, but being incredibly cheap, and hardly ever leaving my house for realsies, during the height of the pandemic I brought everything on to an aged mac mini I keep on a shelf behind some books. I tried using a few applications like Lingon X to manage these services, ...| Oatmeal
I usually read pretty fast. I’ve been intentionally reading Middlemarch slowly. Chapter by chapter. This forced restraint makes reading Middlemarch feel sort of religious in pace and intention. I fell back down the type theory hole, and have once again thought to myself“what about Haskell?” and“what about algebraic data types?” These thoughts are questionable and my motivations dubious, but here I am again imagining tiny type carrying backpacks strapped to little guys — bees, beet...| Oatmeal
In a flash I think I“get” liveliness in relation to programming. It’s talked so much about in the context of programming systems and languages — as being something they do or do not intrinsically have or support…but what if it’s actually about the process of doing the thing, and not inherent to the thing you do it with. A noun-gerund kinda dichotomy. Left with dad shrapnel, 5 minutes here, 20 there, 120 on the horizon, with which to poke at projects what if the key to collaboratio...| Oatmeal
I like programming partially because it’s a practice I can, with appropriate to unhealthy application of effort, usually accomplish something at| eli.li
Blustery Saturday afternoon walk.| Oatmeal
I’ve finished my little exploratory jaunt through the writings of Sally Rooney this week. I’ve left aside one of her novels for some other time,| eli.li
In reply to: Common Cyborg | Jillian Weise | Granta They like us best with bionic arms and legs. They like us deaf with hearing aids, though they prefer cochlear implants. It would be an affront to ask the hearing to learn sign language. Instead they wish for us to lose our language, abandon our culture and consider ourselves cured. They like exoskeletons, which none of us use. They would never consider cyborg those of us with pacemakers or on dialysis, those of us kept alive by machines or m...| Oatmeal
In reply to: The rise of end times fascism, from The Guardian Second, we counter their apocalyptic narratives with a far better story about how to survive the hard times ahead without leaving anyone behind. A story capable of draining end times fascism of its gothic power and galvanizing a movement ready to put it all on the line for our collective survival. A story not of end times, but of better times; not of separation and supremacy, but of interdependence and belonging; not of escaping, b...| Oatmeal
Pixel moose| Oatmeal
Some RSS exclusive week notes: I finished reading Emily St. James’ Woodworking I started reading Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo I took a break from re-watching Frieren for the third time I used that break to start watching The Apothecary Diaries, which isn’t at all what I assumed it was. It is more a detective show than anything else, so far, and I dig it I started to play Citizen Sleeper I cleaned so much, yet the house remains not clean It has stopped snowing (for now), we are now solidly...| Oatmeal
Folks what that haunt me (positive) on the Fediverse may have seen me sharing progress shots from this, but here I am, and I have made another camera application for the web. Leibovitz combines a lot that I learned making my other camera applications into one, hopefully less clunky package. With leibovitz you can either take new photos, or upload any image file and apply filters to it. The UX to toggle between the two modes is a bit clunky, but I’ve tried to be sparing with the UI to leave ...| Oatmeal
The forecast predicted snow, but even with that knowledge I held out hope that it wouldn’t. The shade over the window in the bedroom doesn’t close all the way. It always stops short of totally covering the window with about an inch further to go. It is too short. When I woke up this morning there was a flat grey line of light streaming into the room through the gap left by the too short shade. So, I spent some time shoveling this morning. Probably sooner than I ought to have since it’s ...| Oatmeal
I didn’t go to work today. Six month ago I took the day off when I made my kids a dentist appointment. So, this morning I took them to the dentist| eli.li
I don’t write about work here. Not really as a rule, but out of habit. It is a Saturday, and this morning at around 1 AM the federal government here| eli.li
My previous post included a video. I made that video with OBS which outputs .mkv video files. I wanted to do my best to ensure that folks with a variety of devices and browsers would be able to watch the video if they wanted to, so, I converted it into a few different formats. Here’s the bash script I wrote to do that. It relies on ffmpeg. #!/bin/bash# Won't work if ffmpeg isn't installedif ! command -v ffmpeg &> /dev/null; thenecho"ffmpeg is not installed. Please install ffmpeg to use this...| Oatmeal
I’d never thought about adding playlists to my website, but then I did it and now I wanna add more. While I wait to put together another playlist, here’s the song that I’m listening to right now — Lady Lamb’s“Crane Your Neck.” We had a few big snows, so the kids spent extra time at home and we’ve done a fair bit of sledding and shoveling. There was a bunch of frozen rain after one of the snow storms, so the snow had a crunchy, slick sheet of ice on top of it. The sled fuck...| Oatmeal
I can hear my kids in their room right now. They’re trying to get something that rolled under one of their beds. They’re talking about trying to get| eli.li
All of the entries posted on Oatmeal tagged week notes| eli.li
Help little black square rescue the villagers, and battle the monsters.| eli.li
Dinotopia, James Gurney (fantasy) A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine (sci-fi) The complete works of Emily Dickinson (poetry) A Desolation Called| eli.li
This summer my oldest kid — 8 years old — asked to learn more about programming. They’ve already got about a full time job’s worth of experience| eli.li
I was recently interviewed by Manu for his People and Blogs series! It was a great honor to be suggested by Piper for that, and I had a blast| eli.li
