The Autodidacts

I had other plans for what to write about, and also plans for the day that didn't involve disassembling my connection to the outside world with a screwdriver

Mar 10·1 min read·42 words

Sheep Music & Wedding Bands

On knowledge gaps and bookworm pronunciation syndrome

Mar 9·1 min read·12 words

Old site, new site bookmarklets

A small utility that’s surprisingly useful during website migrations

Mar 7·1 min read·14 words

Ideas Evolve in Dialogue

You can sort of have a conversation with a book. I sometimes write rude comments in the margins when I disagree with the author. But the Stoics recommend that when you’re insulted, you just igno…

Mar 5·1 min read·92 words

An indie blog’s directory of indie blog directories

Blogs are back. RSS is cool again. (Said the blogger to his RSS feed.) Here is a collection of small, independent directories of blogs, personal websites, and smol/indie/slow/human web sites that I’v…

Mar 4·1 min read·83 words

Underrated reasons to dislike AI

The big arguments for and against AI have been endlessly discussed, and I don’t feel I have much to add. AGI and existential risk; human obsolescence; power use; cybersecurity; safety + censorship…

Mar 1·1 min read·89 words

Autodidacts Newsletter #25

25 new human-written posts

Feb 28·1 min read·7 words

We don’t know until the end, and it’s never the end

Judging a book by its content doesn’t work either

Feb 27·1 min read·20 words

It’s surprisingly hard to reliably paste the current date at the cursor on Linux

Long, long ago, in a dotfiles directory far away, I had this snippet: bindsym control+semicolon exec date '+%Y-%m-%d' | tr -d "\n" | xsel -i -b && xdotool sleep 0.5 key "ctrl+v" Isn’t it a be…

Feb 25·1 min read·101 words

Paste clipboard contents in places where you can’t paste

Use AutoKey send_keys() to put clipboard content places where it can't normally be put

Feb 25·1 min read·23 words

The Fewer Ingredients The Better

Good quality ingredients hardly need seasoning. I only need to add spices if I’ve burnt the soup.

Feb 24·1 min read·22 words

Social Cache Busting

How do you ask questions that people don’t just hippopotamus?

Feb 23·1 min read·13 words

The Evening Writing Effect

Time for some night-owl counter-propaganda

Feb 22·1 min read·9 words

De-optimize your search terms to skip the SEO slop

Finding the human in a sea of sales

Feb 20·1 min read·17 words

PSA: local AI handwriting recognition is usable now

To my delight and surprise, local Qwen3-VL:8b WER is acceptable, even on my cryptic handwriting

Feb 20·1 min read·23 words

TIL how to accidentally overwrite a decade worth of data in LibreOffice calc

And also, how to restore from my backup with similar single-keystroke efficiency

Feb 16·1 min read·25 words

Taking responsibility for my energy levels

Bootstrapping mitochondrial function one flax seed at a time

Feb 16·1 min read·15 words

Sonder is a word I like

At a certain point in my life it dawned on me that other people are people too. That guy bent over with Fentanyl? A whole world: boyhood, rites of passage, dreams, regrets, memories, crushes — t…

Feb 15·1 min read·93 words

An unexpected benefit of docking my laptop beside my desk

I can run Performance profile all the time

Feb 13·1 min read·18 words

A strange workaround for when the capacitive touch screen of your e-reader isn’t responding to dry fingers: use your nose

No, really.

Feb 12·1 min read·22 words

The Autodidacts

Longform Stories

Bookmarklet: Copy Ghost Post ID to Clipboard

Backpack Activation Energy

20 years of Linux and I finally started using job control

How to drain pasta without a colander, without burning yourself

All Polymarket temperature markets have disappeared

The bid-ask spread on used physical goods

The art of getting back on one’s horse

Delusional Optimism & the Art of Sneaking Up on Your Goals

Bothering to understand

Curation and its side effects

The butterfly effect of revenge bedtime procrastination

My criteria for a good Linux developer laptop

Some thoughts about backing up, which occurred to me after my laptop abruptly expired

Sheep Music & Wedding Bands

Old site, new site bookmarklets

Ideas Evolve in Dialogue

An indie blog’s directory of indie blog directories

Underrated reasons to dislike AI

Autodidacts Newsletter #25

We don’t know until the end, and it’s never the end

It’s surprisingly hard to reliably paste the current date at the cursor on Linux

Paste clipboard contents in places where you can’t paste

The Fewer Ingredients The Better

Social Cache Busting

The Evening Writing Effect

De-optimize your search terms to skip the SEO slop

PSA: local AI handwriting recognition is usable now

TIL how to accidentally overwrite a decade worth of data in LibreOffice calc

Taking responsibility for my energy levels

Sonder is a word I like

An unexpected benefit of docking my laptop beside my desk

A strange workaround for when the capacitive touch screen of your e-reader isn’t responding to dry fingers: use your nose

Handy.computer is the Linux dictation app I've always wanted.

Maybe don’t optimize conversion rate?

Insomnia isn’t a waste of time

How to increase Ollama context length

Star rating support has been merged into the Readeck KOReader plugin

Script: bulk star Readeck entries by URL (with URL cleaning)

My free Silver price API now has an RSS feed with the day’s bid price

It’s 2026 and LibreOffice Calc still can’t parse JSON API responses without a plugin

Cerelog’s ESP-EEG is a new 8 channel biosensing board at a hobbyist-friendly price