A nasty little virus declared war against my immune system, so this past week has been a counteroffensive. I've gone through about three bottles of foo-quil and had more REM sleep than I have in the past month or three. Whether that indicates I was chronically sleep deprived is a …

Rakudo is an implementation of Raku, which used to be called Perl 6. Termux is an Android app environment that gives you a Debian-ish GNU/apt/dpkg environment on top of Android without root. These two things should go well together, and they do, but the documentation for setting this …

The phrase "flyover country" embodies much of what's wrong with our bicoastal elites. They literally only ever fly over. They don't see most of the country by land area with their own eyeballs, because they assume the (massaged, cherry-picked) data tells them everything they need to know. It does not …

The stereotypical "Naruto Run", bent almost double with arms held parallel and swept back like an airplane's wings, is an eternal element of mockery from anime fans. Often this is (rightly) called out as a way to reduce on-screen motion and thus get away with less animation work, but what …

The brilliant "gaslamp fantasy" (steampunk + magic) webcomic Girl Genius is one of the few works of fiction I have encountered that is written by intelligent authors, about intelligent characters, that manages to convey the feeling of the process of creation as I have experienced it. Characters in the world of …

This spring, I moved for a new job, and I needed a new battlestation. I set one up from scratch so that it could work with my work laptop - a monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers, Ethernet, and sundry other USB peripherals connected to the computer by a single USB-C connection. This …

In S.M. Stirling's classic science fiction stories, the Draka are held up as an example of ultimate evil from the perspective of a Cold War American: Royalists from our Revolution mixed with Confederates from our civil war mixed with apartheid South Africa mixed with aspects of National Socialist racial …

There have been several articles about the technical and political reasons for Roscosmos taking a stacked rocket with an integrated commercial payload off the pad, and so I won't get into that. I will instead discuss how those are all post-hoc rationalizations for the tiny vodka-drunk, knife-wielding gremlin wearing a …

I wrote once that WSL would kill the Mac. I completely missed the implications of Apple silicon. I'm writing this on an M1 Pro rMBP and it's wonderful. Other people have written about the objective performance, so I'll just say that Windows has been steadily declining in UX quality since …

Booting directly from software RAID is impossible in most operating systems. This is actually why "motherboard RAID" exists, as a layered storage driver for Windows that presents multiple storage devices as a single drive so that C: can be on mirrored storage. Linux doesn't support motherboard RAID, but Linux mdraid …