Finally found the ideal way to mix audio between two PCs. I construct a USB-to-TOSLINK-to-USB audio cable using a Cubilux USB A to TOSLINK converter, standard TOSLINK optical audio cable, and Hifime UR23 SPDIF Optical to USB Converter, then on the receiving computer I enable "Listen to this device".

Microwave your food at 50% power for twice as long. It'll cook more evenly.

People say the "dark side" of the moon is a misnomer, because usually the sun is striking both hemispheres. But there is a sense in which it is truly darker: the far side of the moon is never lit by Earthshine (reflected light from the Earth) whereas the near side almost always is.

On my bedroom ceiling this morning I saw this whale made of light 🐋

Just got this awesome optical fiber taper, it's like a rock that magnifies things! Using it to help read small kanji! 😊

There is a difference between a song I respect and a song I love. Some songs I consider highly influential masterpieces but don't enjoy listening to them personally. Some songs are guilty pleasures that I love listening to while fully acknowledging they are completely banal manufactured trash.

Today finally got one of the new 27-inch 4K OLED monitors (AW2725Q), and it is even more beautiful than I dreamed. Incredible contrast and vivid colors, really responsive running at 240 Hz, super detailed. Everything from text to games to high-res art looks amazing on it. Cannot stop staring.

Just saw these migrating birds! They were at incredibly high altitude, barely specks in the sky. Their formation was briefly disrupted by a passing plane.

Layoffs without warning, where people don't even get to say goodbye their coworkers, are standard practice, but they are hurtful and wrong. Security risk can be managed. Tearing people apart and destroying thousand of relationships overnight does incalculable damage.

Rogue planet: Sun? I have no sun.

Fun fact: if you travel 1.75 light years along the route from here toward Alpha Centauri, at that point the Sun and Alpha Centauri system will appear equal in brightness, and BOTH of them will be slightly brighter than Sirius, which is otherwise the brightest star in the sky.

My ability to tolerate bad customer service is directly proportional to how good their hold music is.

I learned today to my shock that the Moon and Mercury actually look really similar. They both have dark gray surfaces full of craters, and little to no atmosphere. Mercury is just a bit bigger, and internally has a larger iron core, but otherwise, they look just like siblings!

I just finished playing "In Stars and Time" which is a 2023 indie RPG and it's one of the most impactful games I've played in my life. I recommend it to everyone. This is my Steam review:

Recently discovered the artist Anly from Okinawa and she's amazingly talented, not only for drawing on all kinds of genres from blues to Celtic, but also for her live shows where she does her own accompaniment and background vocals using only a guitar and loop pedal! www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZUN...

Discovered the virtual singer HACHI recently, she has a spectacular voice, I think it comes through clearest in her live acoustic performances. My favorite track by her so far is this acoustic version of Manazashi (まなざし). open.spotify.com/track/6LlUlK...

Here's a crazy thought: if nuclear weapons hadn't been developed, then we might have preferred thorium reactors to uranium reactors, which are much safer, and the anti-nuclear energy movement might not have existed, and if nuclear energy proliferated, climate change might not have ever happened.

Can I just say I love flywheels? Storing energy by spinning a big metal disk really fast seems so simple yet it's genuinely a vital component of the grid because of how fast it can respond. That's awesome.

Just grabbed the latest version of Subtitle Edit (open-source subtitle software) and the new "Audio to text (Whisper)" feature is absolutely phenomenal. I can dump in any video file in any language and get out subtitles that 99% match the audio in 2 minutes, using a local model. I love the future.

All human chess players are worse than chess-playing AIs but they still play and love the game. If a post-scarcity world comes (and we somehow avoid debilitating poverty), we'll all have to find things we love doing despite their economic irrelevance.

Trump's new policy to revoke gender-affirming care from transgender prisoners and to house them with inmates of the opposite sex is putting them at enormous danger of rape, assault, and suicide. I hope that legal challenges will be successful.

I've been waiting eagerly for this monitor to come out for so long. Behold, the very first 27-inch 4K OLED monitor ever created, running up to 240 Hz! Unfortunately, it's already sold out everywhere! 😢 I will be patient. rog.asus.com/us/monitors/...

Killing bacteria is easy. They're super tiny. You can just like, step on them.

Just recovered from a week-long pneumonia infection with antibiotics and the speed at which I went from "falling apart" to "basically fine" was breathtaking, like 2 days. Sometimes I forget how amazing modern medicine can be.

Because Disney has historically enforced their copyright on Mickey Mouse so litigiously, it's created a "chilling space" around him where many completely legitimate animated character designs were quietly modified or eliminated to reduce legal risk. I wonder what might have been.

The parable of King Solomon and cutting the baby in half takes on a new light from ther perspective of the false mother. At no point was she like "uh no I kind of wanted this baby alive?" Instead she's like, "if my baby is dead, nobody gets to have a baby."

If two magic lamps were to breed, would they pass on their genies to their offspring?

I just realized that other than blue stars, I've never seen anything glow blue due to reaching a temperature of 10,000 K. On Earth almost all materials would disintegrate before reaching that temperature. Most blue glows we observe on Earth are due to ionized gas and wouldn't work in a vaccuum.

@baofox.bsky.social my favorite fox in the world 🦊❤️

Been catching up on Dragon Prince and Season 6 (Stars) is really good. No spoilers but pacing really picks up and there are some big dramatic character moments and some very cool new settings and worldbuilding. Highly recommend catching up for anyone who's dropped off.

Making my way through Final Fantasy 6 in Japanese while systematically reading all the dialog, menus, and even item descriptions. Just got to Vargas! It took me quite a while to work my way through Narshe, Figaro, and South Figaro and there's a ton of game still yet to go.

RIP Jimmy Carter. The day he left office wasn't long before I was born, and since then he's done decades of incredible humanitarian and diplomatic work. Plus, he put solar panels on the White House in 1979 (!). I wish more people were like him.

For those who haven't heard, GitHub Copilot now has a free option (2000 completions + 50 chat messages / month, supports VSCode, VS, Vim, Jetbrains IDEs, Xcode). Even if it's just on the side in some hobby projects I think it's good for all coders to familiarize themselves with LLM-based tools.

I've just learned that Elsevier will give free copies of papers to patients and non-professional caregivers. This is really handy for my research on my partner's chronic pruritis. (They really should still be Open Access though.) www.elsevier.com/about/open-s...

To tell what day of the week any day in 2025 is by the Doomsday method, just remember that all the following days are FRIDAY: Last day of Jan/Feb (1/31, 2/28) 3/7 (1 week after 2/28 ^) 4/4, 6/6, 8/8, 10/10, 12/12 5/9, 9/5 ("working 9-to-5") 7/11, 11/7 ("7 Eleven") From there you can figure it out!

Just reached level 45 of 60 in WaniKani! After ~3 years I'm 75% done and I've learned 1523 kanji. I'm sure I can finish the rest in 2025! 😊

Why web certs don't work: because 99% of the time, a website with an invalid web cert is actually just misconfigured or didn't renew their cert properly, rather than an actual malicious site. Users know this, so they trust sites with bad certs anyway.

Painted this for a teambuilding event at work, it was fun! I added a fox. 🦊

WaniKani (site for memorizing Japanese kanji using an SRS system and suggested mnemonics) are having their annual lifetime subscription sale for $199. I've used it on a daily basis for years and I consider it my most essential tool for learning Japanese. Cannot recommend it enough.

I just figured out how to loop a video continuously with NO PAUSE OR DELAY between loops, not even for a single frame. The key is to use PotPlayer and use its "Seamless Playback" mode. Put 100 copies of the video in your playlist and tell it to preload and combine all 100 of them.

I started a subreddit for AI art of foxes. Because I like them. Join up if interested. 🦊 www.reddit.com/r/aifoxes/

The OS I work on, Android XR, was announced today at XR Unlocked, along with Project Moohan which is the VR headset we're collaborating with Samsung on! Integrated with Gemini AI. Here's an article: www.wired.com/story/google...

I just found out that Yahtzee from Zero Punctuation is now on a new creator-run YouTube channel called Second Wind. You can see all his videos here: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

AHHHHHHH IT'S FINALLY OUT! I've been listening to these tracks in the car and in our room for years and I can't wait to share them with the rest of the world!! And I'm even more excited for Caly's next project, I'm hoping we'll see more of her e-sax and maybe even some vocals. 😊🎷🎤

Lelouch vi Britannia: "Play that funky music... till you die!"

If you haven't seen Link Click (the anime) you are missing out. Basic premise: there are two guys, one can mentally time travel to the past, the other can advise him across space and time, they run a detective agency together. It's also the first Chinese anime I've watched and it's top tier.

Forest is the original room

I have a vertical monitor I've been reading Webtoons and manga and PDFs on and it's great but the viewing angle distortion on TN monitors is frustrating. I'd like to upgrade to an OLED monitor, which has amazing viewing angle independence, but 27-inch 4K OLED monitors aren't coming out till 2025. 😢

I think one of the most underappreciated LLM AIs is Amazon's Rufus. It's really convenient to ask it a question about a product and it will instantaneously read the whole product description, all the reviews, and respond to it, along with showing the relevant source data. Just a great application.

Just finished watching the anime Angels of Death (殺戮の天使). It's based on an adventure game. There are only 6 characters but I love all their designs, especially Rachel Gardner. She seems innocent at first but she's both resourceful and unsettling. Excited to play the original game in Japanese! 😊