game engines is one of those specializations that involves a ton of lingo such as "Atmosphere Occlusion and PBR Shading" and "Frustum Culling"

u9map progress, from a point cloud to textured polygons. #ultima9

I spent all morning refactoring this working code into something easier to read and broken.

The republican party has the presidency, the house, and the senate, yet there is no meaningful action to improve healthcare for Americans. https://www.instagram.com/reel/DSaeCIlkWI4/ The national yearly budget is $6T in spending with only $4.5T in revenue. Military spending is $950B, while the […]

trying to pivot the camera in vulkan is trigonometry for 10-year-olds, but I still have to relearn it. x/y sin/cos

Tonight I discovered fermented garlic water 😲 at my local convenience store

Ive spent the last week in a disassembler, looking at the Ultima 9 win32 executable. Its been engrossing but the single piece of information I'm looking for remains hidden. At least Ive determined that rather than looking for a 'read' system-call, its being read from a file-backed memory map, so […]

You never know where unexpected synergies are going to arise. I was bringing home both a guitar stand and a watermelon.

I'm working on a graphics side-project and its incredible how specific the vulkan driver is, and how thorough the vulkan validation layer is.

Both Thai and Spanish say (essentially) 'finger of the hand' and 'finger of the foot'. I'm not sure why English needs another unique word for toe.

There used to be an extension (I forget its name) that created a chatroom for any page you might visit. If more than one user with that extension is visiting that page, then boom, a community of sorts. It was a very interesting idea. I imagine griefing and privacy issues kept it from becoming […]

https://streetpass.social/ is an interesting and unusual browser extension that scans every page you visit (from what I can tell, they don't actually come out and say that). It looks for rel='me' links to mastodon accounts, and builds a list. The idea being you can check it from time to time and […]

I think this counts as a typesetter's nightmare. The letter near the middle has two marks above it, at the same time the letter and the top row has one Mark below it. There needs to be lots of space above and below Thai letters.

You might be living in a SE Asian country if... you wake up to your neighbor's cooking which could be described as "flavorful tear gas".

I eat approximately one bowl of popcorn per day. #oliveoll #salt

two blankets at night and sunburn in the afternoon has been chiang mai weather lately.

"On January 1, 2026, books published in 1930 enter the U.S. public domain. Books by William Faulkner, Franz Kafka, Agatha Christie, and Langston Hughes enter the U.S. public domain. In addition, The Maltese Falcon, perhaps the best-known noir book—and film—of all time, and books by Evelyn Waugh […]

My language practice is to go back and forth between the Thai and English versions of Ready Player One. I'm reading along okay tonight with "small" "room" that has "chairs" and huh what are these words - "articulated hydraulic supports jutting from" OMG I can skip that part - not likely to come […]

The vocal quality and the changes in timing in this AI cover song are just phenomenal. It hints at AI's potential for persuasion. Eminem - Without Me 1950s Motown Soul AI Cover by Spumoni https://share.google/vzhtltGWHTTWCxhFT

Endurain is the open source/ self hosted strava. Ive been using it with the android app RunKeeper. Overall the experience has been good. Runkeeper will even upload the same run to both Strava and your local Endurain.

A great shame for language learners is to be at the service counter and miss one little word - the puzzlement can be read on your face - and before you even have to to ask them to repeat it, they've repeated it in english. There is maybe no greater feeling of defeat for such a small mis-step.

As a fan of vintage gaming and of MMOs, this 9 hour walk through the Lord of the Rings MMORPG from Bag End to Mt Doom is really impressive. The narration of the relevant parts of the book make it amazing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYipECdYpXc

"Modern luxury is the ability to think clearly, sleep deeply, move slowly & live quietly in a society designed to prevent all four."

The side of this building has a readable QR code 😲

I came across https://jqjake.com/ today. A great quiz/learning-tool for the excellent jq json query language.

learning thai, a language without a 'v' sound, has shown me how odd 'v' is. to vibrate my bottom lip with some air and my front teeth is a unique technique.

the social listening apps like turntable.fm were some of the most fun i had on the internet. anyone know of a modern equivalent?

if you cant get enough of terminal user-interfaces, retronews.py is a fun way to read hackernews. https://github.com/luke8086/retronews

Zootdeck got an update today. Most of the work was to keep up with zig 0.15. Zootdeck is a linux/gtk3 app for reading mastodon sites. Its meant for those who like a multicolumn format, with one column per mastodon instance, reminiscent of tweetdeck. https://donpdonp.github.io/zootdeck/

I'm starting to look at this 'opensource strava' which states interest in activitypub but no implementation currently. Note there is no public hosted version, if you want to try it you have to run it locally. https://docs.endurain.com/gallery/ I discovered it because it was the first upload […]

Pad Grapow and Tea Leaf Salad #thaifood #chiangmai

I've been tinkering with Zootdeck (fediverse reader/mastodon client app) this month (https://github.com/donpdonp/zootdeck) mostly because Zig continues to be an interesting language. Half the struggle is the complexity of making a usable GUI. It does feel like reinventing what a browser engine […]

Local lunch. HangLeh and Larb #chiangmaifood

My favorite meal. Cold zarusoba noodles, salmon sushi, cucumber salad.

I'm in Portland for a week and I'm so happy to be sucking up the pine-infused air of Portland public parks

The web nostr client, iris.to, allows the user to setup independent views of their feed.

videos from the why2025.org hacker camp are up at https://media.ccc.de/c/WHY2025

Very interesting article about AI spending creating an economic bubble in the USA. "Capital-expenditure spending for AI contributed more to growth in the U.S. economy in the past two quarters than *all of consumer spending*, ... spending on IT infrastructure is so big that it’s acting as a sort […]

if the last text-mode browser you've tried is lynx, chawan (https://sr.ht/~bptato/chawan/) is amazing.

I've tripped myself many times this week on the width of ints in rust and learned bit more each time. Using a U512 feels like carrying a double-barrel shotgun. Also floats have their place. As soon as I need a ratio between two giant ints, such as a price calculation, then floats shine.

Power read-out USB-C cables are very useful for knowing how much juice your devices are actually using.

the smart tab completion in zsh greatly improves my daily command line experiences. I love how 'bob<TAB>' finds picture_bob.jpg when no filenames start with bob.

I've been captivated by the UXN 8-bit computing environment (emulator/compiler/language). https://100r.co/site/uxn.html

"The International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), Title II of Pub. L. 95–223, 91 Stat. 1626, enacted December 28, 1977, is a United States federal law authorizing the president to regulate international commerce after declaring a national emergency in response to any unusual and […]

In the US if you don't say iced you get a hot coffee or tea. In a hot country like Thailand, if you don't say hot you will most likely get an iced coffee or tea.

a 1,000 page bill too big to consider, on a timeline impossible to accommodate. How do you vote for a bill that will both "kill puppies" and "save whales"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Read_the_Bills_Act

"I can share the seethe of millions, but it wont do. Rage has limited uses and serious flaws. It cuts off reason and displaces constructive action with mindless theater." -- Toni Morrison

A Chiang Mai afternoon #หนังสือ

Digging out an old bumper sticker design.

Youtube Music, when I need to pause the music quickly by hitting spacebar I definitely meant for you to go to the next track instead, standing out from every other player UI in existence.