Nelson's Linkblog

about • archive • mastodon • feed

Houston West African restaurant, food is real good

2025-01-15 food • dining • nigeria • naija • africa • westafrica • houston • restaurant

Gainfully Unretired

Justin Watt on his post-software-engineer career as a handyman building things for people

2025-01-15 retirement • life • working • purpose • handyman

A thoughtful essay on the problematic use of the term "Cargo cult" in the tech community

2025-01-14 cargocult • culture • tech • language

Musk's fake gaming

Elon buys accounts someone else spent the hours developing, doesn't know how to play them

2025-01-10 elonmusk • gaming • politics • funny

Location spying

Hack of a sleazy data broker reveals how ad networks and mobile apps track and resell your location data

2025-01-10 privacy • gravy • location • tracking • surveillance

Color calibration target

Spot in China for calibrating satellite and airplane cameras. Includes color

2025-01-09 calibration • satellite • space • remotesensing • imagery • china

Music, a sort of metal / baroque mashup with heavy videogame influences

2025-01-09 music • metal • baroque • games • chiptunes

San Francisco stree artists, pasteups featuring a Shiba Inu andlots of mushrooms

2025-01-08 sanfrancisco • streetart • mushroom

A list of little-known feeds for various web products

2025-01-08 rss • syndication • feeds • blogs

Data Portability Map

Articles about transferring data from a service to another service, like Wordpress to Squarespace or getting out of Facebook

2025-01-07 dataportability • data • download • socialmedia • dataliberation

Artisanal information collection in Brooklyn, NY

2025-01-07 funny • parody • krazam • smalldata • data • documentary

Lobste.rs vs UK OSA

Community forums may not be able to comply with the UK's new Online Safety Act

2025-01-07 uk • politics • forum • community • socialmedia • osa • ofcom

Matt Haughey wrote a book about touring all 14 women's soccer stadiums

2025-01-06 nwsl • soccer • women • usa • travel • mathowie

Naoshima Island

An island in Japan with a huge amount of contemporary art

2025-01-05 japan • art • travel

DOGE as procurement capture

Analyzing the Musk/Trump grift

2025-01-05 musk • trump • corruption • politics • doge • procurement

Kehinde Ekundayo

Art history graduate student with an interesting perspective on contemporary art from refugees

2025-01-05 art • arthistory • stanford • refugee • global

Twitter blocks Amber Alerts

Emergency organizations still using Twitter as a messaging medium even though it's completely inappropriate for the use now

2025-01-04 twitter • emergency • socialmedia • elonmusk • chp

Timescape cosmology

Alternate explanation for the universe's acceleration of expansion. Not dark matter or energy but rather variable time

2025-01-03 cosmology • science • astronomy • darkmatter • timescape

An open source alternative to Slack and Discord

2025-01-02 socialmedia • slack • discord • chat • collaboration

Embroidery Journaling

Lovely craft to remember one's year

2025-01-02 journaling • embroidery • fabric • arts • via:kottke • art • crafting

In this house...

Yeats The Second Coming made into the form of a smarmy affirmation lawn sign

2025-01-02 funny • parody • yeats • poetry • inthishouse • 2025

Yearly stats on growth of the Internet

2025-01-02 ipv4 • ipv6 • internet • bgp • routing • networking

An odd New Year's tradition, of a sort

2025-01-01 newyears • food • Glücksschwein • pig • lemon • crafts • alcoa

A map of protests planned for Jan 18

2024-12-31 protest • trump • politics • peoplesmarch • womensmarch • inauguration

Yanyuwa language

Unusual Australian language: 16 noun classes, an unusual consonant inventory, very few vowels, and separate dialects for men and women

2024-12-30 language • linguistics • australia • aborigine • yanyuwa • via:languagehat

19th century Ugandan leader was queer. Interesting bio

2024-12-30 lgbt • history • uganda • africa • bisexual

Reed meat smoke

College buddies got serious about smoking meat for events

2024-12-29 meatsmoke • bbq • reed • rennfayre • college • smoking • cooking

Visualizations of the moon's motions around earth

2024-12-29 visualization • via:kottke • space • moon • lunar • eclipse

Reddit male harassment

Interesting discussion of girls and womens' experiences on a subreddit for girl gamers, how gross men slide into their DMs

2024-12-27 sexism • harassment • reddit • girlgamers • gaming

Hon. Frank Murphy

Supreme Court Justice in early 20th century was almost certainly gay, also a defender of civil rights

2024-12-27 politics • history • lgbt • gay • supremecourt • civilrights

Measuring Starlink users

Clever IPv6 survey finds 3M+ Starlink users

2024-12-27 ipv6 • starlink • survey • isp • internet

Helen Corbitt Texas Caviar

The original recipe for the blackeyed pea salad. Honestly sounds boring, but it's a starting point

2024-12-23 food • texas • history • corbitt • blackeyedpeas • southern

SimonW's linkblog

Details on process and tech for one of the most active current linkblogs

2024-12-22 blogs • linkblogs • socialmedia • internet • sharing

License Plate Game

A new word game from a friend

2024-12-21 games • words • wordle • scrabble • dictionary

The Loves of my Life

Chapter from Edmund White's new sex memoir. Text is very NSFW.

2024-12-20 gay • lgbt • erotic • sex • edmundwhite

World's richest man endorses Germany's right wing extremist party

2024-12-20 elonmusk • politics • germany • afd • nazis • fascism

MacKenzie Scott gives away another large tranche of money to non-profits

2024-12-19 charity • philanthropy • yieldgiving

mail-tester.com

A free service to test if an email is likely to be marked as spam

2024-12-18 email • spam • dkim • spf • testing • filtering • dmarc

Kenji and alcohol

Beloved food writer Kenji Lopez Alt shares a detailed story about his quitting alcohol with the help of AA

2024-12-18 kenji • kenjilopezalt • seriouseats • drinking • alcohol • recovery • aa • patreon

Amazon Time Sync

Microsecond-accurate timing in EC2 instances

2024-12-18 via:iamcal • aws • ec2 • time • ntp • ptp • synchronization • amazon • hosting

hydroxychloroquine fraud withdrawn

Sham paper for the fake Covid drug finally gets retracted

2024-12-18 fraud • science • covid • didierraoult • retraction

bridgy.fed has a new organization and second engineer!

2024-12-17 bridgy • socialmedia • activitypub • atproto • bluesky • mastodon • fediverse • ryanbarrett

Older woman gamer totally roasts stupid gamer boys

2024-12-17 funny • women • gamergirls • streaming

Mass hallucination thinks ordinary airplanes at night are mysterious drones or UFOs

2024-12-15 newjersey • drones • ufos • hallucination • aviation

Radiohead OK Computer re-arranged using Nintendo 64 sounds

2024-12-14 music • nintendo • radiohead • chiptune

A 1990s terminal emulator that provided terminal multiplexing client-side

2024-12-13 unix • uw • shell • terminal • dos • windows • 1990s • programming • screen

LocalThunk interview

Thoughts from the solo creator of indie game Balatro

2024-12-13 games • balatro • localthunk • interview

Sora AI gymnastics

Hypnotizing video of an AI *almost* displaying gymnastics correctly

2024-12-13 gymnastics • ai • uncannyvalley

Queer interview

Snappy interview with Luca Guadagnino and Daniel Craig about the new movie

2024-12-12 movies • gay • lgbt • danielcraig • queer • wsb • burroughs • snowball • queerbait

OldInsuranceMaps.net

Crowdsourcing georeferenced Sanborn maps. Very incomplete archive but totally the right idea.

2024-12-10 maps • sanborn • fireinsurance • history • crowdsourcing • georeferencing

The Library of Congress' collection of property maps

2024-12-10 maps • sanborn • property • history

Harmeet Dhillon (CW: anti-trans)

Trump pick for a DoJ lawyer is an anti-trans crusader who is trying to outlaw gender affirming care in all states

2024-12-10 politics • trump • civilrights • trans • transgender • hate

Uranian (sexuality)

A 19th century term for a homosexual man

2024-12-10 gay • history • lgbt • oscarwilde

Stormlight Archive recaps

In case you don't remember what happened in the first 4500 pages of the story, before reading the last 1500

2024-12-09 books • fantasy • scifi • stormlight • stormlightarchives • sanderson

Colorectal Surgeon Song

Bawdy but kind song by a Canadian duo

2024-12-09 funny • colorectal • medicine • parody • music

Website to make it easy to 3d print terrain models

2024-12-06 printing • 3dprinting • maps • dem • stl • terrain

Stardew Valley Spouse Survey

Choices made broken down by player's gender, sexual orientation, race, age, etc

2024-12-06 games • stardewvalley • survey • lgbt

Argentinian anarcho-capitalism

Summary of a year of a radical libertarian running Argentina and how what he's doing might be a hint of what Musk and DOGE might try to do. (The article is biased in favor of Milei.)

2024-12-05 politics • argentina • libertarian • capitalism • musk • doge • uspol

Accessing home services

A method for connecting to self-hosted web applications that's nicer than just having a bunch of random local IP addresses and ports

2024-12-05 devops • programming • proxmox • services • tailscale

3d objects that only have one stable position

2024-12-05 toys • gomboc • gravity • 3dprinting • sculpture

63 Chinese Cuisines

Interesting review of different regional cuisines in china

2024-12-04 food • tourism • china • sichuan

California solar glut

We don't have the grid and storage infrastructure to use all the electricity we are generating

2024-12-03 electricity • electrify • solar • california • economics • energy

Yet another HTTP server command line tool. This one has options for single page apps, etc.

2024-12-03 web • http • server • hacks

A profile of a prominent gay citizen in Nevada City

2024-12-02 niel • niellocke • gay • history • lgbt • nevadacity • grassvalley • nevadacounty • profile

Threads Won't Take You South of Market

On Facebook's also-ran social media platform pre-emptively blocking a whole lot of queer Fediverse servers

2024-12-02 facebook • threads • meta • fediverse • mastodon • censorship • lgbt • bear • bdsm

Details of Trump's pick to head NIH. His writing during Covid was full of deceit and harmful agenda, including publishing bad studies without peer review

2024-11-30 trump • politics • nih • covid • uspol

Simple web analytics. Uses a hosted tracking pixel, so not as private as running your own, but it's hosted so simpler

2024-11-29 analytics • web • stats • apache

Another simple, privacy-protecting web analytics package

2024-11-29 analytics • web • apache • stats

Simple Sabotage

Culture jamming and malingering for the 21st century

2024-11-29 funny • sabotage • workplace • politics • culture

Project Plowshare

1960s/70s American program to use "the friendly atom" for construction. Why plow when you can nuke?

2024-11-29 funny • wikipedia • america • farming • construction • nuclearweapons

The clearest explanation I've ever seen about line buffering, block buffering, and tty output vs simple file / pipe

2024-11-29 linux • unix • buffering • stdlib • shell • cli

Google altering websites

Some bullshit Google app is now rewriting web pages and injecting links back to Google's own ad-stuffed pages.

2024-11-27 google • antitrust • ads • web

Sensitive Research

Home page / portfolio of Tom Jennings, a creative engineer and famous homosexual

2024-11-26 gay • lgbt • tomjennings • homocore • fidonet • art • projects • rambler

Very interesting web spreadsheet with live Python code running in it. Company is shutting down and open source released the tech.

2024-11-26 neptyne • spreadsheet • observable • notebooks • programming • python

StoryGraph update

Goodreads alternative has momentum

2024-11-26 goodreads • books • reading • socialmedia • storygraph

Major new mobile operating system, to compete with iOS and Android. Coming from Huawei

2024-11-26 china • huawei • android • os • mobile • phone

Coin-op vendors

Funny set of stereotypes about people who sell arcade game

2024-11-26 games • arcade • funny • coinop

SQLite's Use Of Tcl (2017)

I had no idea the database was originally written to be used as a TCL extension. Explains a lot of good things.

2024-11-23 tcl • sqlite • via:lobsters • programming • embedding

Musk brigading government employees

Personally singles out a mid-level civil servant for harassment. Angry mob piles on.

2024-11-23 musk • elonmusk • politics • harassment • fascism • uspol

The popular automation game has a test suite with 6000 tests

2024-11-23 factorio • testing • games • development

Zlibrary access

Reddit wiki has up to date URLs for accessing the download site for unlicensed books

2024-11-21 books • ebooks • zlib • zlibrary • download • epub

Egoless Engineering

New McFunley just dropped. A really smart talk about engineering and release process

2024-11-21 engineering • releases • devops

Francis Williams painting

Extraordinary art history study of a painting of a Black Jamaican man from the 18th century

2024-11-20 via:metafilter • art • arthistory • jamaica • haleyscomet

The Platonic Blow

W.H. Auden's 1948 gay erotic poem. NSFW.

2024-11-20 gay • lgbt • auden • poetry • 1940s • erotic

Fun new Bluesky firehose visualization

2024-11-19 bluesky • visualization • emoji • via:waxy

Bantam Tools Artframe

New computer controlled plotter with a fully controllable z-axis so you can use paint, variable pressure on pens, etc

2024-11-19 plotter • plotterart • computers • emsl • bantamtools

Using OSM vector tiles

Exciting news, vector tile data is live from OpenStreetMap!

2024-11-19 maps • via:hackernews • vectortiles • programming

Starlink sold out

Parts of the western US have a waitlist to get Starlink service again

2024-11-19 starlink • internet • isp • broadband • congestion

Fine-tuning LLMs at home

Surprisingly technical article on how you can customize a Llama model to your specifciations

2024-11-19 ai • llm • training • lora • llama

Bluesky starter packs

Third party site with a database of 52,000 starter packs

2024-11-19 bluesky • socialmedia • starterpack

New global warming emissions dashboard from Planet Labs imagery of methane, etc

2024-11-18 globalwarming • data • maps • carbonmapper • planetlabs • satellites • methane

Love, Acceptance, and Screeching Modems

Notes on early LGBT community online, including my old home of soc.motss

2024-11-17 gay • lgbt • history • socmotss • motss • bbs

Voyager 1 backup radio

After partial failure a radio makes its first transmission in 43 years

2024-11-17 space • voyager • resilience • engineering • via:hackernews • satellite

Butt interview with an activist in the nation of Georgia. (One mild NSFW picture.)

2024-11-17 gay • lgbt • georgia • tblisi • sex • nsfw

Usenet feed growth

Usenet still exists and lately the amount of traffic is growing enormously

2024-11-17 usenet • networking • socialmedia • scene • nzb

Methane mapping

Fighting climate change with Planet Labs satellites detecting methane emissions

2024-11-17 methane • globalwarming • satellite • remotesensing • planetlabs • environment

City99 console font

A creative new programming font inspired by the aesthetics of the game Stray

2024-11-17 fonts • console • fixedwidth • stray • mhoye

Lorraine Gervais

Local singer in Grass Valley, also an ally to LGBTQ youth and just a lovely person

2024-11-16 lorrainegervais • music • grassvalley • nevadacounty • ally • lgbt

A "show me top links" based on your Mastodon and Bluesky feeds

2024-11-16 bluesky • mastodon • linkblog • links • via:waxy

Justin's Linklog

Details on how a linkblog is implemented

2024-11-16 jmason • linkblog • blogging • pinboard