More from bunnie's blog
The Ware for March 2025 is shown below. I was just taking this thing apart to see what went wrong, and thought it had some merit as a name that ware. But perhaps more interestingly, I was also experimenting with my cross-polarized imaging setup. This is a technique a friend of mine told me about […]
The Ware from last month is the main board from a Lego Duplo Steam Train. As predicted, this was a much easier one to guess. Congrats to MJS for naming it (with a margin of just half an hour ahead of Will), email me for your prize! And again, thanks to spida for contributing yet […]
Here’s the Ware for February 2025: Thanks again to spida for contributing yet another guest ware! Hopefully this one is a smidge easier to guess compared to last month’s.
The ware for January 2025 is the Gavilan SC laptop motherboard. The Gavilan laptop is one of the first portable computer designs, announced in 1983, at a 2024-equivalent price of $12,400. However, the company only survived for one year, per Wikipedia: Owing to a rigorous overhaul of the design of the laptop, the company missed […]
The ware for January 2025 is shown below. Thanks to brimdavis for contributing this ware! …back in the day when you would get wares that had “blue wires” in them… One thing I wonder about this ware is…where are the ROMs? Perhaps I’ll find out soon! Happy year of the snake!
More in programming
A large part of our civilisation rests on the shoulders of one medieval monk: Thomas Aquinas. Amid the turmoil of life, riddled with wickedness and pain, he would insist that our world is good. And all our success is built on this belief. Note: Before we start, let’s get one thing out of the way: Thomas Aquinas is clearly a Christian thinker, a Saint even. Yet he was also a brilliant philosopher. So even if you consider yourself agnostic or an atheist, stay with me, you will still enjoy his ideas. What is good? Thomas’ argument is rooted in Aristotle’s concept of goodness: Something is good if it fulfills its function. Aristotle had illustrated this idea with a knife. A knife is good to the extent that it cuts well. He made a distinction between an actual knife and its ideal function. That actual thing in your drawer is the existence of a knife. And its ideal function is its essence—what it means to be a knife: to cut well. So everything is separated into its existence and its ideal essence. And this is also true for humans: We have an ideal conception of what the essence of a human […] The post Thomas Aquinas — The world is divine! appeared first on Ralph Ammer.
Jack Johnson is on Rick Rubin’s podcast Tetragrammaton talking about music, film making, creativity, and surfing. At one point (~24:30) Johnson talks about his love for surfing and the beautiful flow state it puts him in: Sometimes I’ll see a friend riding a wave while I’m paddling out, and the thing I’ll see them do just seems like magic...I’ll think, “How in the world did they just do that?” And then on your next ride you’re doing the exact same thing without thinking but it’s all muscle memory and it’s all in this flow that you get into. That’s a really beautiful state to get into, to do something that feels like a magic trick, like something you shouldn’t be able to do, but all of the sudden you’re doing it. I’m not a surfer, and I can’t do effortlessly cool. But I know what a flow state feels like. Johnson’s description reminds me of that feeling when you get a little time on a personal project — riding the wave of working on your personal website. You open your laptop. You start paddling out. Maybe you see an internet friend who was doing something cool and you want to try it but you have no idea if you’ll be able to do it as well as they did. And before you know it, you’re in that flow state where muscle memory takes over and you’re doing stuff without even consciously thinking about it — stuff that others might look at and perceive as magic (cough anything on the command line cough) but it’s not magic to you. Intuition and experience just take over while you ride the wave. Ok, I’m a nerd. But I don’t care. It’s a great feeling, regardless of whether it’s playing an instrument, or surfing, or programming. That feeling of sinking into a craft you’ve worked at your whole life that you don’t have to think about anymore. Email · Mastodon · Bluesky
My April Cools is out! Gaming Games for Non-Gamers is a 3,000 word essay on video games worth playing if you've never enjoyed a video game before. Patreon notes here. (April Cools is a project where we write genuine content on non-normal topics. You can see all the other April Cools posted so far here. There's still time to submit your own!) April Cools' Club
Everyone wants the software they work on to produce quality products, but what does that mean? In addition, how do you know when you have it? This is the longest single blog post I have ever written. I spent four decades writing software used by people (most of the server