Technology ⁽¹³⁾

My favorite new technology is not new. It's a natural-language game engine for creating text-based interactive stories. Inform 7 The latest version of Inform 7 was released in 2022. Aaron Reed's excellent and completely usable book was published in 2011. The game engine was created in 2006, as a rebuild of a project which was introduced when I was still getting carded for cigarettes (1993). This is a good and appropriate pace for technology. I am just getting started with…

I've been enjoying the short stories on the @clarkesworld@mastodon.online podcast. The story "Never Eaten Vegetables" by H.H. Pak from January 2025 was especially engaging. It hits a whole bunch of standard themes that I really like (biology, space colonization, advanced technology, corporate malfeasance) in a story that's super original, interesting, and well crafted. Plus, Kate Baker is always a great reader. If you're into such things, give it a listen. https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/audio_01_25b/

Just did a quick scan of my local Cleveland area Mastodon connections, and quite a few haven't posted since 2024. Many of those are active on Bluesky. Based on their posts and shares there, it looks like there's a pretty decent Cleveland local scene, at least for the material I sought on twitter (urbanism, community organizations, local journalism, local politics, sports). I have resisted creating an account there, because at it's core Bluesky just another Silicon Valley startup play (created…

I migrated my personal website from Wordpress to Publii. Here are a few observations on Publii, from my experiences to date. I also wrote some more general thoughts about moving to static HTML. At a high level, this is the process I am using to move this website from Wordpress to Publii. When I switched my main working laptop to a Linux system, I had to set up a new clean installation of Publii (on linux) and move my publishing…

One this year's projects has been moving the (eight) websites I shepherd for various projects and community organizations from Wordpress to static HTML. I tried a bunch and settled on Hugo and Publii.  I used Hugo for several simple sites. It's good for some things but it's really only suitable for coders and the image handling is a headache.  It's a fine choice for sites that are mostly text, with one or more technical site managers.  It's a good one…

Every time I set up a new laptop for myself or an employee, I go through a brief "Windows or Linux?" tradeoff analysis. It's never an easy choice. All of our development work is platform-independent, using broadly available open-source tools like java, node, postgresql, QGIS. Everything that's deployed to a server is Linux (usually Ubunutu). On the other hand, the US business world runs almost exclusively on Microsoft. For compatibility sake, Windows is my daily driver so that I can…

There's a common pattern underpinning technology hype cycles, that is basically a bunch of large companies saying "New Shiny Thing will reduce our costs and improve customer experience!" People get very excited about some new and compelling technology then everybody scrambles to figure out how to align it with their business. At the moment, it's "AI" or more specifically a small subset of Artificial Intelligence called Large Language Models (LLMs) which do a very good job of sounding like people…

There was a lot of interest in my Croissants in the Solar Oven post so here is some information about the oven itself. Some photos are at the end of this post. Model: GoSun Sport As of July 2023 the plain Sport model appears to be sold out, but you can still find them on eBay. I paid about $US 150 with shipping in 2023. At the time of writing GoSun still has the newer Sport-E in stock which is…