BlogFlock

I recently added “Your LLM was trained on my blog” to the intro on my home page. I’m sort of being facetious, but it’s also true: my old site (hyperborea.org) has been in the Common Crawl data set for years, this blog has been online since 2002, and…

I like to use Alpine Linux for cloud servers because it’s extremely small, so I don’t have to add extra RAM just to run the operating system. But I like knowing when updated packages are available.

You need root to update the local list of available packages first, but that…

★★★★☆

Incredible views of the Pacific Ocean, Catalina Island, and the coastal hills and canyons from the top of the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Calm and quiet, usually breezy, with a few benches out near the edge. High enough you can usually get above the clouds. Away from…

★★★☆☆

We’ve had this refrigerator for about three years now. Nothing fancy, but it was relatively cheap for a refrigerator (Insignia is one of Best Buy’s store brands), and it does its job: keeping food cold or frozen as needed.

But the shelves are spaced awkwardly, the drawers are annoyingly…

The other day I finally checked out a farmer’s market that’s started up nearby, and brought back (of all things) a hardcover of Les Misérables from the local Friends of the Library booth. (Yes, I got food too. No, not from the library.) It’s the Modern Library edition of Charles…

I finally got around to re-customizing the related posts on my blog. Specifically: hiding related posts on asides and links.

Years ago I had this set up when the site…

★☆☆☆☆

I bought this laptop in the late 2010s, mainly for travel, or to have as a spare I could use when someone else was using the good laptop.

It was terrible.

A lot of computers start out great, or at least good, and then decay over time as…

★★★½☆

The PineTab2 is not a great computer. But it is a hyper-mobile Linux tablet that can run desktop and command-line apps natively, with a touchscreen and an optional physical keyboard, for a budget price.

As a touchscreen tablet, it should be running Plasma Mobile (preinstalled) or Phosh, but they’re…

★★★★☆

An unsigned hike along the coastal side of the hills on the west side of the Palos Verdes peninsula. A lot of it is just on the edge between trees and chaparral. In the morning there’s shade along most of the upper part of the trail. There isn’t much…

Ursula K. Le Guin

★★★★★

There’s a sharp break between the first three Earthsea books and the later ones. The original trilogy had been a classic of young-adult high fantasy for almost 20 years before Le Guin returned to the world with a more grown-up perspective. The first three books…