Imaginary Text

2026 was the summer of ice cream.

We (daughter and me) went to Europe in June.

The defining characteristic of publication design in the past quarter century or more has been the computer screen: the Desktop Publishing paradigm, invented at Xerox PARC in the 1970s and brought to market by Apple and Adobe in the late 1980s, utterly ch…

If we think seriously about intelligence for a little while, we recognize that it isn’t just a random thing in the world, a trait like other traits, but rather a genre of order in the universe.

Earlier this year I attended an all-day symposium on “Teaching and Learning with AI” hosted by my Faculty.

I first posted this recipe in 2023 so that I could share with friends and people out there on the internets.

Last summer I spent a lot of time with Typst (at that point v0.11) and Pandoc, working on a flexible and reusable workflow to typeset markdown-formatted articles to PDF.

UPDATED Aug 1, 2025: The following, which reads partly as an apology for Spotify, has me feeling icky, now that I’ve learned about Spotify’s CEO’s investments in AI-driven weapons tech.

I dug this up and reposted it from way back, because the ideas here keep coming back around.

I’ve had trouble sleeping lately.

The Radavist today ran a “Dust-Up” column on the psychology of bad interactions between cyclists and drivers, and by extension (so the argument continuted) cyclists and hikers.

Here I am writing a blog post, like it’s 2004!

Edie Cats are animals.

UPDATE MARCH 2025: This post, and the template attached, were written for Typst v 0.11 – Typst has upgraded twice since then, and this template will not work with the newer versions of Typst.

Last November I wrote a post about my experimentation with Typst – a new (as of last year) open-source typesetting software that aims to (a) effectively replace LaTeX in its niche and also bring a modern, free tool to a broader set of use cases.

I just want to sing a bit of praise for our heatpump.

In honour of International Women’s Day, here’s a book review.

The Lindisfarne Matthew.

Sometime in early 2023 Typst appeared: a new, from-the-ground up open-source typesetting engine designed to replace the superannuated LaTeX that so much scientific publishing still relies on.

I watch the weather.

Keep Your Silver Shined Devon Sproule Tin Angel Records 2007 americana • jazz • folk • bluegrass I thought I’d have a go at some music criticism after listening to this album for the first time in about a decade.

Amazingly, the Mellon Foundation’s Public Knowledge program invited me to their ‘all-projects’ meeting in New York this fall.

In September I joined up with a dear old friend and we drove all the way around the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, a get-together we’d been talking about for some time.

2023 is the year, apparently, of “enshittification”[1]—of the internet, of platforms, of all sorts of things in our digital lives.

Dante, La terza rime (aka The Divine Comedy), 1502 Aldus is building a library which knows no walls save those of the world itself. – Erasmus of Rotterdam This fall I am on sabbatical, and it’s time for me to talk about one of my major projects this coming

Updated: June 2025: This recipe has evolved since I posted it.

Catalinbread Belle Epoch tape echo effect pedal* I just received Volume 4 in the mail… On the occasion of—well, on the occasion of a bunch of things, but for starters—learning of Penguin’s publication (in 2002) of a new translation of Marcel Proust’s In S…

Tree of Heaven.

for Arley McNeney[1] You Are in a Room… You are in a classroom.

On Mastodon, Mekka Okerke mused: Do bicycles create empathy?

Welcome to my new blog.

To be honest, this took some brain-numbing trial and error – trying to get the remote git repo on the Reclaim server to become the _site folder on my website build locally, so that then I could build into it and have that be the actual site for deployment.