bakelite & roses

1. good food Singapore is a tiny country with a giant cuisine: Malay, Chinese, Indonesian, Indian, the list goes on.

It will escape everyone except myself that baccyflap.com has switched to a new mono font - I use it in only a few places, mainly for bits of copyable code, for instance at the Linux code snippets page and the Mastodon embedder page.

The people of the Internet seem given to coming up with new words for whatever's being discussed online at any given time.

What are grave errors on the computer?

So here I am on a cookery blog hosted by Substack.

I use computers in very particular ways.

Here's an enduring mystery, a song I've been listening to since I discovered it in 2018: MP3, 03:14, 7.8 MB A catchy tune, one I find myself singing at times, and one that's in the regular rotation here at Baccyflap Manor, even though it's obviously not t…

Here's an addendum to yesterday's post: I was chatting with a friend about various mundane aspects of Dutch cultures and Dutch music came up - including this classic song.

Indulge me while I present you with a recording from 1964.

Kagi is a paid search engine, and it's well-loved among nerds who are particular about how they search the Web.

If you run a webring, sooner or later you'll have to deal with decay - sites disappear, and in doing so, break the ring.

I teach in an anthropological museum for a living and hardly a day goes by that I do not talk to my students about colonialism - most simply put, the process by which one human population of this planet occupies and controls another.

My life is blessed, because I do not have to work with computers.

Webrings are alliances of websites.

Everyone ought to have a favourite shell.

Here's a log of three messages I sent to my partner a few days ago. 3:15 PM: a small memorial by the bridge 3:15 PM: crying students 3:15 PM: poor kid We live in a small city and small cities tend to behave like big villages: when something of enough impo…

Platforms like Facebook and Twitter are sometimes referred to as 'walled gardens' - they require an account to use and don't share any data with unsanctioned third parties (including anyone without an account).

When I was a kid in the Netherlands, my four-years-older teen sister lived in a separate universe.

After adding this banner to my homepage, I got a message from someone asking how I did this without JavaScript, when the one on the Keep Android Open homepage, which is the one they provide code for, is JS-based.

I own a Tamagotchi and I apologise to no one.

I was surprised to find that this blog, so briefly after its reopening, has already found a few readers - or at least a few people who picked up on a post or two.

I've added a banner to the home page: Android will become a locked-down platform in 178 days If you click the one above, it will take you to the Keep Android Open website.

My partner and I traveled to Singapore to celebrate the lunar new year with her family.

There's this pernicious 2022 article from the execrable Futurism magazine, gleeful reprinters of conspiracy nonsense and even more gleeful court stenographers to Big Tech firms, stating that AI (meaning Large Language Models) will "be" 90% of the Internet…

Having just come back from hot, humid, rainy Singapore, I have some thoughts on umbrellas.

As time has gone on, I've been keeping a log of the goings-on of the no ai webring - just as a matter of record, realising that as it's been growing, I've been forgetting the decisions I've made and the things I've run into, and also the way I've felt abo…

There's been some mild hubbub of late in personal Web and webring spheres around some websites run by someone who, according to the creator of the hubbub, made some problematic artwork a number of years ago.

All hobbies seem to work roughly the same, in my experience: you get into something, you go at it for whatever amount of time, and then lose interest for a while.