Tootfinder

A citizen of Rome in 117 AD,
under Emperor Trajan,
would've found it difficult to imagine the empire not existing.
The roads, the aqueducts, the legal system, the trade networks stretching from Britain to Mesopotamia:
all of it seemed to be a near-fact of nature, like gravity
Edward Gibbon gave us six volumes explaining how that feeling turned out to be wrong,
and even he couldn't fully untangle all the causes.
But the overarching theme mig…

The empire always falls
A citizen of Rome in 117 AD, under Emperor Trajan, would've found it difficult to imagine the empire not existing. The roads, the aqueducts, the legal system, the trade networks stretching from Britain to Mesopotamia: all of it seemed to be a near-fact of nature, like gravity // the Mediterranean itself.

Today in the drizzle I stopped by the Living Library, a beautiful native plant garden near SF's Balboa Park at the San Jose/Seneca intersection. Highly recommend a visit to see some #ceanothus in bloom and California poppies and island mallows beginning to, and much more.

good grief, gnuplot is always a huge battle
here's a graph of the length of day (green, microseconds)
and UT1-UTC (purple, milliseconds)
from 1973 until today
the LoD is the difference from 24h, averaged over the previous 12 months - the LoD is _very_ noisy so it's hard to see the trends from a shorter averaging period
UT1-UTC is the integral of the LoD, with leap seconds to keep it in bounds
things have been a bit weird since 2020 because the LoD …

Spotify launches a feature to buy physical books in the US and UK, powered by Bookshop.org, and expands its Page Match tool to support 30 additional languages (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/15/spotify-l…

Spotify launches the ability to purchase physical books in the US and UK | TechCrunch
Spotify users in the US and UK can officially purchase physical books through the Android app. iOS users will get the feature next week.

Regardless this good blog about the many aspects that make the midterms difficult to manipulate, I am not as optimistic as the author. The bottomline is Trump and his allies will pay with their freedom and personal wealth if democrats win the midterms and the elections after that, they simply can't allow that to happen... It puzzles me that after everything that already happened under Trump some people don't see this.

Worry, Don't Panic, Over Trump's Efforts to Subvert the Elections
America's system is quite foolproof but he can still try to delegitimize it

As so often, the Internet Archive has come to save the day.
At its newly opened Aadam Jacobs Archive, you can now listen to nearly 2,500 of the concert recordings that volunteers have digitized and uploaded so far.
In that more than a terabyte of files, you’ll find concerts by Nirvana, Phish, Tracy Chapman, Depeche Mode, Flaming Lips, Stereolab, Liz Phair, Sonic Youth, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Björk, They Might Be Giants (recorded four times in 1988 alone), and the Mekons, a…

10,000 Chicago Concert Recordings Are Being Uploaded to the Internet Archive: Nirvana, Phish, Sonic Youth, They Might Be Giants & More
Perhaps you've had the experience of moving to a new city and immediately being told that you've missed its golden age of live music. To an extent, this has happened in more or less every period of the past fifty or sixty years.

oooof. this incumbent running for re-election to the SF Bike Coalition board is literally a landlord lawyer.
if you're a member, the voting details are here and there are 10 candidates for 8 seats. https://sfbike.org/news/meet-the-candidat…

EFF, along with the national ACLU and the ACLU affiliates in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey,
filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit
urging the court to require a warrant for border searches of electronic devices,
-- an argumentEFF has been making in the courts and Congress for nearly a decade.
In our amicus brief, we argue that the U.S. Supreme Court’s balancing test in
Riley v. California (2014)
should govern the …

EFF to Third Circuit: Electronic Device Searches at the Border Require a Warrant
EFF, along with the national ACLU and the ACLU affiliates in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey, filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit urging the court to require a warrant for border searches of electronic devices.

An Afghan man who fought with U.S. forces and was legally evacuated to the U.S. after the fall of Kabul
died this week within a day of being arrested by federal immigration officers in Texas, according to his family.
The reported death would be at least the 24th in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody this fiscal year, which began in October.
The administration is on track for the deadliest year in ICE detention in more than two decades.

Afghan who fought with US special forces dies in ICE custody as Trump on track for deadliest year of detention in more than two decades
Mohammad Nazeer Paktyawal served with U.S. forces in Afghanistan and legally evacuated the country, then died within a day of being taken into ICE custody, according to his family