Tootfinder

Care for life, care for the chips: the future is re-used, recycled and permacomputing
https://branch.climateaction.tech/issues/issue-8/care-for-life-care-for-the-chips/

Care for life, care for the chips: the future is re-used, recycled and permacomputing - Branch
Alistair explores the imperfect answers arising from asking what we can do to radically cut down on our spiralling CPU habit.

Oh yes... I forgot, it's that ridiculous habit of changing the clocks again tonight.
This usually upsets my brain for days.

I’ve always found this historical transition from biphasic sleep fascinating…
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medieval-habit-of-biphasic-sleep

by force of habit I was checking the comments under a post about the new raspberry pi and of course I found The One Who Has To Say that it cost too much and with the same money you can buy <something else>
Somehow I never find these something elses and when I do they are usually wrapped in many “yes, but”

So, is there a MacOS extension that distributes apps across desktops? I have a habit of opening everything on one desktop and it's always a mess lol.
#MacOS

Well that was a first.
Went to grab my ESD shoes at the entrance of the lab (which I only wear when doing chemical work or other potentially hazardous operations, normally I'm just in socks), gave them the usual upside down tap out of habit...
And some tiny little six or eight legged critter actually fell out and scurried off. I've been shaking them before putting them on just in case for years and this is the first time anybody had been lurking in them.
Guess I'…

I know listening to “albums” is over, but due to my Qobuz habit and to owning a record player, I still do sometimes. Here, to celebrate Arvo Pärt’s 90th birthday, is a scrumptious collection of Pärt chestnuts from Paavo Järvi and the Estonian Festival Orchestra. Great music. Fabulous sound. Play it loud!

In honor of today's news that AOL will soon be ending dial-up service, here's the 1996 collaboration between Prince and Kate Bush, which begins & ends with a tribute to the AOL sign-on experience, based on Prince's mid-90s habit of dropping in on fans in our weekly AOL chats: https://www.youtube.com/watch…

by force of habit I was checking the comments under a post about the new raspberry pi and of course I found The One Who Has To Say that it cost too much and with the same money you can buy <something else>
Somehow I never find these something elses and when I do they are usually wrapped in many “yes, but”

2/2 I continued blogging Alberniweather and on FB and Twitter but I gradually removed my personal self from Facebook and eventually during the Pandemic, I decided the Facebook environment was just too toxic even for weather stuff and I shut down my page and left Facebook completely.
The impact on traffic to Alberniweather.ca and its prominence in the community was, and still is, significant.
I have diehard followers, many who have become friends over the years, I still get the odd call from media, or even the public about random weather things.
I have good connections with a few folks at Environment Canada (though their staff have become thinner and more transient :(
and major events still get spikes of local traffic but I since about 2022, and after I removed myself from Twitter that year, I don’t blog nearly as much. I would do a few posts in a week, and then go months without posting. I just got out of the habit I guess.
But I am still interested in the weather. I still feel like Alberniweather is a useful service for people in my community. I still feel a willing obligation to inform people about the weather and I believe I am trusted to do so by the public and local leaders. I’ve never made any money at it, I sold ad space on the website for a few years but it wasn’t worth the hassle and I didn’t feel comfortable taking the money when I was councillor. I have had some generous spontaneous donations at times.
But mainly I do it because it’s interesting, and I hope it is useful for people especially when people are looking for information during a major event.
The highest traffic I have ever had on Alberniweather pre-FB exit was the local Dog Mountain forest fire in 2015.
post-FB exit: the #underwoodfire
People want easy access to reliable local, trusted, information.
Large media orgs have mostly given up on this.
I am grateful we still have an active local newspaper and radio and that both trust me and I trust them.
@… @…

🇺🇦 Auf radioeins läuft...
Daffo:
🎵 Habit
#NowPlaying #Daffo
https://open.spotify.com/track/1veY6qe42qrNN4Qns70szM

I do not seek the ignorant; the ignorant seek me -- I will instruct them.
I ask nothing but sincerity. If they come out of habit, they become tiresome.
-- I Ching

Understanding Ice Crystal Habit Diversity with Self-Supervised Learning
Joseph Ko, Hariprasath Govindarajan, Fredrik Lindsten, Vanessa Przybylo, Kara Sulia, Marcus van Lier-Walqui, Kara Lamb
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07688

Understanding Ice Crystal Habit Diversity with Self-Supervised Learning
Ice-containing clouds strongly impact climate, but they are hard to model due to ice crystal habit (i.e., shape) diversity. We use self-supervised learning (SSL) to learn latent representations of crystals from ice crystal imagery. By pre-training a vision transformer with many cloud particle images, we learn robust representations of crystal morphology, which can be used for various science-driven tasks. Our key contributions include (1) validating that our SSL approach can be used to learn me…

Learning to Pick: A Visuomotor Policy for Clustered Strawberry Picking
Zhenghao Fei, Wenwu Lu, Linsheng Hou, Chen Peng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14530 https://

Learning to Pick: A Visuomotor Policy for Clustered Strawberry Picking
Strawberries naturally grow in clusters, interwoven with leaves, stems, and other fruits, which frequently leads to occlusion. This inherent growth habit presents a significant challenge for robotic picking, as traditional percept-plan-control systems struggle to reach fruits amid the clutter. Effectively picking an occluded strawberry demands dexterous manipulation to carefully bypass or gently move the surrounding soft objects and precisely access the ideal picking point located at the stem j…

@… it's a little after 5 AM and I feel like getting drunk. Thanks for planting the seed 🙂
Time, now, for me to take a sleep in the bath (my habit at this time of the morning) …

Snufkin is often seen as a free spirit who values personal freedom and dislikes material possessions or hierarchical control. He is a carefree, anti-establishment character who despises private property and the trappings of capitalism, as evidenced by his habit of tearing down "private property" signs.
He embodies a philosophy of simplicity, independence, and living in harmony with nature, making him appear anti-hierarchical and anti-capitalist in spirit. This aligns with hi…

Shapes of Cognition for Computational Cognitive Modeling
Marjorie McShane, Sergei Nirenburg, Sanjay Oruganti, Jesse English
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13288 https://

Shapes of Cognition for Computational Cognitive Modeling
Shapes of cognition is a new conceptual paradigm for the computational cognitive modeling of Language-Endowed Intelligent Agents (LEIAs). Shapes are remembered constellations of sensory, linguistic, conceptual, episodic, and procedural knowledge that allow agents to cut through the complexity of real life the same way as people do: by expecting things to be typical, recognizing patterns, acting by habit, reasoning by analogy, satisficing, and generally minimizing cognitive load to the degree si…

It's really not my habit to intrude
Furthermore, I hope my meaning won't be lost or misconstrued
But I'll repeat myself at the risk of being crude
There must be 50 ways to kill your dictator

Cowboys could use surplus talent to shore up holes in the roster https://insidethestar.com/cowboys-could-use-surplus-talent-to-shore-up-holes-in-the-roster

Hop around the puddle
Unlike the youthful habit
Jumping into them.
#dailyhaikuprompt - puddle
#haiku
#poem

Something else that bothers me has just been added to my list:
Spam phone calls.
I've not long got back from picking up a supermarket click & collect order. For the second time tonight.
Why? Well, I've had so many spam calls to my mobile this week, I've got in the habit of just declining them. Except one "spam call" was actually the click & collect guy calling to let me know he'd found another tray in the van. But, because I declined the call, I only discovered this when I got home and unpacked.
So, yeah. Spam phone calls - you bother me!
https://cjhearn.co.uk/that-bothers-me

Journalists still haven't given up their decade long habit of just searching Twitter for reactions, so naturally a story about the Church of England is cantered around the opinions of two people who, I'm pretty sure, are not members.
https://www.

JD Vance and Elon Musk call Canterbury Cathedral graffiti ‘shameful’
Art installation that has covered walls and pillars with street-style spray-painting has drawn a mixed response

"""
But there is no certainty that madness was content to sit locked up in its immutable identity, waiting for psychiatry to perfect its art, before it emerged blinking from the shadows into the blinding light of truth. Nor is it clear that confinement was above all, or even implicitly, a series of measures put in place to deal with madness. It is not even certain that in this repetition of the ancient gesture of segregation at the threshold of the classical age, the modern world was aiming to wipe out all those who, either as a species apart or a spontaneous mutation, appeared as 'asocial'. The fact that the internees of the eighteenth century bear a resemblance to our modern vision of the asocial is undeniable, but it is above all a question of results, as the character of the marginal was produced by the gesture of segregation itself. For the day came when this man, banished in the same exile all over Europe in the mid-seventeenth century, suddenly became an outsider, expelled by a society to whose norms he could not be seen to conform; and for our own intellectual comfort, he then became a candidate for prisons, asylums and punishment. In reality, this character is merely the result of superimposed grids of exclusion.
The gesture that proscribed was as abrupt as the one that had isolated the lepers, and in both cases, the meaning of the gesture should not be mistaken for its effect. Lepers were not excluded to prevent contagion, any more than in 1657, 1 per cent of the population of Paris was confined merely to deliver the city from the 'asocial'. The gesture had a different dimension: it did not isolate strangers who had previously remained invisible, who until then had been ignored by force of habit. It altered the familiar cityscape by giving them new faces, strange, bizarre silhouettes that nobody recognised. Strangers were found in places where their presence had never previously been suspected: the process punctured the fabric of society, and undid the familiar. Through this gesture, something inside man was placed outside of himself, and pushed over the edge of our horizon. It is the gesture of confinement, in short, which created alienation.
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)

I'm a sucker playing Castlevania.
My biggest problem is the habit to rush the stage like Super Mario... 🤦‍♂️
#castlevania #rondoofblood #konami

2025-06-01
getting this one in early and I've been /
on the fence about writing it; I think it's
fun and cute but given the current climate
in the world - literally and figuratively -
I think it could easily be misinterpreted as
a cynical doompost, especially with my habit \________/\________/\___/____/
of writing files that are mired in double
meaning.

On W10 going EOL: It might seem cold but with how many times I've told people I know to look into Mint with encouragement on learning the habit of using FOSS software wherever you can and just getting told something along the lines of "I'll see how everything works out" only to see them still have everything on W10 a few weeks later, I think I'm just gonna sit back with my bucket of popcorn and wait for the fireworks. I've done all I could do lol.

Just finished "Concrete Rose" by Angie Thomas (I haven't yet read "The Hate U Give" but that's now high on my list of things to find). It's excellent, and in particular, an excellent treatise on positive masculinity in fiction form. It's not a super easy book to read emotionally, but is excellently written and deeply immersive. I don't have the perspective to know how it might land among teens like those it portrays, but I have a feeling it's true enough to life, and it held a lot of great wisdom for me.
CW for the book include murder, hard drugs, and parental abandonment.
I caught myself in a racist/classist habit of thought while reading that others night appreciate hearing about: early on I was mentally comparing it to "All my Rage" by Sabaa Tahir and wondering if/when we'd see the human cost of the drug dealing to the junkies, thinking that it would weaken the book not to include that angle. Why is that racist/classist? Because I'm always expecting books with hard drug dealers in them to show the ugly side of their business since it's been drilled into me that they're evil for the harm they cause, yet I never expect the same of characters who are bankers, financial analysts, health insurance claims adjudicators, police officers, etc. (Okay, maybe I do now look for that in police narratives). The point is, our society includes many people who as part of their jobs directly immiserate others, so why and I only concerned about that misery being brought up when it's drug dealers?
#AmReading

Gauge theory approach to describe ice crystals habit evolution in ice clouds
Gianluca Di Natale, Francesco Pio De Cosmo, Leandro Cieri
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02472 https://

Gauge theory approach to describe ice crystals habit evolution in ice clouds
Ice clouds, particularly cirrus clouds, significantly influence Earth's radiative balance but remain poorly characterized in current climate models. A major uncertainty arises from the variability of their microphysical properties, especially the evolution of ice crystal habits under depositional growth. We propose a heuristic method to describe habit evolution based on four fundamental shapes identified in the literature and from in situ observations: droxtals, plates, columns, and rosettes. T…

Cowboys-Eagles Stock Market: Eagles Persevere Through Injury, Immaturity, And Lightning. https://www.si.com/nfl/eagles/news/cowboys-eagles-stock-market-eagles-persevere-through-injury-immaturity-and-lightning-01k4…