Tootfinder

Here's my BEST ALBUMS OF 2025:
https://bzangygroink.co.uk/archives/2025/12/31/albums-of-the-year-2025/
And here's my other lists going back back to 2004:

Albums Of The Year 2025
Well, another absolute fucker of a year, wasn’t it? I retreated a lot this year, into comfort eating, into old Stargate and definitely into music. This list originally had 92 albums on it. It…

The #fediverse is the best verse.

Day 30: Elizabeth Moon
This last spot (somehow 32 days after my last post, but oh well) was a tough decision, but Moon brings us full circle back to fantasy/sci-fi, and also back to books I enjoyed as a teenager. Her politics don't really match up to Le Guin or Jemisin, but her military experience make for books that are much more interesting than standard fantasy fare in terms of their battles & outcomes (something "A Song of Ice and Fire" achieved by cribbing from history but couldn't extrapolate nearly as well). I liked (and still mostly like) her (unironically) strong female protagonists, even if her (especially more recent) forays into "good king" territory leave something to be desired. Still, in Paksenarion the way we get to see the world from a foot-soldier's perspective before transitioning into something more is pretty special and very rare in fantasy (I love the elven ruins scene as Paks travels over the mountains as an inflection point). Battles are won or lost on tactics, shifting politics, and logistics moreso than some epic magical gimmick, which is a wonderful departure from the fantasy norm.
Her work does come with a content warning for rape, although she addresses it with more nuance and respect than any male SF/F author of her generation. Ex-evangelicals might also find her stuff hard to read, as while she's against conservative Christianity, she's very much still a Christian and that makes its way into her writing. Even if her (not bad but not radical enough) politics lead her writing into less-satisfying places at times, part of my respect for her comes from following her on Twitter for a while, where she was a pretty decent human being...
Overall, Paksenarrion is my favorite of her works, although I've enjoyed some of her sci-fi too and read the follow-up series. While it inherits some of Tolkien's baggage, Moon's ability to deeply humanize her hero and depict a believable balance between magic being real but not the answer to all problems is great.
I've reached 30 at this point, and while I've got more authors on my shortlist, I think I'll end things out tomorrow with a dump of also-rans rather than continuing to write up one per day. I may even include a man or two in that group (probably with at least non-{white cishet} perspective). Honestly, doing this challenge I first thought that sexism might have made it difficult, but here at the end I'm realizing that ironically, the misogyny that holds non-man authors to a higher standard means that (given plenty have still made it through) it's hard to think of male authors who compare with this group.
Looking back on the mostly-male authors of SF/F in my teenage years, for example, I'm now struggling to think of a single one whose work I'd recommend to my kids (having cheated and checked one of my old lists, Pratchett, Jaques, and Asimov qualify but they're outnumbered by those I'm now actively ashamed to admit I enjoyed). If I were given a choice between reading only non-men or non-woman authors for the rest of my life (yes I'm giving myself enby authors as a freebie; they're generally great) I'd very easily choose non-men. I think the only place where (to my knowledge) not enough non-men authors have been allowed through to outshine the fields of male mediocrity yet is in videogames sadly. I have a very long list of beloved games and did include some game designers here, but I'm hard-pressed to think of many other non-man game designers I'd include in the genuinely respect column (I'll include at least two tomorrow but might cheat a bit).
TL;DR: this was fun and you should do it too.
#30AuthorsNoMen

Two extreme views of the same event (the recent Cloudflare outage):
"I didn't notice a thing and if it wasn't for chatter on IRC I would never have learned about it"
https://lists.nanog.org/archives/list/nanog@lists.na…

Material para el inicio de una nueva «guerra santa» en el rock: Billboard publicó su listado de las 50 mejores bandas de rock según su staff.
https://www.billboard.com/lists/best-rock-bands/
El top 10:
1 The Beatles
2 The Rolling Stones
3 Led Zeppelin
4…

I rarely make electronic shopping lists, so I only discovered today that the Notes app has a handy feature that converts kilograms into tons. Even when using the comma as decimal separator! It doesn’t recognize “dl” (customary in Switzerland), though, and come to think of it, it has none of the features demoed by Doug Engelbart in 1968.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@cheeaun/115415146417702654
After looking at this, got curious to know the limits in most servers.
So I did a little data analysis. Servers list from @…

A curated list of UI clients for accessing the ActivityPub Fediverse social network.
https://delightful.coding.social/delightful_fediverse_clients

delightful fediverse clients
Delightful curated lists of free software, open science and information sources.

Everyday #Emacs #orgmode task: merge two tables
I'm grading, and want to merge the class list with the list of assignment submissions. Include the two lists as named tables, and a tiny R-snippet will produce a merged table (also named).

I love that everyone has different unique tastes. And many people will probably find some of the things on my favorite albums list this year to be bizarre and unpleasant. But some of the things on some of these other (mainstream AND indie) 'best albums of 2025' lists.. whew. I can't even imagine listening to these ONCE, much less multiple times 😂

Is there a mailing list service (as in “I want to send concert announcements to a few people”) that’s not objectionable, not predatory, and not run by vile people?
For years Mailchimp was the go-to, but I see them landing on boycott lists of late.

Wow, what a wonderful day at @… ! They put on a great conference and I was honored to have been part of it. I held a privacy workshop and gave a #fedvierse talk. I just posted the worksheets from the workshop and the presentation from the talk over on the …

The Trump administration is providing the names of all air travelers to immigration officials,
substantially expanding its use of data sharing to expel people under deportation orders.
Under the previously undisclosed program, the Transportation Security Administration provides a list multiple times a week to Immigration and Customs Enforcement of travelers who will be coming through airports.
ICE can then match the list against its own database of people subject to deporta…

T.S.A. Is Providing Air Passenger Data to Immigration Agents for Deportation Effort
The Transportation Security Administration is providing passenger lists to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement to identify and detain travelers subject to deportation orders.

Solid list:
https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2025/10/06/102-lessons-from-102-books/?ck_subscriber_id=389259318
Don't run through LLM, it's already a very concise list. Take time and look through it.

List Recoverable Codes: The Good, the Bad, and the Unknown (hopefully not Ugly)
Nicolas Resch, S. Venkitesh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07597 https://arxiv.…

List Recoverable Codes: The Good, the Bad, and the Unknown (hopefully not Ugly)
List recovery is a fundamental task for error-correcting codes, vastly generalizing unique decoding from worst-case errors and list decoding. Briefly, one is given ''soft information'' in the form of input lists S_1,...,S_n of bounded size, and one argues that there are not too many codewords that agree a lot with this soft information. This general problem appears in many guises, both within coding theory and in theoretical computer science more broadly. In this article we survey recent resu…

You use @… ? A mail account or a mailing list? Please help to keep it going:
"We ask that individuals with email accounts or owners of lists give monthly or yearly.
If you are broke, live in the global South, or live somewhere with a devalued currency, we don’t expect you to give. This means that those with money in the global North should contrib…

The latest flurry of activity on the @… users mailing list arguing against my complaint that mailing lists are not fun to operate seems to have caused two lurkers to unsubscribe so far. Presumably because the sudden influx of email made them remember they are on a mailing list.

Relevant code in kubectl doing the completions: #kubernetes #zsh #shell #completion