2025-12-31 14:06:51
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:
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:
A couple of weeks ago I learned that you can set sysfs values for Linux MD arrays in the mdadm.conf:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2025/10/msg00318.html
Then I learned this doesn't actually work for incremental assembly (which is how ~all modern Linux does …
The #fediverse is the best verse.
Jeff Pearlman lists the 5 nicest guys & 5 biggest jerks in his history as an #MLB beat writer.
▫️Ranking Of The Five Nicest Ballplayers I Had The Pleasure Of Covering
https://youtube.com/shorts/A9cdPeeaC1I
On the finite irreducible subgroups of $\mathrm{GL}_n(\mathbb{C})$ and $\mathrm{PGL}_n(\mathbb{C})$
Gerard Gonzalo Calbet\'o
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00718 https://…
Esbarrei aqui agora com este canal contendo všrios cursos do MIT, de všrias šreas diferentes. Todos em inglês. Mas acho que podem interessar a alguns:
https://www.youtube.com/@mitocw
The medical facility I go to for PT has a bike rack but it looks like garbage. It is bolted down but just does not look secure.
It's in the parking structure, so it's not exactly out in public... maybe that's a good thing?
But also, I can't ride my bike in the parking structure.
#bikeTooter
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
Proud to see UC Press books recognized across these best-of lists.
From pandemic response and climate history to teaching,
art, and the politics of equity,
these books reflect the kind of publishing we believe in:
books that challenge assumptions,
recover overlooked lives,
and bring complex ideas into public conversation.
Bold, field-defining scholarship for the public good
Happy new year and all that. Maybe now's a good juncture to start looking into the usual new-year activities:
- Making some self-improvement resolution you won't stick to for more than a fortnight.
- Replacing the batteries in your fire alarm (with alkaline cells, not rechargeable!)
- Unsubscribe from all those marketing lists you've been binning for all of 2025.
- Be nicer to everyone and be nicest to the ones you love.
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…
new_zealand_collab: New Zealand scientific collaborations (2015)
A network of scientific collaborations among institutions in New Zealand. Nodes are institutions (universities, organizations, etc.), and two nodes i,j are connected if Scopus lists at least one publication with authors at institutions i and j, in the period 2010-2015. Edges are weighted by the number of such collaborations. Nodes are annotated with the categorical type of institution.
This network has 1511 nodes an…
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…
the most excellent @… has posted his tapes from the very tasty looking fly around festival from august, with a bunch of great contemporary acoustic improvisers (powers/rolin, elkhorn) & a few songwriters (myriam gendron, joan shelley). looking forward to getting autumnal with a bunch of these sets soon.
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.
If anyone is interested in playing this out, this is one of the sites listed to identify agregous yachts...
https://www.superyachtfan.com/lists/biggest-super-yachts/
Am I right to call out these weirdos who are collecting lists of women? I dunno. It just creeps me out.
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 @…
What began as a modest workplace amenity for public servants has metastasized into a taxpayer-funded citadel of privilege
— a Capitol Hill concierge service offering the kind of round-the-clock care and personalized access that, in the private sector, is the sort of luxury care only millionaires can afford.
All the while, the nation’s public health care system lists beneath it.
When a lawmaker collapses, Washington treats it like a national emergency.
In 2012, Senator…
Extinctions ‘already happening’ in Wales as report lists 3,000 at-risk species https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2025/12/extinctions-already-happening-in-wales-as-report-lists-3000-at-risk-species/
…
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.
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.
new_zealand_collab: New Zealand scientific collaborations (2015)
A network of scientific collaborations among institutions in New Zealand. Nodes are institutions (universities, organizations, etc.), and two nodes i,j are connected if Scopus lists at least one publication with authors at institutions i and j, in the period 2010-2015. Edges are weighted by the number of such collaborations. Nodes are annotated with the categorical type of institution.
This network has 1511 nodes an…
@… Also, take note of your address and phone number somewhere.
It has been surprisingly common for me to need to provide lists of all addresses I’ve had in the past X years, and dig through geotagged photos of old apartments to recall the addresses.
Hope that moderation lists make it over from Bluesky as a feature on here.
E.g. I'd love to share onr of alt-right people and their collaborators in the Ruby community so it's easy to mute or block them.
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 😂
“By 2040, the Locational scenario could reduce the total system cost by 23 – 59 Bn. EUR annually. These savings are in the order of magnitude of those associated with the integration of European electricity markets.”
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/J…
OpenAI rolls out an update to let users adjust ChatGPT's characteristics, including how warm or enthusiastic it is, and its use of headers, lists, and emojis (Emma Roth/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/848435/openai-chatgpt-characteris…
housekeeping: i migrated my last dozen lists of year-end favorites to my site. less ranked best-ofs, more extended listening etc. journals so i don't forget. now tagged as "ginchy shit": https://jessejarnow.com/category/ginchy-shit/
TIL: The Japanese Blind ICT Network (JBICT) runs AT surveys (kind of like WebAIM’s).
#accessibility
Discover the power of property-based testing in R with the #quickcheck package! Seamlessly integrates with #testthat and offers a variety of generators for atomic vectors, lists, and tibbles. Perfect for ensuring your code's reliability. Check it out:
Wait... has Adobe changed the layout/features of the Creative Cloud desktop app? All it lists for me are installed apps and the market place... There's no font management 🤔
#Adobe #CreativeCloud
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 …
So, something that's become clear to me is that we still have a real need for self-managing community email lists like we used to have. Many people still use Google Groups, which are horrible. The old Ezmlm and Mailman lists I used to run are now creaky and hard to maintain... I've done a bit of a look around - I implemented Listmonk, but it's not what I'm after - it's broadcast/marketing, not any subscriber to all subscribers. So I've come back to Mailman, now on v3.…
Color me confused - I see that el cheeto's dog, Lindsey Halligan, is listed as a lawyer in Virginia.
Yet, when go to the Virginia bar website and search for her in their lists of Virginia attorneys I get zero hits.
Huh?
The page below says that she is a member of the Virginia Bar, but the Virginia Bar seems not to know who she is?
Am I fat fingering something on the Virginia bar's attorney search site?
Dallas Cowboys make 3 intriguing roster moves for final stretch of season https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/onsi/news/dallas-cowboys-3-intriguing-roster-moves-final-stretch-nfl-season
Today, a customer lost some changes due to git stach drop. This meant that they were no longer accessible with git reflog. As a last resort, git fsck came to our rescue: https://www.python4data.science/en/latest/productive/git/review.html#fsck
New #BandcampFriday purchase, Void Ecstasy by Nostalghia was available for free, but I paid $5 to support the artist and add it to my collection.
https://bandcamp.com/pmarg
Looking for a phantomjs alternative, ran a search and ended up on a page with a seemingly good comparison of possibilities, until you realize the page is on zenrows.com domain. I don't think I'll take YOUR word for your product. Not sure what snakeoil they might be selling but feels overtly self-aggrandizing at least
new_zealand_collab: New Zealand scientific collaborations (2015)
A network of scientific collaborations among institutions in New Zealand. Nodes are institutions (universities, organizations, etc.), and two nodes i,j are connected if Scopus lists at least one publication with authors at institutions i and j, in the period 2010-2015. Edges are weighted by the number of such collaborations. Nodes are annotated with the categorical type of institution.
This network has 1511 nodes an…
LLM-Assisted Web Measurements
Simone Bozzolan, Stefano Calzavara, Lorenzo Cazzaro
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08101 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.08101
FreeBSD 15.0-ALPHA5 Now Available
https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-stable/2025-October/003330.html
For freebsd-update:
― "THE STEP OF UPDATING YOUR EXISTING SYSTEM FIRST IS NECESSARY …"
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.
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 Trump administration is drawing up “secret lists of terrorist groups inside the United States,”
Senator Elissa Slotkin said on the floor of Congress yesterday
— the first such reference to the effects of National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7).
The directive lays out Donald Trump’s policies with regard to equating “anti-Christian” and “anti-capitalist” sentiment with domestic terrorism.
As a result of the directive, the FBI’s domestic terrorism watch…
Clapshot: open source browser-based media review like frame.io
https://cinelinux.com/en/2025/10/04/clapshot-a-alternativa-open-source-ao-frame-io-para-revisao-de-videos/
Haven't tested it yet, but the review seem…
Yeah! How hard would it be anyway to get thousands of volunteers who work on a completely free project to emulate these other commercial entities with full time employees who are making stuff that they sell for actual money? Just, like, commit to some schedule, folks! What? No, I can't use something else that suits me better. I like your thing.
Historian Timothy Snyder lists eerie similarities between how Stalin came to power and how Stephen Miller came to power.
https://snyder.substack.com/p/stalinism-and-stephen-miller-video
So now I'm watching "The Death of Stalin" streaming.
A curated list of UI clients for accessing the ActivityPub Fediverse social network.
https://delightful.coding.social/delightful_fediverse_clients
new_zealand_collab: New Zealand scientific collaborations (2015)
A network of scientific collaborations among institutions in New Zealand. Nodes are institutions (universities, organizations, etc.), and two nodes i,j are connected if Scopus lists at least one publication with authors at institutions i and j, in the period 2010-2015. Edges are weighted by the number of such collaborations. Nodes are annotated with the categorical type of institution.
This network has 1511 nodes an…
@… Also these related lists of all prebuilt "templates" and "features" have come in handy so I'm not re-creating something that's already there:
https://containers.dev/templ…
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.…
Trump administration prepares sweeping crackdown on leftist networks
Thursday marks a first deadline,
set this month in a memo from Attorney General Pam Bondi,
for all federal law enforcement agencies to “coordinate delivery”
to the FBI of their intelligence files
on “Antifa” and “Antifa-related” activities.
Bondi has tasked the FBI with using those files to draw up lists of Americans and foreigners to investigate
as part of a campaign directed by …
Beyond Cons: Purely Relational Data Structures
Rafaello Sanna, William E. Byrd, Nada Amin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03170 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.03170…
SCRIBES: Web-Scale Script-Based Semi-Structured Data Extraction with Reinforcement Learning
Shicheng Liu, Kai Sun, Lisheng Fu, Xilun Chen, Xinyuan Zhang, Zhaojiang Lin, Rulin Shao, Yue Liu, Anuj Kumar, Wen-tau Yih, Xin Luna Dong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01832
I was looking at a set of dumbbells described as "20kg adjustable". The product description lists the individual weights:
4x 0.5kg, 4x 1.25kg, 4x 2.5kg
Plus two bars.
That adds up to 17kg right? So we can determine that each bar weighs 1.5kg by themselves for a max of 10kg per dumbbell.
The reviews are absolutely full of people giving 1 star and writing NOT AS DESCRIBED ONLY 17KG and CAN'T MAKE IT 20KG UNLESS PUT ALL WEIGHTS ON ONE BAR.
🤦♂️
New malware leverages WhatsApp to target Brazilian government and businesses https://therecord.media/brazil-malware-whatsapp-sorvepotel
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…
new_zealand_collab: New Zealand scientific collaborations (2015)
A network of scientific collaborations among institutions in New Zealand. Nodes are institutions (universities, organizations, etc.), and two nodes i,j are connected if Scopus lists at least one publication with authors at institutions i and j, in the period 2010-2015. Edges are weighted by the number of such collaborations. Nodes are annotated with the categorical type of institution.
This network has 1511 nodes an…
one of the reasons mastadon is obviously the best social media network is because i don't think sp**ify even offers a way to post their lists here. also, mastodon still has a headphone jack.
In the latest defense filing,
Luigi Mangione's lawyers claim
Pam Bondi was a partner at the lobbying firm
Ballard Partners
before she became attorney general,
and the company lists UnitedHealth Group (UHG) as a client.
As a result,
Bondi derives and continues to receive personal and financial benefits from Ballard
"in the form of a profit-sharing plan from Ballard's professional association with UHG,"
according to cour…
new_zealand_collab: New Zealand scientific collaborations (2015)
A network of scientific collaborations among institutions in New Zealand. Nodes are institutions (universities, organizations, etc.), and two nodes i,j are connected if Scopus lists at least one publication with authors at institutions i and j, in the period 2010-2015. Edges are weighted by the number of such collaborations. Nodes are annotated with the categorical type of institution.
This network has 1511 nodes an…
Mastodon lists for people's posts excluding boosts.
Is this a feature of any Mastodon client?
I want the from: effect. Focused on the person.
#Mastodon
Relevant code in kubectl doing the completions: #kubernetes #zsh #shell #completion
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.
Good Morning #Canada
Last weekend our granddaughter visited to help decorate our tree and we watched Elf, a movie about #Christmas spirit, because we were feeling Christmassy. I think the majority of Canadians believe in the spirit of this season. We're a little bit more polite and kinder, if that's even possible, and underneath the snark, the passive aggressiveness, the ##ElbowsUp, is a pack of big cuddly beavers. You don't have to take my word for it because places like Quebec City, Banff, and Vancouver regularly end up on lists for best places to sit on Santa's knee. He lives in Canada so not a surprise. Did you know that in 2018, Canada was ranked as #1 most Christmassy country in the world. They can't put it on the internet if it isn't true.
#CanadaIsAwesome #MerryChristmas
https://dailyhive.com/mapped/canada-ranked-1-most-christmassy-country-in-the-world
Police are investigating after the home of Circuit Court Judge Diane Goodstein, 69, roared in flames on Edisto Beach.
On Sept 3 Judge Diane Goodstein had put a hold on DOJ's request to deliver South Carolina voter lists to the federal government.
Goodstein's four-bedroom, four bath home went up in smoke at around 11.30am on Saturday, Oct 4
Her family, including her ex-senator husband Arnold Goodstein, was rushed to hospital.
South Carolina Chief Justice John K…
Donald Trump is dialing up pressure on the Justice Department to freshly scrutinize ballots from the 2020 election,
raising tensions with administration officials who think their time is better spent examining voter lists for future elections.
In recent private meetings, public comments and social media posts,
Trump has renewed demands that members of his administration find fraud in the five-year-old defeat that he never accepted.
He recently hired at the White Ho…