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Well, today is the day. I'm finally "sorta happy enough to pull the trigger" on publishing the book I've been working on for a very long time. It's a technical history book: by a techie, for techies (although I think that between all the code samples, there is plenty of meat for "tech-adjacent" and "tech-interested" people). It tells the story of the Lisp programming language, invented by a genius called John McCarthy in 1958 and today still going strong (to the extent that many people see it as the most powerful programming language in existence).
And this is a time for shameless self promotion, even if you don't plan on buying the book, please repost :-). Self-publishing is self-marketing, so there we go.
If you do buy and read it, please let me know how you liked it!
The book landing page, https://berksoft.ca/gol, has links to all outlets where you can buy the book,
wink posted Feb 13, 2026
If only I knew (or wrote down) when I shut down my Prosody installation.
Today I signed up for the first xmpp account in probably 10 years. Let's see how different it feels now.
So You Want To Write An Open Source Discord Replacement
Things you don’t need:
- federation/distributed systems
- multiparty end-to-end encryption
- an entirely new operating system kernel specially designed to—
Things you DO need:
- a user interface that is Normal
- the ability to use languages other than English and writing systems other than Latin
- higher standards of user experience than how irc actually works in the real world
- any fucking clue how Discord works and why people use it
I have muted replies to this post due to the usual reasons
I passed all my courses except for Greek mythology.
That has always been my Achilles' elbow.
own the libs by writing them yourself from scratch.
A reminder, so people don’t forget. Substack unabashedly platforms and promotes literal Nazi publications.
If you publish on Substack or support authors there, you are paying rent for nazis. It’s that simple.
Refuse to support authors there, and they will move.
Ghost awaits:
https://ghost.org/
The nazi problem:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/substacks-nazi-problem-wont-go-away-after-push-notification-apology/
#Substack #Nazis #NaziProblem #Ghost #Publishing #NaziBar #Writing
wink posted Feb 5, 2026
FreeBSD 13.5-STABLE seems to work perfectly on this 2012 Raspberry Pi Model B (512MB RAM), so much better than that Raspberry Debian trixie version that I am close to trying to measure the speed of the SD card I used.
I'm buying a kitchen and they sent a sample of the marble counter top with a metal ball showing what the sink will be like. Now my desk looks like a 90s 3D rendering tool demo image.
wink posted Feb 2, 2026
Dug out some half-finished near 10y old small PHP project yesterday and rewrote it between chores.
Still kinda nice to just be editing a file live on the (web) server in vim if it's just for fun and when you're finished it's already deployed.
But just now I am noticing how verbose (or maybe fairer: not terse) some syntax constructs are compared to many languages I only learned later.