Blog

Is short for "Weblog" which short for "Web Log".

The Great (Refrigerator) Divide

I like a good hot sauce. It’s not, like, my personality, but I enjoy them. There are enough different hot sauces that having a bit of a collection of them is reasonable. Cholula is a mainstay, working equally well on Mexican and egg-based dishes. Although admit Tabasco is my general go-to. The green Tabasco works […]

ToiletTree Fogless Shower Mirror

I know this is a weird product recommendation, but I’ve just thought about it too long and it needs to come out. I’ve used the ToiletTree Fogless Shower Mirror for like 15 years at least. See you’ve got this problem with shower mirrors where they like instantly fog up with the steam. This mirror solves […]

Tom Burkert on controlling what he reads, through RSS of course. If I’m in the mood for something lighter, I can just look into my “Fun” folder to check out new stuff from The Oatmeal or xkcd. If I feel like reading something more thoughtful, I’d dive into my “Reads” folder for The Marginalian or Sentiers. Feeling like catching up on […]

Everything is Broken

Over in the ol’ ShopTalk Discord (that’s what our Patreon thingy unlocks) our editor Chris Enns was venting about some streaming gear woes. And I said: Nothing Ever Works Chris ultimately blogged the situation and used my reply as part of the title of the blog post. Then shortly after, Jason Rodriguez’s post made the […]

Plates

I bought a new set the other day, after asking about it on Bluesky. This is me jotting down the good recommendations I got.

Oregon Rocketry

My co-worker Robert is into model rocketry. I made a few rockets in my day, but the hobby stopped at Estes. I didn’t really realize people take rocketry much further until knowing Robert. His partner Michelle produced a short video piece for OPB on the community around it here. I’d embed the video here, but […]

Oatmeal on AI Art

Reading Oatmeal stuff is always such a seesaw for me. It’s so riddled with like boobshark jokes and I’m like, yeah yeah ha ha. I don’t hate that kind of humor or find it offensive, I just don’t think it’s very funny. Then it’s also so riddled with such earnest heartfelt well-articulated thoughts that I’m […]

Media Diet

📺 Wondla — 10/10 kids show. I was way into it. Post-apoc situation with underground bunkers (apparently Apple loves that theme) where when the protagonist girl busts out of it, the world is quite different. The premise and payoff in Season 1 was better than the commentary vibe of Season 2, but I liked it […]

Clap on the off beat

Clapping on the on-beat sounds weird and wrong on (most?) songs. In (most?) 4/4 songs, that means clapping on the 1 and 3 sounds bad and 2 and 4 sounds good/normal. But an audience of a bunch of random folks just getting excited can get it wrong! This video of Harry Connick Jr. extending a […]

Fixing the `opendiff` command line tool

On my Mac, you can use this command like… And it’ll open some built-in GUI app called FileMerge to show you the diff. It wasn’t working for me. I wish I copied the exact error but it was something about the path being wrong or the executable not being available or something. The solution that […]