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2026-01-06

Week 261: A good rest

Thus begins the sixth year of these weeknotes. The world is in some ways better than 2021 – we’re not all living under biosecurity house arrest, for one significant thing – but in other ways it seems to be taking a turn for the worse.

We had to reset the “days since the United States illegally invaded another country” counter to zero yet again. L— had been at work all day, and as I cooked dinner I listened to her increasing incredulity as she belatedly learned all the details.

In one sense it’s nothing new, but what is different is that they don’t even pretend any more. It is at least honest to call it the Department of War rather than Defense, and Trump openly says it is about oil – although, frankly, I’m not sure what he knows, or whether that’s really the motivation of the people around him.

But before all that we took a trip to the Tate Modern to catch Emily Kam Kngwarray before the exhibition ends next week. She had an amazing life. She started making batik in her 60s, and didn’t begin to paint canvases until her late 70s. The thing that I found fascinating was that in the videos, other people from her Country understood her work clearly, whereas I struggled to grasp more than the really obvious details (like emu tracks).

I listened out for her name in the videos where people were speaking about her in Anmatyerr; it seems to be pronounced /kŋwaɾˈaj/, with stress on the last syllable, but I can’t find any reliable corroboration online.

The week was a relaxed one for both of us. L— had Monday to Friday off (but then had to work at the weekend) and we enjoyed just taking a break. We didn’t do anything special to celebrate the New Year. I cooked a vegan haggis for dinner and we were both in bed by around midnight.

Links:

• Codebook is a spelling checker for code
• A Good Day to Font Hard. “TL;DR: I have a metric truckload of links to free-to-use fonts that you might like to be somewhat aware of very much actually.”
• From Silicon to Darude Sand-storm: breaking famous synthesizer DSPs. Talk from CCC on how the Usual Suspects group reverse-engineered the DSP in the JV-8000 and created a full emulator.
• Reverse engineered disposable vape boards. They’re quite capable.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Red. “Boy, the problem was more structural than I realized.”
• The Silicon Valley Stack Doesn’t Work Here: Why Africa Will Lead the Post-Bloat Web. “The trend of making the user’s phone do the heavy lifting (Client-Side Rendering) is a mistake for our market. We need to return to Server-Side Rendering (SSR).” My phone doesn’t exactly thrive on heavy client side apps, and it’s reasonably powerful.
• loss32: let’s build a Win32/Linux. “A dream of a Linux distribution where the entire desktop environment is Win32 software running under WINE. A completely free and open-source OS where you can just download .exe files and run them, for the power user who isn’t necessarily a Unixhead, or just for someone who thinks this sounds fun.”