On Life Notes

We had two weeks for a country we could spend months exploring. From a Vladivostok layover to the Great Wall, misty mountains and Shanghai, with Lena, a tour group and a questionable teapot.

I miss the old cars on the streets, and I would very much like another plate of ropa vieja. But the change that has stayed with me most is how differently I now react to news from Cuba.

I wanted to learn how LLM bots worked, but another helpful assistant sounded boring. A slightly ridiculous pig-pirate sounded much more promising.

Old video archives often fail to import cleanly into Apple Photos because the container, video codec, audio codec, or metadata is not what the Apple stack expects. FFmpeg is enough to fix most of that, but the right command depends on what is actually inside the file.

The past few years have been a tough time for me. I was in a deep life crisis and was no longer willing to work on my website. It was always a hobby without commercial or social use, a small but steady source of bills. I was in debt then, so I killed it without a second thought or regrets.

My wife's colleagues planned a trip to Kazan. I went along for a look further east: churches, a ferry across a river that looked like a sea, and an unexpected ministry of agriculture.

Piet Hein’s short poem captures something I love about learning: making mistakes again, but a little less each time.

Books were hard to get when I was a kid. They were expensive and, on top of that, in short supply. Many people owned no books at all; some copied them by hand. But there were always plenty of books in our family, and it was shocking to me to see a room with no books in it.

I have never been really good at writing. I won some awards in my childhood. I wrote some shitty verses in my youth. None of those achievements really were significant for the universe around me. It was all like a silly child play with the symbols I barely knew.

Virtual worlds can be very different. Some require a sharp eye, some quick reactions, and some a powerful graphics card.