Novelist Karl Schroeder has an intriguing possible answer to Fermi’s Paradox, i.e. the question “Where are all those aliens?". I’ve lately been trumpeting my revision of Clarke’s Law (which originally said ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’). My revision says that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Nature. […] Basically, either advanced alien civilizations don’t exist, or we can’t see them because they are indistinguishable from natural systems.

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I’ve just finished moving my entire blog to Micro.blog. Hello M.b! There were a few stragglers (M.b has some issues when importing Markdown files with quotes in front-end matter “title” fields) but I’m good now — settling in, shaping my new virtual couch cushions to my liking, etc. My blog posts go back to 2002. I started blogging a bit earlier than that, actually, but I’ve pruned the archive over the years because not all those morsels stood the test of time.

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1. Stop pretending: You didn’t “lose your cat” — the wee fucker likely ran off because your relationship was asymmetrical to begin with. 2. Don’t waste time making a “Has anyone seen my lost cat” poster for plastering your neighborhood with, because (a) there are already hundreds like them and (b) see 1. 3. Instead, if you come across any cat roaming the streets, just grab it. It’s yours now, congratulations.

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As much as I like the idea of Fairphone, the execution leaves a lot to be desired. The Fairphone 3 unit I bought for the office half a year ago has issues. It keeps its owner from making calls (more precise: there’s a 50:50 chance microphone and speaker will shut off after making a speaker call, it’s a known issue and we’re still waiting for a fix); she’s got an electrical shock hitting her ear while using in-ears; the charge drops like a brick from 100% to 20% within 2h and I don’t think that’s a 3rd-party app issue.

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They are not special, but they’re mine. I’ve distilled them down over the last few years; they are a result of me getting a sense of who I am, together with what a person I want to be. (Wow, that sounded way less pretentious in my mind.) Don’t be a dick. Don’t fuck it all up. Don’t forget to be kind. Don’t delay having fun. Don’t stop moving, ever. Turns out that for me, they kind of cover every imaginable situation.

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TL;DR I built a little helper tool named Bearing which allows for scripting Bear. It adds to Bear’s own capabilites by slightly abstracting and enhancing the experience: There’s a dedicated bearing CLI tool that accepts plain arguments. No more bear://… calls, no more URL-encoding anything. The CLI tool returns callback responses as JSON. https://github.com/carlo/bearing Why? A few weeks back I switched from Evernote to Bear. I like Bear a lot (Markdown!

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A few days ago I started Assassin’s Creed: Origins on PS4 after buying the complete edition during a PSN sale, and hoo boy, what a game. Absolutely stunning, lovely atmosphere, so much to do (duh, it’s a Ubisoft game), and I’d say I’ve seen less than 20% of it so far. 👍🏼 I was about to write “I’ve played most AC games” but after taking a look at the release history I realize I was wrong.

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