Updates for August 2026
Here's what I did during in August:
My daughter started preschool and we all started adjusting to the new schedule.
I reorganized my desk in the office to fit a new sewing workbench and replaced some of our bedroom furniture.
I started a few more sewing projects.
I installed a rear cargo rack on the wet weather bike in preparation for the rainy season.
I finished reading Busy Doing Nothing. And I read a lot of articles, mostly technical:
Nine Years, Never the Same Job
This sums up how I've managed to stay interested in my job, despite being on the same team the entire time.
The Lua community needs to learn to move on
I’m sure I’m partly to blame for this because I engaged in this and helped others, by maintaining compat-5.3, itself an evolution of compat-5.2, with a history tracing all the way back to compat-5.0, which predates my involvement with Lua… and then we’re talking over 20 years ago.
Like Hisham, I want Lua to be a traditional programming language, but I just don't see it happening. There's too much inertia in its current use case and the more popular languages are too entrenched in the spaces that Lua would be used for. Making Lua Compatible With What? is a solid rebuttal, if a bit abrupt:
To attempt to make Lua appeal to non-Lua users is to only make a language that is more fractured. Every feature you add to Lua will bring up more flaws, more incompatibilities, more need (or more aptly desire) for new changes, new concepts, new features.
They don’t make ’em like Sublime Text anymore
Robin Sloan, of all people, shared in the sentiment with Still Sublime after all these years. This is consistently one of the tools that I come back to, just like Blake Waston did in Rediscovering Sublime Text.
Here’s the Tribeca Film Fest website, it sucks, please make me an Excel sheet of all the events. Organize by a) movie, b) director(s), c) venue. Ten minutes later, the film festival made sense.
It's sad that so much of what AI is used for involves making sense of information that should be (and is in the best interest of the provider to be!) clear.
RISC-V: They Should Have Known Better
I find myself agreeing with pretty much everything that Dmitry takes issue with. There's a balance that systems programmers and CPU architects strike when designing an ISA. It's clear the architects were in charge of RISC-V.
I love the immediacy and no-frills aspects of TUIs due to their constraints, but they're terrible for accessibility and visualization. Richard Mamorstein also wrote about Why I'm not a Terminal Guy Anymore this month.
Years of Salt and Metal: The crash of Hop-a-Jet flight 823
The engines of flight 823 failed not because of some common component of the fuel system or some external influence, but rather because both engines possessed an identical latent mechanical flaw that made them both independently vulnerable to failure under the same specific operating conditions.
The maintenance requirements for business jets seems completely insane to me.
Tom Bihn Daylight Briefcase Review
This is one of the best bags I own (and I own way too many). It's simple and it works and it doesn't have a lot of stuff that gets in the way. I don't like the styling of other Tom Bihn bags but this one nails it.
This is a nice reflection on slow travel with a car the author clearly adores.
We didn't go anywhere or tackle any big projects this month. The most impactful change was replacing our queen-sized bed with a new king-sized bed frame and mattress. We also got matching nightstands and I bought an IKEA floor lamp to free up space on top of mine for charging cords, books, and other stuff that accumulates there. Our dressers are next, but we probably won't get to them this year. They work fine and stay out of the way.
On a Sunday, I made pancakes and my daughter helped by sticking her hands in the batter to squish all the clumps. The batter turned out very runny. We then took her to community pool when it opened at 10:00, for the first time. She had a blast being held up and kicking around in the pool with us, even if she wasn't too sure about the situation at first. It's $24 to use the pool for three people, which was surprising, but I also don't know what the typical rates are.
I reorganized the desk in my office to face directly out towards the garden. That opened up some room to put together the other sit/stand desk against the wall so we can use it for sewing projects. I'm still using the Janome 7318 machine that we've had for ages now, but I'm eyeing an upgrade if this hobby sticks. I started in on a LearnMYOG Everyday Fanny Pack and want to work more with canvas in the future.
My daughter also started preschool in the mornings before her nap. I get to bike her there in the trailer on Mondays and Fridays when I work from home.