JJ MacLean

Sick of everything being Orwellian or Kafkaesque. I demand more Scarrylous situations, where animals drive vehicles and run small businesses.

Child of Omelas? That’s thinking too small. What if like eight billion people suffered so a few dozen guys could live lives so insane they convinced themselves it’s more likely they’re inside a computer simulation

If you run a website or blog, make sure you have an RSS feed. I've been trying to stop the endless scroll of Reddit by going directly to the source, but it's difficult if there's no way to easily see new content short of visiting every site individually. Make it easy and cut out the middleman!

Wow, outstanding!

Donating to Wikipedia is more important than ever, and it only takes a couple of minutes! donate.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?...

Painting of a shattered mirror reflecting a sunset in pale blue, purple and fiery yellow and orange.

Day 3 of #JanuArty is Shape

Another practice piece inspired by my love of stained glass and the photography of Bing Wright. 🧵👇🏼

#Art #Painting #AcrylicPainting

1/4 of a color pencil mandala on black paper. Center blue flower, green leaves, puff flowers and blue butterflies- work in progress

Day 3 #Januarty Shapes
I love the look of opaque colored pencil on black paper. When you add a touch of white everything just pops! (There’s a bit of acrylic marker on here too-) #wip #coloredpencil #doodleart #doodle

I'm putting together an end-of-year personal retrospective. I try each year and I'm always left wanting for some greater insight. I'm curious how others do it?
Is it structured or unstructured?
What are you including or NOT including?
And what do you do once you have it?

Your username is so apt in this case, lol. That's a good idea, great goal for '25!

I agree - It's refreshing to not be bombarded by toxicity like other sites.

#artAdventCalendar is so damn awesome. I'm super impressed by the creativity and skill on display.
Maybe I'll have something to contribute for next year's...

I'm tired of the lackluster performance of my work Dell laptop, so I'm adding another Win11 install on my main gaming rig for work, but I figure why stop there? Now queuing up Linux Mint and maybe NixOS?

Anyway, both books are FANTASTIC, and I can't recommend them enough!

I also happened to finish "Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands" by @katebeaton.bsky.social this morning (in one sitting!) and I was struck by how... complicated her experiences were and what future Martian homesteaders would have in store for them if this occurs so close to home.

I just finished "A City on Mars" by Kelly and @zachweinersmith.bsky.social. I'd been a big fan of Zach's for a long time and the book was fantastic. Space colonization always struck me as seeming too easy the way certain folks talk about it, but I didn't appreciate the breadth of issues to overcome.

Whoa, that’s pretty cool. Does it expose more of the tree as the year goes on?

Hot take: I shouldn't have to pay a cloud/SaaS provider for a stream of security logs, and they should definitely not be behind a paywall to even see the logs. All this rent seeking for basic functionality is wild.

I'm thinking of buying a brighter headlamp to compete with the washout of light so I can still see the trail when it happens.

The electric cars are an interesting problem - I'm generally not directly on the road but they do they do tend to creep up and surprise me at road crossings a lot.

Running at night has to be the best time to run. Complete solitude and it’s moving meditation.

Aside from those horrible new car lights, doubly so for the ones that automatically turn on the high beams on dark roads.

Oof, not fun. I enjoy running in the rain and every year I forget about nipple chafing for a few outings then I remember why I have anti chafe sticks all over the house.

Depending on your local library you may have them available electronically (Hoopla for me). There are TONS. Holy moly. Start adding them to the TBR…

Stained glass of the starship Enterprise from Star Trek overlaying the federation insignia in a hexagon.

Rather than keep doomscrolling the news, I'll share this (I think) pretty cool stained glass piece I made. It was my second piece ever and my first design. Now need somewhere to hang it!
#stainedglass #art #trek

I can't help but feel like this is, deep down, the result of a deep lack of empathy for others. How do we both be empathetic and not lose our society to those pandering to people's spiteful nature?

Just started season 1 on nebula - I wish I had done so sooner, story is great and very immersive.

Network topology in GNS3

Early morning BGP labs! Mix of IOSv and IOS XE in GNS3. I'm amazed at how much this has improved in the last 10 years. Not having to tweak idle-pc values and using multiple host nodes, imposing packet loss with a few clicks. Really impressed!

We'll need to see some data showing that mail-in voting is meaningfully less secure and in what way. Anecdotal stories and one-offs are meaningless.

After moving to Oregon and having mail-in as the default voting it’s way less of a hassle. I don’t think there’s a single benefit to in person voting over mail-in (or drop off which is actually what I do). Everyone should have that!

The job market can be a real beast! Hang in there!

When I stepped back from management and took a 100% technical job again I was surprised at how rusty I was in so many regards. But the amount of educational materials and labbing options (beyond manually tweaking GNS3) is mind boggling and has made the transition possible (and fun!).

Great tip! Thanks for sharing!