These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week.

🔖 Lou Reed/Laurie Anderson/John Zorn January 10th, 2008 Stone, NYC pt 3

Music for saxophone, electric guitar, violin and electronics recorded by Robert O’Haire mixed & mastered by Eric Kramer & Lou Reed Tzadik issue three

🔖 John Zorn’s Naked City - The Marquee Club, New York City, NY, 1992-04-09

John Zorn’s Naked City April 9, 1992 The Marquee Club, New York, NY pro-shot (a neckey - voltarized upgrade)

Personnel: John Zorn: Alto Sax Bill Frisell: Guitar Wayne Horvitz: keyboards Fred Frith : Bass Joey Baron: drums Yamatsuka Eye: vocals

🔖 Pho & Banh Mi Saigonese

We have been at this location for over 20 years as formerly Saigonese Restaurant. The Wheaton area has changed dramatically over time as our customers and their preferences. Our restaurant became more and well-known good places to enjoy Vietnamese cuisines. After serious considerations, with kind suggestions from our customers, we rebranded to Pho and Banh Mi Saigonese.

🔖 About Standard Ebooks

Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven effort to produce a collection of high quality, carefully formatted, accessible, open source, and free public domain ebooks that meet or exceed the quality of commercially produced ebooks. The text and cover art in our ebooks are already believed to be in the U.S. public domain, and Standard Ebooks dedicates its own work to the public domain, thus releasing the entirety of each ebook file into the public domain. All the ebooks we produce are distributed free of cost and free of U.S. copyright restrictions.

🔖 The Rime of the Ancient Maintainer

Every culture produces heroes that reflect its deepest anxieties. The Greeks, terrified of both mortality and immortality, gave us Achilles. The Victorians, haunted by social mobility, gave us the self-made industrialist. And Silicon Valley, drunk on exponential curves and both terrified and entranced by endless funding rounds, has given us the Hero Developer: a figure who ships features at midnight, who “moves fast and breaks things,” who transforms whiteboard scribbles into billion-dollar unicorns through sheer caffeinated will.

We celebrate this person constantly. They’re on the front page of TechCrunch et al. They keynote conferences. Their GitHub contributions get screenshotted and shared like saintly relics.

Meanwhile, an unsung developer is updating dependencies, patching security vulnerabilities, and refactoring code that the Hero Developer wrote three years ago before moving on to their next “zero to one” opportunity.

They will never be profiled in Wired.

But they’re doing something far more important than innovation.

They’re preventing collapse.

🔖 One Number I Trust: Plain-Text Accounting for a Multi-Currency Household

No app did exactly what I needed, so I built my own personal finance system using plain-text accounting principles and a powerful Python library called Beancount. This post shows you how I handle imports, investments, multi-currency, and a two-person view.

🔖 Glamorous Christmas: Bringing Charm to Ruby

Today, Ruby 4.0 was released. What an exciting milestone for the language!

This release brings some amazing new features like the experimental Ruby::Box isolation mechanism, the new ZJIT compiler, significant performance improvements for class instantiation, and promotions of Set and Pathname to core classes. It’s incredible to see how Ruby continues to thrive and be pushed forward 30 years after its first release.

To celebrate this release, I’m happy to announce that I’ve been working on porting the Charmbracelet Go terminal libraries to Ruby, and today I’m releasing a first version of them. What better way to make this Ruby 4.0 release a little more glamorous and charming?

🔖 29 Finding a broken trace on my old Mac with the help of its ROM diagnostics

I remembered that people have been working towards documenting the Mac ROM startup tests and using them to diagnose problems, so I decided to give it a shot and see if Apple’s Serial Test Manager could identify my Performa’s issue. Where was the fault on this complicated board? Sure, I could test a zillion traces by hand, but why bother when the computer already knows what is wrong?

🔖 Public Domain Day 2026

1925 was a watershed year for the recording industry. The Jazz Age was in full swing and beginning in March, 1925, widespread adoption of electrical recording meant greater fidelity and new realism for recordings. DAHR documents over 11,000 recordings made in 1925–an all-time high for the industry.

🔖 Pulled 60 Minutes segment on CECOT

This is a screen recording of a 60 Minutes segment about the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) prison in El Salvador, which was intended to be aired December 22, 2025 but was pulled last minute for unclear reasons. Despite being pulled, it aired on Global-TV in Canada anyway.

🔖 Two Years After Cormac McCarthy’s Death, Rare Access to His Personal Library Reveals the Man Behind the Myth

Cormac McCarthy, one of the greatest novelists America has ever produced and one of the most private, had been dead for 13 months when I arrived at his final residence outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was a stately old adobe house, two stories high with beam-ends jutting out of the exterior walls, set back from a country road in a valley below the mountains. First built in 1892, the house was expanded and modernized in the 1970s and extensively modified by McCarthy himself, who, it turns out, was a self-taught architect as well as a master of literary fiction.

I was invited to the house by two McCarthy scholars who were embroiled in a herculean endeavor. Working unpaid, with help from other volunteer scholars and occasional graduate students, they had taken it upon themselves to physically examine and digitally catalog every single book in McCarthy’s enormous and chaotically disorganized personal library. They were guessing it contained upwards of 20,000 volumes. By comparison, Ernest Hemingway, considered a voracious book collector, left behind a personal library of 9,000.

🔖 How uv got so fast

uv is fast because of what it doesn’t do, not because of what language it’s written in. The standards work of PEP 518, 517, 621, and 658 made fast package management possible. Dropping eggs, pip.conf, and permissive parsing made it achievable. Rust makes it a bit faster still.

🔖 Post-Platform Digital Publishing Toolkit

The Post-Platform Digital Publishing Toolkit is an iterative digital and print publication by Well Gedacht Publishing exploring how to overcome the limitations of digital publishing on social media and other online platforms, and advocates for self-hosted infrastructures and practices for artists and artists’ book publishers. You can find the first iteration of the print publication here.

🔖 Giambattista Vico

Giambattista Vico (born Giovan Battista Vico /ˈviːkoʊ/; Italian: [ˈviko]; 23 June 1668 – 23 January 1744) was an Italian philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist during the Italian Enlightenment. He criticized the expansion and development of modern rationalism, finding Cartesian analysis and other types of reductionism impractical to human life, and he was an apologist for classical antiquity and the Renaissance humanities, in addition to being the first expositor of the fundamentals of social science and of semiotics. He is recognised as one of the first Counter-Enlightenment figures in history.

🔖 Robots Can Be Hacked in Minutes, Chinese Cybersecurity Experts Warn

Commercial robots have widespread and exploitable vulnerabilities that can allow hackers to take over within hours or even minutes, according to Chinese cybersecurity experts.

Security in the robotics industry is “riddled with holes,” said Xiao Xuangan, who works at Darknavy, an independent cybersecurity research and services firm based in Singapore and Shanghai. Xiao noted that when testing low-level security issues in quadruped robots, his team gained control of one of Deep Robotics’ Lite-series products in just an hour.