iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I'll never get over the fact that I went to high school with Mike Jr. Thinking that Critch is a standard name for Nfld. (Lots of Crouches, Gruchys, Crumbys... why not Critches.) So when we all regaled him with "Dis is Mike Critch fer da VOCM news sarvice", I just thought the name was a coincidence.

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John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

I've never been to Bakka after they moved to Harbord St. But when I heard that was their new location, somehow I knew exactly what building it must be. One I have fond memories of.

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John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

OH: You aren't gonna hit my $4000 mouth... You're the only one of us that hasn't been KILLED by ORTHODONTIA!

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John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

If you see this, we IMPLORE you to post a picture from whatever device you're using without explanation.

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John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

TIL: the origin of the "Pink" and Copland defunct Apple operating system initiatives. Different-colored index cards when deciding which OS features to do in the near and long term. (The near-term features that actually shipped were on blue cards.) www.macworld.com/article/3136...

macworld.com

35 years ago, the Mac got an era-defining upgrade

System 7 is mostly forgotten today, but we're all still using many of its innovations

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John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 09/05/2026

80 characters? I mean, my Commodore 64 had a 132-character display. I did my Comp Sci homework assignments for the first couple of pre-Amiga years using a 2-pixel-wide(!) font in a VT52 or VT100 terminal emulator.

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John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

I have memories that make me smile from every one of those tennis courts.

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John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 04/04/2026

In my personal music rankings, the best bangers/duds ratios are kind of an unusual pairing. AC/DC and Tedeschi Trucks Band. Well would you look at that.

Calender for August 2026 showing concerts by AC/DC and Tedeschi Trucks Band one week apart.

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John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 21/03/2026

I would eat scorpion lollipops. And have eaten gator - in Toronto of all places.

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John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

Somehow I came to the exact same conclusion as in this thread.

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John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 09/02/2026

TIL: the ancient Olympic games weren't held anywhere near Mt. Olympus. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympia...

en.wikipedia.org

Olympia, Greece - Wikipedia

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Andy Pavlo @andypavlo.bsky.social · 05/01/2026

I've posted my latest recap of the world of databases: www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/blog/... All the hot topics from the last year: • More Postgres action! • MCP for everyone! • MongoDB gets litigious with FerretDB! • File formats! • Market movements! • The richest person in the history of the world!

cs.cmu.edu

Databases in 2025: A Year in Review

The world tried to kill Andy off but he had to stay alive to to talk about what happened with databases in 2025.

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John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 15/11/2025

Greatest first line of a song ever. The lyrics contain a lot of what I think of as "teased rhymes" even if that's not strictly what they are. Every time I hear it, I'm thinking ...a werewolf drinking a Pina Colada at Trader Vic's, and his hair was purple. Huh! I'd like to meet James Taylor.

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John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 09/11/2025

The most accessible explanation of quantum physics I ever heard was from @robertjsawyer.com at his science fiction writing course at Ryerson. Of course, he's since explored that area further in Quantum Night. Interested to hear what his latest thinking is!

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Danny Deraney @dannyderaney.bsky.social · 05/11/2025

Happy 48th Anniversary to the greatest outtake in television history. Tim Conway's Elephant Story from The Carol Burnett Show.

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John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 05/10/2025

There are a bazillion Unicode codepoints where if an email contains one of them, it's 100% guaranteed a phishing attempt or spam trying to evade filters. You would think the anti-spam folks could do more with this knowledge. (E.g. render suspicious characters as boxes or question marks like BITD.)

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Bluesky USGS Quakebot @usgs-quakebot.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

🟡 M4.8 #earthquake detected 3 km ESE of Berkeley, California at 9/22/2025 2:56:12 AM PDT This reflects data from the U.S. Geological Survey that is subject to change. Visit the USGS page linked below for the latest #quake information

earthquake.usgs.gov

M4.8 - 3 km ESE of Berkeley, California

A magnitude 4.8 earthquake located 3 km ESE of Berkeley, California was detected at 9/22/2025 2:56:12 AM PDT. This information is subject to change. Please visit the USGS event page for up-to-date details.

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John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 08/09/2025

I can level a continent. But Where. Are. My. PANTS! (I'm just teasing Galactus. I thought he would have been a better Big Bad than Thanos in the Avengers.)

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Robert J. Sawyer @robertjsawyer.com · 28/08/2025

Come hear the first-ever reading of my next novel at Dragon Con! Sunday at 11:30 a.m., Learning Center Hyatt [Lower Level 1, Atrium Tower — see map below]:

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Andy Pavlo @andypavlo.bsky.social · 25/08/2025

Today is the new semester for @db.cs.cmu.edu's Intro to Database Systems! We're going harder into material than before. More challenging projects but you can use LLMs to help. We also have 10min talks each Wed from leading DB companies: 15445.courses.cs.cmu.edu/fall2025

15445.courses.cs.cmu.edu

CMU 15-445/645 :: Intro to Database Systems (Fall 2025)

You want to know whether this is the premier course at Carnegie Mellon University on the design and implementation of database management systems? Well, it is. This course rips through data models (re...

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John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 18/07/2025

This happens to me so often that I've set up automation to remove such stuff. On Mac, copy the URL, then: pbpaste | <unix command to search-replace-remove the particular cruft for that site> | pbcopy Now what's on the clipboard is the bare URL.

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John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 17/07/2025

TIL: vim has a :args command that opens a new buffer for every pathname passed as an argument. Say you have a script that runs 'vi file1 file2 file3'. Running ':! my_script' inside vim starts a whole new session. Better to make the script print file1 file2 file3 and run ':args `my_script`.

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John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 08/07/2025

Basketball, huh. I am 6' 3", I live walking distance from UC Berkeley, and I'm feeling like I could use some continuing education.

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John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

I was reminded recently about fzf and immediately started finding uses for it. TL;DR - you choose from an interactive menu, with items defined by lines of input. Including shell integration to choose from all files in a directory tree. Here are some more use cases from b0rk. jvns.ca/til/fzf-prev...

jvns.ca

You can use `fzf` to review git commits

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Julia Evans @b0rk.jvns.ca · 24/06/2025

delighted to announce that my new zine "The Secret Rules of the Terminal" is out today!! You can get it for $12 USD here: wizardzines.com/zines/terminal

The Secret Rules of the Terminal, by Julia Evans - The cover illustration depicts three people doing arcane terminal magic in a temple with a smoking censer in the background. Each of the three people has curly brown hair and light brown skin. They are all wearing dresses, billowing cloaks, and utility belts with keyboard symbols on them. The one on the left holds a palette of paints and a brush. The one on the right has a staff with a $ symbol on it and a starfish at the top. The one in the centre has a sword and is reading from a book whose cover says “>_” and “./”, which rests on a lectern with a smiling snake wrapped around it.

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Julia Evans @b0rk.jvns.ca · 23/06/2025

it's happening! "The Secret Rules of the Terminal" is coming out tomorrow! here's the table of contents:

1. SHELL

cast of characters
meet the shell
PATH
PATH tips
history
job control
filename tips
stdin/stderr/stdout
redirects

2. TERMINAL EMULATOR

meet the terminal emulator
escape cdoes
colours
the mouse
copy & paste
TERM

3. PROGRAMS

types of programs
less
editing text in REPLs
keyboard shortcuts

4. TTY DRIVER

meet the TTY driver
stty
canonical mode

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John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 14/06/2025

TIL: If there's a Mac drive that seems to be completely bricked and can't be mounted or even erased, there's a non-obvious "Show all devices" control in Disk Utility. That will show the container device of the drive and you might be able to reformat that. apple.stackexchange.com/questions/12...

apple.stackexchange.com

Unable to format / erase hard drive

I have an external HD that died on me a while ago and I'm trying to see if I can format / erase it to start using it again. The disk does not show up in Finder but I can see it in Disk Utility. Wh...

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Mel Brooks @officialmelbrooks.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

I told you we’d be back

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Sean Yoda Rouse @seanyodarouse.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

SF Bay Area residents, whether you felt this evening’s #earthquake or not, please complete the “Did you feel it?” survey earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/...

earthquake.usgs.gov

The Earthquake Event Page application supports most recent browsers, view supported browsers. Or, try our Real-time Notifications, Feeds, and Web Services.

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John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 08/06/2025

TIL: there's a name for the wild-looking stratigraphic layers of rock that you see along the "gorge" sections of Rennie's River in Newfoundland: "flysch". (Must try that in Scrabble some time.) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flysch

en.wikipedia.org

Flysch - Wikipedia

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John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 24/05/2025

As someone who was told this urban legend from earliest times, there's a lot I could say about this.

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John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 11/05/2025

TIL: the $BASH_REMATCH array variable in bash lets you do the Pythonic operation: match a regex using ( ) groups, then retrieve the value of group 1, group 2, ... As Python evolves more towards numeric analysis, I'm using bash more and more for string processing use cases. medium.com/@linuxadminh...

medium.com

Understanding The $BASH_REMATCH In Bash

$BASH_REMATCH is a special array variable in the Bash shell that stores the results of matching a regular expression using the =~ operator…

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John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

When I was growing up in eastern Canada, some people had a strong affinity for New York, others for Boston. I always wondered what the factors were. (More English ancestry = Boston, Irish = New York?) My granddad worked construction on the Empire State Building, which puts me in the New York camp.

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John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 01/05/2025

Am I the only one who, given an address or a neighborhood in Manhattan, visualizes it in terms of what Peter Parker did or who Spider-Man fought there?

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John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 01/05/2025

TIL: in vi, q/ to bring up a menu of recent searches that you can cursor through, edit, and run again. vi, always a new surprise waiting somewhere.

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Paul Byrne @theplanetaryguy.com · 29/04/2025

This is a new image from #JWST. The bright points with spikes are stars in the Milky Way. Everything else is a galaxy. Everything. Else. Is. A. Galaxy.

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Costa Samaras @costasamaras.com · 29/04/2025

I check the little screen, I check the big screen, I check the watch screen, I check the tablet screen. I check the screen that reminds me of the good times, I check the screen that reminds me of the better times.

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Tom the Dancing Bug, by Ruben Bolling @rubenbolling.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

Holy shit I just found out that “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing,” by Leo Sayer, is basically a Steely Dan song. Drums: Steve Gadd and Jeff Porcaro Bass: Chuck Rainey Guitar: Larry Carlton - youtu.be/ex96q32A6UU

youtu.be

You Make Me Feel Like Dancing - Leo Sayer: Music Production Breakdown

YouTube video by Creating Music and Sound

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Julia Evans @b0rk.jvns.ca · 29/04/2025

terminal escape codes wizardzines.com/comics/escap...

Panel 1: a program's input and outputs are streams of bytes

everything you type goes into standard input

all the output you see comes from either
standard output or standard error

your terminal emulator can only communicate with programs by reading/writing bytes

panel 2: some inputs/outputs are text and some are special instructions

in: mouse position, ctrl+left arrow
out: make text green, make cursor invisible

panel 3: these special instructions are called "escape codes"

they're called "escape codes" because they all start with the ESC character

panel 4: example: how colours get set

program: “^[[31m”

Terminal emulator: “ok, I'll make text red from now on!!”

(there are also codes for bold, underline, background colour)

panel 5: programs can easily "break" your terminal by printing escape codes

program: “oops I made your cursor disappear”

It's easy to fix though, run reset to print a special escape code that resets everything

It's easy to fix though, run reset to print a special escape code that resets everything

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John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 28/04/2025

TIL: I usually use normal! in vi/vim to simulate sending keystrokes for movement etc. I didn't see a way to do the equivalent of Ctrl-R followed by a register letter, to insert the contents of a register. Solution: the feedkeys() function: let @a="hello" call feedkeys("i\<c-r>a\<esc>")

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Danny Deraney @dannyderaney.bsky.social · 23/04/2025

47 years ago today, the same day Steve Martin debuted King Tut, the Blues Brothers made their first official appearance.

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