me.micahrl.com links

In the Houses of Disordered Stars

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 19:37:11 +0000

A short story from CtrlCreep. Aside from this substack, also a great follow on Twitter.

AN ENDANGERED SPECIES

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 19:36:40 +0000

“Fiction” from Uel. I’m so excited that he’s back. Several more where this comes from already over at https://www.greaterrealityarea.net/.

fortunate, a mini-project of mine for interesting fortune databases, includes Uel’s INVISIBLE STATES OF AMERICA: A TOURISM GUIDE.

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Modal editing is a weird historical contingency we have through sheer happenstance

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 12:44:59 +0000

Vim is now very popular and has spawned numerous successors. But its key feature, modes, is not obviously-beneficial, to the point that if Bill Joy didn’t make vi (vim’s direct predecessor) fifty years ago I don’t think we’d have any modal editors today.

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Wi-Fi sharing is a killer Android feature - Kaushik Gopal's Website

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 12:33:58 +0000

Cool feature I didn’t know that Android had — it can re-share not just cellular Internet connectiosn but other wifi hotspots via wifi, like a dedicated travel router.

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Agent Psychosis: Are We Going Insane?

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 14:31:52 +0000

Some musings from a practitioner. (Not a screed, despite the title.)

In His Dark Materials, every human has a dæmon, a companion that is an externally visible manifestation of their soul. It lives alongside as an animal, but it talks, thinks and acts independently. I’m starting to relate our relationship with agents that have memory to those little creatures. We become dependent on them, and separation from them is painful and takes away from our new-found identity.

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Age is the Ultimate Example of a Receding Hrair Line

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 14:22:37 +0000

A great name for a useful handle in the conceptual space.

We came up with the concept of the Hrair Line, defined by our hivemind as “a somewhat arbitrary line past which all numbers seem equally large”

Coming up with this term also led to one of my favorite puns, the “receding hrair line” which is when you act like a number is unfathomably large when it benefits you, but quite reasonable when it doesn’t.

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My Rube Goldberg RSS Pipeline

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 00:07:05 +0000

Writeup of a project to assemble RSS feeds into a very personal magazine-like experience. I love reports from building personal projects like these.

But the reason it’s been working out for me is not just having a single source of truth, or the apps themselves–it’s the way that I approached having multiple hundreds of new items (sometimes thousands) every morning and whittling everything down to a few meaningful things to read every day.

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Next steps for Cartesian Tutor

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 12:04:53 +0000

Documenting his decision to return to a corporate job after working on his own idea for 6 months. Clear introspection and decision making.

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How to Debug Your Life

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 12:07:33 +0000

A take on deliberate reflective practice, which brings me peace.

Most of us treat these failures with a superstitious dread. We view our depression, our procrastination, our sudden outbursts of anger as weather events, storms that pass through us. Or we view them as moral failings: evidence of a corrupted soul. Instead: We should view the mind as a legacy codebase…

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Beingpax/VoiceInk: Voice-to-text app for macOS to transcribe what you say to text almost instantly

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 03:55:15 +0000

A colleague at my last job recommended this as a replacement for supershisper. I love what we can do with local LLMs.

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Pidgin Markup For Writing, or How Much Can HTML Sustain?

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 15:23:06 +0000

A unique syntax for a custom ed(1)-based static site generator.

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DIY Desk LED Lighting

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 11:23:26 +0000

Elegant desk lighting project.

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taikonaut - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 01:25:06 +0000

The name for a Chinese astronaut. New to me; I encountered this word for the first time in the https://jatan.space/ blog.

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My blog_title_here · Using sharp bitmap fonts in modern GIMP

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 17:01:43 +0000

How to use fonts well-suited for e-ink. Linking mostly for the described use of no-battery-required (powered by NFC) e-ink screens as reusable scratchpads.

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The YouTube Bubble: Fame, Parasociality, and the Parts of Culture We Don’t See

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 18:58:07 +0000

Cultural knowledge is fracturing.

If you don’t recognize the name of a YouTuber who has more subscribers than the US has citizens, what makes you think you’d understand the influence of one of the smaller ones?

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How Markdown Took Over the World - Tao of Mac

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 20:10:47 +0000

I can’t not include a link with a quote like this:

I’m willing to bet that when (ok, if) we ever become a Kardashev type 3 civilization we’ll still be using Markdown to write our interstellar missives.

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Xteink X4

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 16:36:58 +0000

A 4" e-ink reader with magnetic backing, designed to attach to the back of a phone. I’m not sure this is a good idea but it is neat. Who doesn’t love little tiny versions of normal-sized things?

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Burnout is breaking a sacred pact

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 18:08:01 +0000

When the conscious fails to deliver on promises to the unconscious, the unconscious rebels. A predictive and actionable framework for thinking about burnout.

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Strategies and Tactics for working with Coding Agents

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 16:35:08 +0000

Advice from experience. The two most surprising recommendations have to do with information architecture at the beginning and blindness at the end.

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TildeTown on iPhone with Blink Shell

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 03:07:35 +0000

A walkthrough for using an iPhone to interact with this Unix server -based community. Highlights some tips and tricks with Blink. I love the photo near the bottom of the author sitting on a couch, typing on a bluetooth keyboard into their phone, which is on some sort of microphone/camera stand, and which is using AirPlay to show IRC on the TV.

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Easy (Horizontal Scrollbar) Fixes for Your Blog CSS

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 20:52:44 +0000

A public service message for people who write their own CSS. Interactive!

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How Will the Miracle Happen Today?

Sun, 04 Jan 2026 19:21:33 +0000

Reflections on gratitude, the kindness of strangers, and that

…this state of being embodied, inflated with life, brimming with possibilities, is so over-the-top unlikely, so extravagant, so unconditional, so far out beyond physical entropy…

I was reminded of this piece in the section of Matt Lakeman’s Notes on Afghanistan where he talks about the generosity of the people he met there.

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How To Get Cheap Ozempic

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 00:46:59 +0000

Part technically-not-medical-advice, part vision of the future.

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GitHub - nohajc/anylinuxfs: macOS: mount any linux-supported filesystem read/write using NFS and a microVM

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 02:33:36 +0000

Read any Linux filesystem on a Mac by mounting it in a Linux VM and exporting it to the Mac host over NFS.

me.micahrl.com links

In the Houses of Disordered Stars

AN ENDANGERED SPECIES

Modal editing is a weird historical contingency we have through sheer happenstance

Wi-Fi sharing is a killer Android feature - Kaushik Gopal's Website

Agent Psychosis: Are We Going Insane?

Age is the Ultimate Example of a Receding Hrair Line

My Rube Goldberg RSS Pipeline

Next steps for Cartesian Tutor

How to Debug Your Life

Beingpax/VoiceInk: Voice-to-text app for macOS to transcribe what you say to text almost instantly

Pidgin Markup For Writing, or How Much Can HTML Sustain?

DIY Desk LED Lighting

taikonaut - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

My blog_title_here · Using sharp bitmap fonts in modern GIMP

The YouTube Bubble: Fame, Parasociality, and the Parts of Culture We Don’t See

How Markdown Took Over the World - Tao of Mac

Xteink X4

Burnout is breaking a sacred pact

Strategies and Tactics for working with Coding Agents

TildeTown on iPhone with Blink Shell

Easy (Horizontal Scrollbar) Fixes for Your Blog CSS

How Will the Miracle Happen Today?

How To Get Cheap Ozempic

GitHub - nohajc/anylinuxfs: macOS: mount any linux-supported filesystem read/write using NFS and a microVM

Microsoft mishandling example.com