Remembering a different life just over 20 years ago when I was playing blackjack in Las Vegas with Zeev, Andi, and the Zend CEO.

I guess we're still gambling with PHP.

Two years ago, we're in Drupal 7 eyeing its end of life and figuring out a path forward for our library and archives website.

I briefly tried a different framework built on Python, but when the university decided to go with Drupal 10 I thought there might be some reuse & shared knowledge.

Joke's on me, we went live way before them, w/o the benefit of any assets or shared efforts b/c they went with a vendor.

Oh what could have been... at least we're patched and back online (before them).

The new UI for Ex Libris Primo is built on modern Angular. The landing page has a background image.

What's weird is that it *has* to be an SVG image, presumably to support responsiveness. The default image of a hand touching a book is 12mb!

Lighthouse says first contentful paint is 4.4s over gigabit ethernet. On mobile with "fast 4G" throttling, FCP is 17.5s and largest contentful paint is 32.4s; JavaScript execution time is 10.2s.

😱

This is really bad.

I wish the "rate limited" messages in Mastodon were themselves rate limited. I don't mind pausing my browsing activity, but it would be nice to be able to scroll through the already-downloaded portion of the timeline while I'm waiting. Maybe just one pop-up / banner at the bottom or top of the screen that doesn't actually obscure any content?

#mastodon #ui

Food ingredient pricing is weird.

I started a batch of hard cider today. 🇨🇦 $22.50 for 15 litres of apple cider, a couple of bucks for yeast and nutrient, and one time cost for a bucket, carboy, etc. It would make no financial/time sense to start with raw apples.

Vs. pumpkin puree: $6 / can (two pies). Or $1.50 for a pumpkin that takes ten minutes of my time to bake, peel, puree, and clean up. Plus I get bonus seeds for snacks!

I think I'm going to freeze a bunch of puree in the next week.

What’s the last decimal digit of 2¹⁰⁰?

What about 2¹⁰⁰⁰?

What about 2¹⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰?

CW your guesses to not spoil the puzzle for others.

The email the vendor sent today has the subject line "Your order <main item> has been delivered." Not <secondary item> or <tertiary item>.

So the chatbot was the only interface that made the complete set of necessary information available.

The vendor emailed me the same info in response to my support ticket.

The vendor could and should have made that same info in both their email and their website info, but maybe they like having a high ratio of support tickets that are closed fast? 🤷

2/2

Breaking news: after emailing the credit 3, I tried the chatbot on the vendor's site. When given my order number, it clearly explained that there were three separate shipments and gave me the tracking numbers for each shipment, which let me find out that the third shipment hasn't actually shipped.

Am I to blame? I think not. The order info on their website gives me one tracking number for the order (it was a bundle of three items), and says the status is "Fulfilled" and "Shipped".

1/?

No, delivery company, a photo of one corner of one of the three packages that you were supposed to deliver is not "proof of delivery".

They delivered two of the three packages, but of course the most expensive package did not arrive. And the only customer service option is a 100% automated chatbot black hole.

https://www.uniuni.com/support/ helpfully says "Ask other members of your household if your parcel was received. Check with your neighbours"

Argggggghhhh

“AI, make the website good”

https://www.zachleat.com/web/ai-websites/

Attended a mayoral candidate debate last night, where the candidates were asked if they would allow a data centre to be built here.

One of them said that, since we still have a lot of dead lakes due to all the pollution from smelting a century ago, we could use them to cool the data centres.

OMG these people... ignoring all the regreening efforts in Sudbury over the last 60 years. Yeah let's double down on destroying the environment! SMDH

RE: https://social.dancohen.org/2026/10/06/on-the-th-anniversary-of.html

It took me two years to start pushing for the addition of Zotero at our university: https://laurentian.scholaris.ca/handle/10219/304

We pulled the plug on RefWorks a few years later. Then launched the Canadian Labour Studies Index that's built on a shared Zotero library (initially custom code with help from @vtrlx, now using Kerko)

And a couple of years ago we were able to add an institutional subscription for unlimited Zotero storage.

What a great tool!

I picked up my #bassGuitar in February 2025 after mostly ignoring it for 30 years, and have been playing and practicing on an almost daily basis.

I'm getting pretty good, y'all. I play about 100 songs from memory with high levels of confidence, pick up new songs fast by ear, and can read (slowly) music notation for tricky bits.

Some days my mind goes dark and tells me I should give up, but that's bullshit. #Music has been my best therapy through some tough times.

Lately, I've been seeing many complaints about LLM-generated reviews in academic journals, but the journal and publishing house names are usually not made public.

One of my manuscripts was rejected by Ethnicities on January 28 this year. I sent an email to the journal and to SAGE's ethics team, stating that one of the reviewer reports was clearly generated by an LLM and that I had not authorized their reviewers to feed my manuscript into an LLM. If a journal uses LLMs in "peer" review, this should be made explicit. I was contacted by the #SAGE ethics team on February 26 and informed that they were going to conduct an investigation. I wrote back on May 23 to ask about the outcome of the investigation and I received a response stating that I was going to be updated soon. It is October and I am yet to receive a response. It seems like I can't publicly share my article when it is published in one of their journals but they can do whatever they want with my manuscripts without bothering with prior notice. I am naming the journal and the publishing house so that people can make informed decisions when they submit their manuscripts in the future.

RE: https://code4lib.social/@dbs/117249311055300159

I ended up getting a used 2015 Kona Blast that looks like it came straight from the shop floor. I'm not sure the owner rode it now than a couple of times.

So it's another hardtail mountain bike, although for some reason this one had 26" wheels instead of the 27.5" the model is supposed to have, but the price was right. My posture is still hunched over, but it came with a rear rack and a front fender, so that's an upgrade over the old Nitro for commuting and local grocery shopping.

Me: I will use "radium water" as an analogy for how horrible AI's potential subtle long-term effects are, because the general public in 2026 can easily understand this analogy.

The general public in 2026: https://futurism.com/future-society/alternative-health-influencer-drinking-radioactive-jug-revigator

Lovely to see Canadian subject heading sovereignty (this is why CSH exists!)

#canada #controlledvocabularies #taxonomy #geography #USpol #libraries #classifcation

Love the "freqently" (sic) asked question with an answer that appears to have been written by a bot that is aware of legal issues around medical claims:

"(Flagged: confirm phrasing with legal.)" Uhh you posted that on your website, I guess you decided to beg for forgiveness...

https://choosemuse.com/pages/benefits

Our Kia was nagging us that the nav system needed to be updated, so I took care of that a few days ago. Still boggling over some aspects of it.

I forgot that their updates are almost 70GB. How many normal people have that much disk space for a download, or a 128GB+ USB key to store it on?

And what is Kia doing to take up so much space? Obviously not incremental upgrades, but even so... most Linux distributions fit on a DVD (4.7GB).

Also: I had to let the upgrade run overnight. SO SLOW.