Daughter annotated the Calamityware tea towel photo I sent her....

And after a few days of modeling and a 3D print, it looks like a handheld! And it has a handle too 😊

Raspberry Pi 3A+
Pimoroni Hyperpixel square LCD w touch
Rii mini BT keyboard
2 x 18650 cells w LX-2BUPS
Volume knob for two rear speakers

#CyberDeck #RaspberryPi

Then he said bravely, "Yes," and then, still more bravely, "Quite so."

D1601.31
Magic towel wipes person.

Hello, and welcome! 👋

We're the Forming Worlds Lab at the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, University of Groningen. We study how rocky planets form and evolve, and what makes a world habitable, from early magma oceans 🌋 to the atmospheres of distant exoplanets 🪐. We model planetary interiors and atmospheres together, and we build the open-source PROTEUS framework our science runs on, in the open. 💻

Over the coming days, we'll introduce our group members one by one, and the research projects each of them leads.

After that, expect regularly:
🪐 the wonder of rocky planets and alien worlds
📄 recent papers and science results
🎤 conference updates and talks
📸 life in the Forming Worlds Lab

It's an exciting time to explore other worlds. Glad to have you here, follow along! 🌍

Web: https://formingworlds.space
Code: https://github.com/FormingWorlds
PROTEUS: https://proteus-framework.org

#Exoplanets #PlanetaryScience #Astronomy #Astrodon #OpenScience

Every bead has a living story. 💔🇺🇦
​Gerdan has long been a powerful Ukrainian amulet protecting our roots. Today, we bring back this power through modern images. ✨
​Many think it's fabric, but it's pure beads & strong thread. Creating it is like painting a picture, only instead of paints, you use tiny beads, and instead of canvas — patience. The photo shows weeks of meticulous work. 🪡🧵❤️
​Available for sale. DM for details & orders! 💌
​#Gerdan #UkrainianArt #Beadweaving #HandmadeJewelry #MastoArt

As long as a critic, beta-reader, editor, or what-have-you fully respects the creator's goals, artistry, time, and worth as a person, they can never go wrong with critique. Such a commenter can be honest about a work's flaws (in light of the creator's goals) and still be thanked because feedback based on respect and not dismissal or insecurity will be constructive. A commenter like this will make friends because the creators will feel so thoroughly seen and known, the feedback will create and strengthen personal bonds.

A commenter who puts respect first knows to separate their personal tastes from the creator's goals because a respectful person does not treat others as extensions or projections: Whether the commenter shares the creator's goals and tastes or not, the creator's aspirations are still worthy of active and serious treatment. Respectful critique will be immersive and fully engaged, diving deep into the work and thinking through it in every aspect because the creator poured their time and effort into it.

And sometimes? Sometimes the better part of respect is silence. A respectful commenter knows their voice is not always needed or wanted, that they might be unable to do justice to a work, that they have their own biases and limitations because being respectful does not mean being perfect. Sometimes it is better not to say anything and silence can be a greater act of respect than anything they say when the circumstances aren't right for critique.

A person who knows when to hold their words and when to release them will never do serious harm with words, and the source of that discernment... is respect.

#TootEssay #writing

If I could make any kind of big statement for Disability Pride Month, it would be this: I would really like to someday live in a world where disability did not need to be legible to bureaucracy.

I get why a lot of our current wins, like the ADA, are based on this legibility. But I also find myself in a reality where the things that actually disable me aren't taken too seriously by a lot of the people I know, while also having state-legible "disabilities" that I consider net positive or neutral in my life. Real dignity would probably involve caring what the actual body owner has to say about it. That lack of self-determination does feel like structural violence.

In the meantime, having a hard line between the disabled and abled populations is fictional and arguably unhelpful. It's a spectrum, with a lot of people in middle places like "needs glasses." We'd have more solidarity if "abled" people didn't see a hard wall between themselves and those with higher medical needs.

They value me in goose eggs
They pay me in woims

I have not yet read the book *Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI* by journalist Karen Hao, but she clearly has a good handle on the business, technological and political aspects of this new form of religious colonialism.

“One of the things that you really have to understand about AI development today is that there are what I call quasi-religious movements that have developed within Silicon Valley,” says Hao. “The concept of artificial general intelligence is not one that’s scientifically grounded.”

https://www.democracynow.org/2026/7/3/journalist_karen_hao_on_sam_altman

#Books #Broligarchy #Tech

You gather your most expensive people into a room to make your most important decisions. Then, somewhere in the second hour, the room quietly gets worse at making them. Not the people. The room.

I now travel with a portable CO2 monitor. Outdoors it reads around 400 parts per million. In a closed meeting room with a handful of people in it, I have watched it climb past 2,000. The photo here is a real reading: 2,143.

That number matters more than it looks. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory put people in a chamber and varied only the CO2. At 1,000 ppm, performance dropped significantly on six of nine decision-making measures compared with a clean-air baseline of 600. At 2,500 ppm, seven of the nine fell substantially, some into a range they called dysfunctional. A separate study out of Harvard found cognitive scores declining as CO2 rose, with the steepest losses in exactly the domains you called the meeting for: strategy, planning, and using information under pressure.

Continue reading on my blog because it's too long for here. https://blog.mikebowler.ca/2026/07/03/co2-and-decision-making/

Beavs wuz cwazy active on our morning hike, spent an hour watching and listening to 'em splashing and mewling. This one cooperated for photos. Birding was OK as well, I'll make another post on that. #Hiking #Beavers #AltText

Got on a call with a coworker whose cats were doing some incredible zoomies in the background the entire time.

What a great day.

#PennedPossibilities 1060 — Tell us about a WIP that you want to finish but doubt you ever will.

The final New Management novel (on hold at 24K words since mid-2024). In which Imp and his crew take the dream roads to Narnia to film amateur action talking animal porn to sell at a furry convention, but wind up in the version of Narnia written by William S. Burroughs instead of C. S. Lewis. There are mugwumps, and Jadis the White Witch is a strict lesbian domme.

#WritersCoffeeClub 3: What's the sign of a good critique?

Respect.

@troublewithwords@wandering.shop

Grindr has been caught sharing users' HIV status and precise location with advertisers without obtaining valid consent. They must immediately stop prioritizing profits over users’ safety, and make privacy the default across its platform. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/grindr-put-queer-safety-and-privacy-over-profits

Maybe we really need to transcend "Open Source" and move towards more of a "community software" or "humane software" kind of direction that puts the focus on Freedom (similar to how Open Source works) but also on responsibility and care for each other and the infrastructures these systems establish.

The "AI" reactions really show how heterogenous the "Open Source" field and the people's and organizations' values are.

I often like when people figure out weird and interesting ways to do creative things.