me.micahrl.com newsletter

Links for February 2026

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 06:00:00 -0600

Hi everyone. This is the inaugural links issue, which I announced previously. These won’t come out too often. You’ll find projects, philosophy, history, and other stuff. Enjoy :).

Links

safe_sleep.sh rarely hangs indefinitely · Issue #3792 · actions/runner (permalink)

A hell of a dumb bug in GitHub Actions containers. Some research in the comments about where it came from has revealed still more bugs. The immediate problem has been fixed, but weirdly, the script still exists even though it is totally useless. More research on lobste.rs.
Microsoft mishandling example.com (permalink)

… and has been for the past six years?
GitHub - nohajc/anylinuxfs: macOS: mount any linux-supported filesystem read/write using NFS and a microVM (permalink)

Read any Linux filesystem on a Mac by mounting it in a Linux VM and exporting it to the Mac host over NFS.
How To Get Cheap Ozempic (permalink)

Part technically-not-medical-advice, part vision of the future.
How Will the Miracle Happen Today? (permalink)

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.
Easy (Horizontal Scrollbar) Fixes for Your Blog CSS (permalink)

A public service message for people who write their own CSS. Interactive!
TildeTown on iPhone with Blink Shell (permalink)

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.
Strategies and Tactics for working with Coding Agents (permalink)

Advice from experience. The two most surprising recommendations have to do with information architecture at the beginning and blindness at the end.
Burnout is breaking a sacred pact (permalink)

When the conscious fails to deliver on promises to the unconscious, the unconscious rebels. A predictive and actionable framework for thinking about burnout.
Xteink X4 (permalink)

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?
How Markdown Took Over the World - Tao of Mac (permalink)

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

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?
My blog_title_here · Using sharp bitmap fonts in modern GIMP (permalink)

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.
taikonaut - Wiktionary, the free dictionary (permalink)

The name for a Chinese astronaut. New to me; I encountered this word for the first time in the https://jatan.space/ blog.
DIY Desk LED Lighting (permalink)

Elegant desk lighting project.
Pidgin Markup For Writing, or How Much Can HTML Sustain? (permalink)

A unique syntax for a custom ed(1)-based static site generator.
Beingpax/VoiceInk: Voice-to-text app for macOS to transcribe what you say to text almost instantly (permalink)

A colleague at my last job recommended this as a replacement for superwhisper. I love what we can do with local LLMs.
How to Debug Your Life (permalink)

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…
Next steps for Cartesian Tutor (permalink)

Documenting his decision to return to a corporate job after working on his own idea for 6 months. Clear introspection and decision making.
My Rube Goldberg RSS Pipeline (permalink)

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.
Age is the Ultimate Example of a Receding Hrair Line (permalink)

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.
Agent Psychosis: Are We Going Insane? (permalink)

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.
Wi-Fi sharing is a killer Android feature - Kaushik Gopal's Website (permalink)

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.
Modal editing is a weird historical contingency we have through sheer happenstance (permalink)

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.

Thanks for reading

I’d love to hear from you: me@micahrl.com.

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The Thousand Nights and a Night

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 10:00:00 -0600

Hi everyone. In this issue is a look at salacious content from the Arabian Nights.

Burton’s Thousand Nights and a Night

I was recently looking for some stories from the Arabian Nights, and found beautiful editions on the Internet Archive of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night translated by Richard Burton, which Wikipedia notes is the only complete English translation.

The vocabulary is a lot of fun. Wikipedia quotes historian Robert Irwin,

Burton shared [John] Payne’s enthusiasm for archaic and forgotten words. The style Burton achieved can be described as a sort of composite mock-Gothic, combining elements from Middle English, the Authorized Version of the Bible and Jacobean drama. Most modern readers will also find Burton’s Victorian vulgarisms jarring, for example ‘regular Joe Millers’, ‘Charleys’, and ‘red cent’. Burton’s translation of the Nights can certainly be recommended to anyone wishing to increase their word-power: ‘chevisance’, ‘fortalice’, ‘kemperly’, ‘cark’, ‘foison’, ‘soothfast’, ‘perlection’, ‘wittol’, ‘parergon’, ‘brewis’, ‘bles’, ‘fadaise’, ‘coelebs’, ‘vivisepulture’, and so on. ‘Whilome’ and ‘anent’ are standard in Burton’s vocabulary. The range of vocabulary is wider and stranger than Payne’s, lurching between the erudite and the plain earthy, so that Harun al-Rashid and Sinbad walk and talk in a linguistic Never Never Land.

It was circulated (though not “published” — see below) in the 1880s, and is quite readable. It feels lux to read even the scanned volumes on the Internet Archive.

It’s also intensely horny.

“Obsessive focus”

The original work clearly contains not a few stories intended primarily for the prurient interest. The stories first came from oral folk tales, of course, and the mix includes morality tales and adventure stories alongside dirty jokes.

Burton spends a great deal of time on the sexual aspect, sometimes far more than the source material. Wikipedia quotes critics claiming the translation has an “obsessive focus on sexuality”. Apparently the work was considered pornographic at the time it was printed, which prevented legal publication. To distribute it, Burton created a private club, the “Kama Shastra Society”, and printed copies only for members.

The bawdiness of both the original stories and Burton’s footnotes is really funny.

Three stories about slave girls

For example, these three stories about slave girls are printed one after another and only make sense as a throuple of dirty jokes told together. You can tell Burton’s interest is piqued by his footnotes, but it’s also clear that the smuttiness is authentic.

The way I read this first one, moving the hands as indicated in the footnote is intended to be suggestive, like making an hourglass figure with your hands, although I am not actually sure.

ABU AL-ASWAD AND HIS SLAVE-GIRL.

Abu al-Aswap bought a native-born slavegirl, who was blind of an eye, and she pleased him; but his people decried her to him; whereat he wondered and, turning the palms of his hands upwards,² recited these two couplets,

“They find me fault with her where I default ne’er find,
Save haply that a speck in either eye may show:
But if her eyes have fault, of fault her form hath none,
Slim-built above the waist and heavily made below.”

² When reciting the Fatihah (opening Koranic chapter), the hands are held in this position as if to receive a blessing falling from Heaven; after which both palms are passed down the face to distribute it over the eyes and other organs of sense.

The second also requires a footnote to explain, although only because of an inaccurate translation. It’s funny that apparently the sexual nature of the joke would have been lost to the intended western audience if the original word was translated directly, but it still needed to be euphemized.

I also like the phrasing from the second girl. “Game belongeth to him who taketh it” obviously is a reference to hunted animals but it sounds like she’s telling the first girl “don’t hate the player”.

HARUN AL-RASHID AND THE TWO SLAVEGIRLS.

The Caliph Harun al-Rashid lay. one night between two slavegirls, one from AlMedinah and the other from Cufa and the Cufite rubbed his hands, whilst the Medinite rubbed his feet and made his concern¹ stand up. Quoth the Cufite, “I see thou wouldst keep the whole of the stock-in-trade to thyself; give me my share of it... And the other answered, “I have been told by Malik, on the authority of Hisham ibn Orwah,² who had it of his (grand) father, that the Prophet said, ‘Whoso quickeneth the dead, the dead belongeth to him and is his.’” But the Cufite took her unawares and, pushing her away, seized it all in her own hand and said, “Al-A’amash telleth us, on the authority of Khaysamah, who had it of Abdallah bin Mas’td, that the Prophet declared, ‘Game belongeth to him who taketh it, not to him who raiseth it,’"

¹ The word used is “bizá’at”=capital or a share in a mercantile business.

² This and the following names are those of noted traditionists of the eighth century, who derive back to Abdallah bin Mas’td, a “Companion of the Apostle.” The text shows the recognised formula of ascription for quoting a “Hadis” =saying of Mohammed; and sometimes it has to pass through half a dozen mouths.

The third one seems to have iterated on the second, I suspect being invented after the telling of the first two together became rote. Not sure where the euphemism comes from in this one.

THE CALIPH HARUN AL-RASHID AND THE THREE SLAVE-GIRLS.

The Caliph Harun al-Rashid once slept with three slave-girls, a Meccan, a Medinite and an Irakite. The Medinah girl put her hand to his yard and handled it, whereupon it rose and the Meccan sprang up and drew it to herself. Quoth the other, “What is this unjust aggression? A tradition was related to me by Malik³ after Al-Zuhri, after Abdallah ibn Salim, after Said bin Zayd, that the Apostle of Allah (whom Allah bless and keep!) said: ‘Whoso enquickeneth a dead land, it is his.’” And the Meccan answered, “It is related to us by Sufyan, from Abu Zanad, from Al-A’araj, from Abu Horayrah, that the Apostle of Allah said: ‘The quarry is his who catcheth it, not his who starteth it.’” But the Irak girl pushed them both away and taking it to herself, said, “This is mine, till your contention be decided.”

³ Traditionists of the seventh and eighth centuries who refer back to the “Father of the Kitten” (Abu Horayrah), an uncle of the Apostle.

The Ebony Horse

In this case, the original story might have been a bit salacious with a prince visiting a princess in her bedroom, but Burton’s footnote really takes it to the next level, focusing on how the ladies sleep: naked. You can practically hear him giggling. Everyone is just naked! In bed! At home! Right next to their husbands and wives! Can you imagine if we did that here, in England?? And by we I mean specifically me and my wife!?!?!? We definitely don’t though. But what if we did???

He went up to the couch, to see what was thereon, and found a young lady lying asleep, chemised with her hair²...

² Eastern women in hot weather, lie mother-nude under a sheet here represented by the hair. The Greeks and Romans also slept stripped and in medieval England the most modest women saw nothing indelicate in sleeping naked by their naked husbands. The “night-cap” and the “night-gown” are comparatively modern inventions.

Lady Burton’s Edition

There was a “Lady Burton’s edition” with all of this sexual content removed. Apparently the name was just for advertising purposes; Burton’s wife Isabel is quoted as saying

I have never read, nor do I intend to read, at his own request, and to be true to my promise to him, my husband’s Arabian Nights.

This makes the sexual content so much funnier to me — Burton is smirking in the footnotes about naked wives sleeping next to naked husbands but makes his own wife pinky swear never to read his middle-eastern erotic fan-footnotes.

Sources

My favorite edition I found is the “Burton Club” edition, printed in the United States, with gold leaf on the binding for the first ten volumes and silver for the supplemental six. Individual volumes on the Internet Archive are linked below. I could not find all volumes from the same source. Any corrections or higher quality links would be appreciated!

The cover images in this post are taken from this scan of Volume II.

It’s too bad there are no modern reproductions of this lovely edition. I guess print on demand can’t make something this large and nice economical yet.

The entire work is also available in hypertext, which makes for much nicer copying and pasting but isn’t nearly as fun to read.

The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night

Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night

Thanks for reading

I’d love to hear from you: me@micahrl.com.

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Disquisition: Parasitic ice

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0600

Hi everyone. This issue contains a special post from Disquisition, my research journal from an alternate universe. This topic was on my mind before the weather last week, but I didn’t quite have my notes together enough to publish it during the freeze itself.

Parasitic ice

At some point prior to 1937, a species of invasive parasitic ice was carelessly introduced to central Texas.

Winters in the area have historically been mild, but the pest has occasionally overwhelmed the local ecology to cause sudden periods of deep cold, even kicking off unexpected snowstorms and other extreme weather events. As water, it burrows into susceptible plants before freezing. Plants that have adapted to the presence of this ice can accommodate the physical expansion of the phase change, but other plants, like those in Texas, don’t have this adaptation. Pressure builds inside the plant until it violently explodes outward, spreading the ice to other plants nearby.

The local government has tried to keep the ice in check via industrial electricity and heat generation — a plan which is fiercely controversial, since it is technically a form of anthropogenic warming. Proponents of the plan argue that, accidental or otherwise, the presence of the ice in the first place is evidence of an act of climate change, legitimizing the same tactic in response; critics decry this use of geothermal weapons because of their effect on the planetary climate, which has externalities beyond central Texas.

This history is running through my mind as I start to think about winterization. We’ve had a mild start to the season, but the last few years have seen a few outbreaks — here are some photographs from 2021, the worst in recent memory.

𓅓

Thanks for reading

I’d love to hear from you: me@micahrl.com.

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Linkblogging

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 21:00:00 -0600

Preamble: I’m going to change how the newsletter works. Going forward, I’ll send the full text of an article in the email. As you’ll see below, I have a new way to collect interesting links, and from these I’ll also produce irregular link issues. Look for one of those coming soon.

Linkblogging

I’ve started a new Links section: just a link, with just enough description for you to decide if you want to click. It has a its own feed; to read it, subscribe to that feed separately or to the newsletter, which will include the links at the end of each issue.

I’ve been thinking about this ever since I read Kellan Elliott-McCrea’s A Link Blog in the Year 2024. Some of my favorite blogs are linkblogs too!

I think people underestimate the linkblog. Kellan says it’s “the very definition of something that no one needs”. In Nelson Minar’s post about his linkblog, he isn’t quite so pessimistic, but expresses a desire for more reach and says “I accept what I’m doing is not mainstream”. Fair enough, but: I think linkblogs are one of those things with outsized impact compared to their direct userbases¹.

I suspect that while they are not read by very many people in absolute terms, the bloggers who contribute the most to the zeitgeist are almost all readers of linkblogs. I also believe that linkblogs contribute significantly to blog discovery. A huge number of the blogs in my feed reader came to me via linkblogs.

When thinking about linkblogs, I also think there are more types than is widely acknowledged. Here’s a sample among blogs I personally read:

Feeds of individual links
- Mindless Link Propagation
- Nelson’s Linkblog
Some blogs in this category might be RSS-only — based on Nelson’s post linked above, it sounds like that used to be the case for his linkblog.

Other blogs here might have a separate web page for each source link.
Feeds of individual links with commentary
- Daring Fireball (which has claimed the excellent name “Linked List”)
- Pixel Envy
- aliquote.org
- jwz’s blog
- kottke.org
- Simon Willison’s Weblog
- One Foot Tsunami
Some blogs here also have essays or microposts that don’t include links, while others are exclusively about the links.

For link posts, some blogs may have the RSS feed point to the source, while others point it to a page on the linkblog.
Link periodicals
- Trivium
- Nixers Newsletter (also available via RSS)
- jatan.space
Blogs that intermix periodic link posts with other posts
- Michael Tsai
- Interconnected
- Astral Codex Ten (including for years at Slate Star Codex), for example Links For December 2025
- Brett Terpstra, for example Web Excursions for January 12nd, 2026
- The Diff, for example Longreads + Open Thread from January 17th
- Construction Physics, for example Reading List 01/24/26
- Ozy Brennan’s Thing of Things, for instance Linkpost for December
I noticed a minor trend of these intermittent link posts among Substack newsletters. I suspect that Substack’s easy monetization has played a role here — link posts reuse some ingredients that go into essays for extra content but still keeps readers engaged. This requires less effort than a new essay, but enough that some free blog authors don’t consider it worth doing.

Personally, my favorite format for reading are blogs of the first two types. I think this is easier to keep track of, especially as I may be looking briefly at my feed reader while I’m waiting on something else.

I track the links I want to post in my Raindrop account with a #linkblog tag. Irregularly, I pull them down via a Python script into a YAML file kept in Hugo site data. I add my commentary as minimal markdown in that YAML file, and a Hugo content adapter assembles the result into one page per link.

February 2025 update

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 07:20:04 -0600

Hi everyone.

I wrote about two things that are really important to me personally: the treachery of disgust and ask culture on the web.

Some friends and I played Hades and read the Iliad over much of last year, and we finally finished reading in October. This was a great experience even though the Iliad itself was difficult, and after a brief interlude into some literary candy that doesn’t deserve a mention here, we’re now reading Pale Fire and playing Tunic, with a theme of “alien culture”.

I have a goal for this year to read every book in my backlog. So far progress is… rocky, as I’m probably 3 books behind schedule so far! But it (nearly) goes without saying that when one makes a new goal, one must update their website to support that goal, so I’m now tracking my bookshelf with a new tool I wrote called bibliographer. Technically this doesn’t count as procrastination from reading because when I was working on this I had intended to be working on another project.

Speaking of goals for the year, I also want to see a sunrise every month and practice context switching and spend the right amount of time on everything, among other things. The sunrises are going great :)

Those focalarium links are part of another new aspect of my site, really intended just for myself. They’re web pages that are designed to be set as a desktop background so that I can be reminded of what’s important to me while I’m at my computer. (The styling might be a little weird on mobile, sorry.) I was inspired by The quotes on my wall by Linus.

I’d love to hear from you: me@micahrl.com.

PS: Did you know that the phrase “hold your horses” may have come from the Iliad?

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Summer 2024 writing

Tue, 24 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0500

Hi everyone. It has felt too busy to write, but looking back I’ve actually written a lot since my last letter. Here’s what I’ve been up to.

I described how we chose my son’s name for his birthday at the end of August.

As always, user agency is on my mind. I wrote about my concerns that passkeys impair it, and how custom emoji further it. I’ve quoted it before, but a phrase from Brent Simmons lives in my head:

But if we don’t have this power that is ours, then I don’t actually care about computers at all. It meant everything.

I’ve added a new chronological section to my site: TIL, a notebook for (mostly sysadmin/programming) things I’ve learned. I’ve published 10 TILs since I added the section last month, including a CSS rant, a method for retrieving HTML tags from the macOS clipboard, an investigation of a problem with a Git hook, a guide for using lunr.js with Hugo describing how I added search, and several more.

I’ll still publish some technical stuff on the blog too. A post about SVGs generated feedback that taught me something new about how sprite sheets work, and it was a lot of fun to work on (I built that diagram by hand).

I’ll end with a drink. Or a few drinks. A whole class of them in fact. 1900 words about the old fashioned cocktail, with several recipes to try.

I’d love to hear from you: me@micahrl.com.

PS: I hope this saying catches on.

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June 2024 update (and initial post)

Sat, 06 Jul 2024 12:00:00 -0500

Hi everyone. Here’s what I worked on in June.

A couple of essays:

An anecdote about technical solutions to social problems
An exploration of one of my favorite quotes

I’ve also written some technical deep dives:

How I’m using the 1Password agent, but only sometimes
Writing a database migrations system for an LDAP server

I have a lot of travel coming up, so we’ll have to see what effect that has on my ability to publish.

Want to talk? Hit me up: me@micahrl.com. Especially if anything in my list prompts a question or a realization, or if you have a list of your own but no place to share it, I’d love to hear from you.

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