Plain-text double-entry accounting for a multi-currency household
TL;DR A software engineer replaced brittle homegrown scripts with a plain-text, double-entry system built on Beancount to track a two-person,…
Ten Years Managing Personal Finances in Plain-Text Beancount Ledgers
TL;DR Since January 2016 the author has tracked personal finances in plain-text Beancount files, spending roughly 30–45 minutes each month…
How Protesters Became Content for the Cops: The Spectacle of Protest Policing
TL;DR In 2025, protest policing in major US cities shifted toward highly staged, confrontational tactics that prioritized displays of force…
How Much Daily Walking Reduces Risk of Chronic Back Pain, According to Research
TL;DR Chronic back pain affects hundreds of millions globally and can diminish quality of life and finances. A recent Wired…
Understanding the Super Flu: H3N2 Subclade K in US and Europe
TL;DR A new variant of influenza A H3N2, called subclade K and nicknamed the “super flu” in media, has driven…
Public Domain Day 2026: 20 Notable 1930 Books Enter the U.S. Public Domain
TL;DR On January 1, 2026, works published in 1930 entered the U.S. public domain. Standard Ebooks prepared and released 20…
Going immutable on macOS with Nix-Darwin — reproducible, versioned configs
TL;DR The author migrated a macOS development environment from imperative Homebrew workflows to a declarative, immutable setup using Nix and…
FreeBSD: Home NAS, Part 1 — Configuring a ZFS Mirror (RAID1)
TL;DR The author tests building a home NAS on vanilla FreeBSD in a VM, planning UFS for the OS on…
Round the tree, yes, but not round the squirrel — a Perelman paradox
TL;DR A short anecdote from Yakov Perelman's 1927 collection recounts a man who circles a glade trying to glimpse a…
Y2K duty postponed one honeymoon by 17 years — more millennial IT tales
TL;DR Readers of The Register’s On Call column recounted spending New Year’s Eve 1999 on call to guard against Y2K…