Mes élucubrations

citation 2026-05-11

2026-05-11T00:00:00Z

je suis comme le deuxième I de Hawaii, je ne sers à rien

un personnage politique anonyme, mais lucide

aphorisme 2026-04-29

2026-04-29T00:00:00Z

glissade sur le balcon
un courant d'air
fleur de béton

frère clou, aphorisme n° rand(128)

the urge to create

2026-03-15T00:00:00Z

I have been taking photographs for a while now.

I usually go out on weekends and wander around my place trying to find some nice spots I have never seen before.

I try to find places that are commonly ignored by most people because they are too close from where they live or not "exotic" enough.

I always try to find the "beauty" in the banality of life in a way. I try to find beauty in the small path that everybody walked thousands of times without even noticing the trees, the plants, the surroundings.

I often end up in small woods, or near rivers and fields, this kind of stuff and I document my small trips with my photographs.

But recently I felt the urge to make something else. I wanted more than just trying to see what was there, what was beautiful in a tree or a path.

I wanted to create something, I wanted to try to make some art that would be mine.

I also wanted to write somehow and so I chose to edit some of my photos and try to make them tell a story that would be accompanied by some text.

I am a huge fan of weird stuff, found footage, analog horror, that kind of things.

I like when the mundane, our everyday life and environment, slips and ends up being something else.

Something uncomfortable, or bizarre.

I like the idea that anything could "glitch" at anytime.

Since I can code, I decided to create some kind of fake blog that would tell a story illustrated with my pictures, I don't know where it will take me yet, but I am quite enthusiastic about it.

So long story short, if you want to read my weird attempt at a fake exploration blog go here :

https://lazare.neocities.org/

How GPS works

2024-04-05T00:00:00Z

This is a great explanation of about a GPS works by Bartosz Ciechanowski, the article has very detailed animations, drawings etc...

It is definitely worth reading.

https://ciechanow.ski/gps/

I also really enjoyed the article on how mechanical watches work (also with animations, a tremendous work)

https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/

searching personal sites

2024-02-29T00:00:00Z

I just stumbled upon this site : https://aboutideasnow.com/

The concept is that it indexes the /about, /ideas and /now pages of more than 7000 personal websites which is a cool idea because it lets you search this index to find new personal sites to read.

I tried to add my tilde.club page but it was not recognized, I need to investigate why.

But I can only advise you to try and add your website to it so that other folks can find you.

We need more content out of those so called "social media" and every initiative is a good step forward.

IA or not IA

2024-02-20T00:00:00Z

I think there are two main reasons for most companies to adopt IA :

It is already or they think it will be profitable (it will allow to gather a lot of personal informations, it will allow to gather more funding etc...)
Everyone else is adopting IA so there is the fear to be left behind

Both are, in my opinion, bad reasons.

Maybe it could be useful to try to adopt a "we don't want to use IA" stance and wait a few years to see a new trendy technology appear which will drain all funds from IA and make it look obsolete.

For me, this [article] 1 by Andrew Kelley the creator of the Zig programming language hits the nail on the head :

LLMs are a way to make software take orders of magnitude more computational power, electricity, and human labor, while delivering a product whose extremely volatile quality is impossible to assure. The work will never be completed; it will only create the need for ever more labor.

For investors, all this churn is attractive. It's disruptive.

It's why we can't have nice software.

Fun with radio and SDR

2024-02-10T00:00:00Z

I recently started to play with an old SDR receiver I bought years ago to get my door bell rings.

This one : https://www.rtl-sdr.com/

And I tried to have a deeper look at what is possible with it.

It turns out the radio frequencies are still widely used.

I was able for example to receive pager messages (from a protocol called POCSAG).

There is a quick setup here if you want to try : https://www.talm.ai/decoding-pocsag-pagers/

I also discovered this site : https://priyom.org/ which lists numbers radio and also government transmissions.

I knew of numbers radio before but I wasn't aware it was still a thing.

I listened to a few one and after each one I always keep listening to the static noise for a while. There is a very specific feeling about hearing static noise I cannot explain. It reminds me of all nights I have spent when I was younger, listening to FM radio and hearing the imperfect sound from old tuners.

I'll most certainly keep on investigating a bit, there are still many fun stuff to try.

social web

2024-01-03T00:00:00Z

I have a hard time finding a suitable "social" platform, even mastodon, which is now widely advised, does not really suit my needs.

In the end I always come back to some forums and RSS feeds for the blogs I follow.

And if I need, I'll occasionally send an email to the blog owner.

I like what Kev Quirk says about mastodon while he himself runs a mastodon instance and I also like his preference on email and forums.

https://kevquirk.com/running-a-social-platform-as-someone-who-dislikes-them

He is starting a penpal project by writing mails with other bloggers, so go read some of their posts.

Like him, I also mostly interact and do stuff IRL.

I have quite a "seasonal" flow, maybe I'll write a post about it some day, but in summary I mostly stay online during the worse times of winter when the weather is really preventing me to go outside. And as soon as the weather gets better I mostly go outside.

That is why most of the releases on my book reading tracker app Jelu happen during winter (see the about page for the link to Jelu).

As usual, if you want to interact with me, don't hesitate to send an email, the about page has my contact info.

Driving compilers

2023-12-04T00:00:00Z

An in-depth, 5 parts series about compilers By Fabien Sanglard.

I just finished this series and found it really interesting.

Treat yourself to its reading if you have some time.

https://fabiensanglard.net/dc/index.php

His website is a treasure of interesting articles so don't forget to take a look at some other pieces he wrote.

https://fabiensanglard.net/

open source is not about you

2023-11-14T00:00:00Z

Rich Hickey, the Clojure creator, published a nice statement about open-source :

https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba9519972d9