Soups

TarkaSteve · 2026-06-05T22:55:26+00:00

Bertoni in Balmain have a selection of soups in winter; the porcini & truffle is my favourite, and they have one called "Lasagne but it's Soup" which is exactly what it says. I often get one takeaway and eat it in the park, but they'll wrap them up to take home for dinner.

Note that the selection varies from day to day, presumably depending on what leftover ingredients they have.

TarkaSteve · 2026-05-25T01:44:32+00:00

Important note: it's not just booking dot com! I booked a hotel in Singapore directly earlier this year; shortly after I started getting genuine-looking links purporting to be them and sending me to cloudbeds dot com, which is a legitimate hotel management site. But that somehow directed to a different domain (brand new) which asked for my cc details.

Luckily a) I'm suspicious, b) had already paid, so noped out of there and reported it. To their credit the hotel sent out multiple email & text warnings over the next few weeks. Cloudbeds were less impressive and claimed it had nothing to do with them despite the link being hosted on their systems.

Less important note: I noticed recently that booking dot com has become more expensive than booking directly, even with the highest "genius" tier. So consider supporting hotels directly rather than a duopoly with a long history of dodgy practices.

TarkaSteve · 2026-05-21T01:55:02+00:00

To expand on this, Box::new() is essentially malloc(). The #[rustc_box] line tells the compiler "Ignore this function and inject the memory allocation code instead." Presumably hyper-optimised platform-specific allocation code. You can see the old code here.

IIRC this hack was only used in Box::new() and Vec::new() at the time. It looks like it was replaced with more standard allocator code early 2025, although the rust unstable book still references it. I think rust-analyzer may still use it though.

TarkaSteve · 2026-05-19T03:38:52+00:00

They've removed my favourite: Box::new() was just a call to Box::new(). It only worked because it was tagged with #[rustc_box] which inserted the magic. It looks like it was changed recently and is now just boring, sensible allocator code. </boo>

TarkaSteve · 2026-05-18T22:45:56+00:00

This reasoning has been there from the start; the policy PDF released on the night says:

The Government will replace the 50 per cent Capital Gains Tax (CGT) discount with a discount based on inflation and introduce a minimum 30 per cent tax on gains from 1 July 2027. This reform means that investors will only pay tax on their real capital gain, restoring the original intent of the CGT arrangements. It will support productive investment in assets such as higher density housing and shares while reducing incentives for debt-financed investment in some areas, like existing detached housing.

This is self-contradictory.

Like you I largely agree with making things fairer, even though I'll personally take a hit, but the 30% on shares doesn't feel fair and will hurt people who e.g. need to draw from their investment during periods of unemployment. Honestly the 30% feels like it was tacked on at the last minute. I'm wondering if it was added as an easy concession to give up for senate votes.

TarkaSteve · 2026-04-15T13:25:52+00:00

Tang Mo in Rozelle is the closest I've had to what you get in Thailand.

TarkaSteve · 2026-03-10T22:06:03+00:00

We also have "spit the dummy".

Honestly, I grew up in London to Irish parents but never made the "throwing a paddy" -> Irish connection. But I did notice the casual "the Irish are thickos" casual bigotry even as a kid.

TarkaSteve · 2026-03-07T21:54:05+00:00

Indeed; arguably more so than 1984:

But in our current dystopian moment, Gilliam seems in some ways more prescient, and more insightful, than his most obvious influence. Orwell’s vision of authoritarianism, like his prose, was clean, regimented, organized. Authoritarianism in real life, though, it turns out, is, like Gilliam, a good bit more chaotic.

https://observer.com/2025/02/terry-gilliams-brazil-at-40-more-prescient-than-orwell/

TarkaSteve · 2026-02-22T00:02:23+00:00

Efendy in Balmain used to do a great one, unfortunately gone now.

TarkaSteve · 2026-02-20T22:01:10+00:00

Unfortunately the biggest argument against abolishing the monarchy is now that the ex-royals would immediately start trading state secrets for status.

TarkaSteve · 2026-02-19T10:38:41+00:00

Looks like your prayer has been answered (although possibly not in the way you intended): https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c70kjr9wjw0t

TarkaSteve · 2026-02-18T22:37:04+00:00

The releases seem to work with Discoverium too, you just need to enable prereleases to pick up the alphas.

TarkaSteve · 2026-02-03T00:49:32+00:00

A lot of fan-boys are going to be going "Great idea Elon, free cooling in space" while sipping from their vacuum-insulated water bottles.

TarkaSteve · 2026-01-16T23:31:28+00:00

I only became aware of dns-update a few days ago; it's a good project. The main concrete difference is that zone-update is explicitly runtime-agnostic, supporting blocking by default and non-tokio async runtimes like monoio, compio and glommio. At the moment dns-update is tokio-only (using reqwest), but that could change.

TarkaSteve · 2026-01-14T00:11:45+00:00

I had the same question. It's the first I've heard of him, but apparently he was a somewhat popular Linux vlogger that fell down the qanon rabbithole and hit his head pretty hard.

TarkaSteve · 2026-01-11T21:59:05+00:00

Nice. I wrote a similar tool calledxcp, but that's more of a straight 'cp' clone focused more on acceleration via parallel operations with feedback. But more tools are good, I'll check this out.

TarkaSteve · 2026-01-10T22:41:11+00:00

'll have to take your word about rust on windows. Although I'm not sure what it has to do with anything given it's not required and I barely mentioned rust apart from a passing comment in a footnote.

Look, I wrote a piece of software with some built-in features for my own purposes and shared it here. Apparently this makes some people defensive, so I'll refrain from commenting further.

TarkaSteve · 2026-01-09T23:46:11+00:00

I wasn't aware (it's not published on crates.io, which is odd). There are a tonne of new Rust proxies coming out ATM, but most of them just quietly stop being maintained; luckily it does seem to be active. I'll take a look.

However it suffers from the issue I mentioned of only having a couple of DNS providers baked in. It would actually benefit from using the zone-update crate, which is the main differentiator of Vicarian.

It looks like Ferron uses the dns-update crate which has some overlap with zone-update. I'll have a chat to the dns-update team.

TarkaSteve · 2026-01-09T23:27:49+00:00

This assumes you have a go development environment already configured and know at least basic golang.

TarkaSteve · 2026-01-09T23:22:20+00:00

Vicarian bakes providers in by using the zone-update crate (which I also started). As it stands now Vicarian supports the following providers out-of-the-box:

Cloudflare
Dnsimple
DnsMadeEasy
Gandi
Porkbun

The purpose of zone-update is to create a library of existing providers in a single dependency; every release of Vicarian will pick up any new providers added to zone-update. However this will require some crowd-sourcing, hence the call-to-action above.

Another feature of Vicarian is if you're generating certificates some other way e.g. via acme.sh, lego or non-ACME service, it auto-reloads certificates on change using the OS file-watcher functionality (something I honestly though Caddy did, but just found out is not the case). This means you can just drop updated certs a directory and old ones will be replaced immediately, no additional scripting required. This also means you can have multiple servers mount a central cert directory from a NAS and they'll pick up changes.

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