David Baer @david@arktos.social

"The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it. ... Rather than seeking its own good, the love of God flows forth and bestows good." - Martin Luther, 1518 Heidelberg Disputation

Last month I repeatedly worked through my day off. That turned out to be a mistake, with negative consequences for my physical and emotional well being. I'm resolved not to do this again in the new year.

Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, 2016

This is cool: generate a random 63-character password for your wireless access point, and encode it in a QR code.

https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/encoding-wifi-access-point-passwords-qr-code/

I somehow missed this Peter Wehner column, which is very good.

"Those of us of the Christian faith believe that Christmas Day represents the moment of God’s incarnation, when this broken world became his home. But it was not an entrance characterized by privilege, comfort, public celebration or self-glorification; it was marked instead by lowliness, obscurity, humility, fragility."

NYTimes: Christmas Turns the World Upside Down
Christmas Turns the World Upside Down https://nyti.ms/2Qhy1vL

All I want for Christmas is a week of hibernation.

Thanks, Amazon, for shipping a child's toy by slapping a label on the retail box. Surprises are overrated anyway.

Kaaterskill Falls, New York State

I left my #openbsd laptop in my office, not realizing I had kicked out the cord from the AC adapter. I came back hours later to find it powered down, but was pleasantly surprised to start it up and see it un-hibernating: apmd automagically did the right thing when the battery level was critically low and suspended to disk. w00t!

I love that the bluff/intimidation factor of this is way higher than its actual degree of difficulty.

You don’t need fancy symbolic integration techniques here. You just need to know that "integral" means roughly "area under curve" and that it’s distributive over addition.

“Folly can be overcome, not by instruction, but only by an act of liberation.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer (h/t Fred Clark)

Gaslighting considered harmful... to the gaslighter. On the other hand, the gaslighters seem to be running things right now, so YMMV.

The switcheroo | Fred Clark
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2019/11/30/the-switcheroo/

@feld It's an opinion column, so it reflects the views of the author, not the editorial stance of the paper. Still, Douthat is their resident NeverTrump religious conservative, so it's counter-intuitive for him to talk up the left-most candidate. But as he explains, he thinks Bernie cares more about economic populism than lefty cultural priorities, and he's willing to live with that.

This is... unexpected.

The Case for Bernie | Ross Douthat
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/30/opinion/bernie-sanders.html

Fred Clark reviews the story of Josiah, which is often tied up as a self-congratulatory morality tale, but actually doesn't make much sense, and ultimately concludes: "An important part of our task as modern readers, then, is to admit and accept that we are bewildered."

Children’s Bible stories | Fred Clark
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2019/11/28/childrens-bible-stories/

I approve this message! There’s no excuse not to make homemade cranberry sauce—it‘s easy, and so much better than the canned stuff.

https://cooking.nytimes.com/guides/14-how-to-make-cranberry-sauce?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

This is actually a pretty good illustration of the difference between a gerund (left) and a participle (right).

Frank and Ernest by Thaves for November 27, 2019 https://www.gocomics.com/frank-and-ernest/2019/11/27

@CarlMuckenhoupt I thought they had long ago settled on "Feel the Bern."