Dispatch #43 (September 2026)

By David Eisinger · View original post

We had a couple trips essentially back-to-back in August, which made for a choppy, whirlwind month. First up, we flew out to California to spend a long weekend in Napa with some of Claire’s friends. Highlights included renting e-bikes and riding the Napa Valley Vine trail and visiting Muir Woods. The kids did great on the flight; guess they’re old pros at this point. Then we headed up to Delaware for our annual Rehoboth Beach trip. Even managed to make it onto the beach a few times, unlike some years past (the kids are generally much more excited about the arcade and candy store).

I picked up a macropad a couple months ago and set up some nice automations:

• MeetingBar to join my next meeting
• FrostCam to pause my video
• toggleMute to mute my mic
• As well as a few others that didn’t stick

In setting this stuff up, I discovered that my main keyboard uses the same software to remap keys that the macropad does, and ended up repurposing the keys along the upper right (del/ins/pgup/etc.) for these frequently used shortcuts. I’m in the process of turning the macropad into a sort of notification/control center, inspired by the Codex Micro that OpenAI came out with a few months ago. I had Codex write some new firmware and a corresponding CLI so I can control colors and effects on a per-key basis. Now I just need to figure out what integrations I want and how to wire it all together.

I’ve been slowly working my way through The Magic of Code by Samuel Arbesman (via), which includes this gem:

Software consists of spells of crystallized thought.

It conjured up a memory: I’m probably seven or eight, and I’d typed in some BASIC program from a magazine, a simple rotation cipher. My dad gets home from his job at IBM and – just off the top of his head, no internet at this point – updates the code to accept flags to decrypt and adjust the amount of rotation. And I remember thinking, are you a wizard?

Our big deck project continues. We’ve yet break ground, but we’re getting close. We’re excited, but it has gotten expensive and the price seems to increase by tens of thousands of dollars every time we talk to our contractors. Do we like this house enough to make a major investment in it? Bit of a chicken-and-egg situation in that we hope we’ll like it a whole lot more once this work is done.

Finally, Nev and I discovered this gem on Netflix: Bad Dinosaurs. It’s scary and hilarious, disgusting and heartfelt. Right up our collective alley. Too bad there’s only one season, but what a season it is.

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This Month

• Adventure: Lake Norman for Labor Day weekend (looking at it right now!); turning 44 i.e. the end of my early 40s.
• Project: I’ve got a nice piano loop I’d like to turn into a finished track (perhaps using some of advice and plugins from this article); blog about my synth setup and, as ever, that 3D printing project I did earlier this year
• Skill: getting better sounds out of my Prophet polysynth; I feel like this really should be the centerpiece of my setup, but I struggle to make patches I really like and wind up leaning on simpler instruments

Reading & Listening

• Fiction: A Parade of Horribles, Matt Dinniman
• Non-fiction: The Magic of Code, Samuel Arbesman (via)
• Music: had a bunch of pre-orders finally show up at the end of the month, so nothing new until I’ve had the chance to spend time with those

Links

• The joy of making stuff with a 3D printer | Note to Self (via)

  Once I discovered Gridfinity, I went to town. When life feels out of control, there are few things more soothing than organizing small objects in little boxes.

• Tiny E-Reader Is the Best Piece of Technology in Years - The Atlantic

  In person, the Xteink is many things: plasticky. Flawed. Finicky. Nevertheless, it is the single best piece of technology that I have purchased in years. In the two months before getting this cartoonishly tiny e-reader, I finished only one book. In one month with the X3, I read three books without even really trying—and my iPhone’s average daily screen time dipped by 25 minutes.

• Spring clean, fall prune – amanda untangled

  Since it’s the first of September and I can literally feel autumn in my bones, I wanted to spend some time today talking about a routine that my family and I came up with over the last several years. It’s a rhythm that we’ve really come to enjoy at the turn of the season, every spring and fall equinox.

• Changes to SourceHut’s terms of service regarding LLMs

  The use of LLMs or other generative AI tools to produce or assist with the production of source code, assets, tickets, emails, and so on, will no longer be permitted on SourceHut once these terms take effect.

  My git forge of choice came out pretty hard against AI-generated code. I’m still processing this – I’ve mostly stopped open-sourcing my slops, but I certainly use Codex for some of the tooling on this site, which appears to be against the letter of the TOS.

• ArtLung: Chuck Tingle and the Internet ~ 23 Aug 2026 (via)

  The promise of the internet was that it was beautiful. “Charlie bit my finger” is such a fascinating thing. (The internet) was great but then the hand of capitalism evolved it against what it started as–human fostering human connection–and capitalism works to crushes connection. But the inertia of the universe is love, and sincerity is good. I think we can cycle back to that beautiful fostering of human connection.

  I asked ChatGPT to confirm the origin of “trot your own trot,” a phrase I borrowed from Chuck Tingle that Claire and I say with some frequency. It told me, “Ha — this appears to be you. Searching the exact phrase ’trot your own trot,’ the earliest clear indexed use I can find is a 2017 Viget article by David Eisinger, Using Microcosm Presenters to Manage Complex Features.” Which is hilarious and utterly false.

• A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird (via)

  In general, goodness is more context-dependent than badness. There isn’t really anything that’s good all the time for everyone independent of context … But there are reliable ways to make people unhappy. There’s a set of evils that are close to universal: death, pain, illness, violence.

  I found this pretty insightful in terms of how easy it is to talk to people about things that suck (politics, climate change, etc.) and harder to talk about things that are going well (the rest of my life).

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