Longer-form posts about whatever I'm exploring.
I had a bike commute where I happened to join the 2026 May 3rd 5 borough bike tour1. I was curious how much overlap I had. The below is an overlay output from a vibe coded ChatGPT session, extracting the overlay data using gpx from my strava data and gpx from the bike tour that looks like is here2. So in my mind it felt like 5 miles. And looks like it was about 5.92 miles.
Recently, myself and the rest of NYC went through a cold spell and news outlets reported2 the 13 day stretch of sub-zero weather, ending Feb 6th, was not longer than a 16 stretch in 1881. And this was shorter than a 1963 stretch, but tying a 2018-01-13 streak. But this recent winter sure felt extreme. I know there is a recency bias, but I figured, why not also compare the area under the curve too. So I ranked the coldest 14-day stretches, using available data of the past decade. And then tried to visualize the spans of the coldest years too.
Email forwarding mystery solved Feeling several facepalms now that my michal@piekarczyk.xyz email finally forwards to my hey.com email inbox. After several sessions of tweaking, the answer was low tech! Registrar forwarding Originally, I setup mail forwarding on my domain registrar. Only $5 a year, okay why not. After proving to my registrar I owned my hey email, I was all set, but tests yielded silence. I spent several chat sessions with a support engineer at my registrar. He pointed out I was missing SPF and DKIM records for my custom domain and so he added those. Those have nothing to do with delivering mail to my address and only help to authenticate mail sent from my domain, but I figured what the heck let’s try something. That did not work.
Life’s a garden, can you dig it? That is what a colleague of mine had said very often when we worked together, about how you need to put time and effort into stuff. You know, get your hands dirty ! Picking up my shovel Today I finally took a first step to trying out this digital gardening concept on Maggie Appleton’s blog0. I came across back on haha I don’t know why but on 2025-07-04 , I guess it was a kind of independence day in my brain, from the march of chronology.
Came back from a flight from New Delhi , Monday morning, that left New Delhi just after midnight and 16 hours later arriving in New York around 5:30 am. And so far today, Thursday morning, I feel kind of fine, not really jet lagged, in the sense of wanting to wake or sleep at odd hours. The specific strategy I did in attempting to align meal time and sleep time with the destination time zone was to fast the day of the flight until lunch time arrival at my destination. It would have been ideal if I was able to sleep during the red eye though not doing so was also perhaps fine since by the time I crashed on Monday at around 19:00, I had about 16 + 16 + 12 = 44 hours of sleep pressure in the tank. And then when I slept for basically 12 hours, waking at 7 am on Tuesday, and getting the morning sun, I was basically back in my rhythm. And so far, sleep on Tuesday night and Wednesday night was pretty okay.
Fleeting notes and thoughts that might take shape later.
I noticed, mentioning here1 also, how images with spaces display fine on logseq will not display on github. But also that I learned about the hack to wrap paths with <> to support both without having to rename filenames like I had done in the past. Well I used codex to create a utility for this into my logseq_utils repo, and that ended up being a cool code gen complexity example.
if an image in logseq has the form  that displays fine on logseq but does not display on github. On github, without changing the filename you can however replace spaces with %20  but that doesn’t work on logseq. However interestingly, though according to this link I found per a google search, common mark supports one alternative that works in both logseq and github markdown !
Replying to a coworker’s comments about code generation, how it is a necessary trade off between delegation and abdication. I like that he uses the phrase, for abdicating vs. delegating, that “prompts with explicit intent, drastically improve claud code’s chances at producing quality code,” emphasis on “chances”. This is to me why it’s not quite assembly since, compilation is deterministic. More on that later, but begs do question, are you in control?
Just hit a mini milestone today w.r.t. a small project I have been working on, to implement cosine similarity search on my logseq4 notes. I have embedded a few months worth of my notes with Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B1 into chromadb and I have a small flask fastapi server2,3 around this, for querying. I have chunked up my notes before embedding them and therefore results show those chunks. I am serving this on ec2 using tailscale5, so I can even hit the endpoint from my phone without really exposing it publicly.
I have been using apple macos transcription on my handwritten notes every once in a while, where you manually select text from some png or pdf and copy paste, into a text document, but it is pretty awful. Is bad because it misses many of the bounding boxes and even then makes so many transcription errors, that I might as well just transcribe it myself. And so ultimately I was wondering if a hugging face model is better at the transcription. I learned about https://huggingface.co/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR-VL-1.5 from chatgpt.
an interlude to having better grasp of an unwieldly photo situation
This project is a reboot of an earlier project predicting bicycle ride share riders destinations.
This is a simple personal time tracker built with clojure, aws lambda and dynamodb, inspired by Laura Vanderkam’s “168 Hours” book
