Dispatch #36 (February 2026)

Journal > Dispatch #36 (February 2026)

Posted 2026-02-02 under #dispatch

Greetings from frigid Durham, North Carolina. We’ve had an uncharacteristic amount of winter precipitation this month (mostly ice last weekend but a few inches of snow this one). On the one hand, our work is pretty flexible and we’ve gotten plenty of extra time with the kids. On the other, my home office and all my hobbies are in the basement, where it’s presently around 40°F, so I’m about ready for things to get back to normal.

I spent a few days in Miami for a company leadership retreat. Highlights included a run along the Miami Beach Beachwalk and beers at Abbey Brewing Company. Then we headed up to DC for a friend’s baby shower and some time with my folks.

While we were up there, our car finally gave up the ghost. It’s been struggling to start for a while now, so it wasn’t completely unexpected, but I’d hoped to replace it by choice rather than by necessity. We’ve got a Toyota Rav4 plug-in hybrid headed our way. I’m pretty psyched for this, getting around town on electric power but still being able to fill up with gas when we travel.

Voice Note Shortcut

I’m constantly thinking of, and then promptly forgetting, things I need to do, groceries to buy, ideas for these blog posts, etc. I’ve been on the hunt for some way to quickly capture these fleeting thoughts. I like the idea of a ring that can record voice memos, but this one requires a $10/mo subscription, and this one just … turns into trash after 12-15 hours of recording.

Instead, I played around in the iOS Shortcuts app and made a shortcut that captures text from speech, then looks for a note named for today’s date (creating it if necessary) and appends the dictated text to it. Then I made it so that double-tapping the back of the phone launches the shortcut (shout out Viget friend Max Myers). I’m getting a ton of utility from this, using it throughout my day. Here’s the shortcut if you want to give it a shot.

3D Printing

Still having a blast with the 3D printer (though, again, too cold to operate it at present). Made a ton of toys for the kids, stuff for the house, and (of course) accessories for the printer itself.

Friend of the blog Tim Hårek linked to this post about OpenSCAD, which lets you define 3D models with code. I had Codex help me make a stencil for Nev to use for her Valentine’s Day cards. Then I ordered this Crayola airbrush kit, which works shockingly well. She’s been having a blast with it.

We’re doing our company hackathon in a few weeks, and I’m planning to use the printer to make something with both physical and digital components (probably involving AprilTags).

Finally, RIP Dan McQuade. 43 years old. What the hell. I’m off to hug my family.

This Month

Adventure: keeping it local this month (though I guess I need to get up to DC to deal with the car at some point) but lots of friends and family visiting
Project: aforementioned hackathon
Skill: I predict I’m going to struggle to meet all of my commitments this month, so I’m going to give myself a little bit of grace on this one

Reading & Listening

Fiction: The Will of the Many, James Islington (via)
Non-fiction: The Magic of Code, Samuel Arbesman (via)
Music: I’ve got a bit of a backlog here; gonna spend some time with the records I already have rather than buying something new

Links

Things you’re allowed to do (via)
This is a list of things you’re allowed to do that you thought you weren’t, or didn’t even know you could.
The Dilbert Afterlife - by Scott Alexander (via)
Once you’re sufficiently prominent, politics becomes a separating equilibrium; if you lean even slightly to one side, the other will pile on you so massively and traumatically that it will force you into their opponents’ open arms just for a shred of psychological security.
Velocity Is the New Authority. Here’s Why – On my Om (via)
Authority used to be the organizing principle of information, and thus the media. You earned attention by being right, by being first in discovery, or by being big enough to be the default. That world is gone. The new and current organizing principle of information is velocity.
ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering (via)
Recently, I’ve been spending my time building an image-to-ASCII renderer. Below is the result — try dragging it around, the demo is interactive!
Fascists Are Pathetic | Defector
In Trump’s second term, the federal government has intentionally rid itself of the capacity to do anything but make things worse; it has quite literally traded Ph.D scientists and dedicated civil servants for the chance to hastily stand up this expansion team from the waiver wire flotsam of the violence worker community.

David Eisinger