Frank van Puffelen

Interesting that for this xkcd strip the link to the explainer site shows up before the link to the original strip. 🔩

While doing some work in Conductor, Codex regularly shows: > CHATGPT USAGE LIMIT REACHED But ChatGPT has 60% of 5h quota and 80% of weekly quota left. The problem disappears at reset, so I wonder if there's application specific limits in addition to the regular quota limit 🤔

Since September 2026 Florecita Panaderia has relocated to the corner of 23rd street and Bartlett street, in the location that used to host Shuggies (and Velvet Cantina before that). Their made-from-scratch pan dulce/conchas are delicious! More: puf.io/socials/2026-...

📕🕳️ Terry Pratchett's Dodger gives a critical view of conditions in Victorian-era London as a whole, while showing that there are good people to be found even in the most dire of places and circumstances. I really liked it! ★★★★☆ Full review: puf.io/books/dodger-...

Regardless of the topic in the post, LinkedIn seems to have this headache-inducing bouncing of content more than any other site I visit. #uifail

📚🥏🧝‍♀️ Being beautiful is not the same as being good. Being respected is not the same as being worthy. Lords and Ladies wraps ideas like those in hilarious comedy, elves, witches, and one very memorable suit of armor. Rating: ★★★★☆ Full review puf.io/books/lords-a...

I'm working with multiple agents on a project, the constant presence of this button is "somewhat" anxiety inducing. 😅 (this is the Conductor app's version, but I expect that most tools have something similar)

"We've reserved your LinkedIn handle on our new site that you've never heard of before we sent you this email" would've been another way to phrase this. :-/

📓 Hyperpolitics explores how we got to the current state of politics: everything feels intensely political, yet very little changes. It was fascinating to read his analysis, but I wish it had been written in more accessible language. 3/5 ⭐ Full review: puf.io/books/hyperpo...

Published in 1998, Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Talents was set in a near-future post-apocalyptic world. By now its story begins just a few years into the future and is eerily recognizable. A hard book to read, for all the right reasons. ★★★★☆ puf.io/books/parable...

“Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.” - Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight

When you just started getting used to Gemini 4 Argon...

📕💣 Based on Vonnegut's experience as a POW during the bombing of Dresden, Slaughterhouse-Five mixes war memoir, science fiction, and dark comedy in one very unusual book. I found it an interesting read. Rating: ★★★★☆ Full review: puf.io/books/slaught...

📖🪐 I enjoyed the Veronica Mars TV show, movie, and audiobooks this year, so Neptune Noir seemed like a no-brainer. However, the essays in this book are not written by the Veronica Mars creator, and I found them mostly uninteresting. ⭐⭐☆☆☆ Review: puf.io/books/neptune...

When I hiked in Mount Sutro Open Space Reserve recently, I noticed these "dollhouse" structures on a few tree trunks. A very cute distraction on an intermediate hike in one of the many beautiful parks in San Francisco. More: puf.io/socials/2026-...

Did @doctorow.pluralistic.net 's books 'Enshittification'and 'Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI' reveal a new world to me? Nah. Did they expand, dispell, reinforce, embarrass, and in other ways alter notions I held, rather than merely entertain them? Yeh. Very much so! Big recommend 👍

📙 The Amber Spyglass seems to be the most divisive book in Pullman’s oft-praised trilogy. Given how explicitly it deals with religion, I get how it may be hard to stomach for certain folks. For me, though, it was a fascinating exploration of these ideas puf.io/books/the-amb...

📖🚀 Great setup and writing in John Scalzi’s 3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years, especially how the different travelers and their goals let the story explore several time-travel scenarios. I found the ending less satisfying than I’d hoped for, though. ★★★☆☆ puf.io/books/3-days,...

📚🥏 I loved Lords and Ladies. Beautiful but cruel elves, Granny Weatherwax at her kind-but-not-nice best, and Magrat growing from a "wet hen" (Granny's words, not mine) into a confident warrior queen. 👸🗡️ Rating: ★★★★☆ Full review: puf.io/books/lords-a...

The first personal computer I owned was an Atari 600XL, which we then upgraded to 48KB memory. Now, I know I'm probably not gonna do a lot with this device, but still... it's an awesome retro kit.

Google makes it easier to launch your vibe-coded apps | The Verge www.theverge.com/tec... The future of apps for hands full of users is bright 🌞

📗 Octavia Butler's Parable of the Talents started showing up in my book recommendations regularly in recent years. First published in 1998, its recent resurgence likely has to do with its narrative of a social and economic collapse of the US. ★★★★☆ puf.io/books/parable...

And now, Richard Garriott, AKA "Lord British," has claimed back the rights to the groundbreaking Ultima series of computer role-playing games, which he sold to Electronic Arts in 1992: www.videogameschronicle.com/news/richard...

📕🛸 I first heard of Slaughterhouse-Five back in my teens, when it was on the allowed-reading list for English classes in my Dutch high school. It took me four decades, but I finally read this Vonnegut classic. 😅 Rating: ★★★★☆ Full review: puf.io/books/slaught...

📖🚀 3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years by John Scalzi has a fun time-travel premise, with travelers returning after one of said internals while changes in the past create new timelines. Most of the story executes that premise well. The ending less so. ★★★☆☆ puf.io/books/3-days,...

🌁🥮 At Florecita Panaderia on 23rd and Bartlett in San Francisco, each perfectly sized concha is baked right on site where you can see them. And smell them… oh my gosh, can you smell them! More pics: puf.io/socials/2026-...

📚 The Amber Spyglass is much more philosophical than the previous two books, exploring free will, divine authority, and how love can take many forms. For me, it was a fascinating exploration of these ideas and a good ending to an interesting trilogy. 👀 puf.io/books/the-amb...

The free edition of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter dives deep into the problems in Firebase SDKs that affected many iOS apps last week. newsletter.pragmatic... TL;DR: a back-end change caused the iOS SDKs to crash. The fix was to roll back the back-end change.

I agree with you, Google, that looks like some seriously scary JSON data there. 🫣

Firestore's count API gets expensive fast. Here's a neat trick: * estimate the document count from just 100-200 IDs * at a fixed cost, no matter how large the collection Full explanation: puf.io/posts/firesto...

"The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time." —  Tom Cargill, Bell Labs

Apparently estimating the amount of work is still one of the hardest thing in software engineering. Just in the opposite direction of how it was before...

Presenting... Talk of the Town, October 2026 edition *Playing with Jev & home-cooked transit dev* feat. @jim-nielsen.com, @nicobaier.com, @mootari.social, @paulchinjr.bsky.social, @marianoguerra.org, @cheersderek.com, @puf.io, @stevekrouse.com, @petemillspaugh.com, and dozens more

One of my experiments showed up in the val.town blog: > Frank van Puffelen used Codex to create a goodreads-bookhive-sync val that automatically syncs his GoodReads updates to BookHive 📚↔️📚 The blog: blog.val.town/talk-o... The tool: www.val.town/x/puf/g...

📕👽 Vonnegut struggled for a long time to write Slaughterhouse-Five based on his own WWII experience. I felt that the absurd mixture of styles combines well with his lived experience and the absurdities of war. Rating: ★★★★☆ Full review: puf.io/books/slaught...

📖🚀Science fiction short stories are one of my favorite "genres", especially when they explore an alternative reality where only one or a few aspects are changed. John Scalzi’s 3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years does that well, with an OK ending. ★★★☆☆ puf.io/books/3-days,...

Ever wonder which of your users is eating up your Firestore read quota? Turns out Firestore audit logs + Cloud Log Analytics = a per-user read breakdown. Here's how 👇 puf.io/posts/countin...