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  One thing that I continually have trouble remembering is on which letter the diaeresis goes and I always have to think quite hard about it. In Spanish, it's always on the first letter, which must be a u. In French, it's always on the second letter, which may vary. This came to mind today because I needed to type “sinvergüenza”—meaning “scoundrel”, and literally, “without shame”—when describing a New Mexico state senator's characterization of the U.S. president.

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  I had to email a news website to ask for a correction because they wrote an article about Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, which is restricting gender-affirming care, and used a stock photo of Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, which, to the best of my knowledge, is not. I was like, "Gee, that building looks familiar," and it was in fact the one I bike by most Fridays. It's important to be accurate and lay blame at the feet of the proper folks.

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  If you're dealing with identification documents from the public, such as passports, you need to allow for options other than male and female (usually X) because people have documents reflecting that. You need to do this even if your particular jurisdiction doesn't allow this because you may deal with documents from other locales that do. And, if your website is accessible in other jurisdictions, you may have legal requirements under human rights law as well.

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  I love mutt and have used it happily for many years, but it's not great on high-latency connections using IMAP. I mean, it's tolerable but not speedy to my mail server in Toronto from Lisbon, but it's extremely painful on an airplane's satellite service so much that I just gave up. Fortunately, my friends and spouse did not need the itinerary that I forgot to send them before my trip.

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  I ran into someone else from Canada today at brunch. How did I know? When spoken to in Portuguese, they said, “Hello, bonjour.”

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  I was taking the bus from the airport to the subway station and the route goes partly on the highway. There was a sign, “Watch for children / surveillez enfants.” On the highway? I certainly hope not.

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  Let me suggest that if you are running a conference, you either get a fixed speaker blurb from each speaker or ask for their pronouns so that you can introduce them in a respectful way.

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  I'm pleased to see we're not finished discovering new cats. https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/tilcayo-tiger-cat-new-species-9.7349140

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  The Government of Canada is collecting feedback about AI transparency and what, if any actions, should be taken. The form is a bit long, but I think it's worth filling out. And you do not need to be a Canadian resident to participate. https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/ised/en/have-your-say-advancing-ai-transparency-canada

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  An interesting article about a study which suggests why cats leave food unfinished. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2026/04/08/japan/cats-meals-unfinished/

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  It's 4°C, so after dinner we had golden Oreo strawberry gelato. Because gelato.

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  J'ai visité la bibliothèque Richview aujourd'hui (en Etobicoke) pour emprunter deux romans policiers français. (J'habite au centre-ville.) Je sais que c'est possible de demander la livraison de livres à une bibliothèque plus près, mais j'aime bien l'opportunité de voir d'autres parties de la ville. Les bibliothécaires était fantastique, comme d'habitude.

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  If you have a non-discrimination policy, it's important to have that on your jobs website and that it include specific categories. It's always been my policy that I won't work for a company that doesn't have sexual orientation and gender identity or expression in their non-discrimination policy. Local laws don't always protect queer people and in any event, it's easier to enforce company policy than it is to force legal compliance. "We&...

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  It's nice to see that OpenSSL 4 came out. And even nicer to see that it removed SSL v3.

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  At some point last year, I installed KDE and my avatar in the system settings got set to this SVG, which looks quite nice when rendered as a circular avatar. Since I didn't like any of the macOS avatars I had on my work Mac, I thought I'd use this, but I had the darndest time finding the logo. It lives in my home directory as .face (in SVG format), but I cannot for the life of me find this anywhere in any Debian package, which is where it must clearly have come from. 🤷

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  Vim has recently added the modelinestrict option to restrict modelines to a small allowlist. This is much like https://github.com/ciaranm/securemodelines (which works back to Vim 7), but built-in. It's a big improvement in security for those who want to set an option or two (I use it for spelllang) but want to reduce the risk of a vulnerability.

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  We rented a car to drive up to Barrie to do some cycling yesterday and we came back during rush hour. On Allen Road, where traffic backs up waiting to turn but there's a subway in the median, the TTC has installed little ads at each bridge. They say things like, "You're not stuck in traffic. You are traffic. Next time take the TTC." I'm fully in favour and if I didn't have to do the inconvenient thing and actually return the rental car, I wo...

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  I replaced our home server case from a tower case that's over 20 years old to a rackmount case this morning. (And yes, we have a rack from a former employer who wanted to get rid of it.) I'd wanted to do this a long time, but when the extremely ancient and somewhat nonstandard case fan started making awful noises, I took the opportunity to upgrade.

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  When I first learned the term “86,” I understood it to mean that a restaurant was out of something, or that they were ejecting a patron. I later on came to understand its additional meaning as “to kill.” I think that, given those multiple meanings, one can hardly imply a serious threat without substantial further context. Arguing that we should eject a politician from office is a fine and noble democratic tradition, one clearly protected by freedom of speech.

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  I registered a .ca domain yesterday and there is a Canadian presence requirement that all registrants must satisfy. You have to pick from a list to indicate which criterion you meet. One of the options is "Her Majesty the Queen". Note that this is not the Monarch in Right of Canada or a province (that's "Government"). This is Elizabeth the Second and her successors personally registering the domain. I am very curious how many such domains are regi...

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  With discussion of expanding Billy Bishop Airport on the Toronto Islands, I decided to see what the difference in travel time is between Pearson and Billy Bishop from Union Station. 6 minutes. The Union Pearson Express takes 25 minutes and the 509 Harbourfront streetcar takes 19. The only practical advantage to flying our of Billy Bishop for me is that it's a smaller airport and security is shorter. I'd happily spend the extra 6 minutes in transit to keep the islands and harbo...

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  The AP has done an article on the Feline Oscars. Because you need more cat pictures in your life. https://apnews.com/photo-gallery/romania-cat-show-photos-41dd948ce63a4c3660507867c68124b8