I took an amazing trip to SE Asia last month, including Angkor Wat. I had a hard time finding good reading or other resources to learn from before I went, in part because Amazon is awash in AI garbage. Here’s some books and podcasts I found useful about the Khmer empire in general and Angkor in particular:

Ancient Angkor by Michael Freeman and Claude Jacques. The closest thing to a coffee-table book to preview what you will see. The practical information is outdated but the pictures and descriptions are good.

Empire Podcast #185: The God Kings of Angkor Wat by William Dalrymple and Anita Anand. An entertaining and fully detailed account of the Khmer empire. It’s basically an excerpt from Dalrymple’s new book The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World.

Fall of Civilizations Podcast #5: The Khmer Empire by Paul Cooper. Another history, not quite as magically well told as Dalrymple but full of good information.

Angkor and the Khmer Civilization by Michael D. Coe. A highly recommended history of the Khmer region. Honestly I found this very dry and too detailed, but I did learn from it.

Lonely Planet Pocket Guide: Siem Reap & the Temples of Angkor. We didn’t use this much but it seemed like a useful practical guide. OTOH it dates to 2018 so things have changed.

My other advice for visiting Siem Reap and Angkor is: go. It is amazing. Plan for at least two full days of touristing there. Hire a private guide and driver if you can, it is absolutely worth it. (Email me for a recommendation.)

I’ve been doing Dry January this year. One thing I missed was something for apéro hour, a beverage to mark the start of the evening. Something complex and maybe bitter, not like a drink you’d have with lunch. I found some good options.

Ghia sodas are my favorite. Ghia is an NA apéritif based on grape juice but with enough bitterness (gentian) and sourness (yuzu) to be interesting. You can buy a bottle and mix it with soda yourself but I like the little cans with extra flavoring. The Ginger and the Sumac & Chili are both great.

Another thing I like are low-sugar fancy soda pops. Not diet drinks, they still have a little sugar, but typically 50 calories a can. De La Calle Tepache is my favorite. Fermented pineapple is delicious and they have some fun flavors. Culture Pop is also good.

A friend gave me the Zero book, a drinks cookbook from the fancy restaurant Alinea. This book is a little aspirational but the recipes are doable, it’s just a lot of labor. Very fancy high end drink mixing, really beautiful flavor ideas. The only thing I made was their gin substitute (mostly junipers extracted in glycerin) and it was too sweet for me. Need to find the right use for it, a martini definitely ain’t it.

An easier homemade drink is this Nonalcoholic Dirty Lemon Tonic. It’s basically a lemonade heavily flavored with salted preserved lemons, then mixed with tonic. I love the complexity and freshness of this drink and enjoy it on its own merits.

Finally, non-alcoholic beer has gotten a lot better in the last few years thanks to manufacturing innovations. I’ve been enjoying NA Black Butte Porter, Stella Artois 0.0, Heineken 0.0. They basically all taste just like their alcoholic uncles, no compromise.

One thing to note about non-alcoholic substitutes is they are not cheap. They’ve become a big high end business. Expect to pay the same for an NA drink as one with alcohol even though they aren’t taxed nearly as much.

The Trump administration has made aggressive threats against immigrants in the US. It’s not clear what’s coming, my biggest fear is a violent display of fascism. (Don’t call them camps!) But even if it’s a polite legal process it will be chaotic and disruptive to many neighbors.

Back in 2018 I donated reactively to the Trump administration’s cruelty to immigrant families. This time I’m trying to get ahead of it. The need for the money is now, no matter what happens it is going to be a bad few years for immigrants in the US. To that end I asked on Metafilter about charities to donate to. I got back a remarkable reply listing 18 charities that all have some California focus. I donated to most of them.

I want to highlight two groups in particular. One is RAICES. They work in Texas, not California, but they are well organized and effective. The other is KIND. They have a simple mission. They try to ensure every unaccompanied minor has legal representation in immigration court (something not guaranteed.) The other groups on the list are all also deserving of consideration.

LLMs are good search helpers. Here’s three search tools I use every day. All of these use an AI to synthesize answers but also provide an essential feature: specific web search results for you to verify and further research. I use these for conversational inquiries in addition to more traditional keyword searches.

Phind is an excellent free LLM + search engine. The AI writes an answer to your query but is very careful to provide footnotes to a web-search-like list of links on the right. I use this mostly for directed search queries, things like “what’s an inexpensive TV streaming device?” where I might have used keyword search too. The Llama-70b LLM that powers the free version is quite good, sometimes I have general conversations with it or ask it to generate code.

Bing CoPilot has a very similar output result to Phind. I find it a little less useful and the search result links are less prominent. But it’s a good second opinion. Bing has been a very good search engine for 10+ years, I’m grateful to Microsoft for continuing to invest in it. CoPilot results are sometimes volunteered on the main Bing page but you often have to click to get to the ChatGPT 4 Turbo enhanced pages.

Kagi is what I use as my general search engine, my Google replacement. It mostly gives traditional keyword search results but sometimes it will volunteer a “Quick Answer” where Claude 3 Haiku synthesizes an answer with references. You can also request one. I think Phind and CoPilot do a better job but I appreciate when Kagi intercepts a keyword search I did and just gives me the right answer.

Google has tried various versions of LLM-enhancement in search, I think the current version is called AI Overviews. It’s not bad but it’s also not as good as the others.

Not mentioned here: ChatGPT or Claude. Those are general purpose LLMs but they don’t really give search results or specific references. In the old days they’d make up URLs if you asked but that’s improving.

8BitDo makes good game controllers. A wide variety of styles from retro to mainstream, with some unusual shapes. And wide compatibility with various systems: PC, Macs, Switch, Android. They’re well built, work right, and quite inexpensive. A far cry from the MadCatz-style junk we used to get.

The new hotness is the Ultimate 2C, an Xbox-style wireless controller for the very low price of $30. But it works great, doesn’t feel cheap at all. The fancier mainstream choice is the Ultimate 2.4g at $50 which includes a charging stand and extra reprogrammability.

But what’s really interesting to me are the odd layouts, often small or retro. The SN30 Pro is particularly interesting as a portable controller. SNES-styling but a full XBox style modern controller with two analog sticks, easy to throw in a suitcase.

There’s a lot of fiddly details for this class of device. Controller type (XInput, DInput, switch, etc), wireless interface (Bluetooth or proprietary), etc. 8BitDo makes good choices and implementations for all that stuff I’ve tested. They seem to work well with Steam. They’re a popular brand so well tested. It helps that PC game controllers have mostly standardized around the Xbox layout and XInput. Steam can patch over any rough spots for older games.

PreSonus makes good computer speakers. They’re marketed as “reference monitors” but at $100 for a small set I have my doubts about their referenceness. Fortunately I have a tin ear and they sound just fine for my computer playing YouTube videos, compressed music, games. Wirecutter agrees.

The specific ones I have are these 3.5" Bluetooth speakers for $150. Inputs are RCA line-in, balanced, and Bluetooth, also an Aux-In and Headphone jacks on the front. Decent amplifier, plenty loud for an office. There’s 100Hz and 10kHz equalization knobs and a Bluetooth pairing button in the back. The “Gen 2” version includes an optional standby mode for power savings which seems to work fine. The cabinet is MDF and while it’s light it doesn’t have that hollow sound of cheap plastic. The website only promises 80 Hz so these are not the speakers for bass thumping.

Fifteen years ago I recommended the M-Audio speakers. IIRC their quality went downhill, maybe they went to plastic enclosures? I also had some Creative Mackie speakers but they have a manufacturing problem that causes them to fail after a few years. We’ll see how long these PreSonus ones last.

I’m self-conscious how this post looks like a spammy marketing affiliate page written by an AI. It’s not! I just like the product.

Phanpy is good software for reading Mastodon or other Fediverse posts. Astonishingly it’s an open source passion project from a single developer, Chee Aun. Its quality is extraordinary, better than most commercial social media software.

There’s so many good things about Phanpy that it’s hard to know where to start. It has several innovations for reading social media. My favorite is the Boost Carousel, a way to collapse the ordinary spammy boosts / retweets so they don’t overwhelm original posts. There’s also the catch-up UI, a novel approach to the problem of helping you read the last 12+ hours of posts quickly.

Mostly I like Phanpy because it’s just very high quality. All the little things work so well, like the post UI and the image display and the notifications. The account switcher is great too. So many software products are full of rough edges and bugs and annoyances. Phanpy is immaculate.

It’s easy to get started. Phanpy runs as a PWA so there’s not even really an install, you just visit the website, approve the login from your main Mastodon host, and you’re up and running. I use it that way in my browser on desktop but have it installed as a formal PWA on my phone. Works great, including notifications.

Honestly surprised a product of this quality is an open source project. AFAICT Chee Aun has worked full time on it for at least a year and he is very good at what he does. He has a modest request for sponsors but I hope somehow his work ends up paying him very well or compensates him in some other way.

Google search is overwhelmed with spam these days. Back in January I switched to Kagi and have been happy with it. It’s not free but there’s a limited trial to check it out. I pay $10/mo for unlimited access. Turns out I do about 50 searches a day.

I’m unclear on how Kagi works or why it’s better than Google. It seems to be returning more quality results and less SEO-churn old-but-look-new pages. I see some AI-padded content on the results at times but mostly better stuff. I assume under the hood it’s mostly Bing. Whatever they’re doing works for me, a bit of a surprise since the similar DuckDuckGo has never succeeded for me.

Kagi is ad-free. It has some interesting advanced features but I don’t use them often. Honestly most of my queries are navigational. Kagi does have a new sidebar LLM feature where it generates a synthetic answer with references, much like Bing, sometimes I find that useful.

My biggest annoyance is Kagi’s local and maps search is nowhere near as good as Google. It’s Apple Maps; their cartography is good these days but they don’t have the local search data with user reviews. Also Kagi doesn’t work in incognito mode because I’m not logged in. They have a workaround for it but then you lose anonymity.

I have a feeling I’m going to be changing search engines several times in the next few years. It’s a shame Neeva didn’t make it, I feel like now is the best time ever for serious search competition. I’m grateful Bing is still viable. And maybe Google will finally get its act together.

Restic is good backup software. It’s a command line tool for backing up filesystems to various local and remote options. It is well documented, easy to set up, secure, and quite fast. It’s a very professional product. I am now backing up all my Linux systems with it. Note it’s a sysadmin tool; I don’t think there’s a friendly consumer GUI.

The underlying data model is its genius. Backups are stored in a repository, some complex hash-index blob store that I don’t understand at all. But it seems able to quickly store blocks of data and de-duplicate them so incremental backups are efficient. It’s encrypted and the blobs in the repository are stored in a simple filesystem. That makes it easy and safe to backup to all sorts of places including untrusted remote stores. I’m doing remote backups to BackBlaze’s S3-like filesystem for about $1/month.

The repo format means you need a working copy of restic to restore your files. I’m OK with that, it’s open source. And the tool is great. It has options for bulk restore, individual file restore, interactive restore via a FUSE filesystem. Also a check command you can use to verify subsets of the backup on your own schedule.

The basic command line tool is good but limited. I’m using resticprofile as a frontend. You set up a single config file and it takes care of running restic for you, even scheduling itself in cron. It’s a bit idiosyncratic but seems to work fine once set up. backrest is another frontend, I haven’t tried it.

Shout out to rsnapshot, I’ve been backing up with it for 18 years now. Time for something new. rsnapshot is pretty slow on lots of little files and remote backups were awkward. Years ago I said 5 minutes to do an incremental backup of 165GB was good; that takes more like 5 seconds in Restic now.

Proxmox is good software for a home datacenter. It’s an OS you install on server hardware that lets you easily run multiple virtual machines and LXC containers. It also manages disk storage and has some more complex support for high availability in a cluster, distributed storage via Ceph, etc. But even with a single small server running a single VM Proxmox offers advantages.

I’ve had a Linux server in my home for 20+ years now. Every few years I have to rebuild it, often from the ashes of failed hardware, and it’s always a tedious manual process. Now my server is truly virtualized, a nice tidy KVM/QEMU virtual machine with a disk I can snapshot and back up. And migrate an exact copy to new hardware in minutes.

Right now I’m mostly running my stuff in one big VM under Proxmox that I migrated from the old server. But I’m slowly moving services to separate VMs and LXC containers. So now my SMB server for Sonos lives in one container, and my Plex server in another, and my Unifi router manager in a third. All running isolated from each other. This feels tidier, more manageable.

Proxmox does a lot of nice things for home-scale servers. It handles ZFS for filesystems, including snapshots and backups. It has a nice web GUI for managing things, even graphical consoles where needed. And I like how it supports both VMs and containers as a first class things. There’s other ways to manage guest systems, like Docker (containers only) or VMware ESXi (proprietary, VMs only). Proxmox feels the right scale for me. I’ve spent about a month tinkering with it and like the software quite a bit. It’s usable, well documented, and seems well designed.