Les Orchard <me@lmorchard.com>
That's me!
About Me
TL;DR: he / him; old adhd cat dad; tinkerer; serial enthusiast; editor-at-large for lmorchard.com
This page collects a bunch of the stuff I do online. If you feel like it, send me an email at
me@lmorchard.com, send a toot to
@lmorchard@masto.hackers.town, or find me in one of
the other usual places below:
Blog (blog.lmorchard.com)
Links
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12 hours ago
Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks
In many jobs, employees must manage multiple projects or tasks at the same time. A typical workday often entails switching between several work activities, including projects, tasks, and meetings. This paper explores how such work design affects individual performance by focusing on the challenge of switching attention from one task to another. As revealed by two experiments, people need to stop thinking about one task in order to fully transition their attention and perform well on another. Yet, results indicate it is difficult for people to transition their attention away from an unfinished task and their subsequent task performance suffers. Being able to finish one task before switching to another is, however, not enough to enable effective task transitions. Time pressure while finishing a prior task is needed to disengage from the first task and thus move to the next task and it contributes to higher performance on the next task.
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12 hours ago
The new 20% time, minus the time | joe.dev
Running a handful of agents and switching between them is its own kind of tired. Harvard Business Review has started calling it “AI brain fry”: the strain of supervising systems that move faster than you can think. It isn’t burnout. For me, burnout is feeling responsible for something you can’t affect, shoving at an immovable object. Brain fry is almost the reverse. You have all the help you could ask for, a row of agents that will do whatever you tell them, and the thing that gives out is your own capacity to hold context and decide.4 We spend all our attention on what the tools can do. We’ve barely started on what running them does to the person doing it.
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15 hours ago
ntfy.sh | Send push notifications to your phone via PUT/POST
ntfy (pronounced notify) is a simple HTTP-based pub-sub notification service. It allows you to send notifications to your phone or desktop via scripts from any computer, and/or using a REST API. It's infinitely flexible, and 100% free software.
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17 hours ago
Banned Book Library | Rick's Blog
A long while back I had an idea to hack a WiFi smart light bulb to do something more useful to me. Actually, I had a few different ideas of things to do with them. One of these ideas was to modify the device to have an open WiFi access point and a web server hosting banned books. The idea was that if you lived somewhere that banned books you thought were important, you could theoretically stick a digital copy of the book on one of these light bulbs. Then you could go install it somewhere in your community. As long as the light bulb is switched on, then anyone in the vicinity can still access the banned material assuming they have an electronic device with WiFi. Since the device is a light bulb, it would be difficult to detect and likely to go unnoticed. A cyberpunk digital dead drop. These devices are also fairly inexpensive, so leaving them around town as is hopefully not very cost prohibitive.
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21 hours ago
Maybe it's time for lots of little indie AIs to take over - Anil Dash
That’s me, in The Guardian a few days ago, trying to distill a message that I’ve been trying to get out as broadly as possible for quite a while now. It's sort of like hoping a comet will take out the major AI players and a bunch of smaller new players will be the smarter, better-adapted mammals that take their place instead.
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1 day ago
MikeSchirtzinger/silent-notetaker: Private, on-device AI meeting notetaker that runs entirely in your browser — live transcription, speaker ID, and note extraction with no audio leaving your machine (WebGPU + WASM).
Private, on-device AI meeting notetaker that runs entirely in your browser — live transcription, speaker ID, and note extraction with no audio leaving your machine (WebGPU + WASM).
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1 day ago
staniks.github.io - Catlantean 3D - Making Graphics Like It's 1993
My goal was to build a complete, shippable first-person shooter using techniques that were common in the early 90s, while allowing myself the luxury of using a modern compiler and a platform abstraction layer.
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2 days ago
Doctor When
DOCTOR WHO is gone. STAR TREK has reached the end of its cycle. The STARGATE reboot was cancelled. The new STAR WARS film did not do well, and I believe they only have one more film in the pipeline. The MCU is not in a great place and the shape of its future will balance on the two new AVENGERS films. SUPERMAN’s takings were soft and SUPERGIRL is tracking at less than half of SUPERMAN’s opening. And the two biggest films of the last month were made for less than a million each by directors in their twenties. One or two swallows don’t make a summer, but right now it looks like old science fiction inflected IP is reaching a hiatus point.
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4 days ago
If Claude Fable stops helping you, you'll never know — Jonathon Ready
That creates a real supply chain risk for businesses. If Claude gives me poor or incorrect advice while I’m working on an AI component, I have no way of knowing whether the model was confused, whether my problem is unsolvable, or if some invisible policy restriction quietly kicked in. Anthropic has explicitly chosen not to tell users when this is happening.
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5 days ago
Split-Flap Display by David Kingsman | Download free STL model | Printables.com
10-unit split-flap display. 3D-printed flaps. Modular. | Download free 3D printable STL models
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5 days ago
Hershey Noailles
The Hershey fonts are a collection of vector fonts developed c. 1967 by Dr. Allen Vincent Hershey at the Naval Weapons Laboratory, and originally designed to be rendered using vectors on early cathode ray tube displays. Decomposing curves to connected straight lines allowed Hershey to produce complex typographic designs. In their original form the font data consists simply in a series of coordinates, meant to be connected by straight lines on the screen. We forked hersheytextjs and made it a program that defines strokes in css, then exports it as a font.
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6 days ago
reg-viz/storycap: A Storybook Addon, Save the screenshot image of your stories via puppeteer.
A Storybook Addon, Save the screenshot image of your stories 📷 via puppeteer.
@lmorchard@masto.hackers.town
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17 hours ago
Like, I read The Illuminatus! Trilogy too, but this is no way to immanentize the eschaton, broh.
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17 hours ago
Another problem with being associated with a team having a launch on Product Hunt is now I'm getting weird bro-spam like hybrid meal replacement competitors to Soylent & Hello Fresh who specialize in feeding "busy founders". This, along with somebody who wants me to mine cryptocurrency to access "the Akashic records dataset" via LLM queries
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20 hours ago
dang it, got nerdsniped into googling the XDG Base Directory Specification instead of going to make lunch
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1 day ago
was at a booze store, this weekend. i asked if they had chartreuse. we had a hearty laugh
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1 day ago
I'm always on the lookout for designers of odd stuff that I can print
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1 day ago
My special geegaws, let me show you them #3dprinting
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1 day ago
It's probably going to be ludicrously wasteful of filament, but for an occasional special little geegaw it'll be nifty
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1 day ago
Ooh, I have a Prusa MK4S and an MMU3 - I think this means I might soon be able to print in CMYKW full color with some software updates? #3dprinting https://blog.prusa3d.com/our-new-open-source-colormix-model-in-prusaslicer-and-easyprint_136079/
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2 days ago
Raccoon's back for a pond party
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3 days ago
My wife and I just had a really nice dinner for our anniversary. Then, on the way home, we got Taco Bell.
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3 days ago
As Alucard would say, "What?!" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ywAg5UJGvfs
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3 days ago
So I finished Castlevania: Symphony of the Night again and I can't believe I forgot about the 90s adult contemporary end credits theme https://castlevania.fandom.com/wiki/I_am_the_Wind
Github (@lmorchard)
- 12 minutes ago pushed cbcdb5d to lmorchard/starnet ( worktree-audio-reference-analyzer ): Harden Gemini call: retry transient failures + cap output tokens
- 1 hour ago pushed 313c323 to lmorchard/starnet ( worktree-audio-reference-analyzer ): Sanitize non-finite numbers so artifacts are always strict JSON
- 9 hours ago pushed 10a729f to lmorchard/starnet ( worktree-audio-reference-analyzer ): Session notes: player findings + fast-follows
- 9 hours ago pushed 605da16 to lmorchard/starnet ( worktree-audio-reference-analyzer ): Prompt: harmonize playable steps to perceived mode, not the raw measured key
- 9 hours ago pushed 7f36843 to lmorchard/starnet ( worktree-audio-reference-analyzer ): Add synth/steps track fields + ScoreSpec shape
- 10 hours ago pushed 3943f68 to lmorchard/starnet ( worktree-audio-reference-analyzer ): Spec: audio-reference Tone.js preview player (engine-shaped score-spec + harness)
- 10 hours ago pushed 859b9bb to lmorchard/starnet ( worktree-audio-reference-analyzer ): Add analyzed reference track: The Knife — Silent Shout
YouTube Videos (lmorchard)
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - Adding limit switches to a 3018 CNC machine?
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - Assembling the Why Em-Ulator Module for RC2014
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - Reflashing Sonoff S31 AC (again)
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Clip: Chiptunes & Tinkering - Reflashing a Sonoff S31 with Tasmota to control an AC outlet with Home
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - Reflashing a Sonoff S31 with Tasmota to control an AC outlet with Home Assis
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - RC2014 assembly, Pi Pico Terminal and Real Time Clock modules
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - RC2014 assembly, Digital I/O board part 2
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - RC2014 assembly, Digital I/O board
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - RC2014 wifi module assembly
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - RC2014 wifi module repair & firmware update
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - RC2014 assembly, again again?
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - RC2014 assembly, again?
Pocket Casts
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The Mythos mess and your AI questions, answered
from
The Vergecast: Ad-Free Edition
20 hours ago
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Big Questions About US-Iran Deal, Trump Wraps G7 Summit, Georgia Primary Results
from
Up First from NPR
5 hours ago
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NPR News: 06-17-2026 10AM EDT
from
NPR News Now
1 hour ago
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MBMBaM 818: Announcing: Utilidrink
from
My Brother, My Brother And Me
1 day ago
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NPR News: 06-16-2026 11AM EDT
from
Unknown Podcast
1 day ago
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# The **epic** story of Markdown
from
The Vergecast: Ad-Free Edition
1 day ago
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Israel Reacts To Iran Deal, Trump Meets World Leaders At G7, Georgia Primary Preview
from
Up First from NPR
1 day ago
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NPR News: 06-16-2026 10AM EDT
from
Unknown Podcast
1 day ago
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Model Not Available - Anthropic's Fable Shutdown & Apple's Siri Update
from
This Week in Tech (Audio)
2 days ago
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NPR News: 06-16-2026 12AM EDT
from
Unknown Podcast
1 day ago
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NPR News: 06-15-2026 11AM EDT
from
Unknown Podcast
2 days ago
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RSA June 1st 2026
from
RSAudio
2 weeks ago
Spotify ( Les Orchard )
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Always on Nostalgia by Vioflesh 21 minutes ago
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So Typical on Now That I'm Real by Fragrance 24 minutes ago
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Closer on Closer by Mercy Girl 28 minutes ago
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Weird Boy on Through the Chaos by Echoberyl 33 minutes ago
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Bury Me on It Will Come to You by ACTORS 36 minutes ago
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Imagination on Twist Of Shadows by Clan of Xymox 40 minutes ago
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Bulbform on TRST by TR/ST 45 minutes ago
Colophon
This is a static web page hosted on Amazon S3. It is periodically updated via a scheduled Github Action that fetches data from many sources on the web.
- Source code:
- https://github.com/lmorchard/about-me
- Last fetched:
- 2026-06-17T15:47:16.547Z
- Last rendered:
- 2026-06-17T15:47:54.811Z