Amazon Wants Me to Destroy My Pressure Cooker | October 27 2026, 17:08

Amazon wants to pay me 75 bucks to destroy my pressure cooker, which I bought seven years ago. I like the pressure cooker, but I’ve been looking for something to replace it anyway, though I haven’t found anything yet. I started making rice in a Cuckoo rice cooker, while soup is still being handled by the Power Quick Pot.

But here’s the problem—the pressure cooker is very difficult to destroy on camera. It’s made to withstand high pressure, so the only things you can break by hand are the decorative elements. Well, and the electrical components. Amazon also says that if they’re not satisfied with the extent of the damage, they won’t give me the money.

Incidentally, the Power Quick Pot has been impossible to buy for a long time anyway. Can you recommend anything worthwhile on the American market?

Open-Source Local Meeting Transcriber | October 26 2026, 03:48

Released an open-source program for creating transcripts of meetings (for example, in Teams), calls, and lectures, with automatic screenshots. And an article about it (RUS/UKR/EN). Link in the comments.

It didn’t start with meetings. I wanted a tool that would listen as I commented aloud while testing an application, and then turn it, together with screenshots, into a document or nearly finished bug reports. But in the end, 9 out of 10 times I use it, it’s for call transcripts and as an assistant right during the conversation. And it’s also great at turning YouTube lectures into readable articles with slides.

Recognition is fully local. Call audio and screen screenshots never leave your machine. Three engines to choose from — faster-whisper, GigaAM (for Russian, 20 times faster than Whisper and without hallucinations like To be continued…”) and Parakeet for a mix of Russian and English.

What it can do:

— Text appears practically in real time, with timestamps, and a regular .txt file on disk is updated as it goes.

— Ctrl-Shift-S takes a screenshot, extracts the text from it via OCR, and inserts it directly into the right place in the transcript. There’s an automatic mode — it takes a screenshot every second, then a cascade of filters keeps only new slides. On a test 11-minute talk, 692 frames → 10 scenes, not a single slide lost.

— Call audio can be captured from the microphone or directly from an application (for example, Teams or Chrome/YouTube)

— Speaker diarization based on voice and context. If a person with voice A calls a person with voice B Vasya, then all of B’s lines in the resulting transcript will be labeled as Vasya. The Teams transcript itself can be loaded as a second source, so more accurate information about who said what can be taken from it.

— The Beautify button turns the raw transcript into a document: decisions, tasks, clean dialogue. While recording is in progress, you can ask the chat what else we’ve forgotten to discuss, for example.

The application definitely works on macOS (DMG in releases, macOS 14+, models are downloaded on first launch). On other platforms, a lot of it won’t work, only the basics.

Two Long-Awaited Yeses | October 22 2026, 12:35

Almost on the same day, two letters arrived: I was accepted into a PhD program at the University of Siegen (Germany), and my mom’s petition to move to the US was approved. For both matters, the real occasions to congratulate me (and my mom) are still ahead, but I’ve been waiting for both of these events for many months (22 and 10, respectively). Today is a good day)

The Chess Loophole That Allowed Vertical Castling | October 21 2026, 12:11

Today I learned that in chess it was once (theoretically) possible (not forbidden) to castle vertically. There was this chess journalist, Tim Krabbé, who composed a chess problem in 1972 in which the white king stood on its original square, e1, while a white pawn promoted to a rook on e8. Krabbé carefully reread the FIDE rules and discovered that they said the king and rook must not have moved before, but nowhere did they say that the rook had to be on the same rank as the king. The new rook on e8 had never moved? It hadn’t. Neither had the king. So, by the letter of the rules, the king could jump to e3, and the rook to e2. Vertical castling, formally flawless.

The problem spread throughout the chess world, everyone had a chuckle, and then in 1973 FIDE quietly amended the rules. Now they clearly state that castling can only be done with a rook on the same rank.

Exploring the World of Whistled Languages: From Silbo Gomero to the Peaks of Human Ingenuity | October 18 2026, 16:03

I learned that there is a language entirely based on whistling. Google Silbo Gomero. It’s a whistling language on the Canary Islands, a whistling dialect of Spanish. Quite a few residents there can communicate in it. A speaker of Silbo Gomero is called a ‘silbador’ (whistler). In 2009, the language was included in the List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. There are many videos about it on YouTube.

I started thinking about how humanity is rapidly losing the skill of whistling. Some can still whistle with their lips pursed, but with all other methods, it seems, no one can.

Apart from that, there is the palatal whistle (search for palatal whistle, roof of mouth whistle) — sharper and more piercing than the lip whistle, better at cutting through noise, but almost no change in pitch. There is also the rolled tongue whistle (search for rolled tongue whistle, taco tongue whistle) — low, dull, sounds like an owl, but reportedly, not everyone can do it (maybe genetics). With fingers in the mouth — louder (wash your hands!). Two fingers of one hand (index + middle or thumb + index ‘ring’) — 100-115 dB, up to 1 km in silence. This is precisely the basis of Silbo Gomero — pitch is adjusted by lip positioning and how deep the fingers are inserted, so much can be encoded. One finger (index or pinky hooked) — almost the same loudness, the other hand free. Fingers of both hands (one or two from each side) — the loudest manual whistle, up to 120 dB, across a valley 2-3 km in the mountains. Thumbs of both hands (nails to tongue) — loud, somewhat low, a tradition of shepherds in the Pyrenees, Caucasus, Balkans.

There’s also the whistle with cupped hands — low, 300-600 Hz, audible at 100-300 m, but the low sound bends around trees and bushes, so in the woods it travels further than a high sound. Pitch is changed by slightly opening the fingers, allowing for 5-8 notes to be whistled.