I returned from Essex on Thursday after four days in a darkened dining room scanning 79 notebooks of my dad’s diary from 1955 to 2013. As regular readers will be sadly aware, being back there is always a mix of emotions. Last week I said I felt like a ghost haunting the house (I kept thinking of Ghost Story) but it’s at least as true to say that the house haunts me. It’s rarely been far from my thoughts for the past 2½ years and I have to struggle to think of other things – because I’m so tired…

The claim that AI consumes water sounds odd if you picture a server as a box of electronics. The obvious objection is that the cooling water goes round in pipes. It returns to where it started, gets used again, and never goes anywhere. How can a conversation with ChatGPT consume it? The answer is that you can be looking at the wrong pipes. A sealed circuit carries heat away from the processors. A separate circuit can release that heat through a cooling tower, evaporating some of its water in…

A few photos from one summer evening I totally forgot to edit. I hope you enjoy them. By the way, do you see this crater kinda standing out? This effect is called golden handle. Comment via guestbook.

Trying late-season beach for fall break this year

#coffeeneuring2026 No. 2 10.3km round-trip Beautiful autumn Sunday afternoon, bright skies, warm, but not too warm, so out for a little ride to a new park along the Tiber. The Parco Marconi used to be a total tip 20 or so years ago when I sometimes had to walk my dog down here. Used needles, human crap and crap, lots of litter of all sorts of broken stuff, from fridges to bicycles. Anyway, it is just one example of the buckets of money spent by the city for last year's Jubilee and it is now a…

Last month I observed that “it seems only a matter of time before Trump ‘renames’ either the Pacific or the Atlantic as the American Ocean, or as the West American and East American Oceans respectively.” I would say “I joked”, but I wasn’t really joking. I knew it. “We have a gulf and we have a lake,” Trump, 80, told reporters in the Oval Office. “Now all we need is an ocean. Maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific. Maybe we’ll change them both.” I missed that…

Aidan Walker, among other things Creator-in-Residence at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writes about his appearance on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher.I don’t understand what exactly he was there to talk about, other than that it had something to do with memes. What saved the piece for me, though, was this paragraph, referring to Maher:You must feel empathy for the Boomer marooned in a world he is not adapted to exist within. It is as if they have been sailing on a boat all…

Aidan Walker, among other things Creator-in-Residence at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writes about his appearance on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher.I don’t understand what exactly he was there to talk about, other than that it had something to do with memes. What saved the piece for me, though, was this paragraph, referring to Maher:You must feel empathy for the Boomer marooned in a world he is not adapted to exist within. It is as if they have been sailing on a boat all…

Note to self. BPPV is an unnecessary addition to the flu. It feels like your eyeballs are rioting. I googled for videos of nystagmus but actually, I can’t even look at them without feeling worse. You can look for your own ones. All the rooms, the houses, the streets are unnaturally quiet around 3am. By 4am the house is whispering, walls shift and yawn. Lying in the dark, ears strain with the listening. It’s easy to write in the darkness and all of it is brilliant, of but in daylight it’s also…

I rearranged my workstation to accommodate my new coffee machine this weekend. Not as smart as Kev's layout, but with 6 dogs, my Wattbike and M4 MBP on Phiilips ultrawide, I squeeze quite a lot into my space!

The leaves outside were half painted for fall. I sat on the porch to watch the sunrise and sip my coffee. The day was young and I was eager, but inside I felt something else. Something churned inside me, something that was somehow resistant. I had searched for the feeling as it grew over the past week. Sun shining on my face now, I continued my search and thought, “I want to create, but why don’t I? I’ve expressed on several occasions my personal path with creativity, an inner push and pull…

We are packed up and awaiting the arrival of our bus that’s going to take us to MCO Orlando International Airport. It has been a very good vacation; I feel relaxed and I feel ready to tackle whatever lies ahead. Most importantly, I feel like I can face the world with a smile on my face again. I find Walt Disney World to not quite be what it used to be when I first visited here 30 years ago, but it is still a very happy place for me. I have been watching folks move through their vacations. Most…

The question 'I' m arriving into X station in London at 8.15am on Saturday. What parkruns can I get to in time?' comes up fairly often on parkrun tourism groups, so I thought I'd try to put a simple list together to help. For the list I have used the 14 central London terminal stations plus the 4 central London through-stations that are considered terminals for ticketing purposes. These are collectively known as the London Station Group. The timings are based on the overall estimated journey…

There was a quarter moon hanging low in the sky last night. My thoughts and my heart were indicative of the time and the view, which was pretty and sad at the same time.I am amazed at the world’s beauty and how the prettiness of a low-hanging moon appears to be a gift, like a sight for sore eyes, and a present to remind me that nothing is so ugly or so desparate.The moon and the seasons are not an enemy, only changing, and they are only reminders that we need to notice the good things that life…

In the fitness world, a saying goes that your diet produces 80% of your results, and working out only 20%. So, focus on your diet, right? In my case, I haven’t found that to be useful or true at all. I’m trying to gain weight and build muscle, so I need to eat more. That only happens when my metabolism is up, and that only happens from an intense workout. No workout, no improved diet. No improved diet, no results. I have tried in vain. Of course, yes, I pay very close attention to what I eat.…

Here's a secret: She actually laughed quite a bit at this stupid joke, which was reassuring because I like the people sticking needles in me to be in a good mood. That wraps up this year's vaccination season. I'm armed (ha!) against the flu and COVID now.

Earlier this week, the auto shop called to say the part finally arrived and I could bring the van in right then and there. The Auto Guy said it’d take 5-7 hours to get her all fixed up. With a free loaner car… I had loads of simple fun getting coffee using the drive-thru (because the van doesn’t fit), visiting the city parks, spending time at the lake on a crisp, colorful autumn day, and just having a whimsical time. Eight hours later… I was booking a hotel. And things didn’t go as planned the…

⌾ : iPhone 17 pro max.⚲ : ///attracts.yields.skirmish The Fujifilm was left behind because, hey, we are only going to look at some boring retail shops. Even my everyday carry pocket camera that I bought specifically to have on my personage at all times was in my satchel …..back in the car. Lunch found us at the Plantation Cafe, which had this awesome front counter with wall to ceiling bookshelves. I wish I could’ve captured it on one of those cameras I didn’t have with me. Plan C was the…

Hello everyone! We continue our journey through Spooky Month with an unperfect but unique game about ghosts catfishing humans on dating apps! In Dead Ringer, you’re a ghost, stuck in limbo, almost disappearing into nothingness. Your only chance is to convince a human to perform a ritual. But that’s no easy task. Luckily for you, you have a phone, unlimited internet access somehow, and a dating app. Surely, one person in here will do that for you. All you have to do is flatter their egos, make…

What do you do below something big?This is a very general question, but an important one. Many pieces of urban architecture are quite large, especially overpasses, bridges, elevated rail, etc. And there are a lot of different approaches to what you put below that, from "nothing" to "actively hostile to homeless architecture" to "cool stuff."So let's consider the advantages of each.1. Nothing in ParticularSometimes you build something big and high, and just ignore what's down below.This bridge…

Seaham, a town of about 20,000 people, is just down the coast from Sunderland. Its main development stems from the construction of a port in the 1820s to export coal, but its fame today is based around sea glass. The Londonderry bottle works were opened in 1853, and at their height produced 20 million bottles per year. Waste glass was dumped into the sea, and is now washed up as rounded off sea glass, which is much in demand for use in craft work. On my weekday visit in the middle of the week…

I found my way to Jacinta Palud’s blog through a link in Stephen’s guestbook.It’s a blog in a very old-school sense, and I enjoy the mix of links, photos, and Winnipeg insights. Subscribed.

We didn't have a great time at our last metal music festival just a few weeks ago, and were hoping we'd have a better time at the more local festival that we've attended the past few years. So we returned to Sloss Furnaces↗ in nearby Birmingham, Alabama for Furnace Fest↗. The festival had a kind of rocky start thanks to some weather but we did wind up seeing some great bands and having a fantastic time. Saturday We woke up Saturday after the storm rolled through to find that the day's set times…

Can you still find a good hotel in London for New Year’s Eve? Yes, but not a cheap one. On 17 October, I found at least 20 well-reviewed hotels with a room for two from 31 December to 2 January for £500 or less for the two nights. The cheapest was £407, and most were between £450 and £500. Under £150 a night, there was almost nothing with a private bathroom: one hotel, rated 7.2, and its price went up within the hour. And things move fast: my top pick on 17 October, the only well-reviewed hotel…

Actual rain on Friday. Cool breeze, blue skies and sunshine this weekend. Invigoratingly autumnal. Three gyms. I’d simply stopped weighing myself for a couple of weeks. I did it again this week and the news isn’t good but at least it’s focused the mind. Good god my arm was sore after my COVID vaccination! That part is not fun. I’ll be getting the flu (jab) this week, after which I’ll be invincible. I made it to LRUG on Monday for the first time since… my weeknotes suggest April 2024, which…

Double check your website’s alt texts with a bookmarklet — This is so handy. I had a stretch of time where I kept messing up the alt text in Markdown, putting it where the title goes, and I know I haven’t cleaned up every image on my blog yet. This will help. The man hiking the world in search of rare cheeses — I always wonder about how much more of this kind of stuff we could have if UBI were a thing. One Balaclava After Another — Articles of Interest is, as always, interesting. This time a…

§ Autumn’s arrival is suddenly undeniable. Everywhere leaves are changing color and beginning to drop. Yesterday I spent part of the afternoon bringing all our our houseplants back inside. Sometime last night we had our first freezing temperatures of the season. § After posting last week’s note, I took a trip to our local orchard to try to track down my favorite apple variety I discovered last year (“zestar”). Well, apparently that variety is known for its early-season ripening so looking for…

While I have enjoyed much of what Bogost has to say about stopping to enjoy the physical experiences of the little things that happen to you every day1 it's easy to fall into an idealized memory of the past2, often a past that didn't really exist. Foreverism talks specifically about this, our societal tendency to look back to the ideal past and keep it in our current conversation as something we should be striving for today3. This ideal physical past when we all interacted with the machines…

Kids' shows get some of the cutest cakes, you guys. I don't even have kids, and I had a blast looking for these!Just look at this adorable Doc McStuffins cake: [By Valentina Pollicino in Italy]Squee! When I Googled the most popular kids' shows of 2018, I was amazed to see Pokémon still on the list. Good thing, though, since that means I get to show you this jaw-dropping Pikachu: [By Le Delizie di Kicca in Italy]The shading makes it look more like a ceramic sculpture than a cake! Also loving all…

We’re wrapping up an incredible week watching the grandkids who have so much on their minds, including the approaching Halloween festivities, so Sunday Morning Reading is taking another hiatus. Sunday Morning Reading will return next week. Hope to see you then. Thanks for reading. Feel free to subscribe if you want. It’s free. If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. If you’d like more…