The beauty of blogging with Pika is how low the barrier to entry is. Think of a thought, write it down, click “publish post,” and you’re good to go. No bloated “update your plugin” horror show that ruins your layout yet again (hello, WordPress); no friction (though friction can be a good thing in itself). Can’t everything in life be this simple, please? I’ve noticed, however, that a quiet, organic division has crept into my daily publishing routine. And that’s one that I don’t like: short,…
Much in the same way that the SECNAV in 1975 created 15 new “cruisers” from thin air by reclassifying DLGs to CGs to gain a two-cruiser lead over the Russkis, the Navy has just dubbed 19 planned Blocks V and VI Virginia class SSNs as SSGNs to fill the gap left by the four retiring TLAM-commando boats. The first of four Ohio-class SSGN conversions, USS Georgia is pending decommissioning after 42 years of service, with her sisters Ohio, Michigan and Florida soon to follow. Each was given a $1…
Florida-based KelTec continues its established trope of delivering strange yet intriguing new guns to the market, introducing the SUB-SDP last week. The pistol, dubbed the “Nub Sub” in the company’s own marketing materials, is based on the KelTec SUB2000 folding carbine, made into a pistol format and sporting a stabilizing brace instead of a stock on a shorter extension tube and a 6-inch barrel. Set up to take Glock-pattern 9mm double stacks (i.e., G17, G19, G45), the base model ships with a…
Sixth Fleet images, some 40 years ago this month. How about this surreal photo of a 44,000-ton Soviet Kiev class (Project 1143 Krechyet) “heavy aviation cruiser” (CVHG) seen from across the deck of a Sovremenny class destroyer, Mediterranean, August 1986. USN Photo DN-ST-86-11164, via NARA And this full-length version, sans Sovremenny: USN Photo DN-ST-86-11165, via NARA How the Kiev and the Sovremenny stack up to the rest of the fleet: DD-ST-86-06685 The above CVGH is believed to be the Minsk,…
When AI-generated code breaks something, the real problem is often how we reviewed, understood, and trusted it.
One obscure, but very useful Bash trick is CTRL+X CTRL+E, which will open $EDITOR to edit the current line. This means I can switch to a Vim session with whatever I was typing on intact. This is handy for those times where I need a search-and-replace operation or fix things in a long command or build a long complex command from scratch. I’m aware of Bash’s vi-mode, but I prefer using the default Emacs keybindings because I also work in other’s remote servers. Also, it’s a Vi emulation. I’ve…
I hadn’t planned to make a series on women war photographers. When I started looking into Lee Miller, I found references to a few other women of the same era and in the present and I got really interested in them. With the war in Ukraine, the risk of global war is the highest since I was a kid in the 70s and 80s when Wargames felt more like a prediction than fiction, and with politicians that now treat war as a way to win elections at home and score political points, war and reporting is more…
Come write HTML with me this Saturday. HTML Day is an annual celebration of getting together and writing HTML, created by Elliott Cost and Laurel Schwulst. Saturday, August 8, 2026, is this year's date, and I'm running two online sessions again, same as last year. Sessions Two one-hour sessions, so folks across time zones can join in. Oceania Time — 6-7pm AEST European Time — 6-7pm CET The European session also works out to 9-10am PT, 11am-12pm CT, and 12-1pm ET, if you're in North America. No…
I may — and I retain the right to reverse this decision — be stopping my week notes posts.I find them useful in terms of looking back over the past week to reflect on moments from my life, the media I’ve consumed etc, but by and large they are starting to feel a little performative. I’m posting them because I feel like I should because it’s part of the cadence of my website. Except, it isn’t really. I only started them recently and whilst I’ve done recap style posts in the past, they didn’t…
BlToday’s TDC is from one of those wonderful random web pages one finds while browsing through the web. Play around with this rolling stone and share a screenshot or a video of what you create. I played around with the sounds and chose chimes for this experiment, then used the MS snipping tool to record my screen as I ‘released’ the stone. Finally I uploaded to YouTube and added the video here. If i’d had time I’d have snipped the video to start with the sound (there’s a delay between me…
From my brother-in-laws house you can see the smouldering landscape, a thick white smog sitting on the surface of the hills. In the village, fire engines and emergency services remain, whilst life continues around them. We are here for the week —alas I still need to work— and it’s always so quiet and peaceful, from the moment we arrive I can feel my shoulders drop. Hoping to fit in some rides when I’m here (a short one the evening I arrived done already) as the roads and surrounding area are…
Life Notes Very busy at work, lots going on so been struggling to find time for any other activities, not read much, not commented on many blogs, just keeping ticking along with my ‘move every day’ target, which has spread to other habits including a daily journal, and Crucial Tracks entry every day too. Jack has finished Nursery. Time flies. In two weeks he starts school. SCHOOL! Alas I couldn’t be there for that — I had to travel to Blairgowrie for my monthly visit to the office — but he and…
Performing circus can teach kids about hard work, dedication, teamwork, performance, etc. Most importantly, it teaches kids how to fail in front of a crowd, get back up, and try it again. “Smile and Style” as they say. The crowd, for their part, will cheer even louder when you get it the next time.
I kinda like this framing of doing work vs. going to the gym: At work, if your job is to move a bunch of heavy things from one side of the room to another, you should use whatever assistive tech you have on hand: a wagon, a forklift… even an AI-powered robot. But at the gym, it makes no sense for that robot to lift weights for you. The point of weightlifting isn’t to move heavy things across the room; it’s to actually lift those heavy things.
[🎶 Look out! Here comes the Spider-Man ad! 🎶] Surprise! You don’t really own your BMW.Link: https://www.techspot.com/news/113327-bmw-putting-spider-man-ads-dashboard-after-promising.html
Celebrating 25 years of blogging with gratitude, reflection, and a sweet slice of success surrounded by creativity and joy. August 6, 2001, 25 years ago. I started blogging. I had a website made by Microsoft FrontPage and hosted on GTE (now Verizon) in the homepages they offered back in those days for residential customers. In fact, your ISP provided everything for you. You had so much website space and an ISP-provided email, which you lost if you changed providers. That's foreign today. But I…
I recently popped by KIELO COFFEE in Akihabara, a small cafe and roaster specialising in light roast pourover coffee. They do also have milk-based coffee and matcha lattes available as well. They had a range of reasonably-priced beans to choose from for your pourover, ranging from an 800 yen Rwanda washed bean to a 1600 yen cup of Colombia’s El Paraiso M3. They also sell all of these beans, and they have sample jars of the beans out to help you make your decision. Ethiopia Guji Shakiso, 1900…
This is a survey for developers about everything but coding, that is accepting answers up to September 5. If you’re a developer, it’s worth participating! It doesn’t take long to fill and can help understanding the current environment of the dev industry in such chaotic times.
Low resolution, high compression, wonky colours and press-the-button-and-hope photos! Yes, it's the shitty camera challenge!
We were on a challenging hike recently, and a few of us got to talking about what a lovely analogy hiking is for life. When you’re working your way up a steep climb, you have to take it one step at a time. There’s little point looking back at how far you’ve come or ahead at how far is left — both just pull you out of the only step that matters, the next one. Along the way, you cross paths with all sorts of people, each on their own version of the journey. And the encouraging thing is that…
General anesthesia using gases for surgery is one of America's great nineteenth century medical achievements. In early 1845 dentist Horace Wells used nitrous oxide to painlessly extract a tooth. In October 1846 dentist William T.G. Morton successfully demonstrated ether anesthesia in Boston during an operation by John Collins Warren. The Morton/Warren event soon made it's way around the world. The Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology outside Chicago maintains an extensive timeline that covers…
As part of building a service for automatically publishing blog posts from RSS feeds into atproto's standard.site lexicon, I implemented atproto OAuth for logging in and getting access tokens to publish for the user. This means that any user with an atproto account, whether they created it on Bluesky, Eurosky, or Blacksky, or any of the other Personal Data Servers available, can log in to your service. Atproto OAuth does not require pre-registering clients with a service, one implementation…
Another interesting recent topic of discussion in the OSM community has been on corporate influence on the project. The concern about corporate influence on OpenStreetMap is fairly old. For some time there had been substantial concern about a direct takeover of the OpenStreetMap Foundation by large US tech corporations. I had commented on this in the past. But i realize that the focus of that discussion had been somewhat one sided, looking mostly at the influence of individual business…
I’d mentioned earlier in the spring that Kim picks up two new hanging ferns every year so the birds can nest in them. This one has had two separate momma birdies choose it to birth and care for their young this year. And yes, that’s a lot of poop! 🤣
tl;dr: After almost seven years my Netgear Nighthawk M2 has started rebooting on its own, reporting nonsensical battery percentages and ignoring most of my presses on its touch buttons, so I spent the past three months replacing it with the GL.iNet Mudi 7 (GL-E5800), a 5G NR Sub-6 travel router with two nano-SIM slots plus an onboard eSIM, Wi-Fi 7, a 2.5 GbE port, two USB-C ports and a removable 5380 mAh battery. It is the most capable mobile router I have owned, its 13.5-hour battery rating is…
July kicked off with some relatively cool weather here in Tokyo, which feels absurd considering how hot Japan's summers usually get, but it was a welcome start to the month. By mid-July we had some pretty darn hot days, but the plus side is that the snow on mountains has all melted and we've truly entered the summer season for hiking. Over the weekend I was hiking in the Southern Alps with a friend, which is why this newsletter is a little delayed compared to the usual. It's our third year in a…
Following up on yesterday's post. If you're not interested in the AI bubble, you might want to come back next week because this thread is going to be running through Friday.Here is Ed Zitron discussing the AI industry's huge off-the-books debt. Before we jump in, however, there's one point I want to emphasize (we'll dig into this even deeper tomorrow when we discuss Patrick Boyle's analysis). This story is Enron-esque. It is Enron-reminiscent. It is "a little bit Enron." It is not, however,…
Wavyleaf basketgrass (photo from Wikimedia) 6 August 2026 Have you seen this plant? Its wavy leaves are nothing like the plants I’m used to in Pennsylvania so I was surprised when I saw it at Bear Run Nature Reserve in late May. Was it a new wildflower? No! This is wavyleaf basketgrass, an extremely invasive plant that is just starting to take hold in Pennsylvania. This month the Pennsylvania iMapInvasives Program is holding a statewide blitz to find it so we can beat it back before it covers…
A minute in the world's life passes! To paint it in its reality, and forget everything for that! To become that minute, to be the sensitive plate... give the image of what we see, forgetting everything that has appeared before our time. Cézanne title here
♠ Today I learned: Atuin ships hooks that capture commands executed by AI LLM coding agents into the same shell history as mine. As of today there are hooks for Claude Code, OpenAI Codex and Pi. % atuin hook --help Manage AI-agent shell hooks Usage: atuin hook atuin hook <COMMAND> Commands: install Install hooks for an AI agent to capture commands in atuin history help Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s) install --help doesn’t list which agents are supported, but a bogus…
