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Hard to understand past experiences when you're constantly subjected to new things. https://strolling.rosano.ca/0266/ 10h12 from Berlin / Germany

Almost exactly a year ago I wrote about my new Garmin Forerunner 570 and how it compared to my previous 255. I partly bought it for some new features and metrics, but also because I was experiencing some rather annoying bugs on the 255. Chief of which was the fact that my alarm wouldn't go off most of the time. The problem followed me from a Forerunner 255 to the 570. Now imagine you have a family who all like sleeping in, and you have this weird hobby which makes you get out of bed at ungodly…

I’m someone who often has trouble sleeping so when I came across Lynne Peeples’ book, The Inner Clock: Living in Sync with Our Circadian Rhythms, I decided to read it in the hope of getting some tips and advice. It turned out to be more of a science book than a self-help book, but I found it absolutely fascinating. Lynne Peeples is a writer and journalist based in Seattle and goes to impressive lengths in order to carry out her research for this book. In the first chapter, she describes how she…

"When I die, delete my browser history." ­— Unknown When you die, there are lots of processes in place to deal with your body, your burial, your physical possessions, subscriptions and bank accounts. But what about your digital accounts and possessions? As our lives become more and more digital, taking these into account when tying up the affairs of a dead person is increasingly important. Think about it: This can involve e-mail accounts, social media accounts, messengers, LLM conversations,…

Like many I‘ve been watching this latest trend to ban social media sites for under 16s. The first I saw of it was the ban in Australia, but it seems the same will be happening in the UK. Keir Starmer wants to give kids their childhood back, which is a catchy slogan I suppose, but feels a little bit hollow to me. Yeah perhaps for some that live out in the countryside, you can imagine they will be able to get back to horse riding and hiking or whatever, but for most inner city kids, it‘s not like…

I've talked about LLMs a few times here - the TL;DR is that I find them useful for certain use cases. Searching something complex? Great. Checking my code, or helping me with a problem in said code? Count me in. But summarising a page I'm reading? Absofuckinglutely not. One of the things I really enjoy about the web is surfing it and reading. Reading is one of the great joys I get from the web, and in general. Why would I want a bastardised version of your words presented to me by a computer…

1888 scientific romance novella. A new self-fuelling railway locomotive turns out to be rather more effective than anyone had supposed.

While it’s said that dogs are a man’s best friend, that certainly doesn’t mean that they’re indifferent to women, and in today’s review we get to meet a pooch who’s loyal to a fault when it comes to his mistress. However, even if it appears that the story is all about our floppy-eared friend, in truth, there’s a whole lot more to the work than meets the eye – and, given the writer, you wouldn’t expect anything less… ***** Virginia Woolf’s Flush takes us back to 1842, where we’re introduced to a…

In the summer of 1994 I had just finished my first year of college. I had taken some Japanese language courses, and I was able to go to Japan with some of the friends I made in those classes. While staying near Yokohama, one of my Japanese friend's mom took us to The Hakone Open-air Museum - and wow, what an experience that was! It was this awesome museum that introduced me to one of my all time favorite artists: Pablo Picasso. I have never been very talented when it comes to drawing or…

Most people just use GitHub Actions to run their tests. It can do far more: deploy a PR to production before merge, make release processes more robust and automate the boring chores you keep forgetting to do. Here are a few patterns I’ve used to make my life easier with GitHub Actions. I’ve done a bunch to evolve Homebrew’s CI over the years so hopefully I can teach you something. 🚀 Merge Queues with Deployments GitHub’s Merge Queue was the last big project I led at GitHub so I’m biased towards…

POP Goes: Dick Tracy Detects, Hombre Means Man, Tides are Passionate, and Groucho Goes Motoring

Status: Tired today, but not fatigued, which I’d like to think is a different. Fatigued it when it feels like my battery is flat and I’m just an empty shell. Tired is what I used to feel like after I did a thing a bit more than I might usually. And yesterday, though I took precautions, the power washing did involve postures and movements I’m not used to engaging, resulting in tiredness (and a bit of a sore back). But not a crash. The crash may still come but I’m optimistic. Of course tired is…

Why I Built Bubbles 🫧 I've been an RSS obsessive for years. Hundreds of feeds, hand-picked one by one. But RSS only shows you sources you already know. New voices don't find you there. What's been missing: a front page like Hacker News, but exclusively for personal blogs. No tech bros, no AI hype, no trendy startups. Just an endless stream of thoughtful blog posts, curated by real people. So I built Bubbles 🫧. For myself, first. And hopefully for a few thousand others too. https://bubbles...

On the longest day, Bungle the cat sat in a trug for a good chunk of the morning. Meanwhile I fixed up our daft little water feature with an added dash of pebbles. Other things happened too but they're not recorded here.

It's three months since the most recent JD Wetherspoon beer festival, and three months to go until the next one. I thought this would be an opportune moment to have a look at what's been new (to me) in the Dublin branches. Moorhouse is a regular at the chain and Pendle Witches Brew is a beer I've certainly heard of, but was surprised to find I'd never drank. "Strong ale" is something of a rare style, although this is down at the bottom end of it — 5.1% ABV — where it could equally be badged as…

A few weeks ago, I learned about the removeprefix method in Python. It lets you remove a specific prefix from the beginning of a string. For example, I can use the following code to remove www. from the beginning of a domain name:"www.jamesg.blog".removeprefix("www.") If the string doesn’t contain the prefix, nothing happens; if the string does contain the prefix, the prefix is removed.I did some digging and, via a mention of the method in Stack Overflow, I learned that Python 3.9 added support…

Back when I purchased my Nintendo Switch in 2023, there were only a few titles I cared about trying on it. Among the first games I purchased at the time was Hades, released in 2020, developed by Supergiant Games. Hades had already made a name for itself, as a title that redefined the genre and the medium, in manners that only a few get to do. It happened with Ocarina of Time and 3D action combat, with Halo’s controller layout for FPS games, with Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of the…

I opened my eyes and saw pink flowers; the countryside was dotted with flowers of all colours. Bees bounced between the thistles. I was delighted by all that I saw when I opened my eyes on the train journey; sleep is seductive, but so, too, is colour.I spent the afternoon on my feet, wandering. I think wandering felt right because I wasn’t sure where I wanted to go. I wanted to walk to figure out where I should be. This has been a theme lately: I put one foot in front of another and look…

I don’t like writing prompts. Prompts are common in online fiction writing advice. You can buy analog writing prompt kits. Writing workshops and workbooks often use exercises (essentially prompts) to help develop skills. I bounce off of all of them. For me, coming up with ideas / getting started is not the hard part of writing. I think it’s great for writers who find themselves stuck on starting to use prompts to get past the blocker of the blank page — but I have come to realize I don’t enjoy…

At Shrewsbury library Doomscrolling, late 1800s style The father of evolution, Charles Darwin was born in Shrewsbury on 12th February 1809 at Mount House. Before attending Edinburgh and Cambridge University and sailing on the HMS Beagle, Darwin fished for newts in the Dingle and studied rocks in the Quarry Park.— Original Shrewsbury.

Monday, the 22nd of June 2026 marks 2 years since I started HRT. Like most would say, I wish I started sooner. But everything happens when it needs to happen. It's kind of crazy how quickly those two years have passed. In that time I've got a new job, a new name, and a new appreciation for life. I'm really not to sure what I want this blog post to be, but I really cant overstate how positive of a change it has been for both my physical and mental health. It hasn't solved every single one of my…

Matching is in NC Matching theory is one of the richest gold mines of ideas and results in mathematics, computer science, and beyond. Recently, Abhranil Chatterjee, Sumanta Ghosh, Rohit Gurjar, Roshan Raj, and Thomas Thierauf proved that bipartite matching is in NC. Namely, there is a polynomial-time algorithm of polylogarithmic depth that decides whether a bipartite graph has a perfect matching. This problem has long been regarded as a holy grail of complexity theory. Congratulations to…

The SpaceX IPO, valuing a motley collection of dubious business at over a trillion dollars, marks the abandonment of the Efficient (financial) Markets Hypothesis, one of the zombie ideas I criticised in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. Not only do financial markets fail in the task of valuing assets accurately, but the institutional structures that are supposed to make them work have given up trying. This was prefigured by the rise of Bitcoin and other forms of crypto. Revealingly, no…

One Month of Bubbles Bubbles turned one month old today. I launched it on March 21 with a short [Mastodon post](https://troet.cafe/@viermalbe/116297302547554995) (original in German): > ... So I built Bubbles. For me. And hopefully for a few thousand others too. On that evening just 4 weeks ago, writing "hopefully for a few thousand others too" was a joke. I put it there because I genuinely assumed this would be a personal tool that maybe a dozen people liked and used. 6,500 visitors in the…

They don't even have proper wings yet, but they already know that one day they will fly.

The first four days of the week whizzed by, with the gym, parents, and a bit of website admin. I also went for my first ever guitar lesson. I found a guy who teaches about 25 minutes drive from us, crucially on this side of Hereford. So no queues, traffic lights, congestion, etc. to contend with. Only narrow roads, oncoming tractors and, in winter, floods. This was only a quick half-hour getting-to-know-each-other session but he seemed very nice and he presumably approved of me because my first…

As I mentioned in my earlier post, I listed my site on bubbles town. What that meant was my posts could be discovered from bubbles town. Bubbles Town has the nice feature of upvoting the blogposts that one likes. Now those upvotes are shown near the top of each blog post on my own website. 1 If you have a login on Bubbles town, you can upvote the posts you like there. The best part is you do not need to create a new account. If you have a Fediverse account, you can just use the same one to log…

The confidence man of Herman Melville's tale boards the Fidèle on the Mississippi on April Fool's day and proceeds, through a succession of disguises, to talk the passengers out of their money. What unsettles the reader is not the swindler's skill but the passengers' appetite. The con works because they want it to. Each mark supplies, from their own optimism or vanity or wish to appear charitable, the credulity the con requires. Melville's swindler does not force the strongbox. They are handed…