@font-face {font-family:"Cambria Math"; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1107305727 0 0 415 0;}@font-face {font-family:Baskerville; panose-1:2 2 5 2 7 4 1 2 3 3; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-pitch:variable;

While researching topics around relatively niche subjects, mostly cats, I’ve needed to access certain websites that block traffic from the UK, namely imgur and civitai. These platforms are global in nature and otherwise accessible to most people, who will have little reason to cater to my geographic circumstances. The most common, but inconvenient, workaround is to turn on a full VPN, visit the pages, and then disconnect and resume normal browsing. A more seamless approach would be to route…

I loved Kev’s latest post, It’s Never Too Late to Learn, for lots of reasons. It turned out that writing and learning are a lot of fun, and I was constantly looking for ways to practice my new found writing skills. I think that’s part of why I still love typing - I just find creating words on a screen a lot of fun. Yeah, I’m weird. I know. I once applied for a data-entry temp job because typing numbers in cells for hours on end sounded fun to me. So if you’re weird, I’m worse. Kev’s post also…

For the first time, my youngest son, working as a Peace Corps volunteer in Peru, recommended a book for me to read. It was a novel written by an American and published about a decade ago. I read little contemporary fiction but the book’s setting interested me and I felt that I owed my son an honest effort. I petered out after seventy pages. I felt guilty about it but the novel was long and my tolerance was short. It’s not a bad book. In fact the novelist is gifted. He writes well and obviously…

As we continue to look at the interfaces in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, this post will focus on the interfaces used to bring Rocky to life. The fancy Latinate word for this is vivification. Come up to the lab The interfaces in the lab where the procedure happens are mounted on an illuminated glass-brick wall. They are heavy and industrial-looking, cased in powder coat red and bolted together. They connect by pipe conduits. It very much reminds me of the ghost containment panel in…

Ridgeline subscribers — I never met Annie Dillard (archive), and I don’t feel as if I know her. She seems unknowable. Part of her attraction: an improbable cipher looking at the world and delighting in minutiae. So, no, we never walked together (and now never will!), but I’ve walked 1000s of miles with her in mind. On the Kii Peninsula, in Things Become Other Things (amzn | bkshp), I think of her whenever I see a particular boat:

Looks Unfamiliar with Mic Wright talking to Tim Worthington about the NatWest Piggies, Eerie. Indiana, Musical Chairs by Kinky Friedman, High On A Rocky Ledge by Moondog, the National Record Of Achievement and more...!

I have an extensive lisp.md file that I include in my system instructions when I am vibe coding Common Lisp. Feel free to use these suggestions or adapt them to your own style. Common Lisp & Functional Programming Directives 1. Identity, Role & Operating Posture Role: You are a highly capable, supportive, and exceptionally effective companion to your user ('the Boss'). Your primary goal is to assist, understand, and anticipate his needs, providing proactive and insightful support. Mastery &…

Dancing with the Stars 35's celebrities faced their first week of a speedier, 7-day schedule. How did they do? And whose holes need filling? Marshal Knight recaps for us!

How a makefile turns the SQLcl, Git and dbLinter commands of an APEX project into short make commands, and how a Git-based sync script stops APEXlang imports from overwriting your colleagues' App Builder changes.

Recent Comments balcony — miawiwhbse: “True, fully involved attention is something extremely difficult. At its best it often is an achievement. How hard it is to let an object be…”

Circling back to smartphones, the main problem is not that it removed the intention of certain activities, it’s the fact that it just provides easy alternative activities to fill our day, a lazy cop-out instead of being creative. Why write something when you can doomscroll endlessly for that sweet sweet micro-dose of dopamine? Why listen to an album and find that great song that no one is talking about when you can jump on Spotify and listen to whatever slop A$AP Rocky released that is pushed…

[1966]A Mexican garage classico. We all know because La Flama Blanca: Kenny Fucking Powers!Mesmerising bass, mucho twangery and a groovy beat baby.

When I was a young boy, we used to get the official XBOX magazine, and the demo discs that came with it. That’s how I first played Brute Force, Ghost Recon, Rainbow Six, and even NCAA Football.¹ It’s also where I first played James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing’s co-op mode — where you play as two anonymous MI-6 agents — and two sample missions: the game’s starting mission where you rappel down the outside of a mountain base, and another where you chase down a tanker driven by Richard Kiel’s…

With this in mind I wondered how far I could get in removing the parts of Liquid Glass I don’t like in NetNewsWire. Turns out I could get pretty far, though it comes at the expense of using NSToolbar (as predicted). Note: this stuff is just on a branch. One night of play, not real design or consideration. (But this is code, not mockups.) It’s not about to ship this way. But I’ll share anyway, because it does hint at some possible ideas for NetNewsWire’s future. Source: inessential: That About…

The biggest offense of Wonka's The Golden Ticket is not the disembodied voice of Gene Wilder, resurrected 10 years after his death via AI. My review explores and explains.

It's been awhile since I've put someone in the spotlight for the It's About TV Interview, a process so terrifying that it's been known to send people fleeing in abject horror. But enough about the readers... (And, by the way, they love the subjects; it's the interviewer himself that they can do without.)However, David Hofstede, author of the Comfort TV website, has bravely stepped into the breech to talk about the upcoming second edition of his book,When Television Brought Us Together:…

This time of year, I end up writing grant proposals to fun my summer field work. This year, there’s the added fun of writing a sabbatical proposal and a proposal for a one-year, named, research chair. All of these proposals will try to get support for my work at Isthmia. In particular, these proposals will ask for time to transform our current work into a book length manuscript (and catch up on bibliography to frame the project in recent studies of the Late Roman and Early Byzantine Greece, the…

Morning comes with fog. 7:00 sail off anchor, light north wind and less fog. A half dozen tacks, gentle sailing, almost ghosting, out of the cove. Rounding the northern tip of Spruce Island, I find Mark out rowing a skiff with his dog. He lives on Spruce Island four months of the year. He points to his Contessa sloop moored nearby, and we talk about sailing the Maine coast. We talk about my slow drift across the water, going fast versus going slow, the trade off between traditional cruising…

This update covers Sunday 09-13-30-26 through Saturday 09-19-26 (icon Glossary, if needed). LIFE 🈁 My body's warranty ran out after my 55th birthday. 📕 Back issues for me, work issues for L. 📜 Socializing for both good (visiting friends on Sun 09-20) and sad (funeral for L.’s former co-worker on Sat 09-19). ❤️‍🩹 My original plan was to move my 7-minute workout schedule a day later, as my lower back was still feeling achy as of Tue 09-15. A late-night swim with L. helped me feel better, but the…

2026-09-15Hello!Stepping back from the window made for an interesting composition through the camera. I wonder what I could have fit in the left third of the image, but as it stands, it remains dark for the middle window to bounce sunlight onto the right wall.It took me way too long to find each stop on my planned trip. My maps app wasn't helping much, because access points change all the time and once I'm inside a building or connected plaza, the phone won't help me at that detail. Signage…

I wrote this post for a prompt given during our local Indieweb club meeting: “Write about non-negotiables in your personal space.” My MacBook Pro is my digital personal space on which I spend hours every day. Absence of some particular tools and capabilities is a deal breaker for me now, even if I switch to a different laptop or OS. First, I require a tiling window manager to use anything at all on my laptop. I don’t want to bother with moving windows around, fixing overlaps, changing their…

Hello fellow bloggers, I'm long overdue an update! There are many easter eggs in the works right now, which may or may not include adopting your own desktop cat for your blog ;) So..

I came across an interesting study out of Singapore that tracked children’s screen time from age one to eight, then measured their academic performance and working memory years later. Two things stood out: Even after adjusting for other factors, screen time at age one, at eighteen months, and at age six was still linked to weaker academic performance years later. Total screen time across childhood was consistently tied to lower academic performance, and the earliest exposure, in infancy, showed…

Here at LSOZI, we take a break every Wednesday to explore the old steam/diesel navies from 1833 to 1954, profiling a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger If you enjoy my always ad-free Warship Wednesday content, you can support it by buying me a cup of joe at https://buymeacoffee.com/lsozi As Henk says: “Warship Coffee – no sugar, just a pinch of salt!” Warship Wednesday 23 September 2026:…

Share a song that tells a great story. So many to choose from. Tribute by Tenacious D? Hotel California by The Eagles? Jolene by Dolly Parton? Last Kiss by Pearl Jam? Disco 2000 by Pulp? But no, let’s keep it simple. Never trust a snake. “The Snake” by Al Wilson Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. Listen to Gordon McLean's Apple Music playlist View original post on Crucial Tracks Thanks for reading and keeping RSS alive. Visit my site for more.

I've genuinely haven't had much to write about. There's been some post ideas, but most of 'em have ended up shelved for one reason or another. These past months have been a real creative drought for me. I think I need a shit-post side blog. One where I can kind of write about whatever without worrying about the content or if the posts starts to sound like a journal entry1. I think since this is my first blog, I overthink too much about what I put into it. Speaking of getting too into my head, I…

Michaelangelo Matos / Rolling Stone: Some of the biggest music deals in recent years have involved songwriting catalogs, from Bob Dylan in 2020 to Justin Bieber in 2025 to Pete Townshend this spring, many fetching nine-figure buyouts. Most of these have come from private-equity firms looking for reliable investments.But independent labels and artists are fast becoming the focus for a number of recently minted investment firms — companies, and catalogs, of seemingly every size. And one label…

The horseshoe theory is probably one of the funniest pseudo-scientific political “theories” out there. In case you’re unfamiliar with this theory, I’m sorry to be the one to disturb your blissful ignorance of it (that I’m jealous of), but here’s what it is: It’s the understanding that the political spectrum is shaped like a horseshoe in which Far-Right and Far-Left beliefs, like illiberalism and anti-establishment positions, converge and both become functionally the same. I would like to…

Starting on September 28th, our short story reading group will read The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 8, edited by Neil Clarke. We’ll discuss a story every Monday and Friday. I haven’t been participating in the group for about a year because I got burned out on reading SF short stories. But I’m hoping to participate again. I miss reading science fiction. I’ve read the first three stories to get back into the swing of things. My reaction was the same to all three. I felt these science…