Via my parents. Found in my suit pocket after resting there for nine years.

Rain starts at first light. A soggy dawn chorus soon subsides, leaving only the new Carolina wren with his exotic accent and enthusiasm. As the rain thickens, he too falls silent.

Comics Curmudgeon readers! Do you love this blog and yearn for a novel written by its creator? Well, good news: Josh Fruhlinger's The Enthusiast is that novel! It's even about newspaper comic strips, partly. Check it out! Intelligent Life, 6/22/26 Everything I’ve learned about all the characters in Intelligent Life has been against my will. I wasn’t thrilled when I realized I instantly recognized this blond guy as “Barry,” the stereotypical jock used as a punching bag by the nerd characters in…

My first web presence was in sixth grade on this website called the express page. It was one of those websites where you could make your own little html page, like an off-brand geocities I guess (I never used geocities). They had some stock gifs too: I remember I really liked this one juggler guy. My biggest memories using expage were the time when we found out it was not expages.com (that was porn) and the time I was updating my site in my sixth grade classroom and my teacher (who, I realize…

Normally on Fathers Day, dad and I would have met up on the riverbank somewhere before sun rise and then spent the morning fishing and chatting together. Catching a fish was never important, just being there together. Obviously this year that wasn't to be, he definitely wouldn't have wanted me to sit around moping though, he would have wanted me to go and get after those tench again, so that's what I did. I made sure to spend some time reminiscing about the good times we spent together and even…

Spokenly I came across spokenly via this YouTube video At first I was reluctant to install it assuming that I will need to create yet another account just to use the app, but that was not the case. They have two completely free options: First one where Whisper and Parakeet models are used locally. There are other models that can be run locally, but the size of these models keeps growing bigger and bigger. In the second free option, if you do not like these models, you may choose other API…

less metadata, more feeling I'm grateful to have fallen asleep most days of my life; I could probably count on two hands the number of times I didn't. There are phases where it happens naturally, and phases where I struggle (often when I'm more electrified through dealing with digital things). So I've tried to figure out some kind of process for when I don't fall asleep easily or automatically. Maybe it can help you? I think of it as 'layers' that can be folded into each other like dough, not…

CSS is hard and it should be hard. For good reason:CSS isn’t just a complex language, it’s one of the most advanced graphics, layout, and typesetting languages available in computing.The deskilling of web dev is harming the product but, more importantly, it’s damaging our health – this is why burnout happens - Baldur BjarnasonHard isn’t a negative label. You know what else is hard? Applying silicone sealant to waterproof bathroom fixtures. It’s hard enough that such expertise are worthy of a…

He’s almost done, big day today then only 6 weeks left then it’s time for school! Wild. Time flies and all that, and I think we’ve done a good job so far. Our boy is smart, thoughtful/sensitive, strong and healthy. He prefers outdoors to indoors, tablet time is self-regulated without us having to peel him away from it, he sleeps through the nights (mostly), he eats well, and from what we’ve heard he’s a sponge at nursery, learning more than we even realised. He is so ready for school. But first…

What’s going on, Internet? Way back in 2022 I wrote a guide on building a static site with 11ty and deploying it to Neocities. It’s been one of my most-read posts, but it’s also aged: Eleventy has moved to v3 with a brand new module system, the dev server changed, and my whole workflow has shifted away from GitHub toward Forgejo and Codeberg. So here’s the refresh. I haven’t hosted my own site on Neocities for years now, but it’s still home to a huge community of personal sites and homepages,…

Note: I am, of course, going to include my books in this. I skipped a few I don't have suggestions for. Character smells like fresh cut grass Song Lyrics: Oh hello, both I Belong to You and Presented with Love would work for this. I Hate Everyone But You: Zomromcom by Olivia Dade National Park: Hello again, I Belong to You fits here as well, with Rock Creek Park. Of Kings and Queens also mentions the Mall. Heatwave: Hot Earl Summer by Erica Ridley Dual Timeline: Cosmic Love at the Multiverse…

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the nature of knowledge and how we acquire it. My training as a scientist taught me to revere the scientific method, and I continue to hold science in the highest regard. Science can teach us much about the world and ourselves, and as I’ve written elsewhere, it can allow us to see beyond our biases — if we can keep open minds. Yet I’ve grown to understand that not all knowledge worth possessing can come from a book, an experiment or a Google search. Science is…

We paid for our very overgrown hedges to be cut back and shaped. It's not cheap, but the garden instantly looks smarter. It also means I can drive onto the street without risking scratches from bush talons. I then found a pigeon chick in the back garden, just out of reach of next door's little dogs that were barking and scrambling furiously through the chain-link fence. I moved it to safety on the other side of the garden. A nest must have been disturbed by the trimming and the chick fell out.…

It’s no secret that the Hollywood Comet loves musicals. In 2010, I revealed I had seen 400 movie musicals over the course of eight years. Now that number is over 600. To celebrate and share this musical love, here is … Continue reading →

Sometimes, all we have are bad and worse options. The only way is through.

From Ternus taking the helm to a long-overdue "Snow Leopard" update, Apple’s latest moves signal a major course correction.

A new Icelandic film is out, Þrost (Thirst) about a peculiarly selective vampire and friend who stalk the streets of Reykjavík. The trailer looks trashy but it is full of familiar faces and lots of scenes of the city. Now streaming on Pecadillio (link at YouTube description:

When I signed up for my first 1500 m track race it sounded like a lot of fun. Throw yourself into the ring for 3¾ laps, get your lungs and legs burning, and go home.When I went to the venue yesterday, I felt out of place. A marathon runner at a track meet featuring sprints and relays? Running a 1500 m with zero clue together with experienced middle-distance runners? I am always nervous before any race, but yesterday was different. Yesterday was a mix of impostor syndrome, rookie nerves and…

Haye Kesteloo reports at DroneXL: “Hundreds of millions of Pokémon Go players spent years filming the streets, parks, and buildings around them to earn in-game rewards. Those roughly 30 billion environmental scans are now owned… More

Frozen food company Amy’s Kitchen issued a public statement this week clarifying that the cooking instructions printed on the back of its popular bean and cheese burritos are completely accurate, putting an end to years of consumer speculation.“We get a lot of emails asking if there was a printing error on the packaging,” said Amy’s quality assurance director Beau Rito. “So let me be clear right here. It is 60 seconds in a microwave, then flip, then another 60 seconds. In a toaster oven, it…

In this week’s issue of The Savvy Diabetic: Want to Participate in Hill Day from Home? Here’s how! GLP-1s/Semaglutide Benefits 17 June 2026 Diabetes Patients on Semaglutide Had Fewer Fractures Semaglutide tied to quality of life improvements vs. placebo in type 2 diabetes, CKD Lower Risk Of Death, Clots Among Autoimmune Patients Taking GLP-1 Drugs GLP-1s may nearly halve risk for hepatic complications in MASLD, type 2 diabetes Why fermented foods are so good for your gut, and 5 ways to eat more…

A centenary conversation celebrating a great conductor and an outstanding Mahlerian The conductor Klaus Tennstedt was born on June 6, 1926. After his arrival from East Germany to the West, he held chief conductor posts with the NDR Symphony Orchestra in Hamburg (1979-81), and with the London Philharmonic Orchestra (1983-87), with whom he recorded extensively, including a Mahler symphony cycle (of which No 8 won a Gramophone Award back in 1987). To mark the anniversary Warner Classics has issued…

Note: Commentary on Nebel, A., Kling, A., Willamowski, R., & Schell, T. (2024). Recalibration of limits to growth: An update of the World3 model. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 28, 87–99. https://doi.org/10.1111/jiec.13442 What the World3 recalibration proves, and the one thing it cannot Nebel, Kling, Willamowski and Schell did something the Limits to Growth literature had talked about for fifty years but never quite carried out: they let a computer search the parameter space. Where Turner and…

A popular way to explain how current LLMs work is to say that “all” they do is predict the next most likely word in a sentence. From one perspective, this is correct. Trained on all human language, the LLMs distilled billions of word sequences so that they can imitate authentic-sounding strings of words that have never been said before. These sentences sound plausible because, based on training on millions of average human texts, the models were predicting what an average human might say next.…

Sometimes, very old buildings gain glamor as they age. Another of our pre-Revolution projects with John G. Waite Associates, Architects is the Roslyn Grist Mill, an industrial building from the early eighteenth century that has somehow become glamorous over time. 1919 A grist mill grinds grain, and needs a source of power to turn its wheels. At the town of Roslyn, on Long Island, there’s a stream- and spring-fed pond south of the mill (and south of the original line of the road that used to be…

How did Fred Astaire dance on the ceiling in Royal Wedding (1951)? Discover the rotating room, strapped cameraman, and brilliant engineering behind one of Hollywood's greatest illusions.

Daily Drawing 904

Erwin M. Schmidt reached out to point me to a new study of the survival rates of on-screen geologists in movies titled “Geologists on the silver screen—the sequel”.Four geologists at the University of Gothenburg spent more than a decade keeping a list of every film they could find that featured a geologist. Across the 141 movies they tracked, the on-screen geologist died 34% of the time. Usually quite early, and often moments after explaining that the volcano is about to go off. Erwin asked…

At the beginning of May, I wrote a post about how I was reconsidering my multi-decade-long goal of finding the perfect digital notebook, in favor of switching to good old-fashioned pen and paper. I still had an empty Field Notes memo book that I’d picked up during a trip to Chicago, and I resolved to use that as a test case for a journal. As you can see from the above picture, things got a little out of hand. Even before I’d filled up the first one, I fell under the thrall of Field Notes’s…

2026-06-15Hello!I'll get to talking about the photo at the end. Because I have to admit a rather pressing issue right now with my photography kit. I don't like talking about my gear. I hide it away in the technical info, for nerds, and leave it be for those who are interested. I've found a kit I like: two lenses work great for events, and a little muffin-shaped lens to walk around with on my own. All on a camera that I bought used that I've stuck with for more than a year.I'm happy with my…