× On May 21, Paul Krugman wrapped up a long argument that the European continent isn’t really in economic decline. With one exception: Europe, he writes, “can’t be sure that it will always have access to new technologies developed and produced in the other superpowers,” and “the risk of being cut off from strategically important technologies, once minimal, is now very real.” Twenty-two days later a US directive switched off a frontier AI model for every non-American (well technically -…

Three years and counting! Keeping up a habit for this long is quite uncommon for someone who gets as easily distracted as I do. Especially with a mind as busy (we'll get to that). Writing is still treating me nicely. It allows me to thoroughly explore my mind. I never expected that writing would do this for me. As a matter of fact, I have only learned this after writing for some time. In the very beginning, I actually believed that all there is to write about was web accessibility—alias my…

Thank you to my local paper, the Lexington News-Gazette, for inviting me to write a monthly guest column this summer. My first commentary appeared last Wednesday and focused on Juneteenth. My small town hosted another wonderful celebration on Friday. I can’t wait for next year’s — and what I hope is a massively better political landscape. More on that below: June 19 is Juneteenth National Independence Day, America’s federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery. Though the Emancipation…

We have some friends visiting us here in Ottawa soon and I wanted to share a few ideas of things they might want to check out while they're here. I may have gotten a little carried away. This list is curated based on my own particular perspective and knowledge; there's certainly some cool stuff I didn't include because I don't know about it or because I haven't made it there yet myself. It's reflective of my own location: we live on the west end, near the Civic Hospital and Experimental Farm…

"Owensboro Messenger," January 29, 1911, via Newspapers.comEarly in 1910, American newspapers breathlessly carried the story of what appeared to be a particularly shocking double homicide. This account comes from the "Republican News Item" for January 6:The mystery of the death of Miss Grace Elosser, of Cumberland, Md., and Charles E. Twigg, of Keyser, W. Va. her fiance, appears as deep as it did shortly after the bodies of the couple were found on the settee in the parlor of the Elosser…

Over the years, I've worked for organisations with various levels of risk tolerance for business travellers. Some have been (rightly) paranoid and others have been (wrongly) placid about the threats their employees face. The fact is, individuals are often targeted for espionage, blackmail, or other state-sponsored attacks. Here's a list of some of the different advice I've received, roughly sorted into levels of suitability. Start at the top and work your way down until you reach a suitable…

Okay, so maybe the backlog doesn’t completely win. But after 12 years of trying to work through growing Steam backlog, I’ve finally come to the point where I feel like I’m done with this project.

The Apollo 14 Lunar Module, with its 7° tilt apparent in the picture. The onboard astronauts looked out the module’s window often to ensure it was not tipping over. Image: NASA / David HarlandFor NASA to safely land 12 astronauts on the Moon with the Apollo missions, a lot had to go right. But before it could even attempt Apollo, the agency needed to know what our Moon is like up close. Worrying about the basic nature of the lunar surface and soil may sound mundane now but it was a big unknown…

Welcome back to the Gridiron Deep Dive everybody, where today, I’m going to take a detour from the normal football fare, to talk about former MLB Centre Fielder Glenn Burke.If you know why I’ve come to talk about Glenn Burke today, then you know, but please keep that information to yourself for the next little while, not to ruin it for everybody else.Writing this article took a lot out of me. Thank you for being here!There are several disclaimers that I would like to give before we begin, both…

The Kate Rays is Kim Floyd’s current project. You can find the music she makes with Tony Chance on bass and Mark Hubbard on drums on Bandcamp. I recommend it. But I discovered some tracks on Soundcloud that predate The Kate Rays and that got me curious. Kim who usually sings and plays guitar is now based in Jacksonville, Florida. I believe at some point she was in New York City. I wonder where she was in 1997. The tracks from her project Tintern Abby date from that year. There are three songs…

I’m … stunned. I was coming up with a short, fun, provider-agnostic SSH target name for my new VM. I landed on ha because I like using “ha” in chat, it’s short for happy place, and most importantly, I was impatient and wanted to move on. Then I realized that ssh ha is annoying to type because my pointer finger has to go from the “h” of ssh, to the spacebar, and then back to the “h” of ha. Then it struck me. Holy shit. I’ve been using the wrong finger for the most frequently typed key for my…

Discussing generative AI is fraughtimages. It's easy to make binary distinctions. Love it, hate it. No in-between. I'm mostly against it for images. Fully admitting some look dope, the fact that it's making it harder for artists to make a living is too muchtime. Not to mention the resource usageenergy. There is one place I'm fine with it: background generation. Behind the Scenes I've taken to playing Magic: The Gathering. The crew I play with is spread across multiple countries. We use Tabletop…

‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend;’ it may have started as a means to annoy Margaret Thatcher, the tabloid press and conservative society by banding together with a group equally reviled by the British Establishment, but the LGSM (Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners) assistance and fundraising society formed a genuine bond with the Welsh […]

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

In most big stories, there are one or two pieces of absolutely essential context that get reported in major outlets but which no one seems to pay much attention to.David Goldman reporting for CNN: Today, neighboring Cushing is the hub of America’s energy market. It literally provides the oil plumbing for the United States. It’s where America’s benchmark West Texas Intermediate oil is priced and warehoused. From there, it’s piped to refineries around the country. In normal times, Cushing stores…

My kids were using Zorin OS 17 on their very old Pentium laptop with 4GB of memory. I understand that it is already an older version of Zorin. But it had started to feel very sluggish. Kids use it mainly for browsing, but opening the browser itself takes really long. But that is after they already wait - what feels like a long time - to see the login prompt 1 after powering up the machine. So today being Sunday I decided I will install Linux Lite on this machine The latest version Linux Lite 8…

Haven’t posted a photo of Lavander for a while (because she doesn’t pose like Wally does, the tart). Status: Decided to power-wash the paving outside the back door today using the pacing methodology of do a bit, rest, do a bit more, and so on. I also did most of it sitting down and discovered that when you hold the nozzle directly above the ground like a giant pen it balances on the pressure from the jet, hovering with no need to direct it. This is much easier on the wrist than the standing-up…

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.

increasingly often, I feel like maybe there's two different kinds of being happy with how you look: being happy with how you look (because you fit society's mold and it makes life easier), and being happy with how you look (because you like how you look) I'd imagine for most folks, these two align? I feel like I'm only just now discovering the latter, though. and I'm really glad I got even this far. it's really nice looking in the mirror and realizing you're actually kind of happy with what…

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…

As a dev I have VS Code open all day anyway. Recently I found out about Foam and moved my note taking there The post Foam for note taking appeared first on Alessandro Muraro.

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…

Fortuitously the three glasses of port I drank last night didn't result in a hangover, so at around nine thirty in the morning I make myself comfortable on a pale couch in Aumann and open up my laptop to do some work. The port was from a good friend who is also here. I messaged him earlier in the week asking for a time to hang out and catch up, and that time was resolved to late in the evening the previous day. He had made a brief comment on the strangeness of the time, but it was nostalgic for…

Thoughts about how you can't yet or don't want to do something in particular can be discouraging, if not self-destructive. Thankfully, there are plenty of viable solutions for this problem. It would be nice to hear how people like you solve for it differently than below. One solution that came to mind recently was applying your mind and body toward something else. For example, if I don't want to work on a particular piece of writing, I can swap it out for something else or whip up something…

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 →

Ridgeline subscribers — Alex Wolfe walks. He walks weird walks and I like weird walks, so when Alex reached out to do a little walk (not a weird one, really, just a little one with a sprinkle of weird), I — of course — said: Sure. His pitch: “A short walk through privately owned public spaces I mapped through Midtown.” Sounded good to me. Midtown, a word that evokes little more than Sbarro, tourists, Tiffany’s, bad suits, cement, cement, MoMA, cement, and glass walls rising from the pavement. I…

A shorter industry-focused version of this piece was originally published in Hotel & Catering News Middle East. You can read the article [HERE] (tab:https://issuu.com/hotelnewsme/docs/hotel_catering_june_2026_issue/26). We live in a world obsessed with visibility. Businesses track engagement, monitor behaviour, measure sentiment, optimise journeys, and analyse performance in extraordinary detail. Every click, booking, review, purchase, and interaction becomes another data point feeding another…