This is a collection of short stories by one of Ireland’s best playwrights. I think you can tell that these stories were written by someone who’s at home with the stage. The dialogue really shines. And some of the stories feel like scenes in a play. But that’s no bad thing. If most short stories are like mini-novels, why not have short stories that are like mini-plays? Some of the stories are very short indeed, just long enough to convey the mood of the piece. That mood is often wistful,…

Hartley Charlton at MacRumors: macOS 27 Golden Gate removes AFP support, ending Time Machine compatibility with Time Capsule after nearly two decades, but a community project from a Microsoft engineer offers a potential workaround for owners not yet ready to move on. The original Time Capsule was announced way back in 2008, in the same Macworld keynote as the first MacBook Air. From Apple at the time: Time Capsule combines an 802.11n base station with a server grade hard disk in one small…

I suspect that if proof of aliens really was disclosed at this current febrile time the public reaction would be hysterical with calls for them to be locked up, dropped on the Moon or something similarly draconian. This is not presently a world receptive to `others` of the human variety let along extra-terrestrials. The idea of such a reveal is what drives Steven Spielberg’s latest which returns him to the territory of ET and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Disclosure Day lacks the…

I wrote about our 8-track player last Friday: Therefore, it seems fitting that the next item in our Hi-Fi stack would be the pinnacle of analogue tape format quality: the 8-track! And further down on the post, emphasis added: For those unaware of the history of 8-track, my comment about quality was most definitely tongue in cheek. You weren’t buying 8-track carts for their quality At least five comments, summarised: Ummmmm errrrr, 8-track wasn’t great quality, what are you even talking about?…

Well, it’s officially peach season, and my mom gave me a small box of fresh peaches from the famed Peach Truck. I immediately knew what to do with at least a couple of them, and got to work trying out a new Half Baked Harvest recipe I saw on her Instagram: Cinnamon Crunch Peach Muffin Bread. View this post on Instagram So let’s dive right in by taking a look at the ingredients list. Here’s everything you need: Since I had literally just been given the peaches, the only thing I didn’t have on…

Anthropic wrote a blog post explaining how they turned Claude into a jerk. Rather than dunking on them more (Claude is still the best coding model around) I’m going to talk seriously about what went wrong and how it could be done better.The most obvious problem is that they didn’t chat with the results of this training and realize that it was a disaster before incorporating the weight updates into the main model. Most likely they don’t have what amounts to pull requests of weights, which they…

Seventeen Days In, Here are some Blog Posts I liked Recently! Photo unrelated, I just like having photos on my blog posts. Took this back in March while the winter was still wintering and never got around to posting it I think the original spirit of Junited was more of a singular post you keep updating as the month goes on, but given the linear nature of blogs I think to me personally it felt like "hey I have enough for a 'Junited 2' post I should do that" was more the vibe. Here's my original…

Grey Ginther and Ezzy Desjarlais are two Métis cousins living in an old trailer near Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Their days are a mix of drinking and endless card games; listless and dull. Grey is a disillusioned environmental and indigenous rights activist, fed up of the corporate NGO lobbyists, and the endless treadmill of well meaning white activists whose trajectory from college to NGO jobs or

Sure, Mr. Darcy puts the “pride” in Pride and Prejudice and Mr. Wickham riles things

2026-06-12Hello!I'll first address the black circle surrounding the image. This photograph was taken with a three-second exposure time, meaning that the camera sensor was exposed to the light for three seconds, gathering all the photons and making an image. Normally, photos are taken within tiny fractions of a second to freeze motion. A long exposure blurs that motion (in this case, blurring any tiny waves in the water and preserving a clear reflection).But loads of light makes the image…

Hello readers, You may have noticed I didn’t post a Counter Craft article last week, which is because I spent the last couple weeks in a furious creative haze to finish up a draft of my forthcoming haunted house novel Haunted Hills. The process of writing that novel has been completely different from the processes behind my last two novels, Metallic Realms and The Body Scout. Partly, that’s just the way it seems to go with books. Each time, you have to teach yourself how to write a book all…

I kind of want to diarypost about the little solstice I ran last night but too much diaryposting and turning all my friends into content seems corrosive. I suppose that's why they invented these things called "diaries" 😔 What I will say is that it was a really strange wonderful evening that I think bound everyone there closer together. I've been having these thoughts about what's lost when one scales a community and the experience is making me want to double down on smallness.

On January 16, 2026, AI solved an impossible bug. A bug in a library downloaded over a billion times every year, with a wall of comments asking for help, several hacked-together workarounds, and an open call to the entire internet to please try to solve it. A bug that had been open for 15 years, languishing as the oldest open issue on the project’s GitHub, predating its migration to GitHub even, because it had stymied every person who had tried to tackle it. I myself had already spent a full…

What happens to the articles published in an online-only journal when that journal not only ceases to publish, but ceases to exist? A screenshot of the Kant Studies Online homepage, via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine That question is raised by the case of Kant Studies Online, an online only, open-access philosophy journal that published articles between 2011 and 2016, the website of which is no longer accessible. The journal was founded by Gary Banham, who died in 2013. The journal…

Here is a little struggle I have. If Good Store sends me a 20% off code (SUMMER) for their coffee/tea; and I buy the 5-pound bag of coffee, which is a considerable savings per ounce over the 12-ounce bags (5 pounds, which is 80 ounces, costs approximately the same as two-and-three-quarters 12-ounce bags, or 33 ounces; it’s $.86/ounce vs $2.08/ounce); and I use my “dots” (little reward points that accumulate from purchases) to get free shipping; and of course I got the 20% off as well; then am I…

The lines between transactional systems, analytical systems, hybrid systems, and shared storage architectures are getting blurry. This post proposes a small taxonomy for describing the different ways systems, workloads, storage tiers, visibility, and durable copies relate to each other.OLTP, OLAP, HTAP, and now LTAP?We can think of the first two as two types of workload which have specialized query engines and storage systems to support them. OLTP such as the RDBMS like Postgres and MySQL use…

LEGO Newsroom: The LEGO Group today reveals the first-ever working LEGO® pinball machine, bringing retro arcade gaming to life in a fully functional brick-built model. The set combines authentic pinball mechanics with a playful space-theme and display appeal. With 2,274 pieces, builders can construct a tabletop pinball machine featuring a spring-powered launcher, dual flippers, spinning bumpers and an up-and-over ramp bridge. Players can launch the ball and aim for targets across the playfield,…

In the game of football (i.e. soccer), players pass the ball around, and eventually someone takes a shot. If the ball breaches the net, the team scores a point, and the game restarts from the center. If an errant shot surpasses the goal line, the opposing goalkeeper restarts the action; if the shot is intercepted by an opponent pushing the ball out of bounds, the attacking team retains possession and restarts the action with a corner or a throw-in. The action can also be stopped and restarted…

Marc Andreesen was on the Latent Space Podcast recently. He‘s best known for being co-author of Mosaic, the first web browser to display inline images, and for being the founder of Netscape. There‘s a great bit midway through where he talks about his roots in unix programming and the Unix Mindset. I started out working on unix systems back in university in the early 2000s, and in my first tech job managing a linux render farm in a visual effects company. Up until that point I‘d only used…

The ultimate source of all miscreation and abomination. The gray mass quobbled and quivered, and swelled perpetually – and from within it, in manifold fission, were spawned anatomies that crept away on every side through the grotto. Here there were things like bodiless legs or arms that flailed in the slime, or heads that rolled, or floundering bellies with the fines of fishes; and all manner of things malformed and monstrous. And those that escaped not swiftly ashore when they fell from the…

LLMs are making inroads into just about every industry on the planet, they’re everywhere now. AI for X, AI for Y, if there’s a thing that somebody is willing to pay for, there’s another person looking for a way to use LLMs to do it. But no human activity is becoming as dominated by LLMs as writing. It’s not that I can’t see the attraction of it as an author, especially where you feel a pressure to produce a lot of content. They’re very good at that, volume. I’ve experimented with LLM assisted…

This is episode 9 of a series of shorter blog posts answering questions I received during the course of my work. They discuss common misconceptions and doubts about various generative AI technologies. You can find the whole series here: Practical Questions. The term "agent harness", or even simply "harness", seemingly appeared out of nowhere at some point at the start of this year, and everybody immediately started using it as if it had always had an obvious and commonly understood definition.…

… a sporting event that can bring a small African island country together is a good thing. imagine! Imagine if a sporting event could bring nations and continents together.Imagine humans seperated only by land mass and water - not by skin and culture. Asé Peace & Blessings,"Guided by the Ancestors"

That's right.I am a walker. Or at least that's what I keep reminding myself. Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels With Atomic Habits by James Clear now fully read (which means I need to find a new book & update /now), I decided the one habit I'd commit to as part of my habit building journey was walking.So I am a walker.Wait. I read the book and know I should make clear my intentions so that is obvious.I will GO FOR A WALK in the MORNING around the NEIGHBOURHOOD after I WAKE UP MY DAUGHTER…

If you read to divert yourself from the pains of life then you should stay away from the novels of Elizabeth Strout. But if you read to understand people better then Strout’s novels are for you, although her vision is bleak and getting bleaker. She must, like many Americans, have been affected by the horrors of the Trump presidency. In fact, although Trump is never mentioned by name, his presidency provides a background to her story of Artie, a history teacher in a small town on the coast of…

The VT102 (1978) and VT220 (1983) had the familiar 24-line terminal screen 1. This the reason your terminal defaults to 80×24, or 132×24. The VT320 (1987) kept a 24-line main display for compatibility, but added something extra: a 25th line at the bottom, reserved for status information. That extra line could be hidden, used by the terminal itself, or made writable by the host. In its normal “indicator” mode, the terminal used it for local state: cursor position, printer status, modem status,…

Someone pointed me to a series of applied economics papers: 1. George Borjas and Nate Breznau, Ideological bias in the production of research findings: Our study exploits an opportunity to observe 158 researchers working independently in 71 teams during an experiment. After being asked their position on immigration policy, they used the same data to answer the same empirical question: Does immigration affect public support for social welfare programs? . . . teams composed of pro-immigration…

Hemel has long been known for its military and tool watches, and while it has continued those themes with its Eyelandt collection, the sub-brand has also provided a place to… The post Hemel Eyelandt Aurelian appeared first on The Time Bum.

Kris Kristofferson as “Rubber Duck” in Convoy (1978) Vitals Kris Kristofferson as Martin “Rubber Duck” Penwald, maverick trucker Arizona to New Mexico, Summer 1978 Film: Convoy Release Date: June 28, 1978 Director: Sam Peckinpah Costumers: Carol James & Kent James WARNING! Spoilers ahead! Background Today would have been the 90th birthday of the late Kris Kristofferson, likely best known as a pioneering singer-songwriter in the 1970s “outlaw country” movement alongside friends and fellow…

When I review a new color or style of a product that I’ve already reviewed many times, I am looking to answer two things: 1. Has anything about the core feature changed, and 2. Why would I choose this model over any other within the same series of products?In the case of the Uni Kuru Toga Metal Mechanical Pencil, the mechanism is the core feature, with its auto-rotation lead system, and this model is the premium barrel Metal version, in this case a brilliant Orange.