Five of HRP's six royal palaces are in London. It costs £120 to visit them all. Tower of London £37.00 Hampton Court Palace £29.00 Kensington Palace £19.00 Banqueting House £10.00 Kew Palace £25.00 TOTAL £120.00 Take up HRP membership and you can get that down to £89. But by playing the long game I've managed to visit the lot for less than £20. I saved the most expensive until last. Tower of London £1.00 Hampton Court Palace £7.75 Kensington Palace £0.00 Banqueting House £0.00 Kew Palace £10.00…

Editor’s Note: Matthew Chicoine interviewed Dr. Robert Shaffern, via phone on August 21st, 2026. Some of the questions/answers have been rearranged, edited, and paraphrased to provide the best reader experience without losing any integrity of the answers given. What makes your account of Peter’s life different from those already written? One of the main things … Continue reading An 1113 Word Interview with Dr. Robert Shaffern about Saint Peter The post An 1113 Word Interview with Dr. Robert…

There is nothing quite as comforting when the cooler months roll around as a good old-fashioned Boiled Dinner - a true Maritime and New England classic that's been loved for generations. This humble one pot meal starts with salty meat simmered low and slow until tender, creating a rich cooking liquor that infuses the eating vegetables with deep, nostalgic flavour.Simple ingredients, gentle cooking, and timeless tradition come together to create a dish that's plain, hearty, and incredibly…

To our Jewish readers: Sorry, we're a bit late on this—chalk it up to being ill—but G'mar Chatimah Tovah. We do not know if an exclamation point is appropriate on the (belated) occasion of such a solemn holiday, so we're sticking with a period. Trump Threatens Iran with Annihilation If you haven't studied World War II fairly closely, you may not be aware of exactly how much most Americans loathed the Japanese back then. There was Pearl Harbor, or course, followed by a brutal 4-year war during…

Let’s talk about responsible quality engineering (RQE). Quality engineering is not testing, although it may require testing. Also, most “quality engineers” don’t do quality engineering. The people who do quality engineering are developers. Testers support that process by analyzing the quality of the product and providing feedback to developers as part of the quality engineering […]

It’s Orb’in time Highest praise for https://ampcode.com and how well integrated their app and tooling is. I’m really really enjoying the Orb’s and terminal integration. Plus having the ability to run Orb’s or a local runner is a game changer. They’ve taken all the good bits from various hardness/providers but made it their own. Also, Puck is great - I can ask meta questions about amp and he gives me the answers without needing a new thread or stealing context from current threads. So good even…

I've spent a good amount of (virtual) ink on this site being suspicious of generative AI and arguing that protesting it is too easy when the actual power sits with capital allotment towards its development and research, not with the model weights. I stand by that. I also admitted a few weeks ago that I broke my own stance and started using it to follow the industry, in hopes of improving my chances at getting a job at all. It's no different than me returning to use GitHub for all of my project…

This is a post in response to James’ post, and I had to write this right after reading his post, because stickers! A journal isn’t a journal until I’ve put stickers on it. Sometimes I go fancy, layering stickers until I’ve covered it up completely. Other times, just one sticker is enough. But sticker have to be on it or I’m bored with my journal within a few pages. And yes, I also love to add stickers to my journal pages. In a way that reminds me of school, where you could go to the front of…

For those of us who enjoy historical fiction, especially when set during WWII, it is a pleasure to encounter a book that reveals a new aspect of the war. Rose is a recent high school graduate, living on the family farm in Saskatchewan, and longing for the adventure of war overseas. In the meantime, she has finagled a job as a reporter/photographer/Girl Friday at the local newspaper, The Touchwood Times. Her youthful patriotism is at odds with the newspaper’s editor, who feels strongly Canadians…

Heads up: the first 7 mins is a bit quiet until we worked out the external mic was misbehaving - sorry! But get through that and have a listen to Scott's experiences with how Report URI is identifying malware-infected machines within orgs, all due to CSP reporting. It's a super cool use of the technology, and I'm sure there's an awesome potential for it that neither of us has really thought about yet. Plus, the crazy rate of malicious browser extensions he's picking up with help from "Rory",…

What do you have left if the basis for existence, character, and persona is social media? I'm throwing LinkedIn into the same bucket as that of Facebook et al. They seem to be dead, littered with paid and bot content everywhere designed to brainwash and mislead people. So does not having an active social media speak volumes for one's character as well?I mean bringing in pretentiousness, fake lives, and just plain lies. Or are people scared of the unknown? I guess I do enjoy people-watching too;…

$599 for the base 256 GB model and $679 for 512 GB with TouchID keyboard model. I don’t think I have seen a product go live in the refurbished store so quickly. I do recommend the refurbished store for items whenever possible.

I'm making ends meet as a freelance software developer. I want my income to be more stable, and I want to return to writing. I view my work in part as funding my future writing. I'm still studying Japanese, about six years in. I spend basically all my free time watching or listening to Japanese content, and I am listening whenever cooking, cleaning, walking or basically anything where my ears aren't needed. I'm aiming for as close to near native level as possible, focusing on input rather than…

Twenty Years Ago on FITK I went down to the river last night, camera and tripod in tow, intent on securing some time exposures of the Giddings Gazebo on the lower Rum River. This structure is all that remains of a group of stoneworks which were constructed on the river's edge, a place where our city's first cultural pioneer would practice his clarinet on warm summer days nearly a century ago.

This isn’t the first ambient tuba music I’ve heard, not by a longshot, but like previous ambient tuba music, it is deep as can be, with digital processing taking the inherent low-end tones and making them reverberate out into the ether. The musician is running the tuba through a chain of effects on an iPad, and thanks to the space-filling, extended sounds, he is able to pause his playing in order to manipulate the tones on the screen manually. Occasionally the iPad interface comes into view, so…

Nau maiYesterday we spent the day in Pittsburgh recovering and drying out. We had driven through the night aboard our bus, Huckleberry. She is a proud bus, old but stout, wearing chrome skirts and a very dignified coat of midnight blue paint. She had crossed the states of Indiana and Ohio and delivered us safely to western Pennsylvania, to a large carpark behind the Hampton Inn & Suites, Pittsburgh Downtown. The rain had followed us to Pittsburgh but thankfully we didn’t have to deal with more…

From time to time, our everyday views here on the Palouse turn surreal. For a few days in August, our normal drive to town got extra geometric as these straw bales waited to be picked up. The warm, soft light came courtesy of the wildfire smoke that now defines most Western summer days. You see views like this around the Palouse and think that you couldn’t possibly go wrong with a camera, but in my experience the view through the lens is almost invariably more difficult to compose than I hope.…

Just a quick one today, because it's nearly midnight, and I'm tired. XD I was planning to write a post at some point entitled "Blogging is a bit schlock, and that's ok!" but I guess I'm going to write it now, very briefly and off-the-cuff before I fall into my bed and give up the ghost for a few hours. I suppose that's apropos, then, this post being somewhat meta-schlock. 😄 I've really enjoyed the blogging challenges this year, like Junited, the July Reply, and now this September Gratitude…

Last year I wrote that a dream came true by attending and speaking at CppCon. And here I was again! Someone is living the dream, apparently. 21 LinkedIn posts shared, 24 sessions attended, 3 talks given. Those are just numbers, though. The human connections are what make a conference special, and CppCon being the largest C++ conference, there is no shortage. If you just want to wind down with...

Spotted in the Cadbury factory, this is an interesting detail for an industrial scene. A bunded area is somewhere to park a tanker, with drainage to avoid spills spreading. I'd assume this is normally where it is being loaded or unloaded, but this one seems not to have any facilities for this. Does the driver haul the tanker to this spot if it appears to be leaking? Modelling would be simple enough: some gratings around the edge of a concrete area. You could probably scribe the lot into card,…

Yesterday was a historic day for the United States. How — and if — it will be recorded in the history books will depend on what we do, how thoroughly we do it, and how quickly. Or it won’t be recorded at all. The key to understanding why was first illustrated, for me at least, in a novel. One of the most interesting things about Blindsight (two decades is long enough, right?) is how Rorschach viewed language itself as an attack. The non-conscious but intelligent entity reasoned that if useful…

A story about how a college club had such a huge impact on people’s lives, and how such student organizations are underappreciated.

And not just because Kev did. 😆 I was amused to see Kev’s post because I had the same experience and realization recently. It dawned on me as I was perusing some big list of links that it really is helpful to have a visual indicator of which ones I’ve already clicked.

I have just applied to this… Let’s see if I get in…

Okay, you know how good it feels when you peel your socks off at the end of the day? You know how your crinkly leg hairs all get a chance to relax, stretch out, and breathe a sigh of relief? Well, taking out your ponytail is like that times a million. All your hair unbends and finally points the other direction. Shivers shake down your spine as you bend your neck and shake your hair out. Yes, all the pressure just melts away and it feels like an instant scalp massage. Plus, if you tied your…

When you were little, did you enjoy playing with magnets? Now you get to play with magnets under the guise of a strategic boardgame. Upside Town is designed by Singaporean designer Quentin Quek and published by PlayByDesign. Quentin comes from a product design background, and it shows in how well put together Upside Town is. This is not a game with a gimmick. The

Being able to ignore things that annoy you is a skill. Some people are born with an innate talent in this area, but the rest of us learn, over time, that it is important to not let people's worst habits or peculiarities grind your gears or otherwise drive you crazy. I used to struggle with this, but eventually I got better at it. The key is understanding that most of the things you dislike about other people are things you dislike in yourself. From there you end up in one of two places, and…

A company of soldiers on a difficult mission. A priestess held hostage by her position. A man trying to save an empire by eliminating the emperor. The writing is fine, albeit somewhat overly flowery at times (for my taste), and I didn’t appreciate the fantasy language passages. If they are translated immediately, why not skip that step please? I’m being peevish, I know, but it was annoying every time. The characters are plentiful, and range from interesting to vapidly dull. Sadly, the author…

I’m working on posts about a British horror movie, a Kollywood sci-fi movie, and a post that ties together Chapter 11 of Dungeon Crawler Carl, sci-fi, and Russian Formalist Boris Tomashevsky. I’m also beginning a study on the narrative purposes of interfaces in sci-fi. But all progress has stopped with the news last week that Dolly Parton and Tim Curry have passed. It’s parasocial, but the feels are real, and it was a lot to bear on top of current systemic anxieties. I’m GenX and both of these…

Today’s Soundtrack…