There seems to have been a bumper crop of classic crime reprints in July, so let’s get cracking and take a look at them…
Some London borough boundaries are easy to cross. The boundary between Croydon and Bromley, for example, is 10 miles long and can be crossed in over 40 different places. But other London boundaries are much harder to cross, or in a few cases impossible except by boat. So let's investigate... The London borough boundaries with fewest crossings It's best to do this in two parts. a) Boundaries along the River Thames Starting out east... Havering → Bexley: 0 (big estuary, no crossing points)…
If you’re craving a quick, comforting dessert that tastes like it came straight from a farmhouse kitchen, this Aunt Berry's Fruit Cobbler is just the thing. Made with simple pantry staples and a can of fruit pie filling, it bakes into a golden, buttery crust with sweet, jammy fruit bubbling through every bite. This cobbler is perfect for weeknights, last‑minute company, or anytime you want a homemade treat without fuss — and it’s endlessly adaptable to whatever fruit you have on hand. Warm,…
The Tennessee Primaries are Today Tennessee is holding its primaries today. The 1796 state Constitution says primaries must be the first Thursday in August. Historians say there was no rationale for that. Maybe they decided it had to be on a day that started with "T," as in Tennessee, and they flipped a coin and Thursday won. Hawaii also shuns Tuesdays. It's primary is this Saturday. Click here for full story
It’s another edition of monthly links! Here are some interesting things for you to check out in August: Tracy Durnell has some interesting takes – and interesting ways of presenting existing ideas. In this tortured reflection on why Tracy won’t buy the lamp that she wants, she highlights how “home decor” is another way of putting you onto the consumerist treadmill. How will I be useless to Capitalism today? And commenter Chris Glass links to his List of Things I Do Not Need – a brilliant idea.…
An agent harness is the software wrapped around a language model that turns it into an agent: the loop that calls the model repeatedly, the tools it can execute, the context management that decides what the model sees, and the guardrails that decide what it’s allowed to do. The model predicts text. The harness is everything that makes those predictions add up to work getting done. Anthropic’s Claude Code documentation puts it in one line: “Claude Code is the harness; Claude is the model inside…
Python A-Z is a blog series about Python. Each day, I share insights, ideas and examples for different parts of Python development that match with the letter of the day. Blaugust is an annual blogging festival in August where the goal is to write a blog post every day of the month. The code that a program runs is provided by the developer of the program. The inputs and interactions are initiated by the user of the program. The environment variables are data provided by the system that runs it.…
Veuve Cliequeot rhymes with Voove Cleekay. And a guitar lesson. Fuck ya Happy anniversary to my beautiful soul mate. Celebrating together after n 2 youngster lesson. This post **(August 5th, 32 years Later)** was last edited **1 minute ago**.
Getting out of my head started with the exhale. Take that, I have the final word.
“It is only about the contents of a book that I care, not its shape, its date, or the number on its flyleaves.” Spoken like a reader, not a parvenu accumulating vogueish titles as though they were bowling trophies. Books as fashion statement or evidence of “interleckchul” (Flannery O’Connor’s spelling) status are comically pretentious. Aldous Huxley published his essay “If My Library Burned Tonight” in the November 1947 issue of House and Garden magazine (!). He posits a fire that destroys his…
Was the first doge really the first? Did he even exist? There are some serious doubt about doge Paulicius (697·717) to be examined.
Learning and dealing with occult magic is all about reach.It reaches across the veil, into dreams, through mirrors, down bloodlines, into old books, forgotten places, and the spaces between worlds. It is not always about power. Sometimes it is about contact.That is what makes it dangerous.The Witch Queen Larina of West Haven knows this better than most. The white streak in her otherwise red hair is not just cosmetic. It is a reminder. A mark. Proof that sometimes her reach goes farther than her…
Perfume PosseA Quiet Morning by Miller et Bertaux Hi Posse crew, This week I was looking through the Indie boxes to find something fun to wear. Completely out of place I found my current and backup bottles of A Quiet Morning by Miller et Bertaux. Very annoying because… Continue Reading → Perfume PosseA Quiet Morning by Miller et Bertaux
I have some really good news if you’re an artist trying to get noticed: You do not even have to be good these days. I think there are enough people out there so bored on their phone, on their computer, on their whatever, just looking for anything halfway interesting. And I bet if you’re an artist, you can be at least halfway interesting. The only thing you have to do is be consistent. I am not a lot of things, but I can be really consistent in my efforts. Walking or riding my bike every day—and…
Thursday 6th August 2026 Okehampton’s doing well for rail service restoration. Not only did the town (population: 9,500) gain the return of a daily hourly train service to and from Exeter along the ‘reopened’ Dartmoor Line in 2021 (building on the successful Devon County Council funded Summer Sunday service that ran for a number of years) but last Saturday it gained a brand new station on its eastern edge with the opening of Okehampton Interchange. Photo courtesy Devon & Cornwall Rail…
Back from holidays, and the railway room is cool enough for some more TINGS preparation. I fitted together the three N-club modules that will form one end of the layout, and carried out a few minor repairs. Two new on-off switches for the fiddle-loops. Some rail repairs to the joker-tunnel. And a new length of track fitted to replace the one damaged packing up after the Erith show. Next job, build a box for the bridge. Then the ESNG meeting, at the new earlier start time at 2pm. We accumulated…
This short novel is weird in ways in which only M. John Harrison can be. A futuristic literary dystopia, the story is set on the southeastern English coast and centers on Phillip and his aunt Marnie. Sometime in the past, some sort of inscrutable alien race called the iGhetti appeared out of nowhere, and everything changed. Decades later, Phillip picks up flotsam on the sea coast, including artefacts which are some shifting form of alien life. His aunt is an artist who barely navigates in this…
Forgot to post yesterday but nothing special happened. I got off work and me and my boyfriend hung out and played board games. Managed not to spend any money and had fun in the mean time. We finally had the brain cells to understand how to play Sky Team and it was fun! We’re only on scenario 2, and we had a tough time cracking it lol. Maybe tomorrow. Today we technically bought food but it was from a sinking fund we set up for fun money. I’m still entertaining all kinds of things I want to buy…
Sure, I like electronic gadgets. But I dislike planned obsolescence more. It’s one thing when the newer model really is that much better. “All About the Pentiums” exaggerated it, but computer hardware in the 1990s really was improving by leaps and bounds. (And the software was devouring those performance gains, both in demanding more resources, and being less efficient as programmers were told to optimize for their own time, not for disk space or RAM.) That eventually settled out around the…
Celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2026, Football Picture Story Monthly is back with two incredible graphic novel volumes out now! Volume One: The Best of Stark and Volume Two: The Best of We Are United!First published in 1986, Football Picture Story Monthly was an instant success for British publishing giant DC Thomson. Running for 17 years and releasing a staggering 418 issues, this celebrated
Open House gets all the attention, but it’s not the only festival throwing open doors this September. Heritage Open Days runs alongside it, from 11 to 20 September 2026, and its shortlist skews a little different: fewer grand civic buildings, more of the odd, small-scale, run-by-enthusiasts places that don’t always make it onto the bigger lists. It’s also, this year at least, where you’ll find a couple of genuine favourites that Open House itself left out. Below are eight I’ve picked out: a…
Two weeks after saying goodbye, we finally brought Cocoa home today. After Cocoa passed, we chose to have her privately cremated. We bought an urn for her and had a plaque engraved with the words Forever Our Baby Grandma. I also decided to keep a little bit of her ashes in a necklace so I can carry her with me wherever I go. She spent almost 15 years showing me the world through her eyes. Now I can't wait to bring her everywhere and show her all the places she never got the chance to see. I've…
If you live in the Tampa Bay area, which has been my home for the past dozen years, you already know we’re a weird, beautiful, heat-soaked paradise of chicken-walking Ybor streets, Cuban sandwiches, unapologetic swagger, and no small amount of Florida weirdness. Also, it’s the long-time home of the reason I’m here: Anitra! But if you want to understand why this town exists at all, grab yourself the largest cafe con leche you can get your mitts on and watch (or listen to) Paul McAllister’s…
Still no perch. Perhaps I should just concentrate on the carp until the weather changes, see if I can get 20 doubles before pike-time? Double #16 above at 12lb 0oz - four more to go...
You could say one of my practicals in BRM is a bit rubbish - well I was asked to take a modern dustcart, and work it into a diorama. The good news is that as well as the modelling, I've written a little history of wheelie bins!As a bonus, I've modelled a man using a manhole to come up from under the road. In the four-step section, my first coach makes an appearance, being fitted out with passengers. Timely, as there is a little discussion floating around wondering if model buses should be…
Wellington in Winter
Introversion Software is quite known for its, "Prison Architect," where you attempt to design and run a successful prison (with things often going wrong). They've been hard at work on, "The Last Starship," for some time now, and have another game, "Arise Dark Lord." It looks interesting, with a blend of tower defense, base building, and you controlling the titular Dark Lord and commanding a bunch of undead minions as a big ol' evil tower gets built. Reading about it made me think of the…
I’m trying out this thing, it’s trained on my blog posts and public talks, that you can chat with as me on Telegram. Behold: AutoMattBot.
Clint (who among other things, does all sorts of OpenZiti development and co-hosts Ziti TV with me) recently posted a video, OpenZiti 2.0: A Management API With No Open Port. It’s a quick but deep dive prompted by a great question over on our Discourse forums: “What’s the service configuration for the hosts part when using identity?” Short answer: there isn’t one. No host.v1, no tunneler hosting it. The core idea: in 2.0+, the controller is the hosting app. Give it an identity and it binds the…
It’s a completely counterintuitive concept, but that’s the thesis of API Gateway Security: A Zero Trust Approach, an article we just refreshed on the NetFoundry blog. Read the article here: https://netfoundry.io/devops/api-gateway-security/ It’s written by Tod Burtchell, Associate Director Service Planning & Development in Management & Operations Platform (long title, dude!), whom I had the pleasure of meeting at a planning meeting last week. Most API security spend goes into inspecting inbound…
