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.

If you look back at the "cardboard starship" tag, you'll see there have been a couple of previous builds... and #3 was never updated. That's because I never finished it. I was unhappy with the foam I'd used to make it, and decided to scrap it. That was 5 years ago. Now that I'm actually playing Stargrave again, and the next official scenario requires a crashed ship with a 10x4 cargo area that the crew can go into, it's time to build my next cardboard spaceship!The only requirement for the…

Brides, have you ever had a lofty cake dream... ...fall flat? Or have you ever wished for pretty-as-a-picture polka dots...

I felt like a skating coach hearing someone say that it's impossible to do a triple axel. Of course it's possible. It's hard, but it's possible. -- Paul Graham on earning a billion dollars***In the wake of the latest populist drivel against "billionaires" by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, venture capitalist Paul Graham decimates her assertion, notably its smuggled-in premise that one must necessarily cheat others on the way to amassing a net worth of billion dollars.The crux of Graham's argument is…

In September, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor will be bringing out the above, this year’s big book on fascism. Given Klein’s well-earned public reputation, as well as the genius of her book Doppelganger, this book is likely to be popular with activists. For people who want to get a taste of its contents; there’s the […]

Want to know less? This is a full breakdown of my holiday - day-by-day. If you want to just see the highlights, I will post a round-up at the end of this series. Previously # It’s time for another rambling exciting travel blog. This is my third swing at travel blogging after I went to New Zealand back in May 2024, and Italy last year. After New Zealand, it took me four months before I decided to write about it, and many of the details were fuzzy by that point. Now, I am trying to write about my…

London is a dizzying delight, full of pomp and pedigree, a place where high culture and cutting-edge trends feed off one another. Suzane Rowan Kelleher, Donald Olson and Darwin Porter, Frommer’s Europe by Rail

Dire Garden of the AgesOut 29th May on Naturmacht Productions The second album from this Irish solo project could be framed as a transfer of styles from one zone to another. Whilst the debut behaved like an epic fable heavily rooted in Viking and Celtic metal stylings, the follow up offers a rather dramatic volte-face into industrial and electronic territory. But both expressions are characterised by a swirling, atmospheric panorama that creates a clear continuity within this project despite…

GLM-5.2 arrived last week. It boasts excellent benchmarks and looks strong. Benchmarks here are a de facto ceiling of how good it is, not a point estimate. Essentially all other aspects of an open model like this, beyond speed and price, will almost always be worse than the numbers suggest. Still, impressive. It is definitely a large step up from GLM-5.1, and likely the strongest open model. GLM-5.2 is still substantially behind the absolute frontier, although plausibly on the cost-benefit…

i have been looking for the next job for a little bit, and i've noticed that most job ads now not only rely heavily on ai for writing the actual job description, but working with ai is one of the main tasks on the job. one such position i had applied for "ai-powered fullstack engineer" (they ended up going with someone else for the position). i am fighting an internal battle: do i go deeper into the ai bubble, apply for "ai-first" companies, or do i try to do what i feel deep within me is right…

American robin fledgling in Frick Park, 16 May 2021 (photo by Charity Kheshgi) 22 June 2026 Nesting is at its peak, June flowers are blooming, bugs are buzzing, and robins are fledging their second brood(*). Join me for a bird and nature walk in Schenley Park on Sunday, June 28, 8:30am to 10:30am. Meet at the Schenley Park Cafe and Visitor Center where Panther Hollow Road joins Schenley Drive. In addition to birds we’ll see wild urban plants, including native Daisy fleabane (Erigeron annuus)…

gonna rank from worst to best song ranking system 😇- need to have a looong conversation with whoever made this song 🥹- teared up a little 🥰- i love love love 😊- very good 🙂- good with some issues 🤔- i would let it play in the background ig.. 😪- not feeling it 😠- no this is bad. 😡- this is really bad. 🤬- play this around me and im taking a gun out. for both of us. pinocchio 😡 you're not serious. 96ers 😡 you're not serious. stupid idiot 😠 you're not serious. overall this is what happens when you…

“The University of Dundee has announced it plans to cease offering Philosophy as a named degree from 2027. This news has come as a complete shock to students, staff and the wider Scottish community. We, the philosophy community of Dundee, are determined to fight this.” So begins a petition protesting an aspect of the University of Dundee’s administration plan to address a large financial deficit. According to the BBC, “Despite already cutting about 675 jobs through voluntary redundancies, the…

Learn how to write a coding agent in Python in this tutorial that teaches how to interact with an LLM through an API, how to manage the context, and how to do tool calling. Introduction This tutorial will show you how to create your own coding agent from first principles. By doing so, you'll understand how coding agents work under the hood. Prerequisites To be able to follow this tutorial, you'll need prior Python experience: this tutorial is not suitable for people who don't have programming…

Learn how to use Eloquent Query Classes to organize important database logic in Laravel without adding a full repository layer. Read more

Big Tech bad. We probably agree that much since we are here in Bear. Big Tech US-based (at least mostly). US not privacy friendly. US ran by absolutely insane unit of a person. Need to run from US. Change tech to EU-based alternatives. Because EU has GDPR. EU privacy friendly. EU friendlier in general. They are on Mastodon too! If you believe that EU-based technology is fundamentally "good" you are either uninformed or crazy bananas. If you believe that the EU is friendly to its citizens'…

What is Dave wearing today? Dave looks athletic this morning in a a white running top, green running shorts, white socks, and gray sneakers. How does Dave feel today? Dave feels good and you knew that he would now. What are the factors affecting Dave's mood? Dave enjoyed a sunrise constitutional, and the reality of the new workweek has not yet set in. What are Dave's thoughts about the World Cup so far? Dave is befuddled by the lackluster showing of some powerhouse teams, and was surprised by…

Laravel Octane promises a faster Laravel: keep your app booted in memory, skip the framework bootstrap on every request, do less work per request. We run a fleet of uptime-checker boxes at Oh Dear that do nothing but fire HTTP, TCP, and ping checks at the sites we monitor, so I figured they’d be a good, low-risk place to try it. We moved a handful of them from PHP-FPM to Octane on FrankenPHP , measured it properly, and then moved every one of them back.

On Saturday Michael and I went to Public Knitoxication, a knit in public event at a local winery – we’d gone to this event back in 2018 and had a great time. Michael worked on the second sock of his Ugly Christmas Socks, which is already past the gusset decreases and onto the foot… …and while we sampled tasting flights of white wine and cider and listened to an excellent guitar/drum duo playing all the songs we like, I finished a slouchy hat that I’d started the day before on the machine,…

I wanted to put yesterday into perspective. Or better yet, I wanted to add color so that I could find contrast in the shadows of this thing I called my youth.And, so, I had to count backwards to make this possible. Of course, counting the years that went back was enough to make me shake my head. This is crazy for me to realize that, including yesterday, 38 Father’s Days have passed since The Old Man, my Father, was around. 37 years have gone by. This means I have made 37 trips around the sun…

[Now “excellence” means “A.I. hallucinations”] Last fall, a report on how businesses are using A.I. contained A.I. hallucinations about A.I. usage by businesses A KPMG report on how AI is being used by businesses across the world exaggerated adoption of the technology with bogus case studies that appear to have been based on AI hallucinations. The October report, “Redefining excellence in the age of agentic AI”, made numerous false claims about the use of AI by organisations including the Swiss…

Had a very nice Father's Day yesterday, beginning with a wonderful brunch at the Stonecat Café. Perfect weather, three guys playing some blues, and an excellent meal. We stopped at Overlook Coffee in Burdett on the way, so Caitie could get coffee up to her fancy LA standards. I missed the turn into the parking lot, so I parked in the back and it was a fortuitous mistake because I'd never seen the falls the shop is named for! There they were, right behind the place! Very cool. We came home from…

About two years ago, I learned that I’m not just being a grumpy “back in the good old days…” style about toilet paper. The article I read was good, and if I recall correctly, I emailed the author and also learned from him that something similar is happening with our sweaters. The takeaway is thus: toilet paper is expensive, and manufacturers are using less and less paper. The result is that it runs out more quickly and tears more easily. My solution to this problem was to start buying my toilet…

Last week I arrived home with a delicious pear frangipane pie from the local bakery. The contents of the cardboard pie box didn’t last long, but on top of it, in a corner, a pink round sticker caught my attention: it read WEEK VAN DE ECLAIR (8th Edition). Today marks the last day of that special week so perhaps it’s not too late to rush off to fetch some after finishing this article, even though I’m not particularly fond of them. You see, exactly ten years ago, during this period my friend & I…

gonna rank from worst to best song ranking system 😇- need to have a looong conversation with whoever made this song 🥹- teared up a little 🥰- i love love love 😊- very good 🙂- good with some issues 🤔- i would let it play in the background ig.. 😪- not feeling it 😠- no this is bad. 😡- this is really bad. 🤬- play this around me and im taking a gun out. for both of us. cbz (prime time) 😪 i sat here for most of the song wondering when it was gonna start....disappointed. it sounds like music for an ad.…

The link. The paragraph. With a background in fine arts, I focus on design and refinement, coupled with an essential intellectual humility. I encourage peer review and believe all “institutional knowledge” is merely a hypothesis awaiting scientific editing. That said, I enjoy the occasional off-script random brew day, following what is in inventory and creating something wacky and undefinable. The point of emphasis. “institutional knowledge” is merely a hypothesis awaiting scientific editing.

A collection of links found around the web. This time we have three sections, inspiration to do things – things that have inspired me to do something, visual niceness – things that I enjoyed looking at, and creative play – things that remind us that we’re human. Inspiration to Do Things Make Believe by Robin Rendle, doing the job of making me finally get Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children by Mac Barnett. In April A-N held an interactive workshop for artists, discussing the…

Evidently we are now on track for our seventh prime minister in (checks watch) fifteen minutes. The Met Office has issued a rare red warning for 09:00 on Wednesday to 21:00 Thursday for parts of England and Wales.This means the heat is likely to bring impacts to health and could be a danger to life, but also a risk to infrastructure such as power supplies and transport.Temperatures will increase significantly in the next few days with the potential for 38 or 39C by Wednesday and Thursday.…

100 lifetimes ago, I worked in a record store. The manager wouldn’t let us play Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville, and instead tried to helpfully suggest…Shawn Colvin. In hindsight, it wasn’t the worst choice. But at the time, it seemed kinda awful? Colvin just wasn’t writing stuff like this: And the license said you had to stick around until I was deadBut if you’re tired of looking at my face, I guess I already amBut you’ve never been a waste of my timeIt’s never been a dragSo take a deep breath…

Longtime DNR contributor has a new book out today: The Veiled Prophet: Secret Societies, White Supremacy, and the Struggle for St. Louis.This week in NYC, visit the live event: Devin O’Shea and TrueAnon hosts Brace Belden & Liz Franczak at The Bell House on June 25th.Founded in 2021, Do Not Research is a reader-supported publication:CHAPTER 16: The VP Fair“This Veiled Prophet Fair’s the biggest farce,” said Big Daddy, correspondent for the local access program World Wide Magazine. Visiting the…