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…

Book Overflow is "a long-form discussion podcast for software engineers" and one of the shows to which I'm subscribed. The recent episode 118 is one in the series where Carter and Nathan discuss the book Learning Domain-Driven Design: Aligning Software Architecture and Business Strategy by Vlad Khononov. I listened to this episode today and found that, as usual, the two go into great depth and draw on their thoughtfulness and experience to tease out details and connect the dots for us…

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…

A small template repo for authoring AI coding plugins in a tool-agnostic format and transpiling them into Claude Code, Copilot CLI, OpenCode, and Codex bundles.

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…

(Photo taken right after we finished setting up. The Market didn’t open for another couple hours.) On June 14th Sarah and I ran a booth featuring my art at the Fremont Sunday Market. We had made prints, buttons, key chains, stickers, zines and posters. It was the first time we had done a market and the first time we’d sold merch in person since we’d been to comic conventions decades ago. It was fun. It was hot. It was educational. There’s nothing like doing something to discover what you hadn’t…

Introduced in 1955, the original Bodyguard snub was a shrouded-hammer, alloy-framed Airweight .38 revolver that later became the Model 38, while its steel-framed counterpart was the Model 49. The original Smith & Wesson Model 49 Bodyguard J-frame. Using a shrouded hammer with an accessible spur, it was DA/SA Then, in 2014, the M&P Bodyguard .38 hit the scene with some significant changes, including a different internal lock work, an ambidextrous cylinder release, and a frame made lighter via…

Today marks the 85th anniversary of Barbarossa, a massive land invasion that was led in many places by small groups of guys hanging on to motorcycle sidecars. The 1920s German Reichswehr, officially restricted from the possession and use of armored vehicles and tanks but still well-aware of the successful factor of speed in military operations, became enamored with motorcycle troops (Kradschützen) to augment other Schnelle Truppen (fast troops) such as horse cavalry and bicycle troops, the…

If you are reading this blog, you likely already know that “America’s Tall Ship,” the 269-foot steel-hulled three-masted barque USCGC Eagle (WIX-327), started life in 1936 as one of the quartet of John Stanley-designed Gorch Fock-class school ships (segelschulschiff) for the German Kriegsmarine (Gorch Fock, Horst Wessel, Albert Leo Schlageter, and Herbert Norkus), followed by Mircea for the Romanian Navy. Horst Wessel (the future USCGC Eagle) at the Mürwik Naval Academy in Flensburg, Germany,…

Sadly earlier this year I was made redundant from my Software Developer job. Looking for a new job has not been fun, but a few common themes have emerged that I wanted to share. My hope is that these will help others to put things in place that may help them in the future. Go to events and meet people Something I have said often is that I enjoy going to events or conferences, like NDC London . These are great places to hear interesting talks, however that is not all they are good for. When you…

A short documentary about music formats, streaming, and the quiet thing that disappeared when your library became endless. Oh, and a musician (me!) trying to work out whether the music changed, or I did.

Ten years. That’s how long the glazing putty held on my first set of windows before it started cracking, pulling away, and letting water in around the glass. I had done everything right on installation day. Primed the rabbets. Used quality putty. Let it skin over before painting. But ten years later, those windows were […] The post Why Glazing Putty Fails Early (And How to Make It Last 30 Years) appeared first on The Craftsman Blog.

Tower Dungeon by Tsutomu NiheiI was trying to get together some other new posts, but those are slow going so here is something that has been rattling around in my brain- how much recent media there is that is based in a dungeon. I listed a chunk of it in the Why Megadungeons post, but at the risk of repeating myself, I did want to separate it out into its own thing. I also tried to limit the media to roughly the last ~10 years. I think benchmarking the last decade also helps illustrate how much…

Food flowed into western Craftlin over the Delving Plateau. Deliveries were made daily across the region. In the days since Apocalypse nary a morsel was received. Torn intended to follow the paths of delivery to their sources. These roads would lead to food with no need to explore the other regions at random. They were required to feed Craftlin. They failed and so Craftlin must find their rightfully earned sustenance and seize it.

ome very interesting things on the schedule for today. For instance, Merv Griffin's lineup is a classic of the time: Phil Silvers, Shecky Greene, Red Buttons and Charo. That had to be out of control before it even started. And then there's poet James Dickey appearing on Bob Cromie's Book Beat, discussing his first novel. You m

By Peter D GraySelf Published5e/OSRLevel ... 4? Farmer Jebsom has a problem – half his farmhouse, along with all of his family fell into a sinkhole that appeared beneath his farm’s foundations. Now he is desperate to get his wife and children back from the mysterious depths and is willing to give 20% of his farm to anyone succeeding in returning them to safety. This seven page backstory uses one page to describe nine rooms in a tunnel complex full of bugs. A general overview with a lengthy…

Entropy Arbitrage Next Today marks the anniversary of the end of the Battle of Cap-Français, where (oversimplifying) the French occupiers, trying to stop the Haitian Revolution, made the mistake of fighting each other and recruiting slaves for the front lines with the predictable results of giving everybody the opportunity to rise up against the government. Over in Europe, Croatia celebrates Anti-Fascist Day, celebrating their World War II uprising against the Axis occupiers. And with that, on…

McGonagall, thou shouldst be living at this hour...'Twas in the year twenty twenty-six, on the twenty-second day of June – Which many political commentators and others said was not a day too soon –That the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, stood outside 10 Downing Street and announced his resignation To the reporters and cameramen assembled there, and also to the nation.His successor is expected to be the popular King of the North, Andy Burnham,But, when it comes to the fortunes of the Labour…

In Saint-Omer in France there was a Benedictine abbey called the Abbey of St. Bertin, founded in 638 and existing right up to the late 18th century. It was closed during the French Revolution, ordered demolished in 1830 (except for the tower), and then damaged due to World War II.A record of several decades was found in the abbey. It is not assumed that it was written in the abbey. The current hypothesis is that the record was made in the court of Louis the Pious and continued during the reign…

(All references in this blog post can be found in the main article the post is about which is here.)Recall that \(R(a,b)\) is the least \(n\) so that, for all 2-colorings of the edges of \(K_n\), there is either a RED \(a\)-clique or a BLUE \(b\)-clique.\(R(k,k)\) has been well studied and is often called \(R(k)\).However, today we are concerned with \(R(a,k)\) \(a\) is fixed and \(k\) goes to infinity.1) In 1995 Jeong Han Kim showed \(R(3,k)\) is asy \(\Theta(\frac{k^2}{\log k})\). At the…

× 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 -…

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…

"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…