In Nilay Patel’s Decoder conversation with Mark Gurman about John Ternus and Apple’s next big thing, Gurman describes something camera-equipped AirPods might eventually do: look at an email on your computer screen and help add an event to your calendar. And that was when he lost me. The email is already on a computer, and by all accounts of how computers have worked for the past decade, the software running on it ought to be able to add an event to a calendar. Introducing a camera seems like a…

We went to a comedy show this weekend. The comedian was Reece Kidd, and he was hallrous, however, there were three people in the front row with NO intention of interacting. A lot of comedy these days is crowd-work, and this was no exception. So, why sit in the front row if you don’t contribute.

I chose a Chinese name before coming to Taiwan and it’s served me well. Most of my friends here call me some variation of Zhen-Kang (振康), and I like it.When I received permanent residency last year, my Chinese name became official. I now have two names on my Taiwan identity card: My original English name (written in English), plus my Chinese name (written in Traditional Chinese).When making online purchases, signing contracts, or using my name in any official capacity, I can choose which to…

Designer Reimar Servas goes further than the usual Border Radius Discourse and thinks about the deeper but often ignored questions of border radii as a system, and about the consequences of such a system that go beyond visuals: […] These redesign efforts suggest ignorance of a fundamental problem: rounded forms have a smaller surface area than angular ones. Used as containers, they reduce usable space. This is fine on most touch-based UIs since they typically feature simple layouts with only a…

There is nothing quite as comforting as a bowl of homemade potato soup, especially one rich with cheddar, garlic, and plenty of hearty goodness. This Easy Cheddar & Garlic Potato Soup is the kind of recipe that comes together quickly, uses simple everyday ingredients, and fills your kitchen with the most irresistible, cozy aroma.Creamy, flavorful, and wonderfully satisfying, it's perfect for busy weeknights, chilly days, or any time you are craving a warm hug in a bowl. If you love easy comfort…

I’m really enjoying Tariq Goddard’s occasional forays at The Quietus; the lad’s got a fine turn of phrase about him. There is a tentative Curtis consensus which allows those who rate him and those who don’t to coalesce round certain qualities inherent in his work that the latter simply don’t attribute as much value to as the former. Tariq Goddard https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/live-reviews/adam-curtis-party-conference-review/ I like to think we could have a very enjoyable chat over a…

Yes, I am on Reddit every day... I think I am addicted. But honestly, I think it is time for a detox program. There is still good content there, but it is getting harder to find, and the reasons why are worth talking about. Years ago, Reddit used to be something I heard about, saw in search results, and then one day found myself scrolling thinking that's interesting or finding something I agreed with (or disagreed with) vehemently and jumping in. I always thought there were so many subreddits…

Day Eleven in Tokyo. Kagayaki finally lost for the first time this tournament, now 10-1. Hitoshi (8-3) henka’d and drove Kagayaki out, picking up his kachi-koshi. Kayo is the only wrestler at 9-2 in Juryo. Nishikigi looks ready for Makushita. On the flip side, Asahifuji looks ready for Juryo, twisting Meisei down to the ground … Continue reading Aki 2026: Day Eleven

I recently played the Tom Sharkett Edit of LCD Soundsystem's beautiful Home. I ended up playing it several times and dancing around my living room. This then sent me on a bit of a trip down the rabbit hole of LCD alternative mixes, edits, remixes and also Franz Ferdinand covering All My Friends. I'll definitely need to feature this as a cover version of the month in the future.As I listened I made a playlist of my favourites. Expect radical reworkings, prepare to get lost in the music, marvel…

Scrolling through the timeline, these are only a few of the things I’ve seen today, people on different perspectives and paths, perhaps someone… That finally managed to fix their printer after a system update Talking about seeing someone else make a funny typo Sharing their progress on a software project Letting everyone know about a cool update on their favourite game Celebrating being done with the work day and going home Coming up with a random pun/name for a pet Criticizing people in power…

I have been using Typefully for a long time and it is genuinely great, but it supports a fixed set of platforms and I wanted to decide that for myself. So I built my own. Say hello to CogSend, a self-hosted social media scheduler. CogSend is open source under the MIT license and it runs on your own free Cloudflare account. There is no monthly fee and no account with me, and your platform credentials stay in your infrastructure. It currently supports Mastodon, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Threads and X…

Today’s TDC says Invariably I take unintended photos when grabbing my phone or those weird compositions featuring a blurred thumb selfie. Can you make/shae art from an accidental or unntended photo? I usually delete any blurry pics I take, but here’s a long exposure one I took at the weekend by mistake. It was very windy! Windy Findhorn flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license I headed over to Lunapic to artify it Artified Findhorn flickr photo…

It is now 9:30pm. I worked all day, got home around 3pm and started working on my annotated bibliography for my current class in pursuit of my master's degree. Five grueling hours of identifying potential sources for my thesis, formatting those sources correctly, and then having to come up with master's level annotations for each source that define the source's thesis and then how it supports my thesis. I got 3 out of 16 of those done. My brain is goo, and I honestly cannot believe I am sitting…

That’s what I got told last week by the Nurse from the doctors. I initially went in for some pain in my arm and chest, thinking I was having some form of a heart attack. Apparently it is a nerve thing, probably from my neck. After all of that I went to have a blood test. While there I was talking to some random guy in the waiting room, I learned that he only had one kidney now. Was supposed to stop drinking and smoking but hasn't and it's been that way for many years. Then when I was getting my…

When I recently whined about modal editing feeling clunky, I think I was being impatient, as I’ve been hitting Vim and Neovim pretty hard lately and have not been feeling that way. That’s also because I’m learning some more stuff and getting more efficient. Scenario: I’m dashing out a sentence, I typo something or change my mind about wording, and then want delete the last one or two words. I do this all the time because I’m a fast-but-sloppy typist. With the macOS defaults, I use Option-Delete…

A common maladaptive daydream I have is imagining that I wake up and I'm much younger again, spontaneously and miraculously, with all of my knowledge and understanding still intact. Magically, I find myself back at a specific age in my life, and I can redo everything all over again from that point on. For me, I always imagine awakening to find myself twelve and in grade six again. Back when I would walk down 17th Avenue travelling home after elementary school ended to take care of our four…

It’s Wednesday so here we go again with progress from our members. We start this week with Mark J and another building for his Arnhem project, there will be lots more about that in the coming months. Moving on and Andy has gone from painting small 28mm sci-fi to painting big 28mm sci-fi. Here we have the start of some Konflikt 47 Stahltruppen Heavy Infantry. Sticking with sci-fi and Tony F has painted himself a miniature for his character in a game of Traveller. The last couple of years have…

Bel AirNikon N90s28-80mm f/3.5-5.6 AF-D NikkorAristaPan 100Bellini Ecofilm 1+12026 This 1953 Chevrolet at a car show had rust spots. Yet it had all of its chrome trim. Is it partially restored, or just a car that had great luck keeping all of its bits across the decades? Get more of my photography in your inbox or reader! Click here to subscribe.

Most people who say a book bores them are lying. Not on purpose. They're lying to themselves. Boredom doesn't really exist the way people think it does. It's not a property of a book. It's the absence of stimulation, and only idle people feel it. Someone busy with the rest of their life doesn't stop mid-day and announce they're bored. They don't have the space for it. Boredom shows up when there's nothing pulling your attention forward, and people blame the book for it instead of themselves. If…

For some reason over the last week, Insta has shown me videos of disabled British people having problems with accessibility, flights, railways, coffee shops. Its appalling that in this day and age accessibility isn't simply the default and should something break alternative arrangements not be made immediately to accommodate people. However - there is one form of discrimination that still pervades society and needs to be stamped out. I speak of discrimination against the tall. I'm 2m tall…

Each new post on this blog now has a Digital Object Identifier. This post looks at the how and the why of getting one, whether it is useful, and any issues you might experience if you go down this path. Table of ContentsBackgroundGetting a DOI the easy wayLet's Go Rogue!Automatic Submission of New ContentManual Submission of Old ContentGetting the DOIGenerating your own DOIMaking the DOI discoverable in HTMLDownsidesLoss of ControlTracking CitationsLicencingVerificationExcluding ContentDeleting…

TL;DR: Five free Mac utilities worth a look this week: a menu-bar fix for notification banners landing on the wrong monitor, a drag-and-drop media compressor, a keyboard-backlight scheduler, an unusually hard-to-skip screen-break app, a notch utility with AI-agent alerts, and a local-only document search tool that cites its sources. The apps I have been testing this week include a couple of entries from someone whose Mac was doing X when they wanted it to do Y, so they built an app to make it…

A Productive Conversation | PM Talks S3E9: What Problem Does This Actually Solve? What in your life is still there mostly because you never stopped to ask what it was for? I always enjoy my monthly chats with Mike.

The Oxford Traherne reports on their new digital collator: The Oxford Traherne in collaboration with the Visual Geometry Group, University of Oxford, has developed a new digital collator designed for the needs of textual scholars and scholarly editors. A major new version (3.0) has been released in September 2026. […] Collation is the process of comparing different copies of the same text in order to identify variants between them, and is a crucial part of scholarly editing, both for…

My Thinkpad arrived yesterday. :jazz-hands: I decided to go with Fedora i3 spin for my distro and desktop environment. I was trying to balance nerdiness and usability. Arch was calling me, and I may go there next. But I don’t know how much hacking time I’ll end up having on this thing, so I leaned toward a just-works approach, scoring my nerd points with i3 rather than Arch and rolling updates. And boy do I love reuniting with i3. I love its speed and power. I also appreciate how different it…

When was the last time you were standing somewhere public, took the phone out of your pocket, scrolled on some app for a while, and then left it, and moved on? When was the last time you did that while still walking? perhaps almost crashing on someone in front of you? Even if you haven’t done that yourself—I’m very sure you have seen some other people staring at those phone screens, even when others are present, without really thinking much about it. It is normalized behavior. At the end of the…

Here in the Midwest, the most iconic semi-local transit infrastructure is, naturally, the Chicago El, and specifically the Loop.While the El is not entirely above ground (the Red and Blue lines go underground through downtown), the name and the brand are both about the elevated lines. This contrasts strongly, of course, with a city like London, where the most significant and iconic intracity rail network is literally called the Underground (though, as we'll discuss below, the DLR is often…

Suppose you want to solve a triangle. You know two sides and the angle between them. Then you can solve for the third side using the law of cosines. Now suppose you want to solve a big triangle, a triangle on the surface of the earth so large that the curvature of the earth matters. You can still use the law of cosines, but you’ll need the spherical law of cosines: cos(c) = cos(a) cos(b) + sin(a) sin(b) cos(C). If you know the (angular) lengths of sides a and b, and (tangential) angle C between…

I read a this post I found on bubbles.town about a guy who determined he was a better person without his phone. It got me thinking, how much do I use my phone? I think for a 60 year old man I might use it more than others my age, but I also think that I don't use it as much as some slightly younger. To be honest, I use it to text my adult boys, to call my mother, stay on top of my calendar, use Spotify at rehearsals so the guys that didn't listen to the songs we are working on can here how they…

Learning new things every day! (We're ok btw) Around 7:20pm Sunday night there was an incredibly loud sound in our yard and my youngest kid shouted from upstairs "UHH HEY A TREE JUST FELL ON THE GARAGE" (Great way to start a wind down Sunday evening, fwiw) We went out (with many neighbors who'd also heard the sound) to investigate and yea. A neighbor's tree had fallen on our (thankfully) detached garage. Before we could do any damage investigation however, we noted that part of the branches had…