When I was a young boy, we used to get the official XBOX magazine, and the demo discs that came with it. That’s how I first played Brute Force, Ghost Recon, Rainbow Six, and even NCAA Football.¹ It’s also where I first played James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing’s co-op mode — where you play as two anonymous MI-6 agents — and two sample missions: the game’s starting mission where you rappel down the outside of a mountain base, and another where you chase down a tanker driven by Richard Kiel’s…

This post is about the signaldiff CLI: how to install it, run a local sitemap crawl, and hand that to Cursor, Copilot, or Claude Code so the agent can spot SEO and crawl issues without opening a dashboard. Signal Diff is the product behind that command. It fetches the URLs in a sitemap, checks on-page SEO and crawl health (titles, meta descriptions, redirects, slow responses, and more), and can compare a run with a baseline—often the previous deploy—so you see what changed. I already use it on…

With this in mind I wondered how far I could get in removing the parts of Liquid Glass I don’t like in NetNewsWire. Turns out I could get pretty far, though it comes at the expense of using NSToolbar (as predicted). Note: this stuff is just on a branch. One night of play, not real design or consideration. (But this is code, not mockups.) It’s not about to ship this way. But I’ll share anyway, because it does hint at some possible ideas for NetNewsWire’s future. Source: inessential: That About…

It's been awhile since I've put someone in the spotlight for the It's About TV Interview, a process so terrifying that it's been known to send people fleeing in abject horror. But enough about the readers... (And, by the way, they love the subjects; it's the interviewer himself that they can do without.)However, David Hofstede, author of the Comfort TV website, has bravely stepped into the breech to talk about the upcoming second edition of his book,When Television Brought Us Together:…

The biggest offense of Wonka's The Golden Ticket is not the disembodied voice of Gene Wilder, resurrected 10 years after his death via AI. My review explores and explains.

This time of year, I end up writing grant proposals to fun my summer field work. This year, there’s the added fun of writing a sabbatical proposal and a proposal for a one-year, named, research chair. All of these proposals will try to get support for my work at Isthmia. In particular, these proposals will ask for time to transform our current work into a book length manuscript (and catch up on bibliography to frame the project in recent studies of the Late Roman and Early Byzantine Greece, the…

Morning comes with fog. 7:00 sail off anchor, light north wind and less fog. A half dozen tacks, gentle sailing, almost ghosting, out of the cove. Rounding the northern tip of Spruce Island, I find Mark out rowing a skiff with his dog. He lives on Spruce Island four months of the year. He points to his Contessa sloop moored nearby, and we talk about sailing the Maine coast. We talk about my slow drift across the water, going fast versus going slow, the trade off between traditional cruising…

I came across an interesting study out of Singapore that tracked children’s screen time from age one to eight, then measured their academic performance and working memory years later. Two things stood out: Even after adjusting for other factors, screen time at age one, at eighteen months, and at age six was still linked to weaker academic performance years later. Total screen time across childhood was consistently tied to lower academic performance, and the earliest exposure, in infancy, showed…

Here at LSOZI, we take a break every Wednesday to explore the old steam/diesel navies from 1833 to 1954, profiling a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger If you enjoy my always ad-free Warship Wednesday content, you can support it by buying me a cup of joe at https://buymeacoffee.com/lsozi As Henk says: “Warship Coffee – no sugar, just a pinch of salt!” Warship Wednesday 23 September 2026:…

I've genuinely haven't had much to write about. There's been some post ideas, but most of 'em have ended up shelved for one reason or another. These past months have been a real creative drought for me. I think I need a shit-post side blog. One where I can kind of write about whatever without worrying about the content or if the posts starts to sound like a journal entry1. I think since this is my first blog, I overthink too much about what I put into it. Speaking of getting too into my head, I…

The horseshoe theory is probably one of the funniest pseudo-scientific political “theories” out there. In case you’re unfamiliar with this theory, I’m sorry to be the one to disturb your blissful ignorance of it (that I’m jealous of), but here’s what it is: It’s the understanding that the political spectrum is shaped like a horseshoe in which Far-Right and Far-Left beliefs, like illiberalism and anti-establishment positions, converge and both become functionally the same. I would like to…

Welcome to Secret Breakfast / The right place to ask why Oktoberfest starts in September, and how Lo-Fi music snuck into your cookingHi there! On September 19th, Oktoberfest began in Germany, which literally means "October festival." So, naturally, it starts in September.It reminds me of Russia's October Revolution, year 1917, which by our calendar actually happened in November, because the tsars were still running on a different one.Two perfectly mismatched facts to sum up the disorientation…

it's weird that ai got too dangerous to keep advancing right around the time money got more expensive to borrow— dr. rich traditions, JD (@helldude.bsky.social) September 22, 2026 at 11:37 AMAt a time when everybody seems to be criticizing AI and particularly the large frontier LLM base models of companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, it is helpful to distinguish between the different schools of arguments.The group which initially dominated the coverage but which seems to be losing ground is the…

Work hard, study well, and eat and sleep plenty! That is the Turtle Hermit way! An apt quote from our beloved Master Roshi. If Dragon Ball has taught me anything, besides that screaming your lungs out during strenuous work does in fact make you stronger, it’s that rest is as important to one’s success as the hard work you build around it. Rest of course, is earned. There’s an obvious difference between someone who is bone idle and someone who rests because they’ve worked hard or is feeling…

Mad Max: Fury Road is a great movie. I was thinking of it again today in relation to our current economy.

I returned home from an afternoon swim the other day and saw a juvenile cat literally eating the heart out of a bird’s chest cavity. She growled. Cats will stiff-arm each other over dry cat food, but they growl and viciously defend real meat. The ravenous cat ate her meal on some pine straw under an old holly bush near my front door. I could not identify what species of bird the cat was devouring–an unusual failure for me because I’m very knowledgeable about local wildlife. The bird was white…

This morning while I was doing my morning routine of drinking my coffee. That routine is setting up the weather page for the current day. Sure, I could automate it, but it takes little time to do it by hand, and I’d have to edit the markdown file anyway to put in the summary. I actually do glance at it, and today I glanced at it out of curiosity to see what yesterday’s rain total was. Normally I would have looked at the Ambient app, but I had this page open, so I scrolled down to look. I…

Via Newspapers.comThis account of your basic friendly neighborhood monster appeared in the “Mexico Weekly Ledger,” December 13, 1883:MEXICO, Mo., December 8.--The neighborhood of Hopewell Church, near this city, is much excited over the appearance in the locality of a strange creature, which is thought by the credulous to be a ghost, and which is a puzzle at least to the most skeptical. The apparition is simply that of a lean monster man, between eight and ten feet in height, wearing a long…

I’m not gonna bother with the preamble about how I got to part six in this series1-5. You can read […]

Mexican long-nosed armadillo loping across a field (photo from Wikimedia) 23 September 2026 Three years ago, in April 2023, I wrote that Armadillos Are On Their Way to Pennsylvania. Since arriving in Texas in 1849 they’ve expanded their range north and east in the U.S. nearly ten times faster than the average rate expected for a mammal. In 2023 they were two states away in Indiana. Not anymore! The first documented naturally occurring armadillo was found as roadkill near Oxford, Ohio. video…

1:4 It’s like a curse… on the first matchday after the coach was fired, the guys (finally) scored 2 goals and beat Fortuna Köln at home to nil, only then to concede 3 goals at home against Duisburg within 15 minutes of the first half just 4 days later. OK, MSV is currently at the top of the standings and on a hot streak, but the ease with which they outplayed our defense was shocking. Like a hot knife through butter. Although the 1-3 goal just before halftime and the team’s determination early…

By Close ReaderOriental Mandarin LegendOSELevels 1-2 In order to thank the PC for killing the monsters in his territory, the Boold[sic] Baron invited the players to come to the bright Red castle he built on the Wild Eagle Mountain. This 28 page adventure presents seven-ish rooms in a scripted human sacrifice ceremony dungeon/scene/event. It has both EASL issues and is overly scripted. Disclaimer: I think this is a difficult review to write. I suspect strongly, based on the chinese characters in…

Lucky 13th Sept! A great day out. Maybe another last good day of Summer, although I think we must be into Autumn by now. I decided to visit Saltoun Big Wood again. This time I thought I'd risk the 113 bus and jogged up to Abbeyhill (rather than Carlton Terrace stop) because there is an electronic sign that says when the next bus will be along. (Yes I know there is an app but the built in redundancy of my iPhone can't download it.) Anyway the sign was temporarily fritzed and of no help. However…

I met with a friend yesterday and the conversation got to what the next hype might be after the current bubble pops. We live at the height of the “AI”-hype and bubble, the hype that took over from the short Metaverse hype which in turn came after the crypto bubble. And the main actors are often the same. The same folks who told us crypto was the future now tell us that “AI” is. Tech these days is built less around actual products but hype, less around building actually functional solutions but…

Hi, baby. I'm 18 weeks pregnant today. 16 weeks ago, you were a single cell with two nuclei, about to mix it together and make a new human. Look at you now: a tiny baby curled up in a foetal position. Sometimes it feels unreal. I can't grasp how lucky I am to have you in my belly. I think it will be easier when I'll really feel you move. For now, I'm always afraid that you might disappear, even though I feel my uterus stretching to give you room to grow. How does it feel? Are you comfortable?…

John Ottman is one of those filmmakers whose résumé is almost ridiculously varied. As a composer, he’s probably best known for movies like The Usual Suspects, X2: X-Men United, Superman Returns, X-Men: Days of Future Past, The Nice Guys, and Valkyrie. Horror fans will also recognize his work from Apt Pupil, Lake Placid, Eight Legged Freaks, Gothika, Hide and Seek, and Orphan. He even directed Urban Legends: Final Cut. In 2019, Ottman won the Academy Award for Best Film Editing for his work on…

From 2020, a random photo I took of a 1931 garage on Lafayette Street: In case you’re wondering, it looked much the same in 1940, although better maintained: Garages, in general, are not great works of architecture. Most of them in Manhattan are very plain and built in the mid-1900s. Some have nice brick facades, and those tend to be converted stables built before 1910. This one is something slightly different: a garage that has a facade that isn’t just a featureless box but was never anything…

What have you recently finished reading? I finished two books last night, which I was very pleased with — two very different books, as is my wont, ahaha. One was Brandt & Stein’s Worst Man, which is a fun and ridiculous graphic novel in which one character is trying to make his best friend’s wedding amazing, and the other one is trying to ruin it (only, of course, he changes his mind). I love the art, the faces are so expressive and there’s a lot of comedy that arises from expression and…

My library in progress #3So happy with this! After playing with the flat version, I decided to apply the logic to individually cloned shelves, about 5 hours later this is the result! #blog #pixels #website #redesignThank you for following my feed! ♥ Leave a reply here.

Ian Holloway has posted about the Ghost Signals book at his Wyrd Britain site: “This, the latest collection of writings from Stephen Prince, the man behind the always excellent ‘A Year in the Country’ blog, takes us on a tour of various obscure televisual gems from ’68 to ’95… he’s a digger extraordinaire so alongside old favourites there are… tantalising treats of programmes I had no idea existed – ‘A Pattern of Roses’, ‘Shades’, ‘The Plant’ – and his analysis are ever cogent, and insightful,…