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…

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…

One hundred years ago this month, my late father-in-law arrived back in the United States after touring Europe as a piano player for a "American college jazz band." Edgar James Wood (1903-1986) had been an undergraduate at Tufts University (then Tufts College) until May, 1926, but he didn't graduate because he couldn't pass his last class. This image shows Ed as a member of the Zeta Psi fraternity, in the class of 1926. Ed had fond memories of his time at Tufts and he attended reunions on and…

If it drains you, cut it out. If it energizes you, do it more. One week free from social media taught me I’m another junkie. My phone time showed me I was an enemy of boredom—or still I am. Analog Sundays helped me to reconnect. But for some reason, or for some distractions, I stopped following them. And I regretted it. A new social platform, my own expectations, and rushing to chase an imaginary finish line took a toll on my physical and mental health. They cost me two nights without proper…

I don't write code anymore. Maybe an exaggeration... the writer's oldest privilege. The honest version is that I barely write code. And I used to get paid for it. These days I describe what I want in plain English, and a machine builds it. First drafts, reports, double-checking other people's work, meeting notes, the to-do lists that keep a team on schedule: all of it now has AI riding shotgun. My job used to be doing the work. Now it's mostly knowing exactly what I want and being stubborn…

Götterdämmerung, Act 3: Siegfried's Funeral March (Twilight of the Gods) very well could be in the top 5 of the most moving pieces of music ever created. Those of us who were around in 1981 may have seen the John Boorman movie "Excalibur" (or maybe watched it years later) will recall the final battle and the death of King Arthur, where his body is carried away to Avalon and the sword Excalibur is returned to the Lady of the Lake... all playing out with Siegfried's Funeral March emotionally…

There are many, many reasons to be angry at the AI crowd. One of mine is that they took the term vibe coding – how else am I going to describe the flow state when I have some repetitive music running in the background and am just breezing through some programming work? (And don’t get me started on the sparkles emoji. Bastards.) Reply by email

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…

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…

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…

Not quite a month later and our little hedgehog is back home, off nesting somewhere in the woods that border our creek. Wildlife Rescue Cork got in touch earlier this week to say he’d made a full recovery and to ask if I wanted to help re-home him (easy YES!). I’m grateful the little guy chose to leave himself on our patio, as it seems that without a helping hand he wouldn’t have recovered from whatever it was he got into. I drove up to Whitechurch on Tuesday to bring him home. And while I’m…

This is a follow up to my previous post: "Call out to BearBloggers - Have you experienced this?" So it turns out I'm not losing my mind, Toasts are being stripped from my posts. Thank you to everyone who reached out and also confirmed in real-time that they watched the number rise and fall. As of writing this, my previous post has been knocked down from a count of 25 Toasts to 1 (Thank you for re-toasting, Tash, even though this has also been wiped for a third time🥲), and the post previous to…

I don't like social media. I haven't been on it for decades. I tried Mastodon recently, but that didn't go too well. I do enjoy YouTube Shorts though - they're a good way to kill some time here and there. The algorithm has recently churned up some videos of auditors. These are people who appear to hang around outside of government buildings "auditing" them (read: taking photo's of staff and their vehicles). This is so the "auditor" can get a rise out of the staff, the puff out their chest and…

While at work today, debugging a weird edge-case where some emails to Outlook have some unexpected padding, I learned something weird: Microsoft Outlook still (kinda) supports WordArt. Wait, what’s WordArt? If you’re too young to remember: when Microsoft Office ’97 came out, it shipped with a feature called WordArt. Basically, these were a somewhat-customisable set of on-demand clip-art-esque text styles that you could apply to your own text. Most of these were as unhinged as PowerPoint’s…

Nice bright light walking the dog this morning, lots of robins out singing.89 words · 2 images

Logging on to a website in 2036: Username. Password. Emails a magic link … click link. Now your Passkey. Verify this is a photo of your child right now as captured by satellite. SMS code. Your child has been taken hostage by the authenticator app until you turn this graphic to the correct spot where it matches up with the other spot. Your password has expired, please enter a new password. Cut off a piece of your hair and insert it into your Mac’s HairID port. Enter the number that answers this…

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.

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…

I’m not getting any less mad about this, didn’t you hear me the first time? The New World, when the Old World was full of all kinds of people, had nobody. NOBODY WAS HERE. THEY ALL CAME HERE FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE. Everybody here was at some point AN IMMIGRANT. And yes, I’m shouting, why can’t we get this into our tiny brains? This first ran Feb. 26, 2024, and I learned it because I was working on the profile of one of the scientists figuring out where we all came from, for a magazine, Hakai, that…

Completed my 25-hour service on the four-wheeler this weekend. I’m happy with this machine so far. I still need to install a winch, which I have, because it is too heavy for me to move on my own and I ride alone a lot.

If you ask me, I’ll probably say I’m not writing much. Because even I forget about the poor little thing. “My blog.” I periodically slip into sentences in conversations with friends mention of “my blog,” knowing none of them read it. There is invariably no reaction, or a furtive look away. “Blog,” I think, has come to mean long-winded all-about-me blather that no one wants to read, although if you put it up as a video on TickyTacky I guess it might be a viral Thing. I wonder if I called it “my…

Last week, most, if not all, of the week I had some sort of a bug in me. At first I thought it was pollen, but I just felt off in general. Really stuffy head and weak with low energy. For my lifts, I did them, but I did the bare minimum effort, and actually squats felt the worst. Finally I am feeling better, starting over the weekend. Go figure; I feel better when Molly’s vacation is over. We weren’t able to do anything anyway for ourselves, so I guess it didn’t really matter. This morning I…

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Based on this article from The Telegraph, I should walk more, eat more fruits and vegetables, and go play football at my void deck. (Two out of three is probably not that bad?) ~ Link: The Longevity Lessons Britain Can Learn from Singapore, by Ella Nunn, The Telgraph