Nearly forty years ago I drove to Beaversprite, a nature reserve near Dolgeville in upstate New York, in the foothills of the Adirondacks, to interview the caretaker. The founder, known for taming beavers and permitting some to live in her house, had recently died and the fate of the sanctuary was uncertain. I spent much of the day speaking with the caretaker and tramping around the grounds, and late in the afternoon started the drive back to Albany. On the way, at a deep dip in the road, I…

Leonora Carrington. CONNECTED: i left my soul in bed: 10feb26 morning computer pluriverse 27jan24 Yuji Agematsu. Love the little SCHWA alien. morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day. My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/

I run a website for my local town called Discover Dursley. One of the platform sections is the local What’s On, and I’m always on the hunt for local events to add into the weekly roundup. So I follow hundred’s of local facebook pages which produces a handy stream I can quickly scan for event posters. Of course, over the last year or so, the rise of the AI poster has been relentless. You know the ones I mean. They’re kinda hard to define, but a bit like life itself, you know it when you see it.…

Nebraska, 2013: Scottsbluff was the starting point for a nice drive across Nebraska, not the interstate but as an entry to Nebraska 2, which took us east to Farwell, which was also interesting.

Deeper understanding of the code and software systems we work on, is not only pragmatic and practical but highly enjoyable as well ... But, if it is both joyful and powerful, why are we so often prone to skip the struggle to understand and take shortcuts, accepting copy-pasted/generated solutions and generic answers, not analyzed?

Caltrain is working on their level boarding roadmap. If their recent work on grade separations is anything to go by, the capture of the agency by the layers of consultants belonging to the transit industrial complex is likely to result in a gold-plated mega-project approach to delivering level boarding in the late 2030s, where each station platform must be reconstructed from the ground up at a system-wide cost easily topping $2 billion.We don’t need to let them turn level boarding into another…

Nau mai,Yesterday we played at Green River Festival, in Greenfields, Massachusetts. In today’s blog I hit the correct spelling of Massachusetts on the second attempt, I’m proud to announce. We had another day in paradise. Snowpiercer was parked behind our festival stage when we woke up, and she was looking decidedly more handsome than the other two coaches she was parked next to. It was another compact festival and we were only a stone’s throw from all the important facilities that would get us…

First thing firstly: I went to OB this morning. It was uneventful. Chilly. Wonderful after several days of not being in the ocean. I was in Northern Virginia / Washington D.C. Instagram used to be where I’d post trip photos. As the platform has worsened, I do it less. That obliges me to post here more. Or somewhere at least. It was a family trip. It was great. I’ll post more later. In the meantime, have a great week. Sign my Guestbook | Contact Me | Book office hours | Share

Since it was created 9 years ago, this blog has been reporting on the way the City of London council leadership weaponises standards. For the entire time we’ve been covering our local authority’s standards regime establishment supporters have been free to flout the rules, and those who oppose that establishment have been persecuted for alleged standards violations despite adhering to the rules. Indeed the vigilantism of the City council’s old Standards Committee was so extreme that it had to be…

Review Originally Published March 13th, 2002 Most of the buzz around Mystic Eye Games which has come my way has focused on their Nightmares & books or the The Hunt: Rise of Evil campaign setting. Not very much attention, it seems, has turned to their modules – such as The Pit of Loch-Durnan, an adventure for characters of 2nd to 4th level. And maybe there’s a good reason for: The Pit of Loch-Durnan has a lot of problems. But we’ll come back to that. First, let’s take a quick peek at the plot.…

So, awhile back, I decided to start self hosting my music collection. I’m sure I’ve at least mentioned it somewhere here on the blog. I re-downloaded my entire collection and more beyond that. Nearly 5TB of new music was stored on my various hard drives. It took months. And by the end, I was pretty damn proud of it. I’ve been using that system now for months, and I’ve realized that I miss streaming services like Tidal and Spotify. It makes me feel a little dirty writing it, but it’s true. Why?…

Two quotes, apropos of nothing: A lot of software developers are seduced by the old “80/20” rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies. Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features. — Joel Spolsky, Strategy Letter IV: Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the…

You won't be surprised that I managed to swap a fiver on the Bring'n'Buy stall for some stuff I probably don't need, although this time I managed to find items that might just be useful. Vinyl letters are always useful. They are now in the drawer with transfers. These are larger than anything I own, I think, so a quid well spent. Possibly less useful is a roll of blue and white check vinyl, but if I did another RC car, I could use that on the wings. Obviously, I don't need another model boat…

hey there We have long needed to replace the flooring in our kitchen for a couple of years. The last owners left it all in pretty poor shape, and over time, it has gotten progressively worse. We were going to have the whole thing sanded down and reused, but when they came out, they found it was a very low-quality ‘builders grade’ floor that they had used, warped, and unable to be sanded. Great. When they were pulling it up, they mentioned it looked like the previous owners’ dogs just were…

Got himself a Lambo…

Technology has given us a lot of cool things. I'm a fan of vaccines and ibuprofen. You can now talk to your friends and family basically anywhere. The Norwegians invented kveik beer yeast. Thanks to the internet, a solid chunk of human knowledge is just sitting there basically for free. They've even started making mildly sycophantic mentats to predigest it for you. And we have dating apps. Doesn't everyone love dating apps? But, this is surely a fraction of what could be. There are many…

Finished reading: Lick by Kylie Scott 📚

Finished reading: His Last Bow by A. Conan Doyle 📚

It’s been a few years since 2023, when I last wrote about the use of AI. Today we have ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude Code, and many other tools, with new models and capabilities appearing constantly. At this point, it’s becoming less about which AI tool you choose and more about the agents, integrations, and skills those tools can leverage. Personally, I don’t mind the use of AI in the workplace. Many teams actively evaluate these tools and work to ensure they’re being used appropriately and…

Getting a little more organized in my workshop. My pwin poi t was boxes if nails or screws falling off shelves. I took a lesson from Minecrafters and put an instance of what was inside the box on the front id the box.

Sunday, June 21, 2026 - 21:00 The Lesbian Historic Motif Project There's some thing of a rolling process to setting up and posting these blogs. Even as I am in the middle of posting the sections of Orr's dissertation, I'm working ahead to finish writing up the remainder of the blogs for this document. I have one more work session to complete that work and then I can coast for the rest of the month. It looks like I've timed the blogs precisely to finish the current publication on the last day of…

Welcome to the world, remote control. We’re happy to have you with us, laptop monitor. You’re free, cellphone. AWESOME! Want a new awesome thing every day? Sign-up here: Photo from: here The post #654 Peeling that thin plastic film off new electronics appeared first on 1000 Awesome Things.

Hello, loves! I think we can do without the info object entirely. Let’s find out. Bear takes a nibble but I think we’re OK. It occurred to me that we can probably put an item’s extra variables right in the procedure that creates a CombinedContent item, and reference them using nonlocal inside the callbacks. It turns out that our existing callback test actually demonstrates the idea: def test_subscriptions(self): count = 0 def increment(*, content, state): nonlocal count print('counting') count…

These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week. 🔖 RFC 9958: Post-Quantum Cryptography for Engineers The advent of a cryptographically relevant quantum computer (CRQC) would render state-of-the-art, traditional public key algorithms deployed today obsolete, as the mathematical assumptions underpinning their security would no longer hold. To address this, protocols and infrastructure must transition to post-quantum algorithms, which are designed to resist both traditional and…

Hello, loves! The new scheme for Content seems to be working out well. Remaining are two concerns … Well, I say two, though there are surely many things to be concerned about. The two I have in mind are: The upcoming Content items require “instance variables”, such as the cycling flag and time counter for the Animated item, that are not included in the standard batch. We’d like to make them optional. The upcoming items need to be subscribed to some events. We need a way to represent those…

What’s your top tip to be successful in life? Okay, WordPress. Slow down. I mean, people love asking this question because they expect some profound answer. Wake up at 4:30 a.m. Manifest abundance. Drink green juice. Read seventeen books a week. Network with billionaires. Become one with your planner. My top tip is much simpler. Lower the bar just enough that you can occasionally step over it. I don’t mean abandon all ambition and spend your days becoming one with the couch cushion. Although…

I eked out a little more listening time this week (but still not enough!) to Abdullah Ibrahim who passed away last week. I find his discography confusing, and I don’t know of any real guide to it. As a result, I’ve always restlessly scrolled through it listening to things that I like rather than trying to get a sense for his development as a musician. I have always had a soft spot for Ibrahim’s unusual 1977 recording The Journey which featured among others Don Cherry and Hamiet Bluiett (and Roy…

• I've been spending my free time reading the various specifications that I implicitly lean on daily for my software dev. • Recently it has been the posix spec. • In our pico.sh irc channel we've been idly chatting about what we like from our shells as well as exploring the variants that have spawned over the decades. It kind of crazy to think that some of these shell implementations have existed for that long. As I was exploring these shells and my own shell journey, I started to realize…

I used to live in a neighborhood with elderly power and phone infrastructure. The 120V, 60 Hz main power fluctuated during spring and summer. I bought an APC Back UPS 1500 uninterruptible power supply in early June, 2020 to get whatever server I was using back then through the inevitable series of short power losses.

The Frances Hodgson Burnett novel A LITTLE PRINCESS was one of my very favorite books growing up, and I reread it many times.In fact, I still vividly remember picking out the paperback copy while shopping with my parents at Pickwick Books at South Coast Plaza when I was maybe seven years old, and I own it to this day.I have to admit to avoiding the Shirley Temple film version for most of my life simply because I knew that the screenplay, by Ethel Hill and Walter Ferris, used the book as a…