Who do you think you are? Pulling into an hotel car-park in Burgundy I found myself face to face with this Quince, which looked distinctly unimpressed by the new visitors. Afterwards, I looked it up on the RHS site to see which variety it might be. It boiled down to two possibilities. I concluded it was the ‘Champion’, though its ‘expression’ reminded me of a couple of Serbian generals in the Balkans wars, one of whom died recently in prison. Quote of the Day ”Money can’t buy you happiness but…

🔖 Read In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own? by Nikole Hannah-Jones (NYT gift link). Instead of fortifying our determination to fight for integration, we have instead chosen to succumb to a collective apathy in the face of a system so devastatingly unequal that it puts at odds trying to be a good person with trying to be a good parent. How do we work toward a more equal system without the work feeling like we’re doing it at our own childrens’ expense? I don’t have the answer…

I am back up. As in, up again, not a “backup,” a spare copy of something. By the way, have you backed up your files lately? You should do that. Have you checked your backups to make sure they work? Do that too. So basically my computer has been having some strange issues with the internet lately. I could connect just fine, I just couldn’t make any TCP connections. That’s most useful connections. It’s what websites use. So that was a problem. I still don’t understand just what was going on. This…

This fall, I don’t think apple picking is in the cards for us! But if you were lucky enough to make it to an orchard and are now staring down a very ambitious haul of apples, wondering how you’ll possibly use them all, I’ve got you covered. After cooking every single one of Ina Garten’s recipes, I’ve made my fair share of apple dishes, and she has plenty that go far beyond the usual apple pie. Today on the blog, I’m sharing my favorites, including savory dinners like Herbed Pork Tenderloins…

Click here to book Delwar Hussain writes about his mother’s horticultural activities in Puma Court Arful Nessa in her garden in Puma Court My mother is the first to admit that when it comes to growing anything, the success rate cannot be predicted – some years are simply better than others. But this summer has, on the whole, been a good one. Despite the aubergines not putting in a show, she has had quite a few runner beans, chillies galore, enough coriander to garnish an army with, mulas (a…

repotted the cyclamen, we've had it for over 20 years and the plastic pot finally started to breakthe ti leaf plant that was in the pot had died, I think it was too hot this summer for itso I dug up the roots and took out some of the soiland put cyclamen into the "new" potI wasn't able to "loosen" the dirt up because it was in that old pot for so long...I hope it will thrive

Finished reading: Heroes The Greek Myths Reimagined (Greek Mythology Book for Adults, Book of Greek Myths and Hero Tales) by Stephen Fry 📚🎧 Listened to Fry read this one himself, too. Great, as always.

BABA IS YOU is one of the most mind-bending puzzle video games of recent memory. Now, thanks to Peter C. Hayward, it’s also a board game. On today’s Space-Cast!, we discuss the peculiar adaptation of Arvi Teikari’s video game, from its inception in That Time You Killed Me and sickbed time-wasting to its gradual development and Hayward’s long-term plans to become a screenwriter. Listen here or download here. Timestamps can be found after the jump. TIMESTAMPS 00:15 — obligatory compliments 17:11…

[This is a guest post by Martin Hairer, cross-posted from Proofs and Prompts. — T.] There has been a lot of speculation regarding the “Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artifical Intelligence” agmai.org since it was announced on Monday. In this short blog post, I would like to explain in a bit more detail how the group works, what we are trying to achieve, and why I agreed to be part of this group. First of all, let me lay down some facts that seem to have been drowned in a torrent of…

weather: ☀️ sure is day 1 of autumn in my region critters: family of woodpeckers one of my old supervisors snagged me in the hallway and told me he might have some temporary work for me soon, but also not to count on it. they're either hiring me to do the job soon or they're not hiring anyone until spring i'm already temping here for a pittance, everyone else in our little clump of people has scattered to the four winds over the summer, and nobody wants to spend the $$$ on someone with better…

The very worst waiters that I've ever seen all had something in common: They all felt that being a waiter was beneath them. When, in fact, being a waiter was well above them. It was their superiority that made them inferior. This much appreciated posting from way back in 2010 was only the start of my recognition of how upside down and embarrassing everything is.

Again used the laser cutter at TkkrLab to create a puzzle based on the China Labyrinth.

There’s something weirdly satisfying to me about taking a piece of gaming hardware I really love and making it a little better. Sometimes that means a new shell or a screen upgrade, while other times it can be something as small as replacing the buttons. GetBetterButtons sits firmly in that latter category, but creator Vincent Lee has taken the idea much further than simply making replacement parts.Vincent designs his buttons from the ground up, looking at everything from ergonomics and…

Clara and I found this Pentium III motherboard and a collection of parts off the side of the road in Chatswood back in 2024. I put it into an Antec case from my father in law, and it’s gradually become my primary utility PC. I use it to test hard drives and expansion cards before I put them into my other machines, and I use its 5.25 and 3.5 disk drives for imaging and creating boot disks. Weirdly, about a month ago the attached PS/2 started sending errant signals. Or so I thought. I’d be in a…

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Planet Hollywood, reflected in the glass façade of the nearby Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas. The post Planet Hollywood Reflections appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

What is this? A single flower that has just appeared in the kitchen garden, not something I planted. I can't recall ever having seen such a flower before. No doubt there are apps that will tell me but where's the fun in that?

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others. Alma Katsu’s novel Incarnate is a chilling modern take on the Faustian bargain for fame. Booklist wrote of the book: “A deal with the devil is reworked for the online age, with a healthy…

~ Chrome 154 adds support for responsively-sized iframes, letting an <iframe> size itself based on the intrinsic size of its embedded document. This is perfect for seamlessly embedding third-party comment widgets, varying-height social media embeds, or any other type of embed that uses an <iframe>. ~ To make this work there is a two-way opt-in: The embedder (e.g. index.html) needs to set the frame-sizing CSS property with a value of content-height (or content-width) on the iframe. The document…

35 years on from the 1991 film, original screenwriter Callie Khouri revisits Thelma & Louise as a stage musical, providing the book to Neko Case's new music and lyrics. When she gets the keys to a colleague's holiday cabin for the weekend, Louise (Rachel Tucker) invites her put-upon friend Thelma (Amy Lennox) to join her for a short break, but the road trip turns into a getaway drive when they stop off at a dive bar along the way. After dancing with a stranger in front of witnesses, Thelma is…

The kids created a TV set with remote control and a Nintendo Switch with a Pro controller from some of the cardboard we had left over from the bookshelf we set up yesterday.

Putting a smart watch or band on your wrist means installing an app on your phone. That makes sense, given the tiny screens on these devices. The problem is that these apps tend to do more than you’d expect. Huawei’s, for example, has a store for watch faces and AI-powered coaching and who knows what else it does behind the scenes. Apple’s (Fitness), one of the more low-key ones, reserves a prominent spot for the Fitness+ button, a paid subscription for access to recorded classes. AI, by the…

The time has finally come for Curious British Telly videos. It's an idea I've toyed with over the years, but always put off as it felt more exposing than simply writing away fairly anonymously. And today, it's time to look at Whatever Happened to Erasmus Microman?It's a quick look at Erasmus Microman, a Children's ITV programme which aired at the end of the 1980s and featured Ken Campbell as the titular character. As these are early days for Curious British Telly videos, it's relatively brief.…

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others. Norah Labiner’s novel Morocco is a compelling modern reimagining of Washington Square by Henry James. Publishers Weekly wrote of the book: “This is subtle but spectacular.” In her own words,…

A while back I reviewed Blackshard, a horror-themed walking simulator set in a vast futuristic megastructure. Such settings, like the one from Blame!, are kind of well-suited for videogame adaptations – they’re the sort of impossible landscape that computer graphics can evoke nicely, and at their best they can divorce designers from the need to present naturalistic features altogether in favour of creating entire landscapes with a visibly intentional architecture to them. In fact, there’s a bit…

As a recent report revealed that sales of cask beer are down year-on-year, I spent an afternoon in York where it appeared to be as popular as ever, not least at the city's annual beer festival....The spectacular and magnificent bulk of York Minster has been a constant presence in the city for hundreds of years, keeping a watch over its citizens and the many thousands of visitors that are drawn to the city every year. In its time so many of the significant events in the history of this country…

Source: thingsthatexist.tumblr.com/post/1351…

Somewhere above Washington, D.C., the airspace knots into one of the more complicated games of three-dimensional Tetris a person can play. The FAA has decided to hand part of that game to an algorithm. Not the plane. Not the landing. The traffic jam. And honestly? Good place to start.On June 22, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford named Air Space Intelligence the winner of a twelve-year contract reported at $875 million. The Boston company, backed by…

Life We had an AI-driven design sprint at work that was on the one hand hugely productive – we (a team of < 10) built, tested, and iterated on three prototypes in the space of four days – but on the other hand I found it far less rewarding than I feel like I’ve felt previously. Probably because I wasn’t building it, I was telling a robot to build it. Just another instance of AI making life less fun. Hard to deny how helpful it was in getting an enormous amount done though, and it almost…