I’ve been passively assuming that ANC is bad for you, that it causes tinnitus or something, but it looks like it’s more of a mixed bag. I finally got around to looking this up last week when I was trying to decide which headphones to bring on a flight. The general answer seems to be that, on a flight or other scenario with a steady, loud background noise, ANC works to actually cancel out the noise through destructive sound waves. That means less pressure on your eardrums, making ANC good for…

Been such a cozy weekend with my partner. It's our ten year anniversary tomorrow and while we'll be stuck in with bad weather, it's been a nice weekend regardless. Yesterday we went out and ate at a restaurant we hadn't eaten at before, a nice kinda boat bar right on the river. I love the vibes of the place, and I even treated myself to an alcoholic drink (a Peach on the Beach) which is extremely rare for me (before yesterday it had probably been years). Then we came home and watched Project…

I was reading my blog today. Yes, I do re-read my own writings! Most of them help me realize that you can do the things you fear most. Many … 🐞 Read more about it ➞ ➞ ➞

There’s a new paper out called “PivCo-Huffman” (HTML version with annotations here) and it’s very interesting. Normal Huffman decoding (and, to a lesser extent, encoding) is inherently quite serial. We can get explicit parallelism by using multiple streams, which scales just fine to moderate numbers of streams – something like 4-8 is usually not an issue. Not very suitable for vectorization or wide vector machines like GPUs, though: every extra stream adds signaling overhead in the bitstream,…

Sunset on the longest day, the summer solstice, from the Weston Hills overlooking Baldock. The skies had been cloudy but cleared to reveal a fiery orb in a haze of grey and pink.

Enjoyed the last of the Selkirk Bannock A busy week catching up, dealing with a bit of fallout while I was OOO, picking up a few high-priority bits and doing some product-y evaluation of our backlog Some more good work on rootly-go this week oapi-codegen's now - on main - got initial OpenAPI 3.1 support, which we'll release in a few weeks One night, Morph was wailing at something - it turns out another cat was in one of our flower beds, and didn't want to leave, but don't worry, Cookie helped 🤭…

6 years ago, my son was born on Father’s Day of all days. Today we celebrated both his birthday and Father’s Day. Next one will be in 2037 (I think).

Life As predicted, a quiet week. Steady at work, steady at home. Productive in small ways, with a lot of little things moved forwards. Managed to get some exercise in, both at the gym, on Zwift, and a wee walk one evening too (even if I did get dive bombed by a heron). Not long back from a weekend up in Perth — meeting up with family, watching my son and his cousin play together. Restorative fun times. The simple joy of just nipping away for the weekend in the motorhome just confirms what a…

The Outsiders in 1966. Public domain image courtesy KLRA Beat and Wikimedia Commons. Last night, I watched the first episode of Art21, which featured a bit on Louise Bourgeois—and then this morning, found David Byrne tossing out an aside about her in Bicycle Diaries. I love that sort of coincidence. But it was one of the artists Byrne didn’t mention, Bruce Nauman, who had me putting show and book together.1 Prior to the Art21 episode, I’d heard Nauman’s name, but knew nothing about him. Lo and…

A local ride.

When trying to type using an input method on GTK4 it simply doesn’t work. The same input methods work on GTK3, Qt5, Qt6, and a variety of other applications which don’t use any of these toolkits. GTK4 is the sole outlier. Running with WAYLAND_DEBUG=1 reveals that GTK4 applications don’t even try to bind to the zwp_text_input_manager_v3 global. A peek through GTK4’s code indicates that the default input method backend is simple, which is really a pseudo-backend which means “don’t use any input…

Vamp legend Theda Bara returned to the screen in an espionage comedy, playing an American agent with an explosive egg being pursued and hampered by Hal Roach luminaries like James Finlayson and Oliver Hardy. Home Media Availability: Widely available in the public domain market It’s a living In 1927, Photoplay magazine published a piece by […]

Super nice light this evening. Love these birds.48 words · 2 images

I have suspected this for a while now...

Guten Tag! Guten Tag! 👋Did you check out the new WebKit grid-lanes resources already? Do you "view transition" with match-element? And have you heard of HTML streaming maybe becoming a thing? Turn on the Web Weekly tune and find some answers below. Enjoy! ::: song by="Pablo" title="GENER8ION - STORM starring Yung Lean" youtube="x6_mbnsh6VU" I loved the cinematography, choreography and the whole bad-boys-from-high-school vibe. ::: Do you want to share your favorite song with the Web Weekly…

by Helen Pilcher Interesting read about the nocebo effect, essentially the evil twin of the placebo effect. The nocebo effect is the effect whereby if you tell people the side effects of medicines, they are more likely to get them. Or people who think they will age less well, get more ill in old age than those who don't think this. You can make people really physically ill by implanting thoughts in their head that they have a cancer or some other disease. You can even condition them, like a dog…

Mozilla a lancé il y a peu un « VPN » gratuit dans Firefox. Je mets VPN entre guillemets car techniquement, il s'agirait plus d'un proxy... Mais bref, ils fournissent donc gratuitement un moyen de faire transiter notre navigation sur le Web par un tunnel chiffré qui sort potentiellement à l'étranger. À …

~ Pixel Perfection was the flawed holy grail. If you, like me, were building websites back in the early 2000s, you’ll undoubtedly remember the absolute headache that was cross-browser compatibility. What didn’t help back then in this era of Internet Explorer, Netscape, and Firefox was the stubborn, widespread belief that websites needed to look exactly the same in every single browser. Pixel perfection was the (flawed) holy grail. Thankfully, the web community eventually came to its senses by…

# This is an RSS-only post. It's a secret! Read more about RSS Club. I'm tired of my "open a tab to the 'front page of the internet'" behavior. When I first used the internet, I had a rich set of bookmarks that turned into RSS feeds. I used the internet like a library, not a tabloid. Now I just open up the "front page" and scarf down whatever tripe I'm served and I'm grateful for it. 🤮 So I've gone back to redirecting reddit and twitter to localhost. Have any of you successfully dismantled your…

Another Father’s Day! Joe got me this cute little He-Man minifig at a nearby toy show. Happy Father’s Day He-Man! We’re not really doing much since Aaron has to work and won’t be home until close to seven tonight. The pool and some spritzes beckon, though. I cooked a nice picanha roast last night for our dinner after he got home after a lengthy soak in the sous vide tank. macOS 27 “Golden Gate” Developer Beta iPad is usually where I’m OK installing a beta OS: I need my Mac to do work, and I…

Pub visits have been somewhat curtailed over the past week, for a variety of reasons, most of which have been family related. There’s also been quite a lot of boring, DIY – home improvement projects going on, nothing major, but still time-consuming and not the stuff that people will necessarily want to read about. On the plus side though, there are a number of out of town* events on the horizon, so there is plenty to look forward to. *Out of Tonbridge.This coming Tuesday, Mrs PBT’s has bought…

Power Cat Sunday 2026-06-21 I imagine this is what it's like having a job.

Buying a birthday present… “We have these tote bags. They’re so practical,” she told me. I was secretly buying a birthday present for my sister. “I’m looking for Hello Kitty merch,” I told her when I entered the store. My sister was turning 30, but still adored Hello Kitty. She left the register and guided me to a red aisle with almost every Hello Kitty item you can imagine. When I showed her a photo of my sister, she recommended the right lipstick—Hello Kitty-themed, of course. “OK, I trust…

A deep dive (ho ho) into the Mandelbrot set rendered with Wasm and WebGPU.

Today I cleaned my apartment. Pretty much the entire thing. The only part that I've yet to do (and that I'm not completely sure if I will do) is to clean my kitchen and clean the fridge. I've actually yet to do that final one for a bit longer than what I want to admit, but I guess that's just a truth of life at times. Maybe I'm at bit hard on myself at times, considering that I have basically moved alone to the other side of the world. I'm struggling with finding direction in a few things. I…

Jag anmälde mig till halvmaraton på Tromsø Midnight Sun Marathon i september 2025, innan jag ens hade klarat min första HM i Uppsala. Då visste jag inte att träningen skulle gå helt åt skogen under vintern och att jag knappt skulle komma igång med löpningen igen förrän det blev varmt i år.

As I was birding at a nearby garden, partially hidden behind a mass of three-foot tall native plants, I found an unexpected delight: a Michigan lily! Found in wetlands and prairies around the Great Lakes, Upper Mississippi Valley, and some southern US states, Michigan lily (Lilium michiganense) is a native plant with striking upside-down orange-red flowers. It can grow up to five feet tall. This weekend is the first time I’ve seen it growing in the wild. My Experience Growing Michigan Lily…

It's time for a quick peek ahead at the July schedule on Turner Classic Movies!As has been the case recently, I'm writing this preview with somewhat less information than usual, but I have enough information to provide a solid peek at some of the fun things coming to TCM starting 10 days from now.There will be a "theme month" for Star of the Month, featuring singing stars every Monday evening. Singers featured will include Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Elvis Presley,…

In a sea of dystopian fiction and shitty world news, here are some science-fiction stories that have help me see positive visions for the near future.

The top photo was taken yesterday on my now semi regular Sunday morning wander around the lake. I saw this rower coming from a ways back and had a time to crouch down and compose this shot. I’m very happy with the framing amongst the grass and the linear white structure of the carillon in the background. Already feeling pretty chuffed with myself for having already captured this photo… …the rowing man was a bonus and, I think the better of the two images.