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.

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.…

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 love Jellyfin. I've talked about it here on The Review many times. Before I was a Jellyfin user, though, I was a Plex guy. See, I've never been keen on the idea of streaming services. You know the ones: Netflix, Hulu, CBS All Access Paramount Plus, HBO Now HBO Max Max, Disney+, Crunchyroll, Amazon Prime Video... etc, etc, ad naseum. 👉Though I have subscribed to a few independent services like Nebula for the excellent Jet Lag: The Game and Dropout for their variety of awesome shows like Game…

Last night, I was in the omg.lol IRC chatroom as I often am. I got talking about my folk.zone project, how I got my own IRC server up-and-running and was now working on getting an instance of BookWyrm spun up. Pablo Murad, a fellow web tinkerer, asked me about how I was running the project, and how I dealt with CGNATs blocking port forwarding for home servers. I explained I was lucky enough to have a fixed public IPv4 address, and that I was using Cloudflare's Zero Trust Tunnelling system to…

Hiked part 7/20 of the Marskramer Path, 18.9 kilometres from Lettele to Deventer. The area between Lettele and the Hanseatic city of Deventer is a small-scale varied landscape with meadows, forest and heath. After this you walk to Deventer aan de IJssel, one of the most beautiful rivers in the Netherlands. Finally, after the medieval streets and alleys, you will enjoy the Deventer Koek. Hike report

In reply to my Sort your sites out note Case Duckworth takes each of my points and gives them a good grilling. There are many good points in his reply so I thought it worth unpicking them a little, alongside my original glib comments, and see where I land. As mentioned before, I write to think and understand, so this is absolutely more an exercise for me than anything else, so please bear with me. The Origins My note was based on the last few weeks clicking around a lot of new blogs and…

The internet you grew up on isn't dying. A commercial veneer glued on top of it is. A visual essay about the protocols, federations, and quiet machinery underneath everything you actually use — and why the boring parts are the parts that survive.

84 years ago today a thirteen-year-old girl was given an autograph book, bound with red-and-white checked cloth, for her birthday. She decided to use it as a diary and chronicle her life; tragically, only for the next two years. That was Anne Frank, a young Jewish girl, born in Germany, who became an unassuming diarist and Holocaust victim. She documented her life in hiding in Amsterdam, as the Germans occupied the Netherlands. She wrote several times that she would never allow anyone to read…

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?

Iain Gray, News Letter: Tech mogul Elon Musk encouraged “repeated and loud” protests ahead of Northern Ireland’s immigration demonstrations, some of which flared into violence. The owner of X, formerly Twitter, went on to comment that “only Restore Britain can save Britain” over the course of comments on a horrific knife attack carried out by a Sudanese man on the streets of north Belfast. For context, Restore Britain is the political party for people who view Nigel Farage as a soft and cuddly…

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…

Game Jams I've taken part in game jams for many years now. It started out as something I would do to get more experience making games but its now just a genuinely fun past-time I fall into every few months. When I was at University I worked within its Computing Society to run them very regularly and they were always lovely. For a few years I was also in a game-jam team who took part in Ludum-Dare regularly. This is a brief overview of the various games I have made over the years. Rummaging…

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

While cleaning out my office today, I found this, which I wrote in 1992: In the middle 1970's, the IBM corporation did (and perhaps still does) most of their in-house programming in a computer language called FORTRAN. They had a pretty good FORTRAN compiler, called the FORTRAN G compiler. It was fast at translating FORTRAN into machine instructions, and the machine instructions it produced implemented the desired behavior fairly efficiently. Nevertheless, IBM decided to write a new compiler.…

I just saw a Brit on BlueSky mocking “an actual respected American online news commentator” for pronouncing “Macron” to rhyme with “Ramone.” My first thought: Pronounce the word “Paris” for me. Likewise, one of the Guardian footy commentators was recently annoyed by a (supposed) American mispronunciation of Paraguay — this coming from Britain, where news readers habitually call another Latin American country Nick-a-RAG-u-əh and football announcers refer to the Aston Villa keeper as Emi…

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…

I often hear conservative Christians condemn gay relationships because of the creation story in Genesis — "God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve," so the slogan goes. I was never particularly impressed by this argument. When I became woke, it was not a major sticking point. But, I happened to think about it the other day, and I realized it goes ignores the logic of Genesis 2 is an important way. In verse 18, God observes that Adam is lonely and incomplete, so He decides to create a partner…

There is little doubt in my mind that AI coding models have fundamentally changed the nature of software development in 2026. But is the SaaS-pocalypse real? I think it kinda is, for some businesses. A history lesson from an elder developer I think it’s worth reflecting on what the original premise for Software-as-a-Service actually was. Back in the late 90’s/early-2000’s software was extremely difficult and expensive to produce. Businesses were ordering software for their staff from Microsoft…

Alien: Colony War is a classical Alien story in the "Aliens / Predator / Prometheus Universe": state, corporate and military corruption and greed, individual bravery and struggle, xenomorphs and mothers willing to protect their children, the occasional psychopath. Entertaining. I feel the author understands and respects the Alien universe. Alien has a successful recipe, one that unlike other franchises, no one yet tried to deconstruct, reinvent or turn into something else. Yes, I am also…

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?…

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My default for making coffee for two is a cafetière. French press if you insist. It requires almost no thought, produces a consistent result, and has no moving parts to break. When I’ve got a bit more time and want a cleaner cup for two or more, I’ll reach for a Bodum pour-over instead. When it’s just me, I’ve been using a Clever Dripper more lately (it suits the days where I want slightly more control without committing to the full V60 ritual). The Hario V60 was my main single-cup pour-over…

Eight years of daily Apple Watch wear taught me to trust data over my own body. Switching to mechanical watches showed me how much that was costing my mental health.

Original post: Bloggers, can we make better titles for our posts? | Michael Harley Overall I agree with Michael's premise: blogs need better titles. I agree; I think I browse Bubbles and Bear's discovery page in much the same way. You can't read everything, and titles are a good shorthand way to guess if it's something you'd be into1. Where I disagree: I think this one might be a bit unpopular but I do not like the round-up posts. You know the ones. They're titled Week Notes, Week in Review,…

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…

Until now, Apple has kept Apple Intelligence — the suite of artificial intelligence tools baked into its operating systems — entirely optional. If you don’t want it, you can simply skip it during a new device setup or when updating the system. That show of respect for its customers may change with iOS/macOS 27. Reports suggest that, at least in the first beta, Apple Intelligence is mandatory: On iOS 26 (left), Apple Intelligence can be turned off. On iOS 27 beta 1, it can’t. “So what’s the…

Apple on its Developer site (via Arseniy Shestakov): Later this summer, Apple will unify the email domains used by Sign in with Apple and iCloud+ Hide My Email under a single, shared domain: private.icloud.com. New addresses generated for both features will be issued on the new domain. […] Previously, Hide My Email addresses were generated on icloud.com, the same domain as any other iCloud email address. This made it basically impossible for web admins to block registration using Hide My Email.…

Anyone is capable of creating pictures more aesthetically pleasing than any renaissance artist. Cameras made sure of that. This led to the many attempts to redefine what art is, as it could no longer be defined as just a "pretty picture". In 1961, Piero Manzoni takes a dump in a can and calls it art. Merda d’artista is one of the most well-known works of modern art, and it’s only one of countless attempts at defining what art is. AI art is a joke. When AI is used as a substitute for human…