08:19 An early Sunday morning spent lazing around in bed is bliss. Reading a book. Or even doing nothing. A privilege not everyone has. 10:32 I have been cooking fresh toast for a few weeks now—I make it only once a week. I haven’t gotten the recipe right yet. I was trying my own personal recipe, but I guess that ain’t working out. So time to look up to prefessionals. 12:10 People on the online forums are rude. Or the rude ones stand out, drowning the sane voices. Learning from my recent stay…

It’s often assumed, on either side of the aisle, billionaires wield too much influence on society, or seek to subvert democratic systems if their power or ambitions are left unchecked. There is a fear that billionaires aim to reshape society to reflect their values. In actuality, their plans for social control tend to range from underwhelming to unimaginative. Peter Thiel has billions and is among the most influential people in tech. What has he invested his time and money in the past 10 years…

I’ll add an image of the finished product when I actually make it again. The title’s just a reminder to me. Recipe below. It’s just your standard potato salad, but I love dill and added a few other minor twists. No raisins, it’s okay. Ingredients Cooking Steps

You'd be forgiven for thinking otherwise, given the corpus of games that I generally play, but I am very much NOT an anime person. A lot of stuff inspired by anime, yes, but broadly speaking, my position has always been that if I'm going to experience this kind of stuff, I would rather play it than watch it. However, youtube decided to throw me a curveball this year: Three months of Crunchyroll for $2 a piece. Even if YT doesn't host their entire catalog, surely I can extract $6 of…

Being publicly witnessable is something that's been tragically hard in the past weeks, if not months (that's why I ended up blogging about Sudoku), but I went out to the mountains yesterday. I admit it sounds like I did some kind of ascetic training and sat under a waterfall to meditate about mortal sorrows. Actually, I've been wanting to go for a while. I grew up on an island, but my family used to travel to the Alps every summer and spend a week hiking: even before I was able to walk on my…

It’s happened again, and it won’t be the last time. There’s a thing I like, something that brings me joy, and yet I can’t find a way to talk about it without feeling a need to roll out a list of defensive caveats first. Whether it’s Homestuck or Steven Universe or Undertale or My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (ok I only saw like three episodes of that last one but they seemed decent), there seems to always be some new flavor-of-the-week that is embarrassing to talk about in public. Something…

I’ll add an image of the finished product when I actually make it again. The title’s just a reminder to me. Recipe below. An attempt to have a ‘healthier’ white sauce for pasta. It works well enough, but I still need to figure out how to fix the bits of grain from the yogurt (I […]

I’ll add an image of the finished product when I actually make it again. The title’s just a reminder to me. Recipe below. It’s my favorite kind of dressing for salads, but they didn’t sell it so I found a recipe online (I forget where) and tweaked it to my tastes. It’s a bit thinner […]

It’s been over a week since my trip to Okanagia, and I still can’t get it off of my mind. Okanagia is the kind of place that gets you excited to write about it. Previously, I had only driven through it on my way to somewhere else. This time however, it was the destination. While I had planned only to go there to do a bike ride, I ended up falling in love with that country! Okanagia, the richest country you probably never heard of, showcases some stunningly beautiful landscapes which offer…

In 2018, while working for the government of Finland, I developed a model of network literacies. Today our Prime Minister says that Canadians need to develop AI literacy and he even has a Minister of AI to implement it. Let’s look back at network literacies — They could be described as individuals and communities understanding and being part of global networks that influence various aspects of our lives. For individuals, the core skill is critical thinking, or questioning all assumptions,…

I’ll add an image of the finished product when I actually make it again. The title’s just a reminder to me. Recipe below. I’m fairly certain I came up with this recipe. It’s in a .txt file all lowercase with no credit attributed, which I’m usually good about. However, I don’t remember ever making them […]

Stories, content, EVERYTHING.

A three-day passage that became one long push: wind, waves, and a beautiful stop in Fair Isle on the way to Lerwick.

… and I don’t mean Declan Rice, of Arsenal and England. I don’t forget him because I have a football sticker of him on my phone case. No, I mean risotto rice. My longest-serving friend and I are on our annual camping trip and we forgot the essential ingredient in our much-loved camping dish. It felt like a stumble when we realised this yesterday, deep in our camping valley, not a risotto rice shop in sight for miles.The thing is, as we’re already discovering, we’re both adaptable and lenient.…

I’ll add an image of the finished product when I actually make it again. The title’s just a reminder to me. Recipe below. I have a preferred recipe for chicken thighs these days with mustard and balsamic vinegar, but I don’t have that written out as a recipe yet and this one’s great for plain, […]

I’ll add an image of the finished product when I actually make it again. The title’s just a reminder to me. Recipe below. I obsess over Mediterranean food. I could eat it and only it for the rest of my life. I admittedly do Americanize this recipe considerably (as well as tweak it for my […]

This Sichuan joint opened last year and now there's almost always a wait to get in, with good reason.Currently Listening: Aldous Harding “I Ate The Most”Reply via email

Orion (the spacecraft part of the Artemis mission), successfully managed the Trans-Lunar Injection (TLI) Burn. This was the critical one to fully escape Earth and head towards the moon. If it had gone wrong, mission aborted and Orion brought back to earth. Phew!! Track it all here.

JSON-LD, also known as JSON Linked Data, is a format for adding structured data to webpages. It can aid web crawlers in understanding the semantic structure of your site, qualifying you for richer link previews, and even potentially improving your search ranking. It's been 4 months since my first post where I described building this site, and Wakatime estimates I've spent ~100 hours coding now, not including time spent researching and testing. Since then, this site has been receiving plenty of…

The closed season passed very quickly this year with nothing really blog-worthy to mention. Plans to fish the local canal and a club stillwater for zander and eels respectively never came too fruition, mainly due to apathy on my part. Had a couple of early bass sessions down in Pembrokeshire in April, but the weather was absolutely vile and I was fishing more in hope than expectation and blanked accordingly. In contrast, when I met up with Joel Squires at a new estuary mark in North Devon in…

Unlike with last month’s Saoirse Ronan Appreciation Week, this weekend’s Pedro Pascal as a father figure marathon was wholly accidental. I ended up watching the newest Fantastic Four movie, The Last of Us’s first season and The Mandalorian and Groku. Only when I was watching him as Mandalorian, I realised the common thread with all of these is him being a father figure: to his son Franklin, to his daughter Sarah, to Ellie and to his protégé Groku. Here’s my spoiler free mini reviews for all…

With the rise of version control systems (VCS) like Github, Pull Requests, often called PRs for short, have become very popular with programmers. They are basically a place to gather together all the bits and pieces for a particular thing you are working on before you merge in the new changes from your feature branch into the main branch of your repo. It's useful as a way to mentally separate out changes, and gives you a high level view of what been going on in the project historically without…

I’ll add an image of the finished product when I actually make it again. The title’s just a reminder to me. Recipe below. My classic birthday cake choice is strawberry, but I’d like to not actively kill myself with a decadent option. This one has the flavor, a mousse-cake-ish texture, and is definitely moist. I […]

I had forgotten that Reading the Meow 2026 was coming up until I started seeing blog posts appearing, and I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to fit anything in. I also couldn’t think what to read, since I had gathered up all the obvious candidates on previous iterations of Mallika’s event. And then – Blood on the Cat by Nancy Rutledge came through the door! It was published in 1945 and is now being reissued as part of Penguin’s American Mystery Classics series. I’ve had a few of these sent, but this…

Happy summer solstice. ☀️ Two days in the office, then three days off to burn some leftover holiday before it expired. I was exhausted so I spent the time catching up on chores & admin and otherwise silently recharging. It was mostly too hot to do anything. I did make it out on my bike to Mr Bingo’s shop on Friday morning to buy a self-affirming print, and to Black Cat Café for lunch on Thursday & Saturday. I also rode to the big Sainsbury’s in Whitechapel to stock up on “extra fiery” ginger…

I’ll add an image of the finished product when I actually make it again. The title’s just a reminder to me. Recipe below. These were an attempt to make sugar cookies that don’t get loaded with, you know…sugar, or a heaping of fat. They taste like a baked confection, but they’re more akin to maple […]

In four recent posts, I explained how President Trump is seizing large parts of the Power of the Purse from Congress and how this has led to restructuring within Congress, the Executive Branch, and the courts. In general, those in each branch adept at bipartisan problem-solving have been sidelined in favor of those that are either hyperpartisan themselves or at least unwilling to moderate the President’s hyperpartisanship. In this final post in this series, I examine how the new, presidentially…

I picked up an OnionBrand A5 in Polished Saddle for my planner. Piper Trading Company Ink Review (via Pen Addict - Kimberly). A first look at some of the Piper Trading Company inks, from the same folks who brought you Franklin-Christoph!They Made It Smooth, But Is It Good? BIC 4-Color Ballpoint (via Inkdependence). It doesn’t need to be good to still be a classic. :) Meet Your Maker: James White, Bonecrusher 7 Studios (via Pen Addict - Caroline). I had the pleasure of meeting James and buying a…

In the introduction of Alan M. Davis’ 201 Principles of Software Development, the author wrote: If we were to examine the set of software engineering principles from 1964 they would look downright silly today (for example, always use short variable names, or do whatever it takes to make your program smaller). Today’s principles will look equally silly in thirty years. Alan M. Davis, 201 Principles of Software Development, page 5. That book was published in 1995, so it now has been thirty years.…

Greetings and salutations, readers. It's been a few weeks since I shared one of these, mostly due to the job search being somewhat exhausting, but I've got a backup of links so it's time to get back in the habit. And of course, it's Father's Day and I want to wish all the dads out there (myself included) a very happy father's day. This weekend I got to officiate my first wedding (for my brother-in-law and his fiance) so my plan today is to do... nothing. Enjoy your links! Mastodon and…