A mistake for them, for you, it's a crime. Only you've seen it done, countless times. Normal things, you claimed were my sins. I felt those crimes. I did, but didn't mean. A small spark, it burned you like a flame. When you noticed what you feard in them. I had kept repeating, that it's not all men. Now myself alone, count as three in them. Just to make a sound. It scares me now. Every step I take, always wrong somehow. I fight them too, the norms that you hate. Unlearning fake privilege, that…
Today, I launched I RSS, a directory for people who love RSS. I’ve already added the badge to my footer and submitted my site to the directory. It also shows a nice live blogroll on the homepage (powered by FeedLand). If you love RSS as much as I do, take a look and add your own website.
Someone says something true and sharp. The response is never "you're wrong". Never "here's why". Always "your language is inappropriate". The content vanishes. The tone becomes the trial. The person who said the thing is now defending how they said it. The person who did the shit walks free. IRC, fediverse, the office, corporate email, academia. Same script. No argument required. The tone was the crime. Someone gets censored. Their response: "it just felt weird". Not "this is nonsense". Weird.…
It's now been over a year since I started blogging with Pagecord (and almost as long since I started paying too). Pagecord was not my first blogging platform this decade, nor is it my only one. But, even in just the past year it has really grown as a service. It's partly why I will be allowing my paid subscription to auto-renew, the other is that it was great last year and those key parts that made it great are still there. I have two main blog, this one and my research blog with Pika. Why two…
I’ve got a lot going on at the moment which means I’ve not been posting here. Big whoop, right. Yeah, work is busy. At home we are in the last week of Jack attending nursery (his last day tomorrow!) and we are spending next week in Nethybridge —yes the one that was evacuated last week cos of the wildfire in the Cairngorms. I’ll still be working but at least it’s a different location, different (quieter) roads to ride on my bike. As ever this blog is the place that gets dropped, but that’s only…
Today it’s a big talky thinky post, that doesn’t have much to do, directly, with video games. Sorry for that, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while and wanted to get off my chest. If you leave things like this spinning around your head for too long they begin to fester, and I’d also like to give my reasons for having grudges against the likes of Fandom (the wiki company, with a capital-F). Until recently I didn’t have a specific list of things I absolutely won’t give the…
Come write HTML with me this Saturday. HTML Day is an annual celebration of getting together and writing HTML, created by Elliott Cost and Laurel Schwulst. Saturday, August 8, 2026, is this year's date, and I'm running two online sessions again, same as last year. Sessions Two one-hour sessions, so folks across time zones can join in. Oceania Time — 6-7pm AEST European Time — 6-7pm CET The European session also works out to 9-10am PT, 11am-12pm CT, and 12-1pm ET, if you're in North America. No…
My Third Blaugust entry, In Which my Gardening Adventures Lead me to find a very pleasant suprise.
I'm doing (a very lax) Blaugust. This is 3/hopefully 31 posts in August. This is a post I started writing on the 19th of July. I was on holiday in July and I stayed in a little town in France called Vallauris, which is famous for its pottery. It was historically famous for pottery but the artistic side of things really kicked off in the 1950's, when Picasso moved there and started creating ceramic art. This is a Picasso plate, I quite like the layout on this one The cute exterior of a pottery…
Performing circus can teach kids about hard work, dedication, teamwork, performance, etc. Most importantly, it teaches kids how to fail in front of a crowd, get back up, and try it again. “Smile and Style” as they say. The crowd, for their part, will cheer even louder when you get it the next time.
I kinda like this framing of doing work vs. going to the gym: At work, if your job is to move a bunch of heavy things from one side of the room to another, you should use whatever assistive tech you have on hand: a wagon, a forklift… even an AI-powered robot. But at the gym, it makes no sense for that robot to lift weights for you. The point of weightlifting isn’t to move heavy things across the room; it’s to actually lift those heavy things.
[🎶 Look out! Here comes the Spider-Man ad! 🎶] Surprise! You don’t really own your BMW.Link: https://www.techspot.com/news/113327-bmw-putting-spider-man-ads-dashboard-after-promising.html
Celebrating 25 years of blogging with gratitude, reflection, and a sweet slice of success surrounded by creativity and joy. August 6, 2001, 25 years ago. I started blogging. I had a website made by Microsoft FrontPage and hosted on GTE (now Verizon) in the homepages they offered back in those days for residential customers. In fact, your ISP provided everything for you. You had so much website space and an ISP-provided email, which you lost if you changed providers. That's foreign today. But I…
“Patience, my young Padawan” is not actually a line used in any Star Wars movie. It is, however, something that seems to be in dwindling supply online. The prevailing culture is one of everything now. The technology train is leaving for productivity town, so hop aboard for the next update, the next feature, the next boost, the next small miracle that will make us better, faster, calmer, more organised and whole. It is, of course, big tech to blame for this impatience and —with every keynote,…
This is a survey for developers about everything but coding, that is accepting answers up to September 5. If you’re a developer, it’s worth participating! It doesn’t take long to fill and can help understanding the current environment of the dev industry in such chaotic times.
Low resolution, high compression, wonky colours and press-the-button-and-hope photos! Yes, it's the shitty camera challenge!
We were on a challenging hike recently, and a few of us got to talking about what a lovely analogy hiking is for life. When you’re working your way up a steep climb, you have to take it one step at a time. There’s little point looking back at how far you’ve come or ahead at how far is left — both just pull you out of the only step that matters, the next one. Along the way, you cross paths with all sorts of people, each on their own version of the journey. And the encouraging thing is that…
General anesthesia using gases for surgery is one of America's great nineteenth century medical achievements. In early 1845 dentist Horace Wells used nitrous oxide to painlessly extract a tooth. In October 1846 dentist William T.G. Morton successfully demonstrated ether anesthesia in Boston during an operation by John Collins Warren. The Morton/Warren event soon made it's way around the world. The Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology outside Chicago maintains an extensive timeline that covers…
As part of building a service for automatically publishing blog posts from RSS feeds into atproto's standard.site lexicon, I implemented atproto OAuth for logging in and getting access tokens to publish for the user. This means that any user with an atproto account, whether they created it on Bluesky, Eurosky, or Blacksky, or any of the other Personal Data Servers available, can log in to your service. Atproto OAuth does not require pre-registering clients with a service, one implementation…
Another interesting recent topic of discussion in the OSM community has been on corporate influence on the project. The concern about corporate influence on OpenStreetMap is fairly old. For some time there had been substantial concern about a direct takeover of the OpenStreetMap Foundation by large US tech corporations. I had commented on this in the past. But i realize that the focus of that discussion had been somewhat one sided, looking mostly at the influence of individual business…
I’d mentioned earlier in the spring that Kim picks up two new hanging ferns every year so the birds can nest in them. This one has had two separate momma birdies choose it to birth and care for their young this year. And yes, that’s a lot of poop! 🤣
My wife has recently gotten into watercolor painting, and the paper she uses comes in a thing called a block. There are times when she would like to have the block not flat on the table, but at an angle. So necessity being the mother of invention, I made a block holder with adjustable angle. It turns out that the "adjustable" part was a bit tougher than I thought it might be.The completed projectI had some spare spruce/pine/fir from the potting bench project, so I used that. The block is 9" x…
tl;dr: After almost seven years my Netgear Nighthawk M2 has started rebooting on its own, reporting nonsensical battery percentages and ignoring most of my presses on its touch buttons, so I spent the past three months replacing it with the GL.iNet Mudi 7 (GL-E5800), a 5G NR Sub-6 travel router with two nano-SIM slots plus an onboard eSIM, Wi-Fi 7, a 2.5 GbE port, two USB-C ports and a removable 5380 mAh battery. It is the most capable mobile router I have owned, its 13.5-hour battery rating is…
How listening to and collecting vinyl records helped me reconnect with music. At the start of July, I decided I wanted to collect records again.* This happened after we visited our neighborhood comic book store and realized there was a whole-ass record store with graffiti supplies upstairs. We'd just never bothered to check it out. * Before I left the US in 2012 I started to build a record collection. I think I had 5 albums. The only one I remember is Flight of the Conchord's "I Told You I Was…
A minute in the world's life passes! To paint it in its reality, and forget everything for that! To become that minute, to be the sensitive plate... give the image of what we see, forgetting everything that has appeared before our time. Cézanne title here
Following up on yesterday's post. If you're not interested in the AI bubble, you might want to come back next week because this thread is going to be running through Friday.Here is Ed Zitron discussing the AI industry's huge off-the-books debt. Before we jump in, however, there's one point I want to emphasize (we'll dig into this even deeper tomorrow when we discuss Patrick Boyle's analysis). This story is Enron-esque. It is Enron-reminiscent. It is "a little bit Enron." It is not, however,…
Wavyleaf basketgrass (photo from Wikimedia) 6 August 2026 Have you seen this plant? Its wavy leaves are nothing like the plants I’m used to in Pennsylvania so I was surprised when I saw it at Bear Run Nature Reserve in late May. Was it a new wildflower? No! This is wavyleaf basketgrass, an extremely invasive plant that is just starting to take hold in Pennsylvania. This month the Pennsylvania iMapInvasives Program is holding a statewide blitz to find it so we can beat it back before it covers…
A few weeks ago, the Canadian wildfire haze reached Central Virginia, where I live, and we noticed it as a haziness in the air. Well, I have an AirGradient Open Air (model O-1PST) outdoor sensor and two AirGradient ONE units (model I-9PSL) indoor sensors. I'm a data-driven person, and I was instantly curious how this was showing up to the sensors in Home Assistant. Here's what it looked like in the sensor logs: Hourly mean PM2.5, 17-18 July 2026, central Virginia. The shaded band spans the two…
This is a good thing. A very good thing right now. When we arrived in Nethybridge you could see the low hanging smoke that was still rising from the remnants of the wildfires here, one area reignited yesterday too, this is far from over. But through the night and, as I type at 9:11am, it’s been raining steadily. This is the forecast for the day and it’s very very welcomed here. There is an area still closed, local businesses are suffering into their third week of closed doors and lost revenue.…
♠ Today I learned: Atuin ships hooks that capture commands executed by AI LLM coding agents into the same shell history as mine. As of today there are hooks for Claude Code, OpenAI Codex and Pi. % atuin hook --help Manage AI-agent shell hooks Usage: atuin hook atuin hook <COMMAND> Commands: install Install hooks for an AI agent to capture commands in atuin history help Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s) install --help doesn’t list which agents are supported, but a bogus…
