Woke up to a dead car battery. Made a guide to jump it.Currently Listening: Bruton and De Wolfe “Sounds Of The Department Store 1979”Reply via email
The Summer Solstice is the Sun’s big annual entrance.The light stretches itself to the edge of the day. The evening lingers. The garden is a riot of colour and texture. The flowers are fragrant. The fireflies zip through the long twilight. Everything feels a little more golden than usual, as though the world has decided to lean fully into its own radiance.Come, hang out, subscribe! This publication wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for folks like yourself who are interested in reading articles and…
Looking to replace my aging/noisy AMD Zen1+ desktop with a mini PC, Intel 11th gen or newer.
I’m getting to the age where peers have accomplished a lot. I’m not talking about people who were exceptional out of the gate and did great things in their 20s and 30s. I’m talking about people that felt like genuine peers, but now have done things like: made a boatload of money built a business such that they have all kinds of freedom are well known in their fields These folks have things that I want. And I feel like I’m just as talented. I could be where they are and have what they have. In…
The advent of AI chat bots has positioned ‘chat’ front-and-centre as the future of UX - the nexus of all conversations, all interactions. And they portend to have personality; they’re friendly and converse with you in your own colloquialisms. Coincidentally, “Chat Box” experiences are popular amongst software engineers. This is because they don’t need to build intuitive, usable, UI. It can be abdicated the LLM under cover of ‘articulate it in words’ and when it doesn't work ‘you’re dumb if you…
Rochdale Canal Towards Deansgate Station Footbridge to Deansgate Station Life Cycle by George Wylie outside Deansgate Station Around Deansgate Station is an area of never-ending interest. The buildings provide such a varied background, I am always tempted to concentrate on them and hope someone walks into the shot - rather than looking for people first.Probably, I could stand on any of these corners all day, and there would be no need to go anywhere else to find photos. Perhaps I should do just…
Each week in Refill, the Pen Addict Members newsletter, I publish Ink Links as part of the additional content you receive for being a member. And each week, after 10 to 15 links, plus my added commentary on each, I'm left with many great items I want to share. Enter Misfill. Here are this weeks links: Read: — Proof of Purchase: Daily Purchase Drawings 2006 --> 2026 (KBBBLOG) — 9-Year Blogiversary (Rachel’s Reflections) — Bigger Bolder Marks (Comfortable Shoes Studio) — From Olivetti to…
When my first grandchild, Claire, was born, my heart was full of so many strong emotions that it took a few weeks to parse out and understand them all. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to share her with others. Then when I saw her other grandmother holding her and gushing all those same … Continue reading Crying in an Elevator Holding a Tiny Jesus
I read this post from the inimitable Thaliarchus whilst like two drinks in and a bunch of thoughts came bubbling up. You should read it yourself, and also the rest of their work. Thaliarchus rules. This is not intended to be a takedown in any way whatsoever in case you clicked on this hoping for random internet drama, this is more of a Cohost-thread-style continuation post where I go "ooh, ooh, I can ramble about this topic!" I've kinda already done so before anyway. I am not a game designer so…
RICE and other confidence-based frameworks are mostly noise. Here's how to make decisions without pretending to know the unknowable.
I was able to work on Stream for Mac Friday and I finally fixed up some UI stuff I’ve been meaning to get to for a very long time. I’d asked a friend from some honest to goodness, unvarnished, feedback and part of what he recommended, I took care of Friday. When you Refresh your feeds either directly — Cmd+r or clicking the Refresh button or selecting File > Refresh — or indirectly at startup, there was no indication of what was happening. Now there is. Up in the title where it says Stream I’ve…
Thanks to Charlie Horse 47 and Killdumpster for their sponsorship of this post, via the magic of Patreon. ***Politics will always be with us.And it sometimes seems like some politicians will be too. For instance, May 1988 saw François Mitterrand, having already spent seven years as President of France, manage to get himself re-elected for another seven!But some things were coming to an end. One of them being that, after more than eight years of fighting, the Soviet Army began its withdrawal…
That went by quickly! A week since the Golden Hinde!It was the exact opposite to the Brighton gigi terms of mood, sound, everything. The boat is moored on the Thames not far from London Bridge station; it's one of several replicas of the original boat and is just as low-ceilinged and many-laddered. For such a small ship, it has a remarkably complex layout, but thankfully two toilets.The sound man was Robert Sekula from 14 Iced Bears, something I found out when I mentioned doing a song by The…
Keyboard Basics There's a few things to know about keyboards you plug into your computer: They have little computers in them. When you press a key, the little computer in the keyboard sends a signal to your actual computer telling it what key you pressed. The little computer in your keyboard is programmed with a map that defines which keys send what signals to your computer (i.e. when you press the "a" it sends and "a" signal). Some keyboards let you reprogram the map to change the signals each…
NYC Seattle LA DC Some of America's largest cities are embracing Democratic Socialists as their Mayors. Cities on both the East and West coast are electing leaders from the DSA. Mamdani is absolutely killing it in New York City, honoring his promises with an impressive first hundred days. Katie Wilson won the mayoral race in Seattle last year as well. Janees Lewis won the Democrat primary in the District of Columbia, despite Trump's threats to take over the city if she wins. DC has maintained…
I had a long draft with a lot of my writing background, but I started to not like it, so I’ll take a new approach. I’m tired to write in english. Constantly using my second language is hurting my brain. I have to stop and search world to elaborate my points because they come to me naturally in portuguese but not in english. My vocabulary is small and I feel like a kid. I missed my own language, so I started writer more and read more in portuguese. I fell happier. Writing in paper/notebooks is…
i think about intimacy, sharing my past and history
After deciding that my original pick for this week was so terribly bad that reviewing it would be a simple unkindness to myself as much as the author, my plea for some more sapphic or queer suggestions turned up a much better replacement, Kiss of Seduction, as well as a few other books I can add to my review backlog. This one’s a contemporary paranormal romance, a succubus and a half angel, set in the author’s version of the kinky decadent court of BDSM obsessed supernaturals trope. Demons,…
It has been a weekend of cheer, pigeons and gardening. On Friday afternoon I was in town and spotted not one, not two but three pigeons all with string foot. One of them had a very swollen and white foot which was clearly causing him a lot of pain but I had stupidly left my net at home. When I returned about an hour later with the net he was nowhere to be seen but I managed to catch a different bird that needed help so it wasn’t a wasted journey. Here’s the before photo. It doesn’t look so bad…
There was movement in the water, on the opposite bank of the River Teme.A fish? No, we could now see it swimming on the surface. A snake—it was long and thin. And coming towards us.No: Jane pointed out the furry tail. A rat, then? A very small beaver? (I kept that thought to myself) A squirrel? Do squirrels swim?Yes, they do. Across the water Almost with us
A tremendous week here in sunny athens! Perfect temperatures (~30ºC), blue skies, a breeze and sunshine every day is good for the soul. Also good for the soul but less good for the body has been a reversion to going out a lot. Outdoor cinema Monday evening, after my greek class, was a trip to Nea Filadelfeia for a taverna meal at Αυλή and my first outdoor cinema of the year, to see the new Spielberg alien film – Disclosure Day (review + pics, ⭐️⭐️). Film was fine but forgettable. Cine Alsos was…
More music at Fête de la Musique. All the locations were pretty close by. But the kids did not fancy the high temperatures, so we didn't last long.
I was hoping that people sending postcards of restaurants would have mentioned the food they ate in those places. That rarely happened. What was far more likely was that they would say when they were returning from their trips. What had put the idea about mentions of food into my mind was the message on the back of one of the linen postcards from my last post. That was the card from Burdick’s Drive-In Restaurant that pictured French-fried shrimp on a plate seemingly floating in the sky over the…
Before I can think about fitting the garboard planks, I need to bevel the keel so the planks fit at just the right angle. To prepare for this, I watched an Off Center Harbor video ($) from Geoff Kerr’s Caledonia Yawl series. The Caledonia Yawl is a larger boat, but the the construction process (glued lapstrake; plywood) is pretty similar. A few minutes into the video, Kerr says “if you haven’t bought a hand power planer yet, you’re going to run to the store.
A collection of seasonal excerpts from the commonplaceEssays, blogs, and other prose: No as a Noticeboard, Sara Ahmed A no to an institution can be expressed through the withdrawal of labour from it. When you leave because of a complaint, you don’t just leave the problem behind. You leave a record of confronting that problem, which can be another kind of legacy although one that often has to be unburied by those who come after. Leaving also meant I was freer to express myself. And that I had…
You might find this post especially useful if you have a project with many #[sqlx::test] tests. One of the upstream Rust projects that I worked on during the past few years was the rewrite of bors, the merge queue bot we use to merge all rust-lang/rust PRs. If you are interested in learning more about this bot, check out my talk from RustWeek 2026. I’m quite proud of the integration test suite of bors, which I spent a lot of effort on, and thanks to which the bot has been working pretty much…
Reading this week: Sir Harry Johnston and the Scramble for Africa by Roland Oliver The second full day of our river cruise on the mighty Danube I woke up while the ship was still moving, mist-shrouded Austrian-looking buildings sliding past in the quiet morning. Very neat! Right before we entered Vienna we went through another lock. Since it wasn’t our first it was much less exciting, and we experienced it as we ate breakfast, i.e. we watched a concrete wall slowly lower (from our perspective)…
Looking Out Browsing Talking Crossing Peering and Walking
