Book review for The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann. I rated it 5 stars The Wager is a non-fiction book covering the improbable story of the 1741 shipwreck and mutiny of the crew from the English warship HMS Wager. Remarkably, after the crew mutinies and split into two groups, both manage to make the long voyage home to England. Along the way they live as castaways on an island, traverse dangerous seas on a tiny boat, and some even end up being captured by the…

We are currently looking to get a new washing machine. Looking online at the usual big stores and every single one has an awful AWFUL website experience. These are large companies who are typically owned by a large conglomerate who should, somewhere in the depths of their organisations, have people who know how to build websites well, and certainly they’ll know how to code things so they work well on a mobile device. Right? RIGHT? Wrong. The worst, so far, is Curry’s. I’d clicked through to…

Last year, my wife and I went on a 5,025 Km Interrail adventure. We got the month-long unlimited pass and saw 10 Countries in 30 Days. That was a bit too intense. So this year we got the 15 travel days in 2 months package. We grabbed the 1st class tickets when they went on sale in December. Here's how our journey ended up: The trip included two ferries - one overnight - which had a small Interrail discount. In total we spent approximately 40 hours on trains over a 7 week trip. This blog post…

Pretty hard to write an intro for this post that consists of anything other than ‘Holy fucking shit this is hot’, so I won’t even try. Please welcome the phenomenal @jamiebear – who has contributed stunning guest blogs here before on being a proud sub, and the sexiness of smell – to share an outrageously […] The post Guest blog: Are you a dirty fucker? appeared first on Girl on the Net.

I came across this article by Panayotis, for whom “AI-generated blog post images are not cool any more”. It’s not the first article on that topic I have read1, and I feel particularly targeted, since I use AI-generated cover images for most of my articles, this one included. I’m totally fine with that. I think it’s a usage of AI which is fun and even creative. I think it’s more original and personal than looking for and using an image I would not have created myself. For that matter, I…

I love taking notes, but one problem that I have is that that I start cherishing every notebook that I start. I can't seem to keep my notes messy. Eventually, I start structuring the notes, doing cleaner handwriting, adding a cover or some stickers ... and before I know it, the notebook is too well-organised for simply scribbling into. This, of course, raises the hurdle for taking more notes and makes me start a new notebook, where the same process repeats again. It's a vicious circle. It won't…

I’ve decided that Archive sounds dry and musty. It’s a rare reader who would venture into a section of a blog called Archive. So I’m rebranding to Explore. All my hundreds of post titles are still listed by date and you can click on them to read the articles. But you can also filter those titles, do full article searches and, best of all, roll the dice for a random post. I’m having a blast reading posts from ye olden times. Some are about hot new apps that have since disappeared without a…

In a highly uncharacteristic move, I recently purchased a brand new device: an Xteink X4 e-reader. The X4 is a minimalist e-reader that is the size of an old smartphone, but much thinner and lighter. Speaking of smartphones, a portable e-reader is great alternative to absentmindedly unlocking your smartphone and vanishing alarmingly large chunks of time. I feel much better about finishing reading a book than I do about finishing reading a list of misleading headlines. Here's what the X4 looks…

Previously I opined that Valve was about to win the console generation. I couldn't have possibly predicted that both Microsoft and Sony would just self-sabotage so hard that they're both going to lose. Between Microsoft's decimation of the Xbox division, slaughtering off the IdTech team, and continued increases of Xbox hardware prices; there's nothing to really be excited about with the Xbox. Sure their most recent presentation showed off a bunch of exclusives, but none of them really made me…

Many years ago, when I was single and had money, I bought some lego kits and then —for reasons I can’t really recall— went on an eBay splurge on some Lego Minifigures. I don’t think I was trying to build a collection, just realised that for a few quid (I think the most I paid was £3 + P&P) I could have some little fun lego people. I have a LOT of them but most of them are from common sets and are worth precisely as much as they cost at the time. However, a couple of years ago I was trying to…

I like Angela Collier’s videos about physics and I was delighted to discover this 18-minute one… …because it’s a great continuation to the thread about the complexity of Microsoft Office I shared recently. Collier talks about why physicists prefer LaTeX to Word. LaTeX is sort of a nerdy HTML that predates HTML. It looks like this… …and given how nerdy HTML already is, you might imagine this is a power-user tool that’s chiefly about power and control. But Collier makes the argument that there…

I hope other cities are seeing a similar trend to that of Minneapolis — we’re seeing a revival of independent physical video rental shops (the latest being a cafe/rental experiment called Saturn Video). So far three have entered the space. Here’s to hoping they stick around and this takes off.

I recently bought a new Peugeot and the experience of getting setup on their online platform has been painful to say the least. Yesterday I picked up my shiny new (to me) Peugeot E-3008 GT. It's a beautiful car with lots of bells, whistles, and toys. I had my little MG EV for around 2.5 years, and it served me well, but I wanted something bigger, with more range. So I opted for the Peugeot. Anyway, since this is a modern car, it no longer comes with an owner's manual. Instead you need to…

A piece of advice that is also a (somewhat sad) statement of fact https://filiph.net/text/to-make-money-be-useful-to-rich-people.html

A ghost bike is a memorial for a cyclist who has been killed in a motor vehicle accident. These bikes can be seen all over the world, painted white and located at, or near the site of the accident. As well as celebrating the life of the cyclist, ghost bikes are intended to raise public awareness of bikes on the road. A ghost bike memorial project was started in St. Louis, Missouri, in October 2003. After observing a motorist strike a bicyclist in a bike lane on Holly Hills Boulevard, Patrick…

I don't like the taste of Pepsi. Whether it is regular, diet, or any of the various flavors. Therefore, it feels weird when you've got me defending the brand and saying people are reading way too much into a social media post Pepsi did. A chunk of days ago, on Threads, Pepsi/whoever works for social media there wrote, "Pepsi Wild Cherry is what happens when regular cherry stops asking permission." It's a cute little joke about being spontaneous and throwing caution to the wind, right? Well, a…

Link: https://derekhanson.blog/nobody-clicks-your-share-buttons/(Via rendezvous with cassidoo.)I've always wondered if anyone actually used the social sharing buttons embedded on news sites and (some) WordPress blogs.Derek Hanson digs into the numbers: The UK government ran one of the most thorough studies on this. When GOV.UK added social sharing buttons, they tracked usage for 10 weeks across 6.8 million pageviews. The share buttons got clicked 14,078 times. That’s a 0.21% usage rate, which…

Last week I went full speed into setting up webmentions on my site. My implementation works around using webmention.io in my site's <head> and Bridgy for sending me webmentions for comments, likes and reposts on my posts that I share. Ideally I would like to self-host my webmentions endpoint so I am not relying on another service but I haven't found a suitable replacement yet. Maybe I should just self-host webmentions.io as it is open source. While looking for alternatives I came across this…

Sunscreen use is increasing, but skin cancer rates are also rising. Does that mean sunscreen doesn’t work, or – even worse – sunscreen might cause skin cancer? This was one of the common sunscreen myths I debunked in this video. Here’s one example, from @TonicHealth on TikTok: “Why is nobody talking about this? All these sunscreens are not doing the ... Read more Source

A couple of weeks ago I decided to read John Green’s book, Everything is Tuberculosis, in part as research for the novel I am writing about a tuberculosis outbreak. Initially I considered buying it, but remembered the weak state of my finances and checked the Toronto Public Library system. A library 150 metres away had it available immediately. Yesterday was the due day, so I swung by to drop of the unfinished book. The librarian asked if I was done with it, and I explained that my effort to…

Many times online, when asked what their dream job is, some users will reply that they “do not dream of labor.” The statment broadly means that in their fantasies, they do not do (ostensibely employment-related) work, and can instead merely relax and do other things. Typically this statement is also used to imply the speaker is somehow trapped within the confines of capitalism and can’t dream of a future beyond it. It’s also one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard in my life. Because you do…

Why willn't thine bubble pop sooner As usual, photo unrelated. I like photos in blog posts even if they aren't relevant because I'm a photographer and I have so much goddamn backlog. Here's a cicada, aka the perfect lifeform. Emerge from the ground, scream, fuck, shed your skin and become something new, etc. Happy JulyReply, all. This post titled I'm just so bored of AI has been going around1 and honestly same, man. I'm so tired. But!! I wanted to dig in a bit because it feels like the rise of…

I'm just so bored of talking about AI. It's like listening to vapers tell me how delicious their flavoured poison is. Did you ever meet someone at university who'd just tried drugs for the first time? Listening to a stoner ramble on about their mystic crystal revelations is amusing for the first five minutes, but quickly gets tiresome. Wow! You got your little computer friend to automate calling your mum? Great job, mate! Can we talk about something interesting now? Just as bad are the people…

For 94 minutes at least, all the countries in the world (except the US) were rooting for Belgium. And did they deliver. 4-1 to Belgium and US was knocked-out of the Round of 16. Even if Belgium were to lose to Spain in the quarter-finals, they are heroes for showing that even corruption can't overcome quality. I don't have anything against the USMNT itself, but when politicians try to influence sports, sportsmen inevitably become tarnished by politics.

The easiest way to make an interface harder to maintain is to rebuild the browser badly. A div can look like a button. It can be given a click handler, a pressed style, a hover state, a focus ring, an ARIA role, a keydown listener for Enter, another one for Space, a disabled class that hopefully also blocks interaction, and enough attributes to convince assistive tech that it is interactive. Or it can be a button. That sounds obvious until you look inside a lot of modern component libraries.…

Following up on my two previous posts about book recommendations. I now finished reading Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. The book didn't disappoint. I watched the HBO series back in 2021 when it came out and it remains, in my opinion, the best TV shows I have ever watched. The book which was the source material, while differing in plot significantly, especially in the second part of the story, shares the same melancholy and nostalgia after lost world processed through art, memory and…

I have been getting back into blogging recently. I know I write this newsletter every 2 weeks, but I try and keep to a set number of topics as I know my audience is mostly developers. My blog gives me chance to write about whatever is on my mind, without worrying about it being relevant to my audience. When I first started "surfing the web" it was all about personal websites and going from one person's blog to another via links and blogrolls. I miss that style of the internet. You know, before…

Probably not. I bought one anyway. Figured I’d write some of my memories surrounding it growing up, as well as how I set-up my own. Some memories The Nintendo 3DS was one of those consoles that I mostly admired from a distance. There are a few moments in time, sparsed throughout my youth where I interacted with one, an uncommon endeavor compared to my love for the PSP or even the older Game Boy Advance. When it came out I was too poor to even consider it, it was super expensive when it…

Satya Nadella at Microsoft’s Build conference this year: Perhaps the most important design criteria for us is: ‘how do we earn the permission from the communities in which we are building these data centres?’ That’s where these principles ground us and focus us. How do we ensure that the D.C.s do not increase the electricity prices? Making sure that we are replenishing all our water use. Creating jobs in the local communities for the local residents. Adding to the tax base. […] Kate Brandt,…

I started my day checking the headlines on news sites and saw an interesting title that caught my eye because it's about CSS. These posts are generally interesting because it'll mean I learn some new CSS tricks. The posts I've read are https://dbushell.com/2026/07/03/fixing-full-bleed-css/ and since this refers to https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/full-bleed/ I've read that too. And the only thing I think while reading is... why are you making this so complicated. But still you should read those…