"Oh, glory," she whispered, and went to see what lay below on that side. Passing a dip in the rock, she halted. A pool of some eerie substance was cupped there. It shimmered with green, yellow, gray, and blue lights, much like the colours that she'd seen in the sky the night before. They moved over its surface in globes, waves, or strips. Watching the pool made her giddy. She swayed, and put out a hand. This is an excerpt from The Realms of the Gods by Tamora Pierce, a beloved fantasy novel…

German has a word for the weather much of northern Europe has had since the end of October: dunkelflaute. Dunkel is dark, and Flaute is the sailor's word for a dead calm, the kind of day when a sailing ship goes nowhere. Put together it means a spell of grey skies, short days and hardly any wind, so that solar panels and wind turbines give very little power at the time of year when we need the most of it. It went from energy jargon to news headlines in only a few years. Most of what gets…

Standishgate Standishgate Market Place Mesnes Street Wallgate

In which I challenged myself to draw a pokemon every day until I stopped A year ago today I was sitting by my fireplace with my kids and realized that I'd never drawn a pokemon before. Like ever. Not a scribble of a pikachu, not a meowth face, not even a ditto - and since at the time I was heavily playing Pokemon Legends Z-A, I decided to do a line art of my starter in my Techo. Once I was done I thought it needed color so I busted out color pencils and then drew a little frame around it. The…

I’ve spent most of this past week in Dublin on vacation, and there are too many joyful things to mention. I will list the five things that come to mind first ☺️ 🌤️ The weather in Dublin was magnificent. We’ve only had half a day of a bit of rain, for the rest it was just perfect, even better than in my own country. 🚶‍♀️ I was able to walk around so much, more than I have in a long time, I loved it. I did have to have rest moments, but they were all in wonderful cafe’s or sitting on park…

In any conversation, whoever is asking the questions is leading the conversation. Many people treat questions as an admission of ignorance.

A photo Designed by me to represent my blog Name or nicknameWiddershins Basically chosen because it refelected my concept of changing my direction from the other persona's I have had online over the many years. Where in the world I blog fromMidwest, United States My goal is not to give out too many details of myself. Not that I am ashamed or anything, it's just that a level of anonimity allows me to sometimes let my thoughts be presented without the need to censor myself. What my blog is mostly…

The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX/BSD/Linux systems. Whenever I stumble upon something worth mentioning on the Internet I just put it here. Today the amount information that we get using various information streams is at massive overload. Thus one needs to focus only on what is important without the need to grep(1) the Internet everyday. Hence the idea of providing such…

“We are frankly stunned to find a focus… on intemperate social media posts, papers that didn’t after all get retracted, and books being published by second-choice publishers.” * * * The Vanderbilt “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences,” was published this past summer, with a special report about academic philosophy authored by Kit Fine (NYU) and Gideon Rosen (Princeton). In the following guest post, Talia Bettcher (Eddie Goldenberg Research…

Victoria's Major Project Royal Commission hearings started yesterday. People can lodge submissions and some have already done so. Some are private while others are public. If you wish to learn how transport planning is done in the 'real world' and its sometimes messy interplay with politics, I strongly recommend reading some of the submissions to the Major Projects Royal Commission. Read them here https://www.rcimcp.vic.gov.au/published-submissionsThis item was written by Peter Parker…

Habitat map work On the habitat map work I went back to the input stages again, and actually did a bunch of data-spelunking. This meant quite a few days of just looking at dots on maps and asking why is that dot that colour and another another colour, the colour being the assumed habitat at that point from species obsevations. OSM with occurrencesSatellite with occurrences This lead to a bunch of discoveries and then improvements in how I'm trying to clean up the species occurrence data. I say…

# Introduction This article is the second of a series about building my container images on my Forgejo server. In the previous article, I explained how I run a private registry with zot. The images are now built by Forgejo Actions, which is the CI of Forgejo, compatible with the GitHub Actions syntax (mostly). The jobs are executed by the Forgejo runner, a program you install on another system which takes the jobs from Forgejo and runs them in containers or as a regular user, beware that using…

AppAddict is going on hiatus while I recover from an accident - broke a few bones in a cycling mishap. I had hoped to be able to keep things going with the help of some great folks who volunteered to help, but I honestly lack the energy and time to manage even that. I will leave the site online since many reviews still are being used by Mac Users doing research. I hope to return later this winter or the spring of 2027. To all of the developers who've reached out for reviews, I do appreciate it.…

Exophony is the practice of writing in a language that is not one’s mother tongue. It’s not as rare as it might seem. Among the lengthy list of exophonic authors that Wikipedia provides are many recognizable names, including Chinua Achebe, Samuel Beckett, Paul Celan, Don Mee Choi, Joseph Conrad, Kazuo Ishiguro, Agota Kristof, Vladimir Nabokov, and Tom Stoppard, to pick a few. The Japanese writer Yoko Tawada has been linked to two languages—her mother tongue Japanese and her adopted language…

I return to Apple Reminders during each summer beta season, and most years, I leave for one reason or another. This time, it stuck, but I was bothered by two things: Entering tasks into Reminders is slow and clunky There is no Apple Watch complication showing how many tasks are remaining for the day Earlier this fall, I started working on an app to resolve those two issues. It’s called DropTask, and it is available — for free! — on the App Store now: During the app’s TestFlight era, I took…

Last week a cybersecurity firm named Layer3 Intel quietly announced that they'd found something troubling: numerous Trump administration officials had installed dodgy Russian proxy spyware on their computers at the White House, potentially allowing unauthorized access to U.S. government networks. This kind of proxy software allows users to mask their IP address, spoof their real location, or "rent" bandwidth for as little as 60 cents a Gigabyte. Often computers are unknowingly infected with…

I have been meaning to row one again for a while. I started working towards it in 2024 after my discovery. I intended on doing it around the new year but I got violently sick so that didn’t happen. Last year my mind was too occupied planning a trip. My sister has been training to run a half marathon again so when she told me I knew I wanted to try to row a half marathon around the same time as she ran. Running one wouldn’t work well for me. That’s miles of being overwhelmed by my terrible…

Hard to disagree with any of these choices. The post Some of my least favourite modern fonts appeared first on @Kevuhnn / 📸 / 📚 / 🇨🇦.

When I customize my Emacs, I often utilize hooks. However, when experimenting, I often inadvertently add the wrong thing to a hook – a function I later decide to rename or even a lambda. I have always painstakingly written the correct remove-hook invocation to do it. A few days ago it occurred to me that it would be nice to write an interactive wrapper around remove-hook to make it easier. As usual in such cases, I started with a bit of research to see if someone did something similar already.…

This is a test of something I’m working on. If you are seeing this, it worked!

I was so hyped about major Android updates when Android versions were still single-digits or had minor versions (and I was still much younger). I even made an update a requirement for buying a new phone (that phone still works, by the way, and runs Lineage OS with Android 13 - but sadly isn’t supported for a long time anymore). Recently, my main devices (do we still call it “daily drivers”?) received OneUI 9 / Android 17, and I don’t even notice a difference and don’t know any new features this…

Every week I’m inundated with email offers and pitches of one kind or another. It’s one of the side effects of running a small media company. Most are cold calls, though increasingly well targeted thanks to AI, and over time the products being pitched have become more polished and complete. I can’t name names, but one I received last week, for a storytelling product, was incredibly well packaged, superior in look and feel to what we produce. The writing wasn't the best, but everything else…

this week’s WISLW video was 8 mins long of me nattering about everything – longer than shortform, shorter than longform, i think that’s what the kids call MIDFORM???? idk. so figured i might as well post a transcript just in case anyone cba to watch 8mins of my slow-gabbling, j read w ur eyes not ur ears!!!! as always, this video was sponsored by GO WITH YAMO! an app that’s like pokemon go x letterboxd for London’s galleries and exhibitions. you can slide to check in, leave a review, leave a…

Captain Britain Omnibus #HC-A Release: Apr 13, 2022 Creators WriterJamie Delano | Steve Craddock | Mark Farmer | Dez Skinn | Gary Friedrich | Roy Thomas | Larry Lieber | Chris Claremont | Grant Morrison | Dave Thorpe | Len Wein | Jim Lawrence | Bob Budiansky | Mike Collins | Paul Neary | Alan Davis | Steve ParkhouseCover ArtistAlan DavisPencillerPaul Neary | Howard Purcell | John Stokes | Alan Davis | Herb Trimpe | Ron Wilson | John Buscema | Noel Davis | Pablo Marcos Studio | Pablo Marcos |…

Deleting social media apps off of my phone isn’t a digital minimalism thing for me or “I need to be more offline” thing, I just want to spend my time a little differently, which boils down to using less apps. Here’s last week’s screen time report. I have app limits on IG and Bluesky even though I already deleted the app from my phone (but maybe it syncs to my ipad?) 7 hours on calculator is funny - I don’t have auto lock turned on and I guess I leave my phone on the calculator app more than I…

A bash script that emails Sam Altman once a day to report the RAM he missed. (It’s a parody, but it works; read the context.) Tip from @wilfredo@fosstodon.org.

I never noticed the practical applications list on the back of the black Field Notes before. It's a fun little list to jump off of for some quick journaling ideas Yesterday we drove downtown with K's brother and sister-in-law. We went to Sonic Boom and I got the Haute and Freddy record! We walked around Chinatown a bit and ate the most delish Chinese food. Favs: steamed dumplings and the Beef Shanghai Noodles. Yummy. When we got home, K and I watched Mobland. Helen Miran is delightfully…

The moon really is a reflector.

Bad Dollsby Rachel HarrisonGenres: Horror, Short Stories Pages: 192 Rating: Synopsis: In Reply Hazy, Try Again, an indecisive young woman finds a mysterious Magic 8 Ball that might just have the answers she's been looking for...or might lead her down a path of self-destruction. In Bachelorette, a bridesmaid attends her childhood best friend's bachelorette weekend only to discover the itinerary may demand more than she's willing to sacrifice. In Goblin, an unusually brutal dieting app wreaks…