Love a good “electpic” horn. (And yes, I know it said “electric” before part of the R got rubbed off, but first, for a while after seeing the sign, I thought it said “elliptic,” like a descriptor of the sound running up and down in cycles, or something like that.)

I recently returned from Madrid, which is full of excellent food and splendid dogs and pedestrian crossings that make pee-yooooo noises like Ring My Bell by Anita Ward.There is also, of course, art. Since 1992, Picasso’s Guernica has resided at the Reina Sofia museum, its monochrome depiction of man-made hell as powerful as ever. At least, I think it is; it’s difficult to tell, under the scrum of selfie-takers, even though its proportions (more than twice as wide as it’s tall) don’t easily fit…

Kendrick Lamar’s GNX album reminds me of Kyoto, Japan. Mainly because I was stuck in the Kyoto Train Station because the shinkansen was delayed for 3 hours and I needed something to do. So I listened to that album the day it dropped for 3 hours straight

Bryan TalbotJonathan CapeWith top-hat and cane in hand, Scotland Yard's DI Stamford Hawksmoor shadows the murky backstreets of London on the hunt for a sadistic serial killer. In the dying days of the French occupation of Britain, through gaslit, cobbled streets and squalid alleyways, stalks the great eagle Detective Stamford Hawksmoor in search of the homicidal manic whose killing spree claims dozens of seemingly unconnected victims, from random murders to targeted political assassinations.The…

Alice Girard Guittard: Before recommendation algorithms were a thing, you had to decide what you would be doing on the computer. You didn’t really have one big app that you could open and order it to entertain you. Instead, you had a few dozen of bookmarks to websites, each with a specific idea in mind. A site for video game news, that one website with lots of tutorials, a blog about anime that didn’t update often enough, a wiki about a TV show from the 90s… Of course awful things existed on…

I slept less than four hours last night. So I was feeling sleepy and blue. On the way to work, I listened to this playlist titled 'mood', which I created some time ago. It's something I listen to when I feel unhappy. It never fails to amaze me how songs are able to transport us. A song can be tied to an era. To a place. To a state of emotion. To a person. To a memory. To a version of you. And when I hear these songs, it's always an unbelievable feeling. Sometimes comforting. Sometimes hurtful.…

Fremantle2026 September 22 (Tuesday), 1:22PM· genealogy · Flickr · Who FediFlick Archive Is Actually For, 13 September 2026, by Leo Gaggl: The third is genealogists and family historians, and everyone who travels specifically to the town their grandmother left, the church a great-grandfather was married in, the street that shows up in one faded photo with no caption. It’s the same anthropogeography as the first group, narrowed from a region or a species to a single family’s line. And the…

Here we are at World’s End again, and the passing the narrowboat reveals national treasure Uncle Bob checking out a Nasmyth & Wilson Company Ltd built 2-6-2 locomotiveIt was originally intended for export to foreign climes, but the order was cancelled when the railway it was intended for decided to re-gauge from 2ft 3 inches to 4ft 1 & 1/2 inches. Though looking at the size of it, one cannot but wonder if it could have been re gauged, however I’m no authority on such things. Meanwhile Pick-axe…

Last week, after dutifully opting out of the TSA’s facial recognition and making it through all the scanners, I reached the only line in any airport that brings me joy: the SFO watering hole (as I now call it since it reminds me of animals gathering around a small pond to drink). It's the first thing you see beyond security in the international terminal: two beautiful and simple water bottle filling areas each in the shape of a three-pointed star. Forget clanking your bottle against a water…

Designer Reimar Servas goes further than the usual Border Radius Discourse and thinks about the deeper but often ignored questions of border radii as a system, and about the consequences of such a system that go beyond visuals: […] These redesign efforts suggest ignorance of a fundamental problem: rounded forms have a smaller surface area than angular ones. Used as containers, they reduce usable space. This is fine on most touch-based UIs since they typically feature simple layouts with only a…

The late Victor Brombert writes in The Pensive Citadel (University of Chicago Press, 2023): “[T]here is a rarer, quite precious experience that might be called ‘pre-reading,’ when certain dispositions in our character, coupled with circumstances, make us receptive in advance to an author we have not yet encountered.” Brombert’s example in his own reading life is Baudelaire. As a boy growing up in Paris, attending the lycée, he walked the city streets as an unknowing flâneur, predisposing…

Whilst I was playing trains, son Michael was celebrating 40 years of Network SouthEast. Network SouthEast only ran for 8 years 1986 – 1994, but had a big impact on the railway, and it’s now 40 years since they first cane into service within British Rail. It has not been forgotten (as well as not forgetting passengers opening the slam-doors and jumping onto a moving train). Personally, it is nostalgia, as it shares the same year I came into this world, which meant I spent my younger years with…

Tuesday 22nd September 2026 Answer: a brand new bus station. (And a Mayoral authority, of course) Replacing a smaller ‘Bus Hub’ (which comprised four bus shelters)… … Heckmondwike’s smart new facility opened on Sunday with Mayor Brabin proudly heralding it as the very first bus station to be introduced as part of her Weaver branded bus network coming next year to West Yorkshire . The fascinating thing about this development is the town centre location, constrained site and number of buses using…

The Lancaster Witch by Carol H. Behrman, 1993. Thirteen-year-old Maddie Stoner is startled when her parents suddenly tell her that she has an English cousin named Clive who is going to be arriving for a two-week visit on Saturday. Maddie has never even heard of Clive before and wants to know who he is and what’s behind his sudden visit. Her parents explain that Clive is more like a second or third cousin, the son of her mother’s cousin, who moved to England years ago and married a British man.…

What can I say about the amazing place I've called my Internet-home for the past four and a half years? The Fediverse is an amazing place. It consistently amazes me that there are just so many cool, kind, and amazing people on there. It's what social media should have always been. When I say, "Fediverse, my Beloved," I guess I'm really saying "Humanity, my Beloved." Because somehow, even in the Year of Our Confusion Two Thousand and Twenty Six, I'm still such a huge believer in humanity, even…

A fun lil convention from the financial app YNAB’s release notes page – there is always a headlining feature with a hero shot and a long description, but the smaller improvements are still listed as “pocket change”: #release notes

Well, I got back to the Handworks event in Amana, IA on Sept. 4th and 5th. And it was awesome again. Two days full of hand tool immersion. The event is put on by the proprietors of "Benchcrafted", the company who sells crubber, the leg vise "criss-cross" thing, workbenches and other stuff. And other than getting there and staying somewhere, the event was free to attend - though I did add to the donation jar.One of the outdoor tentsThis open-air timber-framed structure housed Pete Galbert, Jason…

As part of the Bournville Heritage Weekend, Andy Christie had organised a live steam railway in the St Francis of Assisi church, and asked me if I'd help out. It seemed like a nice chance to take a train ride, and have some fun. As a bonus, when I arrived, the Carillon was playing, something I'd not heard before. Although it's a peal of bells, the sound is quite different to that produced by bell ringers. The "layout" was a couple of circuits of 45mm gauge track, with connecting crossovers and…

From grammar suggestions by Microsoft Word to poetry by Gen AI… and other links for your reading tonight. The Curious Power of Punctuation, by Louis Menand, New Yorker Carlo Rovelli on The Dangers of Getting Trapped Inside Your Own Conceptual Framework, by Carlo Rovelli, Literary Hub Pivot from Video, by Violet Conroy, Vittles Tomato Cure, by Seth Kaplan, Orion Magazine

I caught two amazing games this week, the diamondbacks beat the Yankees with the two run homer in the bottom of the ninth, and the Phoenix Mercury, who aren’t making it to the playoffs. Just beat the Dallas team that is making it to the playoffs. Not sure second the last game this evening. This post (Games of the season dbacks and Mercury Wnba) was last edited 4 minutes ago.

A year ago I briefly tried Omarchy and then returned to the comfort of my MacOS. This felt like the exact opposite of my impressions in OSX adventures, which I wrote a long time ago when I was switching from Linux to Mac. I tried it on an older generation of Thinkpad and it didn’t click, not just because I couldn’t switch to worse hardware and the feeling of plastic under my fingers, but also because its tiling window manager didn’t work for me. See, the thing that didn’t click is the fact that…

If your bad back, busted ankle, or bum knee is keeping you off the courts, then get ready to lean back in your desk chair and reminisce about the game you loved… Just crumple that hot inky sheet yanked from the photocopier’s paper-jammed bowels, swivel your desk chair sideways, and shoot a majestic three-pointer into the metal garbage bin. And don’t worry — if you’re inside the line, just go with a hook shot, buzzer beater, or big swooping alley-oop over to the glass fire extinguisher case…

Teh Tarik Game by Ray Tan was the winner of the 2025 Malaysia Design & Play game design competition, of which I was one of the judges. The winner's prize was either a publishing deal, or a cash prize. Ray decided to take the cash prize and publish the game himself. He did all the planning and the art. The game was released this year. I got myself a copy. I was part of this game's journey,

500 things I love about London [because it's exactly twenty-five years since I properly moved here] Life, nightlife, the sense of history, the Underground, the Overground, canalside strolls, the view from Greenwich Park, the fact there's always somewhere to discover, cutting-edge architecture, classical architecture, curvaceous Regent Street, the chimes of Big Ben, the 2012 Olympics, the Olympic Park, layers of history, nightbuses, world cinema, world cuisine, the world in a city, a Muslim…

Talarico leads PaxtonTexas Democrats have long struggled with the Republican-dominated Texas for decades. To give you an idea of how reliable it is, Ted Cruz has been sent to Congress by Texas voters since 2013. What makes the current US Senate race in Texas interesting is the confluence of factors involved: John Cornyn is an establishment Republican: This seat is currently held by John Cornyn, who has held the position since before I graduated from high school. He’s not a mover or shaker…

Cool site; recommend going in here and poking around

But first, this. And, also, because someone on Threads made me think about Dave Pirner, I'm going to force ask you to listen to Soul Asylum's outstanding cover of Victoria Williams' "Summer of Drugs". Soul Asylum was one of many bands that contributed Sweet Relief, a tribute record that was an integral part of teenaged Dave's world. Pearl Jam's cover of "Crazy Mary" and Evan Dando's cover of "Frying Pan" are also standouts. 🌲 gonna 🌼 go 🌱 touch work on feeling okay about only 🌳 grass writing a…

As we reach the first official day of fall, 2026, Apple and Google have made their latest product announcements focused on their visions for how artificial intelligence integrates with smartphones and laptop computers. Meanwhile, we wait for Microsoft’s product announcements in October. Google’s hardware efforts exist for the purposes of solidifying and extending its software ecosystem. The first Android phones provided a safe place for Google Search on mobile should Apple decide or be forced…

Outside The Met – New York, New York My wife and I stayed to the very end, right up to closing time. Given how large the museum is, we must have seen only a fraction of the exhibits. We definitely need to visit again. We were part of the scramble to exit the museum, resulting in a crowd of people leaving at the same time. Sensing a street photography moment, I pulled out the Leica M246. Admittedly, a picture like this is pretty easy with a modern autofocus camera. Using my D-Lux 8 would have…

Tags: #places #dispatches #sketches #natureNot that far south of Hollister, make a left at a little complex of buildings or a large farm, depending on how you look at it, that’s the start of it. This is CR J1, the Panoche Road, and it is only marginally maintained. As it winds its way up the Tres Pinos gulch the grand landscape views are presented in miniature. The views are close, the walls rise steeply but not to a particularly great height, and yet all the necessary components are present.…