First, a massive thank you to fellow comics scholar David Palmer, who found, scanned, and shared the 1970 letter columns I include and discuss below. The first letter begins: “Dear Mr. Lee and Mr. Thomas:“I am a black writer and a long-time reader of your often very sophisticated magazines. The following is a brief criticism of AVENGERS #74:” In this case, “brief” means 877 words, which Marvel printed in full (minus, apparently, one “expletive”). The letter ends: “Philip Mallory Jones, 327 1/2…

pays to be a pack rackNoticed this pile of 1/2" poplar while during the laundry. It will do for the upcoming experiment.the boxI couldn't get a complete color/grain match for the sides. I eyeballed the long and short sides and squared and sawed them to length.labeledI labeled this the way I would any dovetail project. I'm just not laying out the tails with my dovetail jig.practice firstUsed one of the extras to saw the tails first. The big concern was sawing square without a square line to…

When hiring, people routinely overestimate the value of domain knowledge. And they underestimate the combined power of curiosity and first-principles thinking.

In which we discuss the market reaction to the election, how AI is taking over lawyering, and the new NY AI regs: Apple Spotify YouTube

Social Media Itch Mini-Server, Part 38 Clearer Licensing, Part 3 Board Games Library Updates Next Today marks the fourth day of Diwali (Dīpāvalī), the (not exclusively) Hindu festival of lights, known—the day, I mean—by many names including Annakut, Bali Padyami, Bali Pratipada, Goverdhan puja, Kartik Shukla Pratipada, Padwa, and others. Regardless of the name, most Hindu-influenced communities use it to celebrate the bond in marital relationships, though the implied fertility aspects also go…

Wise Vengeance was known across all the lands as a calm and trusty judge. Children and People would travel from far to have their disputes resolved. Greedy Noble and brother, Lord of Feasts both wanted the same farmland. They both expanded their territories until they finally met. Instead of fighting, risking People’s lives, they traveled to the Justice Hall. Wise Vengeance listened as they spoke their minds, for why they deserved this land. He then determined a border be set to separate their…

Cybercamp.ai was one of the best tech events I attended in recent months. I am hardly the first person to criticise the dire state of tech meetups and conferences. As Fernando Borretti put it, it’s as if we, the tech community, collectively lost 30 IQ points: People used to talk about compilers, type systems, logic. Now they talk about “prompts”, “harnesses”, “loops”. The discourse is narrower, shallower, and more repetitive. There’s only so many times I can hear about “agentic harnesses”…

A ticket that says “SonicWall patched” leaves out the question at the center of CVE-2026-19868: which sign-in routes would the SSL VPN accept, and did they all enforce the intended controls? For an MSP with several client firewalls, that question needs an answer for each deployment, not just a firmware job marked complete.SonicWall published its SonicOS advisory on November 6. The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security says SonicWall has observed exploitation, and CISA added the CVE to its Known…

I cut bot traffic to my site by over 80% with a simple trap. Last month, my hobby website OpenBenches.org transferred more than 2.5TB of data to visitors. As much as I'd like to think the site is enormously popular, it looks like it is just AI bots endlessly crawling the data and slurping up the images. So I've built B6 to be an indiscriminate tool to eradicate these unwanted parasites. It is very loosely inspired by Jeff Starr's Blackhole, but works even on sites with heavy caching. Here's the…

Welcome back to the Gridiron Deep Dive everybody, where today, I’m going to be expanding EPA/Play leaderboards for QBs back to 1977.Welcome to the Gridiron Deep Dive, where I take advanced analytics into places they don’t belong.For those who don’t know, Expected Points Added (EPA) at the player level measures all expected points added to his team’s score, on plays where a given player either touched the football or was targeted for a pass. Expected points is a measure of how many points an…

Ding is a toast notification library with playful spring physics, built to work with React, Svelte, or plain DOM. The site includes interactive demos for layout, sounds, themes, and different toast behaviors. Read more

Darkness is upon us. It's that time of year when the Danish weather starts taking a toll on everyone’s mood. There are only two solutions: keep running and stay active, and a whole lot of vitamin D. Legra started walking which is a bit nuts. Vitto’s back at work and going full steam ahead. It’s hard to juggle everything all the time. But we are slowly (VERY SLOWLY) getting the hang of it. Using Executor: I like experimenting with different coding agents, harnesses and products. But I hate…

In case you didn't hear.The US intelligence community believes that Alice Huang, an executive at a Singapore-based Nvidia customer who was said to have been romantically involved with the US chipmaker’s chief executive, was recruited as a spy by China’s Ministry of State Security. ft.trib.al/DnT9JqY[image or embed]— Financial Times (@financialtimes.com) November 8, 2026 at 9:48 AM Good summary from Moynihan.The Huang scandal, in brief: *had an affair with someone suspected of being a Chinese…

The poem "Finding Something" here

Agatha Christie was one of the most prolific and enduring writers of all time. Sneered at by some contemporaries for her page-turning mysteries, it was a skill she developed in childhood, writing stories in competition and collaboration with her sister, a talent she expanded considerably during her lifetime resulting not just in novels but plays, […]

I realised again yesterday how bad this issue is becoming on YouTube. It is especially YouTube as these “creators” get rewarded finically for the views. I watched a video that just sounded like that typical way that the narration goes, challenging assumptions, and winding things up and down. The confirmation came though at about 17 minutes in when a narration slide briefly appeared for 2 seconds showing the narration transition instruction. That video has over a million views in the last week.…

I took a time-out and called in sick at work. I need some rest, and possibly support from a psychologist. Looking back through my older posts, I noticed a pattern; I've needed a lot of self-care for my well-being. I guess I overworked myself for various reasons, and now I'm trying to prevent a burn-out.Recently, I've also been skipping quite a few evening online classes, and more often than not I left an hour or a bit earlier. I didn't feel that I was able to stay focused for hours. So I'm…

FEI GamesSelf PublishedB/XLevels 3-4 Long ago a small village accepted a gift from a traveling group of clerics. The gift was a large bronze bell that was surprisingly light for it’s size. A newly formed cult discovered the bell and it’s history and have recently decided that bell was better off in their possession… so they took it. This seventeen page adventure uses seven pages to describe seven rooms in a graveyard. More FEI slop, with massive read-aloud to make it to seven pages, and enemies…

I once wrote a song called Lists. None of the others in the Chefs liked it, so we never recorded it; I'm recalling it today because I have a whole pile of lists on the kitchen table. The latest things that has gone wrong is that my Square payment system has locked me out and gives me an endless 'renew password' loop. Their ai assistant is as unhelpful as all ai assistants, so I'm going to have one last go by re-installing it on my phone later on (thanks for the tip, Caryne) before making the…

Darkness is upon us. It's that time of year when the Danish weather starts taking a toll on everyone’s mood. There are only two solutions: keep running and stay active, and a whole lot of vitamin D. Legra started walking which is a bit nuts. Vitto’s back at work and going full steam ahead. It’s hard to juggle everything all the time. But we are slowly (VERY SLOWLY) getting the hang of it. Using Executor: I like experimenting with different coding agents, harnesses and products. But I hate…

Ghosts are usually associated with dank old castles, cemeteries, lonely moonlit roads, and the like. It charms me that at least one had the good taste to haunt a museum instead.The site of our little tale is the Yorkshire Museum in York, England. On Sunday, September 20, 1953, it was hosting an evangelical meeting. The museum was rarely open on Sunday evenings, so it was unusual for the caretaker, George Leonard Jones, to be on duty at that time. After the meeting ended, Jones locked the front…

Overcast and cold at first light. The six-point buck is back, stalking through the yard, giving me a long stare as I raise a mug to my lips, but not showing much alarm. The few oaks retaining leaves whisper in the wind.

As a novelty camera enjoyer, I had to get my hands on a Jaffa Cake Jaffa cam. Just look at it. For a penny short of seven english pounds you get the camera, the keyring, a USB A to C cable (A, really?), and a pack of Jaffa Cakes. You do have to provide your own micro SD card. On turning it on you get a little jingle and a Jaffa Cake splash screen. Cute. I stuck in a 1GB one I had lying around and it said I could fit around 7500 images on it which gives you some idea of how low quality these…

Say "good day" to Samuel Onion if you will. He's an onion. A fine enough onion. He's also destined to be included in tonight's stir fry. I'm pretty sure that it's good place to be if your career involves you in being any sort of onion or some other random vegetable type. You will eventually end up being part of a recipe or another related arrangement. Call it fate or the achievement of a proper purpose. Being useful. That's something many folks miss out on. Bye for now (?) Sam Onion. What is it…

I’ve been publishing a post every day for two weeks now. I don’t have enough time to spend hours mulling over what to write about (I write these notes at night when my baby is asleep), so I try to write about whatever comes to mind while feeding my baby at home, talking with friends at a coffee shop, or pushing a stroller through a nearby park. I don’t carry around a notebook to record all my observations, but I try to put on my writer’s glasses and remember whatever leaves an impression on me.…

I like the film experience very much. I like the limitations of the medium (e.g. fixed ISO), the limitations of the process (e.g. no feedback until you process), I like the fact that you have to plan (e.g. you have the films you have, no infinite shooting), and I like the limitations of the render (e.g. you’re stuck with the film stock you chose). All those limitations make the process more of a slow, intent-driven, more personal experience. But it’s so expensive! Taadaa! So I thought to…

In a direct rebuke to the ethical grocery movement, food startup Unfair Trade Provisions launched its flagship coffee line today, promising customers that its beans are harvested through ruthless, completely unchecked environmental aggression.While specialty roasters compete over shade-grown certifications, carbon offsets, and bird-friendly biosphere seals, founder Forrest Recht argues that ecological caution has been dragging down roast quality for decades.“People brag about leaving zero…

WHAT’S IN THIS WEEK’S ISSUE NDAM: Assemblywoman Heather Simmons Advocates for T1D James Talarico Elected to U.S. Senate — A Voice Living With T1D twiist Insulin Pump Receives FDA Clearance for T2 Diabetes Supporting T1D at Mealtimes — Webinar, 18 November 2026 Stronger Cholesterol Treatment Shrinks Plaque in Heart Arteries Abbott Libre Duo: A Closer Look at the User Manual Lower-Cost Component for Experimental Injectable Glucose Sensor Dexcom & Potential Expansion of Medicare CGM Coverage FDA’s…

We all have expectations when we travel to places we’ve never been, or don’t know well. Prior to the APT conference two weeks ago, I’d been to Indianapolis once, for a day, and had no chance to look around. When I got to explore a bit two weeks ago, I had a small surprise: there was less limestone and more terra cotta than I had expected in the facades of older buildings. “Indiana limestone” is the most common limestone used in construction in the US, and that name is used for a type of stone…