Writing a post about the start of Michaelmas term has been on my to-do list for three weeks. I’ve been too busy to write about how busy I am. However, the weather today – an autumnal mix of sun, clouds, and light rain – inspired me to take a few photos. Here they are. Gibbs’ Building from the Porter’s Lodge Gibbs’ Building and the King’s College Chapel I work in Gibbs’ Building, directly across from the Porter’s Lodge which is the College’s front entrance. My office is in G2: The G staircase is…

I was served a cup of Earl Grey in a café recently; Picard's brew of choice, if memory serves. I rather enjoyed it so I bought a box from Twinings and they have a story on the side where they claim to have invented it. The blend was put together on the instruction of the then Prime Minister of England, Earl Grey, who liked it so much he gave his name to it. Tea. Earl Grey. Hot. Thanks for reading this post via RSS! Let me know your thoughts by sending me an email: rss@thomasrigby.com.

Facebook likes to feed me a never-ending supply of beautiful home design reels. It must know I like period cottages with instagram-worthy rooms. I try to avoid clicking them (and therefore rewarding the algorithm) but it’s a bit of a weak spot for me. The trouble with this sort of content is that, rather than making me feel inspired, it actually makes me feel like my own home is inadequate. No matter how I try, I can’t make mine look so… perfect. And that’s because it’s impossible. A video or…

And another month has flown by. Only two months left this year. At work, we had release testing in October. Before we release a new version, it undergoes extensive testing. Of course, this phase involves a lot of bug fixing. Bug fixing is actually what I enjoy the most. It’s a bit like detective work. And then there’s that satisfying feeling when you’ve found the bug, fixed it, and maybe even improved the code in the process. Then I took a week off. We didn’t go far, just an hour away from…

Although I never had the good fortune to test one of Polyend’s products (not for lack of wanting), I can’t help but applaud this–the popularity of the FM-1 and its openness is certainly having an impact, and Polyend is unusually well positioned to make a similar move. The firmware release covers the original Tracker as well as the Tracker+ and Mini, and the original even gets SD card sample streaming. There are SDKs for Sample Editor effects and, on the newer models, synth engines–which gives…

Leica M11-P · Summicron-M 35 f/2 ASPH. · 35 mm · f/2.8 · 1/2000 s · ISO 64

Link: How an obscure website became a force in America’s election information machine, by Ian Duncan and Kevin Schaul in the Washington PostThere hasn’t been enough discussion about the proliferation of reference sites that are built not for humans but to influence chatbot answers. Take the Ballot Brief, which was designed to influence questions about the election:“In tests by The Washington Post, ChatGPT cited the Ballot Brief in 22 percent of its answers to questions about the election.…

last updated 0 minutes ago this is partly a follow up to no, partly a reminder to myself to keep it pushing when it comes to migration off platforms i dislike AND am giving money to, and partly my second post in an impromptu writing month. these are services i am trying out to replace/go low-use with other popular services that have myriad issues. instead of spotify... qobuzpros has most of the music i want (but i listen to a lot of pop, indie pop and indie so ymmv) easy to transfer playlists…

A shot I took of Deja Vu Showgirls Las Vegas in October. For more of my photographs, follow me on Instagram.About I My Book | Consulting I X I Instagram I Newsletter I Email

Clara and I went to the local Sydney Hammerbarn recently, and decided to try somewhere new for our morning coffee. We left Thornleigh station on the Aldi side, and ended up walking past this cute cafe called the Dinoni on Railway Parade we hadn’t seen before. The decor was incredibly charming, and the Xmas decorations were already up. We tried their breakfast rolls (technically more lunch for us at that point, cough) and our usual espressos and piccolos. They were perfect. The warmer spring…

There was a conference held at KITP the week before last entitled Intermediate-Scale AI for Physics. The nature of this conference was somewhat of a mystery. As far as I can tell it never appeared in the list of forthcoming KITP conferences, and the minimal webpage for the conference had no list of speakers, no schedule of talks, and nothing about how to register to attend (at least going by the pre-conference version of the page on the Wayback Machine). Today a schedule with some video…

Um…the naming convention is confusing, the battery can’t be removed, and the tint could be better. That’s it. That’s the sum total of bad news. But wait, this is an oLight. I thought I was supposed to dislike their mainstream stuff (because, let’s just say I am in love with the Marauder III, review coming soon). Here is the review of the S1, the S1A, the Baton Turbo, and the Arkfeld Ultra. This is a mid length review because, well, I have reviewed this form factor about a dozen times,…

November, huh? Bloody hell.That’s it. That’s all I’ve got. Time for some links. These are almost all about social media in some form or another. I guess it’s on peoples minds lately.Supporting StrangersIt’s crazy to me that people I know will support total strangers and not their own family and friends. They watch hours of videos made by millionaires, they like, share and subscribe to total and complete strangers, and some will even give them money in support when they clearly don’t need it.An…

A new post from ben.balter.com · Read it on the web →“Happy Halloween! Take one!” chirped the blue Furby by my front door. Then the pink one, eyes glowing red, answered: “Take two… if you DARE.” One Furby wants you to follow the rules. The other wants all of your candy. They bickered all night. The opening exchange in the browser simulator that rehearses the show. It's muted because the voices are cloned from Hasbro's recordings, so captions stand in for them. Over-engineering things is a…

I’ve written an average of about 450 words of fiction a day since I was laid off, but that number is misleading: some of those words have been rewritten several times. The more meaningful number is 28 rejections from agents and 25 from publishers in that same period. And before anyone asks, no, I haven’t used AI to write any of this. Most of these projects are years old—I’m just taking advantage of my unexpected idleness to revise or rewrite them. Beneath Coriandel (adult fantasy novel): A…

Kilauea is a basaltic volcano, driven by magma from a deep hot spot. Over time it has build a summit on top of the older Mauna Loa lava pile, and a one-sided eastern ridge extending far into the Pacific Ocean. There is a rift on the west side as well, but it is short, has…

This is a schematic of the gearing of the Antikythera mechanism, from Tony Freeth’s 2021 Nature paper, “A Model of the Cosmos in the Ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism“. In my opinion this is the most comprehensive and well-supported of the several theories which fill in the missing portions of the mechanism. Use this along with the supplementary manuscript and supplementary videos in the link above to figure out how to construct the device (noting my comment on the paper about a small…

Greetings everybody from Tel Aviv! Irit Dinur and Amir Shpilka asked me to spread the word through my blog about the celebration for Avi Wigderson and for computer science and discrete mathematics at IAS. Avi Fest @ IAS: Dates: June 14-18, 2027 The Institute for Advanced Study’s School of Mathematics is pleased to announce a conference celebrating Avi Wigderson’s 70th birthday and retirement, together with 30 years of the Computer Science and Discrete Mathematics program (CSDM) at IAS. The…

This is either aggrandized or a publication we’ll remember for quite some time: LLMs fluently reading and editing neural network

A quick preservation update for an unusual Commodore 64 game called Dallas Petrol, highlighted to GTW thanks to Tanaydin Sirin. Dating from around 1985 and reportedly created by Alp Kaan Akal, Dallas Petrol was a Turkish-language strategy game where players competed in the oil industry, buying wells, drilling equipment and tankers before attempting to make their fortunes selling oil. Players could also sabotage rivals, including blowing up their oil wells! One particularly interesting feature…

I downloaded a massive iPadOS 27.2 update today that seems to have fixed none of the issues that have been driving me potty for the past few weeks: I pull down on the Home Screen and the keyboard input doesn’t work. I do it again and it does. Apps get stuck seemingly with shift lock on. (I didn’t even know there was a shift lock.) Safari gets in a weird mode where clicking a link plays an animation where the link is sent to the tabs icon as if it is being saved for later or something, but the…

A few weeks ago I mentioned how I started writing agent skills for use with my LLM-based coding assistant. It turned out that I encountered a few rough edges pretty quickly.

And a few more layouts (rather late in the day….) Wouldham Town. I thought that I hadn’t seen the lovely N gauge layout Melton Mowbray (North) at an exhibition recently. Well, here it is…. Wishton Halt…. And finally, Beaver Creek.

Like they say in The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz and Janet Mills, when someone is awful to you, it’s more often than not, not about you at all. I suppose we can turn that on its head and say if you are angry–no, when you are nasty to someone for no good reason–it’s more about what’s going inside your head than what the person has done. It’s more about something that happened and your only recourse is to grow spiky barbs in order to protect something soft and hurt inside. It may be that…

Regular readers will know that November is not my favourite month. This year I am going to try and overcome my Novemberitis, partly helped by having reduced my working hours in the summer so that I can make a point of having more time outside in daylight to fight off the winter gloom. November started well yesterday with a whole day in the sunshine in the garden. Mostly I was hacking things back and digging things up. While down on my knees hauling grass out of my raised beds, I found lots of…

Weekly cleaning and home improvement series, with some thoughts in between. It feels like I'm cleaning the living room weekly, but it's been a mess since we've busied ourselves with costume-making last week. We also got a new internet/mobile provider so our old router is still on the floor, along with cardboard boxes. Random thought I haven't done my monthly reflection, but that will have to wait until tomorrow. I'm starting to build up financial anxiety again. Whenever my bank account dips…

A photo Sheryl took last night at the end of our walk. Our backyard is to the left.

The county cop had me dead to rights. He knew it, and I knew it. Or at least I knew it when, as he passed me heading east on the two-lane highway (I was heading west), I glanced at my speedometer and realized I was humming along somewhere north of 65 miles per hour. The speed limit, of course, was 55. Yeah, I was screwed. His party lights began to strobe; I said some bad words. He whipped his squad car around in a Bullitt-worthy U-turn, and I pulled onto the shoulder.

There's this one ultimate rule that I've been following when working with AI for work (AI literacy and expertise are pretty much required now 😬). Don't use generative AI for warm outreach (talking to a friend, a workmate, a client; making an announcement)The next thing is you gotta write how you wanna write. You gotta write pretty close to how you actually talk (minus the filler words, or not). You don't want AI to sound like you, because if it keeps doing so, you'll end up sounding like AI.…

Audience capture is the part that scares me the most about writing on the internet. I have the soul of an engineer1: when I see a metric like engagement, I want to improve it. I like to make the number go up. In fact, the whole environment of online writing is tailor-made to help you make engagement numbers go up. It’s trivial to find out how many people are reading my posts, and from what sources. Hundreds of link aggregators all over the internet have algorithms that will help my most…