A cartoon coded in CSS from comiCSS.

Pete Byrne, frontman of Naked Eyes, is dead at 74. I actually saw him play live last summer, at the hotel in Park City where the Park City Math Institute was being held, on a triple bill with Flock of Seagulls and Men Without Hats. To be honest, I noted at the time that Byrne’s voice was shot, and that Ivan Doroschuk was the only one of the frontmen who was still in frontman condition. But still: I will never get over “Always Something There To Remind Me,” a hit when I was 11 years old, and the…

The Ninth Circuit’s Section 230 jurisprudence has dev0lved into a drama-filled implosion, so it’s shocking (in a refreshing way) when the Ninth Circuit nowadays issues a normal, straight-down-the-middle Section 230 opinion without any caveats, tricks, or angst. I have a blogging backlog of many other Section 230 cases that I hope to cover before year-end, but I’m fast-tracking this one because of its novelty. * * * This is an account termination/content removal case, so you already know the…

29-10-26. Another day when the forecast promised much and delivered only some. It could have been much worse and I did have fun and got to please myself (no work), outside, in glowing health, taking a run along beautiful East Lothian coastal trails. So how come I am complaining? I think the winter blues are creeping in.I took the 10.39 train after a sprint up to Waverley and got off at Longniddry around 11am. Some blue skies, some hazy clouds, some chilly breeze. Thin gloves weather. There…

Watching the final of the BBC Young Musician of the Year concert last night was wonderfully heartening. Whatever else is wrong with the world – and with music education – somehow these phenomenally talented youngsters keep emerging. The three finalists were whittled down from an original pool of several hundred video applications and forty auditionees, and, to judge by those who made it to the later stages, standards must have been very high indeed. For those who didn't see the final, the three…

In my newsletter I give an introduction to the latest few posts and occasionally give some additional commentary. In my latest newsletter I wrote Projective space and homogeneous coordinates seemed like arbitrary abstractions when I was a student because they were presented without any motivation. Much later I came to realize that they’re natural, almost inevitable. Exceptional cases and hand-wavy references to objects “at infinity” go away when moving to projective space. My mathematics…

The day after…

Every time you do something good, every time you build something on your own, every time you learn a new skill, you want to share it with someone. Your family, your partner, your friends. And every time, their lukewarm reactions leave you deflated. You are still the child seeking a pat on the back after showing his parents a trick. They didn't give two hoots and looked away. The void inside you never got filled. You grew up, passed through different phases over the years, but the void stayed.…

I’ve mentioned this a few times on social media over the last three or four years or so as the LLMs have come to the fore. Whenever I’ve checked my own writing against an AI that’s supposed to detect LLM use, they usually come back with a high percentage chance that my writing was AI generated. It wasn’t. It isn’t. Some of the material I checked was from the 90s and they still claim that it’s AI… …the obvious explanation is that the LLMs have been trained on my work, they have assimilated my…

Prior to my Swiss Game (and multiple Double Pushing Finesses), I played a few sessions of the local sectional. This was the North American Open Pairs weekend. I played in the NAOPs in 2024, but didn’t play any of the qualifier games this time, so I just played in the sectional. When talking with Sam Dinkin (who had a new Junior International Player taking a gap year before college as partner) I wished him luck in the upcoming game and he said “I look forward to the NAOP, because when I lose…

Separately, individually, the two boys were sweet, but together they took joy in tormenting their classmates. They called themselves "bad guys." They knocked over block constructions. they gleefully upset games of domesticity. They called names, snatched objects from hands, and roared, all the while giggling together, then running off whenever an adult approached.They never physically harmed anyone, but they definitely frighten some, but mostly, they left a trail of frustration and anger behind…

Three parks, one KH1, and a friend at Great Brook Farm Much of my field operating lately has been with my Yaesu FT-891, but I still love my Elecraft KH1. This past weekend, October 31 and November 1, 2026, I left the big radio home and activated three parks in eastern Massachusetts with the KH1 and a whip antenna with a coil. All three activations were CW at 5 watts. The three parks Great Brook Farm State Park (US-2435), Carlisle, Saturday October 31. 15 contacts on 40 meters. Minute Man…

1954-1964 recordings

TL;DR the source is at hare-sql, hare-sqlite, and hare-postgresql. I've been writing Hare modules for a while and I did initially make hare-sqlite with limited C bindings, but now I wanted to attempt to make much more robust SQL modules to not only support SQLite, but also PostgreSQL since those are the 2 most popular databases in open source. I have a lot of experience with Go's database/sql package and so I thought that was a good design to follow and to adapt it to Hare's idioms and language…

November 2, 2026 After a long hiatus, I'm back to Bear. Here are a few reasons why: I like Bear's organization, its UI, and the theme options. Bear's MCP server works directly in the app, helping me proofread, search, tag, and update notes. I can also use it to create new notes. Bear's scriptability lets me automate my workflow with scripts written in AppleScript, shell, or Python. I use Keyboard Maestro to trigger many of them. My notes live in Bear's database, not as plain files. But getting…

Over the weekend, The Visitor’s News got its first subscription arriving via the PO box. This one was a friend of a friend, and so a pleasant surprise.

The free Affinity app, which includes near clones of Illustrator, Photoshop, and inDesign, has made it to iPadOS. The new app supports Apple Pencil Pro, and the only features you’d need to pay for are those that use AI, similar to the way the desktop version of Affinity works. Note that there are a few desktop features missing from the iPad version, but nothing of significance to photographers other than perhaps the Astrophotography Studio.Get Affinity for iPad on the App Store.

I really liked Ray Nayler’s The Mountain In The Sea. I also liked The Tusks Of Extinction. But reading those back-to-back gave me pause: At times it seems to relish in describing the worst that humanity is capable of. It starts to veer into misanthropy. I said: I hope that the next Ray Nayler book I read won’t tip over into wallowing in the worst of our species. Well, when I cracked open Palaces Of The Crow, my mind was immediately put at ease. And I mean immediately. Before the story even…

Rock Hudson (1925-1985) isn’t known for frock flicks — he was first and best known

A couple of days ago, I posted photos of a downpour while I was at Costco in Kailua Kona. After the rain stopped and the sun came out, there were still large puddles around the store. I started taking photos of people negotiating them and reflecting in them at the same time. This was the last of those photos. Posted for Bushboy’s Last on the Card. See more responses here.

For Day 2 of the #30DayMapChallenge, the theme is Lines. For my contribution, I've created MapterGLOW, an interactive 3D terrain map that turns elevation data into glowing neon contour lines.The map uses elevation tiles from Mapterhorn to build a three-dimensional model of the landscape, overlaid with luminous cyan contour lines at 50-metre intervals. You can rotate the terrain, tilt the camera and zoom in and out to explore the topography from different angles.You aren't restricted to…

Boarhammer: III: Instruments of Fungal IntentOut 31st October, self-released Germany’s Boarhammer continue their journey into classically eccentric black metal. The sound remains unmistakably their own (a rare thing in this day and age), paradoxically derived from dipping their toes into an eclectic assemblage of brews. True to their foraging subject matter, one that explores the use of wood, mushrooms, and herbs in ritual magic, this is an earthy, organic, roughhewn metallic foliage drawn from…

Announced today, in post 1st December, Christophe Fanichet (bio on Wikipedia) will replace Gwendoline Cazenave as CEO of Eurostar Group (bio on Wayback Machine - she has already been removed from Eurostar's website). News confirming it from Le Figaro here.Eurostar then is replacing someone who had worked 20 years for SNCF (Cazenave) with someone who worked 18 years for SNCF (Fanichet). No surprise I suppose, as Eurostar Group is - post merger with Thalys - SNCF Voyageurs (55.75%), CDPQ…

Some shiny links from about the internet! For even more, try last weeks set found here or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Bloggie-nominated. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request. Attronarch's Athenaeum launches RPG Blog Carnival: Underworld & Wilderness Adventures ToucantSam hosts mini map jam Rise Up Comus posts The retinue came arrayed in their finery and their armor [In the House of the High King] The Tao of D&D gives us Subterranean…

As you might have noticed, I’ve been doing some remodelling around this home. Added new painting, and things are still a bit out of place here and there, but I take joy in the process. Though slow, it releases from me a force of creativity I often miss. As if slowly, as the season darkens, my desire to bring about a new sort of light rises and pursues my dreams, and won’t let go, tugging, tugging, until I give in. Often, this means letting go of other impulses and pet projects. Often, this mean…

WordSmith Progress Chart Introduction I don’t normally try to write much about these writing events when I am in the middle of them. However, this year I thought I would try to write something every few days just to record some of the things that have happened, and any thoughts or ideas moving forward. 2026-11-01: Day One So, today is the first day of FediWriMo2026. I hadn’t planned to start at midnight, but I got really excited about a couple of things, so I stayed up for the start. What…

i'm sitting outside, smoking a cigarette and feeling the phantom blood pooling in my gums, feeling the pulse of it in my fingertips. i listen to the crickets and the occasional truck passing by on the main road. i'm overcome with that familiar 1am urge to make something of my life, which i know i wont right now. but i care that i feel it. i've been told many times that my big feelings are a blessing, even when they bring me pain. that without the depths of my capacity to be upset, i'd not be…

The link. The (short) paragraph: “You can almost call (pumpking beer) the original pastry beer,” says Phil Markowski, brewmaster at Two Roads Brewing in Stratford, Conn.

There are places which I have never been or seen in real life. However, there are places, like Memphis, or places even the idea of a rainy night in Baltimore that somehow reconnect me to songs from my young adult life.Music . . .God, where would I be without you? I remember the feelings that used to come over me when I heard a song called Sweet Thing from Van Morrison.I suppose I felt the same way when I heard van Morrison sing Into The Mystic.This was another good one.I remember the way I felt…

Sun rising through an increasingly threadbare forest canopy of mellow reds and yellows, all converging on brown: oaks in November. A hunter walks out of the woods in camouflage gray.