Worcestershire's Oldest Yew TreesA simple brief for the latest Celtic Pilgrimage for All Hallows. It’s the season of thinning veils, when ancestors and departed loved ones are thought of as being nearer than usual. Walk to a local graveyard, light a candle, do the old things we have always done. The Irish and Mexican traditions show us how feasting and merriment are part of honouring too. In Britain, a walk to an ancient yew tree can hold this mood, a reminder that death and life are…

Big changes in my kinda, sorta quantified self. Other than that, life goes on, and goes on well. Highlights of the month: Venice A visit to Subiaco, always worthwhile Many bicycle rides Visits from friends A/C and heat; finally cracked, on the promise of an efficient heat pump. Baked cookies, molassses Frank Horvath photo show at the Terme di Caracalla Weeknotes! Vaccinated against the ’flu Orchids repotted Olives harvested Activities I do like the autumn when days are bright and sunny, warm…

“Our central ambition is philosophy on demand: philosophical judgment of exceptional depth and quality, available quickly enough to inform consequential decisions.” That’s Graham Clay, writing about Pensatura, an AI philosophy system he and Caleb Ontiveros are developing. Pensatura “coordinates AI tasks that investigate sources, develop arguments, examine objections and construct an overall answer [to a philosophical question], retaining the resulting work so later inquiries can use, challenge…

YouTube’s redesign brings one annoying change, but I found a workaround androidauthority.com If I want to go to my Subscriptions, I now have to go to the top of the Home tab, where several new sections live, the first of which, confusingly, is just called “Home.” Right next to it is the new Subs section that finally shows videos and shorts from my subscriptions. There’s also a new, more unreliable option in the form of a swipe gesture. Because everything in the new Home page is a tab, you can…

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I have arrived at the party but it's late, very late. Ships have sailed, trains have departed, reunions are over, wine has been spilled, hangovers recovered from, relationships ended, tapes played out and rewound. The world has turned many times. 2026 is almost over. Everyone who mattered in music is old or dead or something worse. That's how us riding on the bumpy over 70s bus see things. A digital minefield of jumbled, curated memory.This film came out in January 2025. I just found it on…

A Sobering Meditation[1] “A man goes to his spiritual master and says, ‘I’ve been trying to meditate faithfully for an hour a day, but I have a wife and three kids and a demanding job. The kids are already up when I wake up, the house is in full swing when I get home, and at night my wife and I need time together. What should I do?’ “The master replies, ‘Two hours a day.’” — Bo Lozoff, It’s a Meaningful Life: It Just Takes Practice The practices of Krishna consciousness are not always easy to…

Every year I pick one personal project for the winter and give it a deadline: the first day of spring. This year it is tmail, a keyboard-driven mail client for the terminal. Should it also talk XMPP and IRC?

Nota bene: Here are the previous ten installments — parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 — in my multi-part series on Adam Smith’s day-to-day duties as a commissioner of the Board of Customs of Scotland. Endnotes are below the fold. Order #127 is dated __ Nov. 1784 (the day is cut off) and is signed by the same three commissioners (and in the same sequence) who signed the previous two orders (#126 and #125): David Reid (top signature), Adam Smith (middle), and James Edgar (bottom). This…

I wonder whether having more and better screens around us has driven the great shift towards video. Or is this a chicken-and-egg problem? Did our growing appetite for video drive the spread of those screens in the first place? Look around and you’ll see what I mean. Everything is video now. If you’re not making TikToks or Reels, you’re missing out, so people bend over backwards to make them, even when they don’t want to. No other type of “content” seems to exist or matter anymore. The logic is…

22-10-26 Weather's set decent, better go somewhere! Musselburgh lagoons have been on the radar for a while but I never get that much from the new hides and scrapes so don't visit often. Today kinda backed that suspicion up. It was enjoyable but no high tariff species, pics or fantastic creatures seen. Plenty nice.oyster catcherI nearly cycled, as the bike is in good shape at the moment having been cleaned and tweaked recently. Put new pedals and toeclips on as the last ones were a hundred years…

Inspired by some old pictures of rather unappetizing Jell-O salads (also known as aspic), I decided to make a jello fruit salad recipe that I wrote down from "Home Cooking Memories." I like lime and pineapple jello, but this was a recipe I came by that sounded yummy and I've been wanting to make it except for one problem; I needed a mold to form it in! I kept forgetting to buy one, but it's a Bundt pan (a cake pan). You can form jello in just about anything, but I wanted to do it this way…

1. Surgeons removed Peter Falk's right eye, along with a malignant tumor, when he was three years old. In a 1997 interview in Cigar Aficionado, Falk famously shared a baseball anecdote: "I remember once in high school the umpire called me out at third base when I was sure I was safe. I got so mad I took out my glass eye, handed it to him and said, 'Try this.' I got such a laugh you wouldn't believe." To compensate for the lack of movement in his right eye, Falk naturally squinted or tilted his…

There's a good chance you've never heard of the 2-XL Robot. I certainly wouldn't blame you, I know I haven’t. Originally produced by Mego Corporation in the late 1970s, and later revived by Tiger Electronics in the 1990s, it was a rather peculiar talking toy that used audio cassettes to tell stories, ask questions and respond to its owner's choices. Depending on which buttons you pressed, the robot would switch between different audio tracks, giving the impression that you were having something…

11:48 - One of my buddies messaged me as they saw my last note and encouraged me to contact Substack support. Substack makes it really difficult to do this, so I ended up having to search "How to contact Substack support" which sent me to an article, which then directed me to their chatbot. I was skeptical but typed in my request. Within seconds, my subscription was cancelled and refunded. Whew! Shoutout to Vince for saving the day!

Links from social.omgmog.net for Monday 26th October to Sunday 1st November. It was mostly follow-ups and a bit of housekeeping on my own projects. Now it’s back to procrastinating from work and sharing links this week…

Dogs can smell the time, apparently. This is not a new discovery. It was discussed ten years ago by canine cognition scientist Alexandra Horowitz. But I just saw the phenomenon mentioned in the Gillian McAllister novel, That Night, the main protagonists of which are veterinarians, and thought I’d revisit the idea a decade late! They can tell when their owner is due back from work by how much of them they can still smell in the air. Horowitz was interviewed by the American Kennel Club around the…

Spinning fish flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license Today’s TDC says Look at this fish, spinning and spinning. Write a poem about the fish – bonus points for putting it to music. Spinning Fish A fish out of water Spinning in the ether Silently, effortlessly, eternally

I replaced custom frontend code with established libraries. The result was bigger, felt the same, and left me wondering how much my project needed them.

Monday means Fantasy with Friends time! All the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is about sci-fi’s relationship with fantasy: Science fiction and fantasy are often bundled together. Why do you think this is? How do you see the two genres as related or distinct? Do you enjoy both? I think the two get bundled together because they’re fundamentally about imagining something that doesn’t exist (yet). There’s that saying about how any sufficiently…

At the end of 2024, Thomas MacEntee published a brief overview of using artificial intelligence (AI) for genealogy. Genealogical.com provided me with a free review copy of this concise digital publication--with no strings attached and no influence over my brief, honest review of this digital-only publication.Despite the rapid evolution of AI in the past couple of years, MacEntee's "at a glance" brief intro to the technology can be useful, especially to folks like me who have barely dipped a toe…

Nonfiction November starts today and Week 1 is hosted by Heather of Based on a True Story who has posted the following questions for us to answer: Week 1 November 2-8 – My Year in Nonfiction – Celebrate your year of nonfiction. What books have you read? What were your favorites? Have you had a favorite topic? Is there a topic you want to read about more? What are you hoping to get out of participating in Nonfiction November? So far in 2026 I have read seven nonfiction books, which I know isn’t…

A command-line tool can print lines, which stay in the terminal's scrollback but look plain. Or it can take over the screen like a full-screen app, which looks good until it exits and takes its output with it. I wanted the looks of the second and the scrollback of the first, so I wrote console, an OCaml library for tables, trees and live progress rows that print into the scrollback. Its first version, 0.9.0, is now on opam: $ opam install console console-eio It comes in two parts. console is a…

Agent hooks are small scripts that your agent tool runs automatically when something happens, like right before a shell command or when the agent finishes. Claude Code hooks, Cursor hooks, and Codex hooks all work this way, and they are the most reliable way to make sure a rule is followed every time. I use … → The post Agent hooks in Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex explained appeared first on SwiftLee.

To liberate podcasts from the German ARD Sounds app, use this neat open-source tool by Sebastian Cohnen (tisba): https://ardsounds.tisba.de I came across this on Mastodon, heard about it again in the Wochendämmerung podcast, and used it to subscribe to the Kult! podcast (German audio books of classical literature) upon a recommendation by blumenstrasse who plugged the The War of the Worlds audio book.

I'm not in the market for a new MacBook right now, but I think I'd be sticking with the regular MacBook Pro next time regardless. OLED would be lovely, but for the price, I don't need a touchscreen laptop.

Things that brought me delight in October, 2026:The Cramps, Gravest GravyIf you're a Cramps fan, you'll recognize a lot of the tracks on Gravest Gravy, but you haven't heard them quite so raw and primordial as this. This batch of tracks was slated for release in the 90s, but they got shelved until now--and we are absolutely blessed to be able to hear them in the year 2026. This is purestrain Cramps--rock 'n' roll that still sounds dangerous, a mindset warped by b-movie and trash culture kitsch,…

In the interest of full disclosure; this is a rant that has some racing content, but the main topic does not have a ton to do with IndyCar or motorsports in general. You’ve been warned. Anyone who has read this site for very long, knows that I despise change. In case you didn’t know, my […]

When I came out of my mom’s vagina, they put a cowboy hat on me. – Clint Patterson I picked this song as John Anderson’s sendoff because I used to sing a parody of it called “Weeblin'” to amuse Grace after she declared that as she put on weight she felt like a weeble. The links above the video were provided byFranklin Harris, IncarcerNation (x2), Charles Hill, Mike Masnick, Jesse Walker, and Jessica Pishko, in that order. That Bigfoot film finally proven a hoax. Cops never stop showing what…