29 years ago today I added a news page to my website. Four years ago I wrote that I wasn’t too proud of this blog anymore. This year feels different: I’ve already published more than in either of the last two years, and almost four times as many longer pieces. Here’s to year 30. 🍻

It's pretty hilarious, or shall I say ridiculous, that the iOS 27 update is modest enough to demand nothing less than 20GB of disk space if you wanted to download it to your phone. May I bring to mind, dear Tim Apple and friends, that you once had iPhones in your product line that had a total of whopping 64GB in disk space (and users who still own phones such as these? Exactly right: yours, truly). According to ongoing calculations, 20GB is a little less than a third of that. To say the least,…

As a child, I watched the sky through leaves. My gaze intently on the glimmer surrounding these leaves, the sky a backdrop to the words I could not hear. I know now, after reading about it often, that my experience is not a unique one —perhaps now it is as children spend less time in nature. There was life in those leaves, I was witness to their existence. I went on a walk in nature with my family, us and the quietness of trees. I noticed how much I yearned for the smell of the rotting leaves,…

Cobra Records was founded in August 1956 by Elias P. Toscano (1924-1967) and Howard Bedno (1919-2006) was an independent record label that operated in Chicago from 1956 to 1959 and launched the careers of Chicago blues artists Otis Rush, Magic Sam and Buddy Guy, a new generation who pioneered the West Side Sound.The most comprehensive Cobra/Artistic reissue package to date (it does not include alternate takes, but it throws in both sides of 8 Abcos for good measure) appeared in Japan in 2008:…

I've recently bought the third expansion for Faraway.

1997 Psygnosis Platforms: PC, Sony PlayStation Special Forces was an ambitious military action and strategy game proposed by Psygnosis Stroud in 1997, with versions planned for PC and Sony PlayStation. Although the game was intended for release during early 1999, it seemingly disappeared without trace, and we’re currently unsure whether it progressed beyond the initial planning stages. The game has come to our attention thanks to Neil Thomas from The Retro Collective, who very kindly got in…

In 2011 I was really into writing flash fiction. I submitted a few of these very short stories to online publishing sites, and some of them even got accepted and published! Here is one that came about because of my love of the TV reality series Survivor, and an idea I got many years before: a landscape that changed with the rising and setting of the sun. The late Weirdyear flash fiction site posted this story on June 24th of that year. Since they are now deceased, I am taking the liberty of…

I’ve been trying to say the word ‘weird’ a little less. It’s a holdover from my small town days when anything different was to be kept at arms’ length. I would rather stop disparaging things I don’t quite understand, so when I overheard my son use a modern-day synonym for ‘weird’, it struck a better chord. “I dunno, is it niche that I do that?” he asked his girlfriend. That’ll do just fine, I thought. Language is in constant flux, sometimes changing in response to other languages it encounters,…

I've added custom themes to my favorite macOS apps to make them look more mine.

A great harvest of player advice this week! 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. AMONG CATS AND BOOKS posts Bloggies '27 - Enter the Arena Zedeck Siew's Writing Hours shares Make Good Guys Simple, Make Bad Guys Sympathetic Traverse Fantasy shares Combat Difficulty Again Troy Press posts Player Principles A shrike for my dreams writes Real Player's…

Agentic engineering changed how I build software, and today I’m launching the course I wrote about it: AI Fundamentals. I use agentic engineering and agentic coding for the same shift: you write less code yourself, and spend more time describing outcomes, reviewing changes, and improving the system around your agents. The course has been on … → The post Agentic engineering: why I built the AI Fundamentals course appeared first on SwiftLee.

There is something undeniably romantic about casting a message in a bottle into the ocean. After all, what could be more enchanting than surrendering a personal secret to the tides, with nothing but the hope that it might one day wash ashore and find its way into a stranger's hands?Tell the Sky takes this idea to the skies. However with this interactive map, instead of throwing a bottle into the ocean, you write a message on a glowing virtual lantern and release it into the wind. Carried by…

Remember when Apple boasted that people working at Apple retail stores "receive no sales commissions and have no sales quotas"? In an article by Yukari Iwatani Kane and Ian Sherr of the Wall Street Journal, as referenced by Steve Denning in Forbes: "You were never trying to close a sale. It was about finding solutions for a customer and finding their pain points," said David Ambrose, 26 years old, who worked at an Apple store in Arlington, Va., until 2007. And then we have this report from Joe…

November 9, 2026 Our heroine who lives in mostly brown! I know this feels sort of dark and limited to some of you, but I think the range of possibilities available to her with her limited palette is fascinating… Her painting? So soft, muted and calming: At the end of October, our heroine had a lot of clothes! At least it feels like a lot to me, when I’m trying to arrange them all on one or two pages… She also has a pretty comfortable assortment of accessories – especially scarves! But if you’re…

Who would have thought it? Good mate Simon and I, two perfectly ordinary anglers of modest means, (well I say that, Simon earns a small fortune), questionable dress sense and even more questionable fishing ability, were about to find ourselves fishing behind enemy lines. Not literally, of course, although given the price of the property surrounding us, I wouldn't have been surprised to find armed security guards patrolling the riverbank asking to see our fishing licences, proof of income and…

I believe most people working with defence news have a more or less well-formulated bucket-list of things that would be cool to get to see up close. I certainly have one, and that is one which never really included nuclear-powered submarines. Not that I didn’t thinking seeing one up close wouldn’t be cool, but they are rare and usually among the most closely guarded platforms of any state lucky (and rich) enough to operate one. With just some 60 western SSNs in total – of which the US Navy is…

It’s 1822 in the village of Brooklyn, a recently carved out enclave on the high bluffs overlooking the East River in the Kings County town also known as Brooklyn. Roughly 5,000 souls reside in this village, living and working amid a tidy network of streets mostly named for earlier landowners and new developers (like Jacob and John Middagh Hicks) and connected to Manhattan since 1814 by steam-powered ferries. One of the residents, a cooper named John Rogers, decided to construct a new building…

Athlone's Dead Centre Brewing remains a jewel in the national brewery treasury, the Shannonside tap room a gloriously bright and jolly place when the weather is good, which it was when I visited recently. I don't get here often enough to tell you how frequently the beers turn over, but while there was a modest selection of new-to-me offerings on the day, the flagship pale ale, Marooned, was the best beer there, that I tried.I had started the afternoon with Silly Giggles, an India pale lager,…

Next up in the countdown, another two-voter: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac (Slave Labor Graphics, 1995 – 1997) So let me tell you about this comic, and how it did for us at my former place of employment. Jhonen Vasquez’s JTHM series ran for only seven issues (plus some spin-offs, more on those in a moment), but the individual issues were kept in print for years and years. It’s kind of like the Absolute Batman of its day! But we kept all seven issues (and spin-offs…gettin’ to ’em, hold your…

It's STUFF FROM THE BOX time! Perhaps you read about it in "Colliers" or "Good Housekeeping"? Or at least "Reader's Digest". It's highlights some kooky collections of vintage STUFF. Usually from a box. But today we have some contributions from GDB pal Steve Stuart, AKA Nanook (which is the name I will use henceforth). You know him, you love him. Nanook generously sent along some photos of two treasures, along with some fun info to give some useful context. Hooray! Let's go:Evidently this…

The Night of the Hunter (1955)

There are a number of authors I consider long-term favourites and whose work I’ve pretty much read everything of; and although I do like to do re-reads, I also keep an eye on what’s available in case something new turns up. This is particularly the case for translated works, and I’ve been delighted, for example, by the recent new English-language version of books by Mishima. Another author I love is Hermann Hesse, and when I had a rummage through my collection recently, I realised that I was…

I’m fascinated by the ethics of gossip. For something so commonplace and natural, people rarely question or discuss the morality of talking about those who aren’t present. I’ve written about the Buddhist view of gossip: it is considered a violation of ‘Right Speech’, the principle of speaking without causing harm to oneself or others. Gossip… The post On Gossip and the Ethics of Exclusion appeared first on Sam Woolfe.

In choosing themes for German Literature Month, Caroline and I were looking for writers with anniversaries in 2026, and when I saw that this year marked one hundred years since the birth of Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann, it seemed only fitting to choose her as one of our two featured authors for the event. My selection this time around is a collection of stories, and as it turns out, I’m not the only one who had Bachmann on their radar – as you’ll see at the end of my post, there’s…

Railway time, clock timeThe industrial revolution, it’s often said, brought about a new perception of time for vast swathes of the population. It was no longer good enough to base one’s day on the rising and setting of the sun, as farmers and their workers did. Industrial workers had to turn up when the factory gates opened in the morning, and there were severe penalties for lateness. Clock time, accurate to the minute, became essential. The same was true for the railways, although here there…

In the previous article , we made Go code faster by changing how it computes. SIMD lets one CPU instruction work on several values at once, and the simd/archsimd and simd packages give Go access to it. Our dot product ran about 9 times faster, but the code got a lot harder to read. At the end, I promised another route to speed, one where you don’t rewrite anything. That route is Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO). You record a CPU profile of where your program spends its time and give it back to…

The work is the transcript. Read here.

No, these are not J70s! This trio of small 0-4-0 trams are relatively straight forward conversions of the Rapido Y7 with 3D printed bodies and added detail, finished in three periods. They are, also, the start of a small collection of equipment I’m working on for a customer and it’s lovely to see them here today…The prints have been modified to lift this finish. The integral crude cowcatcher have been removed and replaced with an Rapido spare. Extra detail like handrails, lamp irons and…

Hari ini saya memasang halaman micro ini untuk tempat menulis notes pendek yang mungkin bakal sering ditulis dibandingkan halaman ‘posts’. Berikutnya mungkin akan di bagikan juga di utas media sosial saya entah itu bluesky atau threads.

What’s your favorite new track released this week? All hail the mighty Shazam! I listen BBC Radio 6Music (via my own little app) while I work. It’s a great station, with a mix of music past and present. Safe to say that virtually all of my new music finds come through this station. Shout out to Pitchfork and the Crucial Tracks Blog as well! With so much new music it can almost feel like a chore to keep on top of it, and I’ll admit I’ve sort of given up trying to. Happenstance is a much more…