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The British (original) version of anthropomorphic steam train drama for children, "Thomas The Tank Engine" was originally narrated by Beatles' drummer Ringo Starr. Ringo was replaced after a few seasons by soundalike Michael Angelis who was married to Corrie's Gail Platt (the lovely Helen Worth). This I already knew, tbh. But what's news to me is Michael's brother, Paul, was the voice of Ringo Starr in the Beatles' animation for "The Yellow Submarine" bringing the whole thing full circle. Or…

Orginal post: 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Johann Dirk "Diederich" Nölken, son of Johann Henrich and Maria Elisabeth (Höllmann) Nölken, was born in Glandorf 30 March 18141 and died there 5 January 1873.2 He married there 13 July 1837, Maria Catharina Lüchtefeld,3 daughter of Johann Heinrich and Maria Catharina (Buller) Lüchtefeld. She was born in Bad Laer 15 March 18114 and died in Glandorf 5 February 1868.5 They resided in the village of Schwege within the municipality of Glandorf. Dirk was called…

Make it not so! www.theguardian.com/culture/2026…— Andy Clarke (@allthatmalarkey.bsky.social) 2026-10-29T20:08:26.870Z I was saddened to learn that Patrick Stewart had passed away four days ago. I was surprised as I am sure many people were. I was not aware that he was sick or had the health conditions that were disclosed. Walter Koenig, who played Chekov in the original series, had passed away the week before. I loved Patrick’s portrayal of Captain Jean Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next…

I’m slacking somewhat in my quest to break my record of visiting as many “unique” pubs as possible, especially after hitting the magic 100 at the middle of last month. Some might accuse me of “resting on my laurels”, although in self-defence, I’ve had several other distractions that I’ve had to attach more importance to. The first of these is my impending retirement which, after 50 years of being a wage slave, can’t come quick enough. I mentioned previously how, after a few, ill-conceived…

The old news.gmane.io server was getting a bit long in the tooth, so I’ve spent the last few days transferring the spool to a new, spiffier server. The server has been down most of the day while I did the final setup, but everything should now be back up again — both the Gmane parts (the NNTP mailing list archive) and the Gwene parts (the RSS to NNTP gateway). What made this more urgent than usual is, of course, the current wave of sploits — I’ve sorta kinda kept the old server updated in user…

Happy November! Here are a few photos from my phone from the last month with neither rhyme nor reason to the theme. Thanks for reading this post via RSS! Let me know your thoughts by sending me an email: rss@thomasrigby.com.

Mailshake has terminated my employment after 8+ years. In that time, I... Started as engineer #3 Moved into management thanks to an awesome CTO Ran a 10-person team across backend, frontend, QA, and support Scaled down to 2 engineers while maintaining productivity Reduced annual AWS spend by ~70% over 3 years Was always on-call and handled support escalations Ran technical due diligence on 4 acquisition targets (2 closed) Migrated and maintained acquired products post-close Built agentic…

This is like a Superbowl ad back when Superbowl ads were good, and it’s aimed squarely at Millennials. A word on Omarchy (マリウス.com) A good breakdown on why Omarchy is has no there there. Omarchy is a meme in the linux community right now. Also, sick unicode hostname. Kiwibank is desperately trying to stop people saying they want to fuck its sheep mascot (thespinoff.co.nz) Meanwhile in New Zealand. See also this followup coverage. Weird Guys (drewdevault.com) For one’s information. Re: Return of…

Last week, during my friend group’s weekly hour-long Big Walk session, we stumbled on a very special puzzle room. It took place in a little house, perched near the edge of a cliff, with windows overlooking a little beach. It’s clean, modern and playful in its Toy-Construction-Set-like aesthetic, and sparsely decorated. There’s some chairs, a little table, and a giant LED clock screen displaying “00:00” in an ominous red colour. And the puzzle in that room felt like the purest distillation of…

This Cybersecurity Awareness Month, I made seven Python releases, when two were originally planned for October. Altogether, we made 16 Python releases, when five were originally planned. Of the extra releases, only 3.15.0rc3 was not a security release. The releases # 3.16.0a1 3.15.2 3.15.1 3.15.0 3.15.0rc3 3.14.10 3.14.9 3.14.8 3.13.18 3.13.17 3.13.16 3.12.16 3.12.15 3.11.18 3.11.17 3.10.22 Announcements # 1 October: Python 3.10.22, 3.11.17, 3.12.15, 3.13.16 and 3.14.8 are now available! 2…

I wrote several posts on poles and polars a few days ago. First, I wrote about the dual of a spherical triangle, called the polar triangle. Then I wrote about poles and polars in plane geometry and briefly mentioned the extension to projective geometry. Poles and polars are a little awkward in the plane because you have to pay attention to special cases. Poles and polars are relative to a conic section, and are defined/computed differently depending on whether you’re taking the dual with…

I recently finished Time: From Earth Rotation to Atomic Physics (Internet Archive), an exceptionally nerdy book. There’s a lot (probably most of it) I didn’t understand (turns out Earth’s rotation and other motion is hella complicated!), but it’s satisfying just to know that there’s so much knowledge out there. Since today is change-the-clocks day here in the US, I wanted to share a couple fun facts that stood out to me. Sometimes, assumptions need checking In 1695, Edmund Halley (of comet…

Another spaceship added to the fleet. I’d write more about this one, but ever since the missus had her surgery on Wednesday I’m just so swamped with the additional workload at home. I’m glad to finally have this thing done though, and I’m looking forward to getting started on the next one.Hope you like it!As always the full resolution image is available on my Ko-Fi page.

Met up early with Graham and Maran to do our regular monthly riverfly check on the Frome site. The levels are still accessible, although it’s quite a bit higher than it has been recently. I’ve noted in previous months recently that Mayfly are still appearing , and today was no exception with 15 spotted. Not a large number of species, but most of them had a score of 2, which meant we were seeing relatively healthy numbers of each one. Overall the score was 8, which is pretty good for this site.

(Throughout this post I will assume that the recent results by OpenAI and Anthropic contain correct proofs of what they claim.)I wrote the following about 2 years ago but did not post it. It's dated, but that's the point.BEGIN DOCUMENT FROM TWO YEARS AGOWhy do we think \(P\ne NP\)?a) Lots of people have worked on SAT and other NP-complete problems, without getting them in P. This is not mathematical evidence but it is worth noting.b) If SAT is in P then {\it all } problems in NP are in P. This…

#SilentSunday

In the past, authorities have authorized censorship on the basis of claims of substantial chances of social disruption or collapse if people were free to hear about religious heresy, alternate ideologies, sexually permissive art, losses in ongoing wars, looming disasters, and pandemic details. Quite often, those who pushed for such censorship benefited from it in ways well beyond the prevention of social collapse.Some say that the US govt has long known of strong evidence that some UFOs/UAPs…

26th October - 1st November #blessed by a postcard perfect Autumn day: crisp and clear, not too cold, the sunrise gold competing with the moonlight silver at dawn. It's 0640 and the moon is still winning. I got my annual flu jab like a good citizen. The next morning awoke to thick fog befitting of the season; the vibrant leaves given a soft and milky backdrop to really show off their glorious fiery hues. I took my film camera with me on my morning walk to run down a roll and lamented it was…

Now that Hallowe’en is out of the way, and we’re into November, the next scheduled break is in seven weeks time, for Christmas. The mid-term break fell in such a way that the 12 weeks of teaching split 5-7 instead of the tidier 6-6, which means that we have quite a long run-in. Lectures finish on Friday 18th December 2026. I don’t have any lectures on that day, actually, nor on the day before. I do have a tutorial on Friday 18th but I don’t imagine many students will turn up. I think I’ll try…

I’ve been through so many books over the past few months, I need to review them all. This is...

I’ve been through so many books over the past few months, I need to review them all. This is the most recent addition to my collection, published back in 2011. It’s new to ME! The last couple of months have been difficult for reasons I won’t go into. I decided Friday that I needed something light and fluffy to lift my mood. I had just finished a book that left me feeling particularly bereft (I’ll review once I eventually finish the series), and needed something to make me feel better. One of my…

Things did not go well for the Australian men’s cricket team over the weekend, in South Africa. They lost the third test, played in Cape Town, by one-hundred-and-seventy-six runs, handing South Africa the three match series, two games to one. I sat down to watch one session, and looked on in disbelief as Simon Harmer, a South African spin bowler, tore through the Australian batting line up. Spin bowling is a method of delivery that is slower than pace or fast bowling, but can be far more…

Cybersecurity recommendations during The Hackening. In 2023 I guessed that AI would help attackers before it helped defenders, and that their lead would last three to five years. We're inside that window now. Red will move much faster than blue on this. Attackers can be sloppy and fast, and defenders have to be a lot slower and more careful. Unsupervised Learning NO. 417 (January 2024)As I wrote in Attacker vs. Defender AI Advantage, attackers can go from learning something to using it in…

The shiny new tech syndrome makes us focus on always wanting to work with the latest greatest AI models, almost by default. And switching away from one of those to something else is then tied to the question if it is as good or better than the frontier model you already use. I know companies who switch between various models based on task considerations, and use a router of some sort in between to seamlessly switch, but it will still be switching between frontier models. For me some of my use…

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I’ve been blocking new posts to this blog because I want to do entries for my many travels this year first, but I can’t find the time. Here I aim to get back to blogging… The dahlias are still in bloom at Britzer Garten︎. In a fourth visit to see Dahlia Fire this fall (see the 1st, 2nd, 3rd times on my micro blog), the theme of my pictures is autumn juxtaposition – the surrounding trees framed the flower beds in yellow, green, and orange. Even though it was cloudy grey, the colors were glowing.…

• 3-star hikes • 2 to 4 mile options • Easy | Gain 70 to 440 feet • Concord, MA | MetroWest Region . During his two-year stay at Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau immersed himself in simple living and the close observation of nature. His reflections on living in the area culminated in his writing of 'Walden', now a celebrated work of American literature. Today, the glacial kettle pond where his small cabin once stood is preserved within the Walden Pond State Reservation, leaving visitors to…

Dedicated to producing plays with a ‘Victorian’ flavour – adaptations of detective and horror literature that have a touch of the macabre – Don’t Go Into The Cellar theatre company’s latest show focuses on ‘folk horror’. Performed by writer/creator Jonathan Goodwin and dressed in the pre-20th century attire, the character of McLaird divulges to the audience three tales that deftly peel back the layers of the modern, rationalist world to reveal the primal fears that still reside in the…

Home Network Update I spent the day changing how my home network works. Or rather, how I make services on my home network available when I'm on the go. I run two servers at home. My NAS, which uses Docker Compose to provide a bunch of useful tools, mostly for internal use, and a mini server that runs my Home Assistant setup. For the last few years, I exposed Home Assistant directly to the Internet using a port forward on my FritzBox router and a DuckDNS dynamic DNS setup. If I needed access to…