Updated my post on tools for discovering the IndieWeb to include Bubbles, which I’ve been enjoying a lot recently.

# Introduction I wanted a simple way to try local AI on my computer when I need to experiment, both a LLM to chat with (with web search and image recognition) and a model to generate or modify images. Most guides require installing a lot of things and choosing models among thousands of files, so I made a small project doing it for me. => https://git.coopix.eu/public/braindead-local-intelligence braindead-local-intelligence project page The name is a bad pun, "braindead" because you just start…

This Halloween was a blur. On top of my aggressive posting schedule, I was working a lot, too.So let's see what I accomplished this past month.October Horror Movie Marathon My theme this month was "Small town horror," focusing on movies between 1985 and 1986. I expanded it to 1983 to 1987 to cover my high school years, and again to cover 1980 to 1989. The theme I discovered was "Horror Comes Home." I dealt with movies where the horror was largely local. You no longer went to some strange land…

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades. Kirby games are mostly light and friendly, but need antagonists. The first game had the mischievous and charismatic King Dedede, but after that it’s mostly been a long line of cosmic horrors: the Nightmare, Dark Matter, O² and others. Even the cute antagonists, like Magalor and Marx, have their scary sides. Probably the Kirby antagonist though, of all of them, is a half cute/half…

Free transit may not be a great strategy for a transit agency long-term, but it's definitely a good thing to let people get where they need to go on important days.Election day is just such a day. So I'm glad that the QCA transit agencies are all offering free rides on that day.It's a very good thing that anyone can get to the polls--to the extent, of course, that any transit serves their polling place.And if someone is going to go, the less that gets in their way the better, which is why I…

Observing and Listening in BusinessApplied qualitative research methods are terribly underrated and underrepresented. One obvious domain is business. Sam Walton is famous for having said that he visited more of his major competitor’s stores than any of their managers. I love the story where he went to see some small-chain competitor’s store together with some of his senior management and afterwards they all trash-talked about how badly set-up it was. Sam Walton’s point of view? ‘Yes, but did…

I'm conscious that some of you are getting this as an email - it's a weekly digest of blog posts sent via RSS to buttondown and then emailed automatically to you.But it's not a great experience because there are always broken images at the bottom and it's not formatted especially well. It's just always been too fiddly to fix. I still haven't worked that out, to be honest, but I wanted to let you know that you have options. Ghost (the blog platform) allows you to sign up to receive blog posts…

Last weekend was a full moon, the Hunter’s Moon. Bright enough to take note, both at its fullest and for several days later. There were storms too, wind hurling trees and water. Homes without power and more of Brighton’s West Pier gone. When I was a teenager we used to have parties on the beach opposite the West Pier. A friend took photographs inside it for his degree show final project – even then, it was a dangerous mission (and illegal). Now there is no inside, and it’s gone from a full…

However, there is good reason to fight those tendencies. Tokens don’t appear to be getting cheaper anytime soon. Continually encountering friction, learning, and gaining experience will at the very least give you the advantage in a future if tokens are no longer subsidized to you. And if you do have unlimited reign of tokens, that gained experience gives you the power to come up with better solutions, introduce friction, and fight slop-level outcomes. So it may be worth it to take a step back…

Installing Jugulans on OS X Mavericks I'm still having fun with OS X Mavericks on an old mid 2013 MacBook Air. This time I wanted to install Jugulans on it. Jugulans Jugulans is a text mode mind map application. Use Jugulans to support your thinking by creating mind maps. Jugulans is a text mode application, it works in a terminal window. The key bindings consists of only single key commands. It works fast, intuitive and stays out of your way. Chicken Scheme Jubulans is build in Chicken Scheme.…

Talking about desire is one thing; living through its intensity is another. It blinds you to reason. It numbs you to everything else. You do not notice how your body responds under the spell of desire. Spell is the most accurate word, because that is exactly how it feels when you are in it. You do not grasp its effect until you see it in someone else. Not all desires are bad, though. Some are necessary to carry you through the monotony of life: wanting a partner, wanting to do well for…

I used to base my self-worth on my job. Anchoring my life to a job. To a person. To a place. To an anything. But as I realised human beings are fucking untrustworthy (tbh I don't blame them) when it comes to their own interests, I start looking inwards. It's not the usual "Am I a better self than who I was last year?" But more like, yeah it's ok if the choices you make are unpopular. It's okay if you're the only person who understand your own path. Basing myself on my own happiness is the thing…

Sweetgum leaf at Frick Park, 31 Oct 2026 (photo by Kate St. John) 1 November 2026 Beautiful fall color this week at Frick (above) and Schenley Parks (below). Bright yellow: Bottlebrush buckeyes, Schenley Park, 30 Oct 2026 (photo by Kate St. John) It was also gorgeous in Centre County where we took a getaway vacation in Bellefonte. We thoroughly enjoyed our stay at the beautifully renovated historic flour mill, Gamble Mill, and are impressed with how walkable Bellefonte is, especially the…

Kessel took a U-turn back on the main road to real jazz, Hollywood be damned. [row-start] [half] [/half] [half] Personnel Barney Kessel (guitar), Bobby Hutcherson (vibraphone), Chuck Domenica (bass), Elvin Jones (drums) Recorded on February 19, 1969 at Contemporary Records Studio, Los Angeles Released as Contemporary M3618 in 1969 Track listing Side A: Moving Up / Blue Grass / This Guy’s In Love With You / Side B: Blues Up, Down & All Around / The Sound Of Silence / Two Note Samba [/half]…

How was the month? It was okay. Honestly really felt like I didn't do much this month, not with school nor with TIR. I did restart the conlang, though, and I hope it doesn't go to shit this time! Also I started playing Minecraft. Had been playing it since last month but I forgot to mention LOL. I'm building a commie-block, and I want the ceiling of every floor to be glowstone. This means at least 4-5 stacks of glowstone every story. So I'm just toiling in the Nether. Very funny. I signed the…

It sure seems like we are, and are likely to continue to be, in the messy middle of the AI written / not debate. The only path is to stay true to yourself, no matter which side you’d prefer to be.

I used to think that I needed to share every opinion that I had with the people around me. But the years have gone by and I have learnt that sometimes people really don't want to hear it. There is a reason why there is a saying "shoot the messenger". No one wants to hear things they can't accept about themselves, unfortunately. And if you are the motherfucker who decides that your life is too peaceful and wants to bring it up? Too bad you are fucked. This came to mind because a few weeks ago…

October was certainly a month. Full disclosure, I feel like warm garbage today and I really don't want to be looking at my laptop screen right now. Something something suffering for your art. I continued shooting with the incredible Hasselblad X2D-II 100C this month. I've used it a lot and I love it. I've actually found that, although I started out with the 65x24 aspect ratio, I'm finding I prefer the 6x7 (stop it) aspect ratio for more general use. I mean, it makes sense - the panoramic aspect…

今週って忙しかったけど、やっと終わった！良かった！ For two big pieces of work I am doing, my summary is the same: Two steps forward, one half step back and a step to the side. Progress is progress I guess. Cocktails were wonderful and we spoke openly about some personal things I think two years ago I could not. But the one-shot cocktails were the star of the show: One was an old fashioned but somehow grape flavoured?? and another was a peaty pumpkin spice latte. No, really. Kanda okonomiyaki with the boys in blue were…

To protect against link rot and disappearing content, I save local copies of web pages I like into my web archive. Ideally, this archive is completely self-contained. I want a local copy of each page’s HTML and all the assets it depends on (CSS, images, scripts, and so on). I don’t want my archived pages fetching resources from the original website, which could disappear at any time. Initially, I was verifying self-containedness by hand. I’d open each saved page in a web browser, and check the…

Here’s some comics I’ve read over the past couple weeks. You don’t see Chinese comics much, so I got this book by Yi Yang… And I have to say that I quite like the line — it’s kinda scratchy in an 80s US indie way (but then also very Japanese-like at the same time). And I can see what they’re going for here, with all the chaos and stuff in the storytelling, but I just found reading it to be exhausting. So I ditched it after reading about a third of the book. I’ve been buying these DC Finest…

There are some fishing trips where everything falls beautifully into place. The weather behaves itself, the sea resembles a large ornamental pond and the fish queue up politely to inspect your bait. And then there are trips to Westward Ho! in October half-term, where Mother Nature appears to have taken a personal dislike to you and the sea looks like it's auditioning for a disaster movie.This particular expedition was brought to us courtesy of Storm Austen, who clearly hadn't received the memo…

📷 288/365 - Get your bike.

A couple of years ago I wrote about “my proudest development moment“, where I triumphed over a bullying manager. Well, many years later, but at the same company, my second best development moment occurred. But, equally, why I regretted it – it’s a warning for us all! But, first, context is needed. Lots of context. Buckle up. What my role was At this point in time I worked in an EPoS (Electronic Point of Sale) Applications Development team. Basically, we looked after the company’s till software…

One of the evils of American electoral politics is the failure to speak plainly. By this I do not mean outright lying. We almost all agree that is bad and, generally speaking, politicians try to avoid it. (Generally speaking.) In order to avoid outright lies, politicians take the advice of consultants and marketers, experts in the art of never quite answering any question and twisting facts in a way that benefits them. This is weasel talk, and what I mean by the failure to speak plainly. This…

Roger Livesey in A Matter of Life and Death (1946) Vitals Roger Livesey as Dr. Frank Reeves, small-town neurologist England, Spring 1945 Film: A Matter of Life and Death Release Date: November 1, 1946 Directed by: Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger Costume Designer: Hein Heckroth WARNING! Spoilers ahead! Background Powell and Pressburger’s Technicolor triumph A Matter of Life and Death premiered eighty years ago on November 1, 1946. It begins during World War II’s final days over Europe,…

I recently read Ava’s post about AI and loneliness, an article from a couple of years ago that raises concerns about companies making money from emotional attachment. There is plenty in it worth considering, especially when it comes to privacy, manipulation, and what happens when something personally meaningful depends on a company continuing to provide it. What I have trouble with is the picture of the person using it. As the article progresses, the user increasingly seems to be someone…

So, before getting to the 99th volume of Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed, some fantastic news for those who have been reading reviews of this series on various blog various blogs, but have been hesitant to pick it up – mainly due to the growing size of the series. I can understand why not everyone wants to start on a new series with a backlog of nearly 100 volumes. Next year, Viz is going to re-release Case Closed in 3-in-1 volumes under its original title of Detective Conan with the names of the…

It's the most wonderful time of the year, cake lovers: that blessedly spooky season when we can shop for discounted Halloween and Christmas decorations all at the same time.I know, Halloween was technically yesterday, but we can still glam it up with spooky sweet wedding cakes! Like this gorgeous Gothic number: [By ArchiCAKEture in Bulgaria]Look closely; two of those "rubies" are really a vampire love bite! Or, if you prefer a partner who keeps you in stitches: (By Cakes By Summer in…