Curious With A Camera blog logo. ©2026On September 1st, I started a new blog. It is a photography blog, called “Curious with a Camera.” (https://www.curiouswithacamera.com) I thought it was about time that I mention it here.The new blog is much different than this one. But that is the point. It is meant to be completely different. Where this blog is full of narrative and mostly interesting and useful information, Curious with a Camera has almost none. Just photos that I have made that really…

Why a Rust developer might feel at home in Gleam, and where the BEAM is a different world.

I’m giving away these (physical) books in readable conditions in Bengaluru, India. Please contact me if you want any of them, and can meet me or get them picked up. Fiction# River of Smoke — Amitav Ghosh Sea of Poppies — Amitav Ghosh The Calcutta Chromosome — Amitav Ghosh Less — Andrew Sean Greer Contact — Carl Sagan Half of a Yellow Sun — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Black Hills — Dan Simmons Olympos — Dan Simmons Dance Dance Dance — Haruki Murakami There’s Gunpowder in the Air — Manoranjan…

§ Rabbit rabbit. Happy November. § Halloween was a great success, the baby’s lobster costume was a crowd pleaser. § All of the fruit on our fig tree seems to be ripening all at once. On Friday alone we picked nearly two pounds of them. Getting hit with a sudden windfall of figs is great but it presents a bit of a challenge due to the fruit’s extremely short shelf life. We ended up making a big batch of jam with enough extra to gift some away. § Kali Malone released a new album this week. Her…

When my friends over at Rosemont Market & Bakery asked if I could create a vegetarian side for Thanksgiving, I knew I wanted to create something that was hearty enough to stand on its own and not some sad, obligatory vegetarian dish. And I think I nailed it with my Maple-Miso Roasted Vegetables with Farro! As you should know by now (because I refuse to shut up about it) farro is my all-time favorite grain – the Maine Grains farro provides the perfect nutty flavor and chewy textured base for the…

I hate trick-or-treaters. That sounds mean, I know. It's nothing to do with dealing with the kids. I don't mind them. I love seeing them in their little costumes; it's very cute. If I had the courage to open the door, I'd also be dressed up to greet them. Unfortunately, hearing someone knock on the door is a major trigger for me. I know. It looks silly when put into words, but it's true. Years ago - well over a decade by now - I had a horrible experience with a guy who used to be one of my best…

Cheers to 40 Years! A Birthday Pint (or Two!) Well, it’s nearly time for me to hit the big 4-0! On 10th November, I’ll be celebrating my 40th birthday, and naturally, there are a few pub adventures planned to mark the occasion! A couple of birthday adventures Just before my birthday, I’ll be heading over to Ilkeston and Heanor with a few friends for a day exploring some of the fantastic micropubs and independent pubs around the area. There should be plenty of good beer, a few familiar faces…

I am late. It was already in 2022 that Miriam Suzanne wrote her Cascade Layers Guide for CSS-Tricks. And yet, late 2026 is the first time I give a proper look at CSS layers. Between a few years in upper management, and working on CSS-in-JS codebases, I never really got a good opportunity to pay attention to this relatively recent specification. So over the weekend, I sat down and took a moment to better understand how CSS layers work, and implement them on this website. There was no real need,…

A PHP security alert and a long-overdue WordPress fix I’ve been blogging since 2004. Over that time, my WordPress site has accumulated around 2,500 posts, covering everything from technology and work to cycling, photography and whatever else happened to interest me at the time. But WordPress had become increasingly unreliable. Intermittent HTTP 503 errors were a recurring frustration, and attempts to upgrade PHP seemed to make matters worse. It was one of the reasons I decided to start afresh…

Links and Notes We're bootstrapping a network of twitter-like systems built out of components of the web and nothing more. Every part replaceable. [ ⇦ John's World Wide Wall Display: Life in Links – 70 ] Bloffy “Your blog, your markup. No server to manage.” Write in Markdown and HTML, customize with CSS and JavaScript, and publish on your own domain. [ 📌jimcmcdonald ]

To celebrate the release of my latest book from the British Library, The Golden Age of Classic Crime Quiz Book, I posted a quiz competition. The topic of the quiz was in fact the theme of competitions themselves, in particular competitions related to and part of crime fiction stories. If you would like to see the questions before checking out the answers (although it is now too late to enter the prize competition), then here’s the link to the original post. If you are ready to read the answers,…

This is an oral history of Saturday Night Live by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller. I read the original 2002 edition, not the updated 2014 edition. It was a cheap used-book find, and SNL hasn't been much a part of my life since 2002 anyhow. There's a memorable Lorne Michaels quote near the beginning where he says, in effect, that it's hard to make a performance good and that many things end up being not good. Martin Short makes a similar point in Marty, Life is Short (roughly: "that's show…

1. Google eats the web, finds it’s not very fillingAlphabet fell 12.6% on 29 Oct, wiping out about $500bn, after Google's chief business officer said AI Mode makes less money than traditional search. Reddit — which has been the big winner for search traffic over the past few years — also saw it’s share tank on falling search traffic, and it will now push visitors to log in.The funny thing is that Google spent a decade gradually trying to keep people on its own pages, then built a machine that…

It is increasingly preposterous to produce a countdown of the five most popular posts when the previous month only saw six or seven, but I do have a taste for the absurd. Here's what did the business in October. 1. Evading the Simple Fact 2. The Clear Blue Water Strategy 3. Undercover in Reform 4. John Healey's Little Budget 5. Local Council By-Elections October 2026 Up at October's top is my piece looking at the attacks being made on Zack Polanski and the Green Party in the aftermath of their…

Ypsilon Mountain rises over Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park. The post Snowbound Peak appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

If you came here thinking you would get a post about all the trick-or-treaters that came to our house, that is not the neighborhood we live in now. Will our fixer-upper house have more trick-or-treaters? Perhaps we will see in the coming years; last night we were in Arden, NC.Our NC neighborhood has maybe 2 or 3 families with children, depending on the year. We don't have sidewalks, and many of our driveways are not friendly and welcoming for trick-or-treaters. Most years, we don't even see…

Having a hard time interacting with a baby? Try these: Become an interviewer. Ask for her take on the possibility of an impending WW III. Ask what she thinks about the impact of AI on society. Ask what kind of person she'd like to be when robots take over human jobs. Ask what she expects from her parents. Ask what the secret is behind her chill attitude toward life. Make false promises. Promise the baby you'll pay for a trip around the world. Promise the baby Daddy will be fine even if she…

What's been happeningWow, we're at the penultimate month of the year. I have no idea how the weeks went by so fast. Work-wise, things have been pretty busy. My manager is on vacation, so a lot of the compliance-related work came to me and I've been busy trying to get those done. LiteLLM had a supply chain compromise this week and one of our machine learning jobs was hit by it and thus I was roped into the investigation - including the root cause, the possible damage and what might have been…

Sunday Morning Reading is on hiatus this weekend as we’re a bit exhausted following a night of Halloween tricking and treating with the grandkids. Sunday Morning Reading will be back next week. Thanks for reading. Feel free to subscribe if you want. It’s free. If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. If you’d like more click on the Sunday Morning Reading link in the category column to check…

This week sadly explores how buying online became a nightmare, from deceptive patterns to AI slop. Also, don't miss a fun history guessing game, colorful tufting art, and a book on feminist approaches to type, and my Golden Honey Suckle color.

9731/21650Legotowergate continues to rumble on. Ernie wrote about his "world record" for his homework and we stuck my forged certificate into his course work. Will his duplicity and my lies be rumbled by the teacher. Where will this end? The fear of scandal did not stop us though, as Ernie was a bit upset that his certificate was now Pritt-sticked (or is it Pritt-stuck? Not sure. It's maybe called a stick because it's a stick of glue, not because you stick things with it, so I may have for it…

Clear skies last night, but pretty chilly. ✍️ Reply by email Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:20 Sunday, 1 November 2026

It seems like recent AI boom is having some jitters, which is perhaps not the worst thing in the world. After all, I’m a value-conscious buyer and the AI boom has essentially priced me out of DRAM, SSDs and even hard drives. Some users are even going back to optical media – I myself have burned upwards of 700 discs this year alone. I remember the days when hard drives were “cheap” – my personal-best record is still a brand-new 18TB Seagate IronWolf Pro for AU$271.58 in 2023 for a record-price…

There’s possibly nothing more painful than wanting something you already have.

If you ask most people they’ll tell you that pubs called The Green Man are named after a pagan deity and are vestiges of an Old Religion. Well, probably not, it turns out. We’ll admit that if you’d asked us about this a month or two ago, we’d have said the same thing, albeit with a question mark or two. When we’ve mentioned The Green Man in passing over the years, we have taken note of pushback from Phil Edwards in particular, who has said things like… You still hear a lot about The Whole Pagan…

31 October 2026 in Melbourne, supported by Blue Communications and Amazon.We first saw Exek at the Croxton Block Party and that was enough to make us want to see them again, this time at the Grace Darling Hotel on Smith Street. I found out about this show via Ask A Punk Melbourne so thank you to whoever runs that.Getting the layout of a pub right seems to be a tricky challenge at which many have failed. I don't quite understand why some feel wrong, but they do. The Grace Darling, however,…

Pasty flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license Today’s TDC says Everyone has some random facts sitting orotund in the long term storage of their mind. Today is the day to dust one off one of those facts and share. Yesterday I made Cornish pasties – a vegetarian version, of course. The traditional recipe would be potato, turnip and onion with beef skirt. For my version I substitute cheese for the meat – a Cornish cheddar, of course. So here’s my…

These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week. 🔖 Imagery Topo Base Map Retirement The United States Geological Survey’s (USGS) National Geospatial Program (NGP) will retire the USGS Imagery Topo Base Map that combines aerial imagery with topographic map features like roads, place names, and contour lines into a single map view. It has been a popular resource for users who want to view topographic details on top of real-world imagery. data delete gov maps 🔖 FOSDEM 2027 Devroom:…

Yesterday, I started working on a new project called “Postmarked” (working title). It’s a small writing project inspired by sending postcards. Claude is helping with the build and Midjourney with the art, but the writing, the layouts, and the direction are mine. The idea is a bunch of postcards, drafted in the moment from whatever I notice or feel. My progress so far: On the reading front, I made zero progress on the poetry book. I did start Batman: Year One this morning, though, and am in love…

Living in Valencia 5+ years and more than that in other warm countries, I have had or heard of my share of bug/vermin problems. If you don't like reading long posts or guides, skip this one! I did a bunch of research online, so you don't have to. I quote some professional exterminators. I'm not a dirty person that leaves food lying around and I am not talking shit about Valencia either. In my experience, almost any city anywhere, with 300 days of sun a year and quite some humidity has the same…