AI in writing isn’t a threat because readers can usually spot it. Even with AI, your unique voice still shines through the polished grammar. The final result really just depends on your input. While many online still prefer overly fancy writing, authentic human expression is usually easy to...

Alfred Hitchcock: A Brief Life by Peter Ackroyd Short biography covers the basics without going into excessive detail but covers the highlights. Worth a read to get the general picture of his life 4/5 The Platinum Age of Television: From I Love Lucy to the Walking Dead, How TV Became Terrific by David Bianculli Despite it’s title it traces the evolution and keys shows in each genre towards 1999 – 2016 era (The Sopranos to when the book released). Interesting and wide-ranging although US and…

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved number searching and binary manipulation. (Note that this ends today.)

A very long article about how I built Bob, an AI executive assistant with Claude Code.

I find myself following familiar roads, retracing a well worn path back to Chirk on this most unholy of evenings…The streets are awash with parents and little children heading home and teenagers heading out, the most peculiar of haunting hours as the world forgets the real meaning behind the original pagan ceremonies of old and embraces capitalism fuelled consumerism. Now I’m neither religious or spooked but it strikes me as peculiar as I’m driving these streets in search of a treat of my own……

A Maunsell N1 Class 2-6-0 brings a Meldon Ballast train past Fisherton Sarum. The Drummond M7 class No. 41 is collecting its stock from the carriage siding. My N1 class has been converted from a Bachmann N Class for details see my Talking Stock #12 post here…

What’s a song where the remix, demo, or live version is better than the album version? I’m gonna start by discounting live music as I’m such a huge fan of live music that, by default, all live versions are better than the originals. Although I’d maybe exclude New Order because, ye gads, Bernard Sumner CANNOT sing live (as evidenced at Glastonbury many years ago when I ended up heading elsewhere, so so bad). I’ll pass on demos too as I’ve not heard all that many and certainly none that have…

Hello JST. Zero gyms, because I was in Tokyo. 🇯🇵 I left from Heathrow on Monday morning and arrived at Haneda on Tuesday morning. The jet lag hit me hard for the first day or so, then gradually eased off and I felt more human again. So let’s focus on the positives. I spent the week wandering around, looking at things and eating. I was obviously way out of my element but fortunately vegan food was always easy to find and uniformly delicious so I was content. Same goes for the coffee. It’s a…

“Where you at?” That’s what i want to ask you for this month’s IndieWeb Carnival. It’s also the title of “a self-scoring test on basic environmental perception of place” that opened the Winter ’81 issue of CoEvolution Quarterly, a small publication that was born out of the Whole Earth Catalog. The quiz’s twenty questions, compiled by Leonard Charles, Jim Dodge, Lynn Milliman and Victoria Stockley, are as follows: Trace the water you drink from precipitation to tap. How many days till the moon…

Last time I worked out the comms half of my whale project - 900 MHz ISM radio to get the audio across the Bay of Banderas, no satellite, no cloud. But comms is only half. Something on the water still has to decide what’s worth sending. That’s the brain. And it turns out my day job already built it.

The paper that started all of this is called “Attention Is All You Need.” That’s the 2017 Google paper that gave us the transformer, which gave us GPT, which gave us Claude Code, which gave us the glorious mess I’m about to confess to. And the joke that keeps rattling around in my head is this: the thing that makes the models work is attention. And the thing I’m fresh out of is attention. Mine. The human kind.

Something to read on the trainThe story is quite well known. William Henry Smith took over the business selling newspapers that had been founded by his parents, Henry Walton Smith and his wife Anna. William Henry not only gave the business its long-standing name, W. H. Smith, but also took advantage of the railway boom of the 1840s by doing a series of deals with railway companies to establish news-stands on station platforms all over the country. An increasing number of branches on Britain’s…

One week at number one on 20th August 1988Originally, I was tempted to tie this together with the last entry (“Superfly Guy”) for the simple reason that it underlines the point I was making about the different approaches to music for the dancefloor. You can either stick doggedly to a groove where the lyrics are a pure afterthought, mere chanted exhortations, or offer a much more coherent, emotional story, guided more by pop song structures (“I Will Survive”). Otis Clay’s original version of…

The move is happening soon! I’m packing all the stuff. It is, predictably, taking a lot of effort. Fortunately, I don’t have too much stuff to get rid of, and the move is within the same city, so it should be much less painful than the move from Berlin. It feels like I am starting from scratch. I don’t have a moving checklist; I’m taking things as they come. My week­notes will be, predictably, considerably terser than usual. Quick bits Rest in peace, mon capitaine. I’m on my fourth Amazon Prime…

Personal notes for week 44 of 2026

By pure timing coincidence, the Proton CEO's AI @ Proton, Engineering Manifesto made headlines around the same time as this week's video. The guy's management style and choice of language have really rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way, and deservedly so, IMHO. However... this section of his screed really resonated with me:Your job has fundamentally changed. It is no longer to write code, and LLMs are not here to help you write better code faster. Your job is to help the LLM write better…

However, my goal to play monthly didn’t work out; we had too many other activities on our side, and we simply didn’t have a free weekend day for six weeks. But we will.The water struck Luka like a slammed door.read more...

'Cause this is the kinda shit we have to drive a stake through in this country... once-and-for-all. And as if you needed any possible reason more...

The last few days I wrote a several blog posts about git powered content creation workflows. I wanted something that I could point to that pulled together some of the main concepts, so somebody that was wanting to build such a thing would have a quick way to get up to speed on the possibilities: Files, folders, exports, aliases and functions: Explores how to leverage standard OS primitives, flat files and directories, as a resilient, long-lasting storage layer. It details how combining shell…

El Día de los Muertos is celebrated every year in Mexico from November 1 to November 2.

Earlier this year, the people behind the Dead Meat channel announced a project called Fresh Meat, an anthology of short horror films from up-and-coming filmmakers. The collection would get a theatrical and home streaming release, exposure from being promoted on the channel, and a cut of the revenue. I’ve been one of the channel’s many fans for a couple of years now, and I think this is a fantastic project. The creators of Dead Meat, James A Janisse and Chelsea Rebecca, are former film students…

Snoozles are a fact of life. One of the details on the Jungle Cruise that I've always liked a lot is this monumental carved stone head (from a photo date August 1970), part of some ancient Cambodian ruins. Why was this temple abandoned? "Too many boats, man". The face has an enigmatic smile in spite of almost being swallowed by strangler figs in the jungle.Next, the leaning rocket of Anaheim, circa August, 1962. It's not the worst photo I've seen, but the Dutch angle is odd, and the shadows are…

I recently got back from a short trip to see my sister and came home to some very wet weather. I had barely finished unpacking when lo and behold, I had a soggy dog needing some pets scritches a massage love visiting my couch (already prepped for his visit with a washable quilt!). Did you miss me, Oma? Ready for scritches now! Yasssss, that’s what I wanted. Don’t even think about taking a break, Oma. That’s the spot. More please! Okay, you’re dismissed. Ready to nap now. We hope you get some…

One hundred years ago this month, Grace Kingsley reported on a survey of theater managers that gave some idea of what audiences wanted to see in the movies: Hollywood is buzzing today over the publication in the Exhibitors’ Herald of a list of the sixty best box-office names in pictures, rated in order according to reports by 2471 exhibitors throughout the country. A list of 240 names was submitted to the exhibitors who were asked which names drew in the most patrons when displayed at the…

She-Devil (1989)

If you tried to reach this site for a few hours today and got nothing, that was me. I took it offline on purpose, and I’d do it again. Here’s the what and the why.

A clergyman raises alarm in his new parish when, in contravention of local superstition, he crosses and then sets out to defile the 'Devil's Mound' thinking it no more than an ancient burial site where he can satisfy his antiquarian urges.This 2023 short, written, directed, edited and co-produced by Gaius Brown and adapted from a chapter in the novel Skendleby by Nick Brown, has the welcome feel of an M.R. James adaptation to it and owes a large tip of the hat to the master's 'A Warning to the…

Walking the England Coast Path Birchington → Reculver (5 miles) In my very long-term attempt to walk the coast of Kent, yesterday I plugged a five mile gap on the north coast. In 2014 I'd got no further east than Reculver and in 2019 no further west than Birchington so in 2026 I've connected them together. I actually walked all the way from Birchington to Herne Bay because the intervening miles are marshy nomansland with no stations, but today I'll just blog about the gap. Thankfully all the…

Hey everyone!This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects during the month of October. Wiki, added taxes, and updated . Donsol, fixed some bugs. Note that we plan to release a Playdate build on itch.io next month. Rabbit Waves, finished a new comic page, added a section on monochrome signal flags(scroll to bottom) and updated the zine to include them. Over the summer, we looked around Pino and tried to make a list of all that had changed since we sailed back from Japan and…