About 3 weeks ago, Leo Laporte and I recorded the first episode of what will be a new monthly show on the TWiT network. Naming things is hard, and we almost voted on the name, like we did for Stack Overflow, but we quickly landed on Off By One with Jeff Atwood. Which is funny for so many reasons, but mainly because of this programmer joke:No, I did not come up with this variation on the classic quote, but I wish I had. Well, whatever, here's show number two – free to view for everyone.The show…

You can’t be model agnostic if you’re hand-tuning prompts Thanks to natural language interfaces, AI applications can be prototyped quickly. You write what you want in English, hand it to a frontier model, and a working prototype appears in an afternoon. This is extraordinarily powerful and for one-off tasks, optimal. But as a way to build reliable systems, the natural language prompt is a trap. The plain-English prompt that makes prototypes effortless turns out to be a poor way to specify how a…

other things said thunder like an open E minor on heaven's dreadnought Yesterday :: Monday, 22nd June 2026

On this page You can now pre-order Valve's Steam Machine! Fortuitous timing as I drafted this as a follow up to my post from December where I wrote about using Linux for PC gaming. At that time Steam ran well on my desktop and I chipped away at lighter games on the Deck. I ended that post by saying: I don't think I'll buy a Steam Machine, but I'm very happy it will exist. I've been testing out dual booting Bazzite on my desktop and I'd love to replace that with SteamOS proper. If I can pick up…

Dear fiction writer, Thank you for creating worlds we can escape to. Your ability to write words that create mental pictures, evoke feelings and tell stories is a gift. Keep writing. Sincerely, A Fan

Nowadays, most of my gaming is online. In part, this is a practical decision. A lot of the friends I have who are interested in the same sorts of games I am are scattered across the world, so doing things in person is very infeasible. It’s also a matter of preference of social dynamic – I’m a lot more timid in person than online, and find the distance of a computer to help make a lot of interactions more comfortable. Plus, even today, the echoes of the Covid-19 pandemic pushed some of the…

Yellow Rose – Litchfield Park, AZ – Fujifilm X-E4 – Pacific Blues Part 1: 5th-Gen This is Part 2 of what will be a five-part series exploring Fujifilm Recipes for each generation of cameras. Beginning with the latest models, we will work our way back towards the older cameras. For each article, I will suggest seven Recipes to try. This is intended for those new to the whole Recipe thing, who haven’t tried them before (or perhaps only a few Recipes so far). The intention is to provide you with a…

Vine or willow charcoal General Mills Charcoal Stick (soft) Charcoal Pencils (hard/medium and White) Electric pencil sharpener Kneaded eraser Fluffy brush Paper towels for softening Gun Metal Paper: Daler-Rowney Canford Paper in Gunmetal Short fast straight lines to block in contour, then they start to look like curves filling in the darkeer and the lighter areas (smoothing it out) Use White charcoal to do more straight lines in the lighter area. Build darker areas in to the shadows. Cast…

Combine three new CSS features to build fully adaptive themed components.

I have a copy of SICP, or as it is also known, The Wizard Book. This book is widely praised, but I can’t take the time to work my way through all of it. However, sometimes I jump into parts of it that look interesting. Today, we’ll see how to support multiple representations of data through tagging. This article is written in Haskell throughout, but at the start it will look a lot like the Lisp code in SICP. I have intentionally tried to recreate the SICP solution as closely as possible,…

Power Cat 2026-06-22 It's not a phase mom.

I had my first ever mention on a Spanish online radio/podcast show tonight. I'm feeling very "international" 😊 Esta noche me han mencionado por primera vez en un programa de radio o podcast online español. Me siento muy "internacional" 😊

I knew this would happen, but I just stumbled across one more Steam demo I want to showcase after posting my big demo roundup the other day. The game is called Wind Runners, and it's a 2D action roguelike / bullet hell / shoot 'em up in which you fly a lil plane around and shoot dudes who are shooting at you. There are a million games I could compare it to—Luftrausers comes to mind—but it feels like a good one of those. It mainly stood out to me with its really pretty mix of gorgeous 2D pixel…

A lot of people think of the number 13 as bad luck, but in this case it is good luck. Namely, I am announcing the 13th Annual Rule, Britannia Blogathon. I am setting it for September 18 to September 20, 2026. While many people think of Hollywood when it comes to movies, the fact is that the United Kingdom made many significant contributions to film over the years. From the Gainsborough melodramas to Hammer Films to the British New Wave, cinema would be much poorer without the British.ere are…

This past weekend I was listening to the Queens of the Stone Age 2013 album ...Like Clockwork while I was choring around the house. I love this album but I hadn't chewed on it in a year or two. The third track, The Vampyre of Time and Memory (link opens in Youtube), is a somber synthy piano piece under Josh Homme's confessional vocals. The song has always stuck with me, but due to what Jay Dragon has called "ludic pareidolia" I found my mind wandering to what it would mean to literalize the…

I spent a bunch of time this week glue-gunning LEDs into a T-shirt so I could dress up as the night sky. I gave up after LED #80, it looked good! I don’t think I’ve used a hot glue gun since I was a child, there were some real sense memories locked up in the activity. I was dressing up for a Space themed night at a Butlins 2000s weekender, this time for Charlotte’s birthday down in Minehead. Minehead is quite pretty, the Butlins less so but it was a lot of fun. On Friday we dressed as various…

gonna rank from worst to best song ranking system 😇- need to have a looong conversation with whoever made this song 🥹- teared up a little 🥰- i love love love 😊- very good 🙂- good with some issues 🤔- i would let it play in the background ig.. 😪- not feeling it 😠- no this is bad. 😡- this is really bad. 🤬- play this around me and im taking a gun out. for both of us. shake it off (mingyu) 🤬 this song doesn't exist. skyfall (minghao) 😠 i've tried with this song i really have, but it's just not for…

Keller, Murray, Ivory & Cabreros for The NYT: The Deadly Rise of Giant Trucks and S.U.V.s. A beautifully-illustrated case for America’s king-sized vehicles being the main culprit for increased pedestrian deaths. The careful reader will remember that this “Big SUV hypothesis” was also highlighted by Brian Potter a while back, though it didn’t explain all of the increase. And of course my conspiracy theory may also be true, although if there are people who said a while back “hey, these big…

Pokémon is something of an autonomous force these days. It's the largest IP in the world, and essentially everything it does will be met with the loud cheers of fans the world over. This is especially true in the case of its mainline games, which have changed enormously over the years but consistently sold millions (often tens of millions!) of copies. Increasingly, the series has leaned into narrative and online play with features such as raids and even coop while changing its level design foci…

Status: Pre-heatwave day today, so it’s hot but it’s going to get hotter. Feeling quite tired anyway after yesterday’s excursion and have had continuous tinnitus all day which hasn’t happened for a while — usually it comes and goes, serving as a warning light for me to take a break. I’ve decided to lean into the football a bit, looking for more teams to follow over the World Cup alongside the obvious England. Argentina were a little underwhelming this afternoon and I’m going to give France a go…

A Lakelands setting post Most of the Unbound crave human worship, attention, or service, but not all of them do. Some of them lack any interest in humanity. While the Howling Rustic decided to make its own version of a terrestrial hominid, the Sulphur Herald remembered its former subjects. Long ago it held sway over the peoples of two planets: on Yir and its moon Sdikga it governed the drakemantids and amazons, while on Nkamvond it commanded the psanzomv, often called spacegnomes in the…

You know, I’m beginning to think that SwiftUI’s Commands API is not very good.

Tem um ditado que eu sempre gostei bastante, após ouvi-lo pela primeira vez há muitos anos, atribuído de forma apócrifa a Confúcio, quando na real é apenas um fruto da cultura popular. A sabedoria vem de escutar; de falar vem o arrependimento. Eu nunca vivi por essa filosofia, apesar de achá-la prudente. Sim, eu acho que eu sou um bom ouvinte (minha esposa e meus sócios podem ter outra opinião a respeito), e eu gosto de pensar que eu sempre soube escolher a hora de falar menos e escutar mais.…

Enough has been said about Tolkien's works that I won't much discuss the work here. Safe to say I now understand why the Hobbit holds the place it does in the canon of fantasy literature. Despite consuming much Tolkien-inspired media, I'd never read any of the Lord of the Rings series nor seen the Peter Jackson film series. I went into the book with the hope of being as untainted by outside interpretations and criticisms as possible.

Finished reading: The Permanent Problem by Brink Lindsey 📚Food for thought though I am not entirely sure of the solutions proposed.

Reviving an old blog feature. My coffee this week is Brazil Mogiana from Happy Goat, for pour over.

Featured Projects Three live Azure workloads I own end-to-end — CI/CD static delivery, AI-backed search on real content, and full-stack Blazor with actual users. 🔧 Episode Atlas Track TV progress at scale with per-user state and cloud-backed data. What it does: Per-user episode lists, “last watched” markers, and curated metadata links — so long-running franchises stay manageable. Tech used: .NET Blazor, Azure Static Web Apps, Azure Functions, Cosmos DB, GitHub auth. Why it’s impressive:…

I'm at the rehabilitation center where Bunny is rehabilitating her broken shoulders and all the TVs in the place shut down, and it's suddenly quiet. Maybe not as silent as Rachel, Nevada, or maybe when a Las Vagas casino lost power (talk about dead silence—it was weird!), but still, it's eerie.