As I wrote on The Free Press yesterday, we are in the midst of a Pumpkin Panic. In East Texas, a 4-month-old girl participated in her day care’s “seasonal activity” of putting pumpkin guts in a plastic bag. The next day, she started vomiting, and by noon, she was admitted to the hospital. She had a very rough time of it, but thankfully recovered and is fine. Her mom took to social media to tell others. She wasn’t fearmongering, just shocked. But pretty soon, salmonella fears were spreading like…

We tried something today. Since I’ve been convelescing in the cat free zone, my bedroom has been mostly cat heaven. Which is cat hell, for our elderly Butterscotch, since she won’t leave the room, and they often go after her when she tries to use a litter box. When we go into the bedroom, we … Continue reading Cuddle session

One problem with AI is that it’s pretty stupid. I mean, sure, the current models are wildly useful. But out of the box, they overcomplicate, take undue shortcuts, and compound deficiencies to the moon. To get from default Claude or ChatGPT to a fast, affordable software loop – one that reliably zaps bugs, backlog items, and security vulnerabilities in your product in particular – it takes some real work. Increasingly, this is the work. So it’s past time you shared that work with your team.…

Having learned of two bars I'd never heard of on a recent episode of the Great British Pub Crawl on YouTube I decided I ought to visit New Brighton again. I headed out on a grey autumnal Saturday morning. By the time I got to New Brighton the sun was shining.Before I'd even reached my first target I noticed at the side of a bowling alley was the Riverside Bar:Inside I found a very pleasant bar area surrounded by bowling lanes, darts boards, pool tables and so on. I see they also offer Laser…

Golden Ginkgo.

Direct from the basement of my parents' house comes this delightful artifact of yesteryear: one issue of Film Threat, the underground's underground movie magazine. If you were of a certain impressionable age and temperament in those closing years of the 20th century, you may recall it. Visiting my folks this past summer I lucked into in a box labeled "Taxes" (but of course) which contained other

i received the latest issue of interview magazine in the mail. it’s my third copy this year and i find it to be an interesting concept. created by warhol himself, featuring interviews of different aspects of pop culture. the only downside is it’s very expensive to import into the united kingdom but it’s a price worth paying for. nostalgia hits as i think of a time where print magazines trumped the media. i think of old issues of life magazine, keeping the world updated with all the news of the…

About being 65 years old according to the tropical year, the sideral year, and the apsis.

We got a little over one kilo of curly kale in the harvest from the Herenboeren Usseler Es cooperative and made hotchpotch with about half of it.

This is a friendly reminder to vote. California allows you to track your ballot, so you can know exactly where it is and when it is counted. On the ballot this year are 14 propositions. Propositions are legislative or citizen-initiated constitutional amendments or other proposals to change the law in California. I was lucky enough to be part of a class that spent the semester writing objective analyses of every proposition, which you can find here. We also presented every proposition during a…

Took the plunge and upgraded WordPress to the latest 7.x branch. Seems to have worked out ok? I don't immediately dig the subtle tweaks in the admin UI mind you. But what are you gonna do?

Clouds in a blue skyAre what I want to seeSome days they're highSome days they're bigBut some days they're not there at allA clear blue skyHas a meaningMaybe high pressureMaybe dry airBut wait and the clouds do returnA cycle in the skyDifferent for you and INorth, SouthDesert, CoastClouds in a blue sky

Rey as Espeon and Drew as Eevee. Our two little Pokemon! The post Halloween 2026 appeared first on @Kevuhnn / 📸 / 📚 / 🇨🇦.

For over a decade I’ve been using Vimeo to host videos of my weddings and elopements, the next annual renewal was coming up thus month so o got OpenAI Codex to download each video and upload it to Cloudflare where the hosting costs are about $3 a month. Then I asked Codex to build a website to show the videos and make them downloadable. It took 20 minutes. $400 better off a year, plus I have full control instead of Vimeo/Bending Spoons.

Looks like bluebubbles server had an update after a LONG time.

Hier im Greenwaycastle gibt es seit Jahren eine Tradition: wenn der Kater aus dem Haus ist und seinem Hobby fröhnt, andere Leute mit Musik zu beschallen, dann tanzt die Maus nicht auf den Tischen, sondern brät sich Garnelen oder Leber. Beides mag der Kater nämlich gar nicht und so gab es vor Kurzem wieder mal Leber. Von meiner Mutter habe ich zwei Varianten übernommen: die mit dunkler

Another rock & roll movie from the Devil’s Candy guy. Traumatic backstory comes back around in the end in a different way than expected. Lola likes a boy Brent, but the boy likes Holly. So Lola has her dad kidnap the boy and bring him home to enact their own little prom. The boy is resistant to this idea, so they nail his foot to the floor, then drill a hole in his skull and threaten to “boil his brains.” He escapes and kills the dad, so she throws him into the boyfriend pit… but he’s got a…

It's a "truth universally acknowledged," to borrow an Austen phrase, that the 1995 version of SENSE AND SENSIBILITY is a perfect film.Indeed, in 2014 I included it on my personal list of "10 Favorite Films of the Last 25 Years."One might thus ask why I would bother to go see the brand-new version of SENSE AND SENSIBILITY (2026), given the existence of the older film, but I've always enjoyed seeing alternative versions of Austen stories. The oldest production of the several editions of SENSE AND…

I am so back with another “your favorite [insert something]” carnival because I’m unoriginal and you guys have to live with it. Actually, I blame this on Xaya for encouraging me after making an old stan Twitter joke from a misogynistic moment in journalism’s history. You can write a short post (it really doesn’t have to be long) explaining your favorite delicacy or kitchen utensil for presenting food. You can take it literally or actually get the point. Anyway, here is mine: My favorite dish… I…

Time management: Last weekend we changed all the clocks one hour backwards here in the UK. Well why stop there? I think the clocks should change every Saturday night. Let's see where that gets us.From autumn backwards, and then from spring forwards, all year round. Sorry to those of you operating around timetables (and that's everybody), but it might help us to better appreciate how time works for us and also against us.Of course, the practical consequences would be fairly catastrophic.…

Courtesy of insomnia, I've put together this 1:144 scale model of a Nieuport 11 Bebe. Another scout for the Entente to put up against those blasted Fokkers.This little sesquiplane went into service on the French front in January, 1916. It outclassed its main opponent, the Fokker E-III monoplane, in every respect: speed, climb, agility and strength. The French did not, at that time, have an interruptor system for the gun, so it carried a single Lewis gun high on it's top wing, to fire over the…

Haggard and dirty, his clothes jagged and torn, a mixture between a young scarecrow and the crows it was supposed to scare.- Leonora Carrington, The Stone DoorOrcs live for battle, Hobgoblins for conquest, and Gnolls for chaos-worship. Skulkers pick through what's left. Skulkers are willowy, vaguely avian humanoids who live in ruins and survive on what they scavenge. They wear leather lashed with rags and telescopic goggles to magnify their vision. It is common for skulkers darken their beaks…

If you could see my neighborhood right now, you’d understand why I say Halloween is the best day of the year. Hundred of kids, almost all houses decorated and handing put candy. Amazing.

npm pack --ignore-scripts runs prepare Running npm pack --dry-run --ignore-scripts is (apparently?) supposed to be benign. This surprised me: $ npm pack --dry-run --ignore-scripts anythingatall@someone/somerepo > gitdep@1.0.0 prepare > node -e "require('fs').writeFileSync('/tmp/test','PREPARE RAN')" [...] $ cat /tmp/test PREPARE RAN The name before the @ doesn’t matter. npm will automatically download https://github.com/someone/somerepo, treat it as an npm package’s source, and execute its…

Happy Halloween! What an incredibly busy month. On top of work being extremely busy — with some great results — I got a lot done outside of work as well. Midterm elections in the US are on this upcoming Tuesday; please vote if you’re able to! projects the PHPocalypse, and other vulnerabilities As many of you are aware, a large number of security vulnerabilities across the web were announced last week. This ended up being quite a bit of a pain for me, someone who has been building things for the…

October 2026

It goes without saying GPT lags at writing. Even a pro subscription of Astra produces prose that is predictably AI, and easily identified by readers and software like Pangram as such. It has usual “failure modes” such as wordiness and lack of affect. Why can’t it do writing as well as it does math or coding? That is the million dollar question. I think this needs to be reframed; it writes well…for an audience of other agents. Agents have no concept of wordiness or overuse of hedging language.…

It's been three months now since I last posted here (!), but I have been very busy with work. Most significantly I have been working steadily on the Cornell Woolrich biography and I have finished seven of its projected ten chapters, amounting to 105,000 words. That's 35,000 words a month, almost 9000 words a week. I feel it's gone really well, I very much am pleased with what I have written and the more narrative approach I have taken with it. I've actually discovered a lot of new information…