Reply to unrequested scrapers and aggregators (and AI) by slime journal blog (enter the void) “its also interesting to see what bots are hitting my feedunfortunately, it seems like some aggregators have found it somehow? maybe from scraping bubbles or somethingi dont usually mind, since its usually just a smallweb thing and maybe i could get some new readers off it” I agree with that and that’s what the smallweb is about, community and not trying to go trending (but things like Bubbles,…

(Continued from my previous post.) I finished the game (sort of) and then I finished it again (this time with more hints). I’ll explain what I mean in context– From the first issue of A & B Computing. One thing that helped was to realize, like Peter Smith’s Hitch-Hiker, a great deal of the action maps down to simply typing DROP. So the pass at the beginning you show to the guard can be dropped, as can the key that gets inserted right afterwards. This simplifies matters down slightly in terms of…

Happy Halloween to all! Big thanks to all the fine folks who have supported us this year! Your contributions and participation are greatly appreciated! Please have a fun, safe All Hallow's Eve & remember to inspect your candy before consumption and to treat all black cats like the kings they are! Screenshot

Hello. I’ve been to see some old trains. I thought you might like to hear about it. The Tanfield Railway likes to brand itself as “the world’s oldest railway”, operating since 1725. It’s the sort of boast that tends to come with asterisks attached, but it’s worded specifically enough that i think it might just be true. Is it the world’s first railway? Not by a long shot. The use of wheels in rails for transport goes back to the 1550s in Germany, and it was introduced to Britain soon thereafter.…

With every holiday on the Western calendar comes the debate over its origins. Pagan or Christian. Historians chime in, apologists spew their nonsense, and no opinions are changed. Personally, I’m tired of such arguments. I assume Christianity has tainted most things and choose to ignore it where possible. What I find more interesting is that Halloween preserves something much older than that silly death cult: the human tendency to treat seasonal transitions as spiritually significant. The…

Happy Halloween everyone, enjoy another year of Darumaka costumes! Want to see Darumaka’s past Halloween costumes? I’ve got them up here (2025) (2024) (2023) (2022 & 2021) (2019) Click to reveal the sketch

chromium is a fairly reasonable dependency when the thing you're building is a browser.

It recently came to light that the CEO of Proton is pushing engineers to develop its software using AI and treating them badly when they raise concerns. It made me realize that setting up an email address through my own domain would allow me to change providers when needed while keeping my email address the same. I've been using Proton Mail for several years, even signing up for a 2-year Mail Plus subscription in May of this year to take advantage of some additional features like aliases email…

The Academy for the Mathematical Sciences, which is based in the UK, has released a report “The mathematical sciences in an AI-enabled world“. To quote from the release: The paper examines how recent advances in artificial intelligence are changing mathematical research and its applications, bringing new opportunities for discovery, verification and the use of mathematics across science, industry and society. It also considers the risks associated with these developments and identifies the…

Most gym ads are focused on the solution. An advertisement will describe the hours, perks, and make a strong trial offer. Of course, it should also include photos of the gym. In other words, the ad is solution oriented. It doesn’t talk about the problem because people already know they have a problem: they want to lose weight, get more fit, and find a community. They’ve already decided they need a place to help them do that. The customer’s problem awareness might run deep; there’s a chance they…

9730/21649The Herring family annual (it seems) Halloween party this afternoon and the whole family worked hard to make the place look decent and then make it look scary and also put out food and drinks for our friends.You can tell the impact that Newsround is having on the public consciousness as someone (no way of knowing who) came dressed as Hahayourbuttsmells).Phoebe was particularly excited, making biscuits and planning games and hanging up decorations.I

#1. A huge table, a bad query, and no indexes. Those are the characters of the scariest lines of code I’ve ever written. #2. What’s worse than spending all day in meetings? Well, here are 12 nightmares every coder faces. Be careful it any of them makes you wake up. #3. You spent two days preparing for your next interview, just to find out your interviewer, who never asks your name, wants to test your IQ and have your brain scanned to see if you’re smart to work with him. #4. Do you have a…

I realised today that you were unfair to me. I decided to not take this relationship "light and breezy". I decided to take a chance and focus my efforts on the relationship, wanting to genuinely give it a shot and see where it could lead to. I am beginning to think that you never really wanted that in the beginning. You just wanted to say you had a girlfriend. I was just that, a fun thing to have next to you. Maybe not in the end, I think eventually you began to see our relationship as a…

Back in 1992, Japanese PC owners were treated to a pretty gruesome horror adventure called Dead of the Brain, a game that took inspiration from the excessive splatter films of the 1980s and combined them with the detailed pixel artwork that made Japan's computer gaming scene so distinctive. It never received an official English release, and while dedicated fans have worked to make it more accessible over the years, experiencing it generally meant dealing with old hardware, emulators or…

I’ve been finding my footing with this newsletter. It’s an incomplete mix of what I’ve written and read since June. I’ll start, sheepishly, with a personal milestone: the first time seeing my own name in a print magazine, or as they say in the biz, my first byline— WIRED This summer, WIRED magazine sent me to ICANN86 in Spain to learn about top-level domains and the people who make them. The story was published online earlier this month. At 4,000 words, it’s the best approximation yet of what…

It just doesn’t have to be like this. It just doesn’t. I care about the experience of the people using a product more than anything else – yes, even more than security. As I wrote elsewhere, if you have the best system in the world but it makes customers want to kill themselves while using it, then you don’t have the best system in the world. Security that makes people miserable, while doing nothing to attackers, is the antithesis of everything I care about. I forgot my OLX password, used the…

Few debates are as stubborn as the one over free speech. One camp holds that freedom of speech must be absolute: no one should be punished for voicing an opinion. The other insists that not everything deserves to be said. Neither position holds up cleanly. If someone else decides what may be said, are we free in any absolute sense? And if anyone may say anything, every opinion invites its counter-opinion. I believe no one should be punished for speaking their mind. But if one person has the…

Yes this is another post about screen time/ phone addiction. Everyone says "I need to doomscroll less", "I need to get off my phone", etc etc. These are probably the most relatable statements of the current decade (well, those and "we're all cooked"). People buy contraptions and download apps and treat themselves like drug addicts or prisoners just to break the "phone curse". But it never seems to work. Why? Because they never defined the success condition in the first place! You know, the…

Finished reading: Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell, Daniel C. Dennett 📚

While quesadillas are probably more well known, sopa de huitlacoche is also traditional, and a good way to stretch a small amount of the mushrooms. Today I'll walk you through two different versions: a smooth, pureed soup made with frozen mushrooms, and a more traditional, brothy version with fresh mushrooms, chorizo and potatoes. Credit for... Read More The post Sopa de Huitlacoche appeared first on Forager | Chef .

In reply to Missing printed magazines. · JetGirlArt This article from JetGirlArt really hit home. I miss magazines. Earlier this week, I was at one of our large grocery stores, one that still has a magazine aisle, and was sad to discover that there wasn't a single magazine I was interested in buying. I regularly go to Barnes & Noble. They still have a whole magazine section, and sometimes I'll find one or two that look interesting, like the current copy of 2600 or one of the Linux magazines. I…

Happy Halloween!This year I'm sharing studio Halloween publicity photos featuring the beautiful Ava Gardner.Have a wonderful day!Previous Halloween posts, in reverse chronological order: Vera-Ellen (2025), Paulette Goddard (2024), Ella Raines, Joyce Holden, Barbara Bates, Jane Adams, Patricia Alphin, Nan Grey, and Anne Gwynne (with Universal's black cat prop, 2023), Anne Gwynne, Peggy Moran, Anne Nagel, Nan Grey, Peggy Ryan, and Gloria Jean (with Universal's jack o'lantern prop, 2022), Ellen…

Dave with some absolute bait: If you have tried to email me, you know this too and you either never got a reply or received one 9-months later starting with the phrase, “Sorry.” I am truly sorry… but also I’m not. It’s a function of who I am. I want people to be good at email, including Dave, but that’s not quite it. I want people to be productive. And Dave is saying: I can’t have email be a big part of my life because it’s a mental suck, and it makes me less productive. A catch-22, if you…

Like many others I was saddened to hear that Patrick Stewart had died. Star Trek: TNG was how I first came to know him in my teens, and I believe it’s not an exaggeration to say that I loved whatever characters he played or voiced. As an adult, I grew to admire him further, especially after I learned he’d moved relatively close to me — to Park Slope in Brooklyn (at least when he was in New York). I used to work in that neighborhood, and I remember thinking that maybe I’d run into him one day.…

New Musical Express article announcing Peter’s new group in April 1969 Stan Endersby (Guitar, vocals) Peter Quaife (Bass) Marty Fisher (Keyboards, vocals) Mick Cook (Drums) replaced by Gordon MacBain (Drums, vocals) This fascinating Anglo-Canadian group is best known for containing Kinks bass player Peter Quaife who first proposed the idea of forming a band with Canadian guitarist Stan Endersby when the pair met by pure chance at Hatchetts nightclub in Piccadilly in mid-1968. Endersby was in…

I must admit. D2 players are showing up more every day. Heck, I even found a couple that were supportive in a GM nightfall as I needed to be carried as I bring my light level up. When they are this supportive, this is truly one of the best communities I’ve been part of for over a decade now.

Back to September. All of these were part of the Super Saturday Movie Club, whose monthly theme this time was Halloween, comprising movies #42 to #46. Oct 3 - Suspiria (1977)Watched it for the first time on Wednesday, April 8, 2020, and was blown away. This time around I was a bit less wowed by the colours and oneirism, but it's still a hell of a movie. Now that I have seen quite a few more movies I can see just how scrappy and sorta shoddy the production is; this could have been a shitty…

Keep safe. If you're new to this metal blog of bones you can also check out the various interview projects I have going on as well as the weekly recommendation posts. And if you'd like to keep abreast of the latest, most pressing developments follow us wherever I may roam (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Spotify, Bluesky, TIKTOK etc), and listen to my, I guess, active? (no) podcast (YouTube, Spotify, Apple), and to check out our amazing compilation albums. You could also possibly support my…

Lows are headed into sub 30s F this week. The darkening and the cooling are here.

Not me, this is just friendly advice from a struggling user.Alongside Codeberg I’d consider Tangled to be a real GitHub replacement. We desperately need to leave GitHub behind. It’s difficult to recommend any tech these days. I used to spread the gospel of Proton and that backfired. From what I’ve seen, Tangled seems to be saying and doing the right things so far. I have trepidations about their venture capital funding (see Deno’s demise) but pessimism is no fun.Tangled’s recent blog post on…