In the music of Sarah Davachi, sound remains suspended beyond the moment of its apparent exhaustion, gathering strange internal populations as its harmonics fracture and quietly reassemble. What initially presents itself as stasis develops a secret grammar of departures, an entire cosmology folded into the infinitesimal distance between two frequencies. The ear, accustomed to locating movement in the passage from one event to another, must relearn the contours of an event whose distances are…

Every Linux system you have ever logged into went through the same sequence a few seconds before you got a prompt. Firmware found a bootloader, the bootloader found a kernel, the kernel found a root filesystem, and something called PID 1 turned all of that into a running system. Most of the time nobody looks at this chain. It only gets attention when it breaks, and then it gets a lot of attention at once. This is the first article in the Linux Foundationals series, the Linux counterpart to…

Who are you, and what do you do? Jim Capobianco. I mainly work in animation. Writing, directing. I’ve done some voice work too. I went to school to learn the craft of animation in 1987. Whoa, that’s a long time ago. Shit. It pains me to write that year down but that’s when it was. I went to the California Institute of the Arts or as it is more simply called - CalArts. Incidentally, that school was the last big project Walt Disney had a hand in creating. That’s pretty neat, the Obi Wan, the dean…

I read that you can tighten up prose by avoiding the word “just” and thought, sure, let’s try that. I found 43 offenders on my blog. (I only went back to 2020 or so—anything older is beyond redemption.) The worst instances are those where “just” is used as a synonym of “only,” but that modifier is already implied by the sentence structure: A student who wishes to apply to a top university needs more than just confidence in her academic talent. Another tic of mine is to use “just” just to mean…

Seemingly because I’m on a roll and want to catch up on all the ‘responding to monthly challenges’ fun I’ve been missing out on due to my lack of internet activity this last while, I’m participating in this month’s Bear Blog Carnival. It’s like the IndieWeb Carnival, but hosted by people who use the wonderful Bear Blog service (run by Herman), or folks affiliated with people who do. Hopefully they won’t mind me participating? Perhaps it’ll count if I admit I’ve started a Bear Blog? More on that…

I haven’t participated in one of these since I hosted the first one several months ago…never mind! I’m here now, writing my entry. Unlike most times I submit to blogging challenges, I’ll be on time, and not using the advantage of being 24 hours ahead to submit a day late…and in case I sound way too defensive, rest assured! It’s not directed at anyone but myself. Anyway! This is my entry for the October 2026 edition of the IndieWeb Fiction Carnival: a monthly challenge hosted by a different…

Wow! I haven’t participated in one of these for a while. This is my entry for the October 2026 edition of the IndieWeb Carnival, hosted by Marisabel on the theme of ‘pages.’ In her call for submissions, she asks three intriguing questions: How do you see the blank page, the unseen page, the traced page, the colored page? How does it influence what you share online? Do you believe the illusion of infinity gives you more freedom, or does it make it harder? Here, I attempt, at least, to answer…

If you’ve just got hold of the Evercade Nexus games console, there are some fun secret games to unlock, via combination of secret codes and button combos. Once unlocked, you’ll find they appear on your games menu (the star icon in the UI), under a section titled “Hidden Games”. Secret Code Games These are codes that you enter in the Settings -> Secret menu. “GRIBBLYGROBBLY” = Gribbly’s Day Out (C64) “SEIJIWASHERE” = Kubo 1 & 2 (NES) “STONE” = Rogue 64 (Commodore 64) “BLOP” = The Lost Mines…

https://zebra.rodeo/en/blog/marelleo/

Reading: Psychedelics tune the brain to the environment, Nature (news and views), 19 August 2026.The story so far: reality is a controlled hallucination.A theoretic framework of brain function known as predictive processing posits that the brain does not just register sensory information passively, but builds predictive models based on past experiences.Your brain is predicting what's expected, and updating the predictions by diff-ing against what is actually sensed. Your actions are trying to…

Happy Halloween, dear readers, and Blessed Be!

You can tell when someone is much-loved by the public by the number of people who mention their passing in conversation. Since Sir Patrick Stewart beamed up a few days ago, I have had five people mention it without any prompting. I think it just goes to show how greatly admired he was by everyday people, and how his acting resonated with generations of TV viewers and movie goers alike. Here, Picard Looking, usually associated with their fun Star Trek parodies, which we have featured on…

Halloween has almost become synonymous with camp pop music, so for this year’s spooky season perfume list, I turned to the likes of Lady Gaga, Ray Parker Jr and Madonna for inspiration. The plan was simple: come up with a Halloween party playlist, then pair each song with a suitable perfume. The results are now […] The post Scents For A Halloween Party Playlist – Top 10 Perfumes For 2026 appeared first on .

Tool or not There is an interesting discussion happening right now around whether AI is a tool or not. The core argument seems to be the necessary skill. People argue that sufficiently advanced AIs will require no skill to use; thus they are not tools. Now while this argument could be true in a hypothetical future, I do not find it correct for the current state of AI. The current best usage of AI seems to be the centaur. A symbiosis of a skilled software engineer and AI can achieve far better…

XSLT is being deprecated from the browser platform, and is planned to be fully removed in the coming year. I had already seen some posts come by that mentioned that they were replacing XSLT with something else, but I completely missed the gist. RIP XSLT. Two years and a few days ago, I introduced styled RSS feeds and XML sitemaps on this website. To do so, I relied on this almost obscure Internet technology that a lot of people don’t know about: XSLT. XSLT was originally introduced in 1999, and…

A nasty wet day with gale force winds. Cleaned the moped in the a.m. The gang came for tea. Went home just after 7pm. N and I watched telly. Not a bad show.

Every week, I share something I learned in the previous seven days. I usually find these while I’m putting my weekly newsletter together but somehow, they don’t quite fit!This week I learned that the best-selling book of the year I was born was The Godfather by Mario Puzo.I would have bet money on it being a seventies book. In my head it belongs to 1972, because that is when the film arrived and Brando made it his.The novel got there first. It came out in March 1969 and just sneaked into the…

Someone was asking in the BGG forums how to re-pack the Collector’s Edition of Timeless Journeys. Since I have a copy at hand, I thought I’d quickly create one. Hope it helps! Bottom Layer The bottom layer contains of the removable resource tray and a bottom tray that stays in the box. Put the resources and coins in the removable tray. The raised parts of the lid are just so things level out when the player component trays are later put on top, but the extra space makes it easier to fit the…

So Sam Altman is saying that RAM is wasted in personal computers and should be put in datacentres instead. What he's actually saying is "I want to rent my datacentres to you for all your computing needs." This allows him to control who gets to use his computers. It allows him to own all the stuff you do on his computers. This allows him to set the price for your computing. It allows him to control what the computers are allowed to do. It allows him to control the world. What an absolute fucking…

One of my dreams is finally coming true: ecological modeling with the help of category theory! Topos Research UK, run by my friends and colleagues, will be providing computational support to ecological modelers using CatColab, their modeling software based on double categories. And they’re hiring a postdoc! I almost want to apply myself. You can see details, and apply, here. The start is the 6th of October, 2026. The location is their wonderful office in Oxford, UK. It’s a full-time 2-year job…

Pumpkins v Turnips - I guess the pumpkins won this year. They're on a cultural roll of some sort, a cultural troll even. All for the best for humanity. Progress happens in the world of fruit and vegetable art. Only a primitive style of kitchen knife carving is required. We live in unskilled times. Less chance of a serious injury too. The candles have been replaced by LEDs. The house will not be burned down. Happy 31st and welcome to your new vacant winter life. Downhill all the way to…

The Tabula Peutingeriana is one of the most remarkable surviving maps from the ancient world. Held at the Austrian National Library in Vienna, it is a medieval copy of a Roman road map, originally drawn on a parchment scroll almost seven metres long and just 34 centimetres high.The map depicts the road network of the Roman Empire, stretching from the British Isles and the Atlantic coast to the Middle East and India. Thousands of place names, roads and distances are recorded along its…

2017 contemporary police mystery, eighth in Cleeves' Vera Stanhope series. A corrupt policeman, now in prison, offers a solution to a decades-old disappearance, if Vera will look out for his bastard daughter…

Still muddling through feeling ill. The worst was over by last weekend but I have a lingering cough, drip, and fatigue. I haven’t been ill like this since before the pandemic. Best of the blogs ▷ Ted Shideler has had the misfortune of selling a lot of stuff on Facebook Marketplace lately and offers a retrospective that might help you if you decide to try the same. Read What I learned by selling a ton of stuff on Facebook Nikon N90s, 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6G AF Nikkor, Agfa CT Precisa (expired…

A doting Wood family aunt in Chicago, Illinois sent this cute holiday penny postcard to her nephew in Cleveland, Ohio. It was post-marked October 28, 1913. Still in my husband's family today!May you have all treats and no tricks on Halloween, 2026.

It is a somewhat niche quiz question, but then dear reader, you are then one who decided to show up here, so here we go: What is the largest vessel of the Royal Norwegian Navy? If your mind goes to the 5,300 ton and 134 meter long Fridtjof Nansen-class frigates, that is very understandable, but also wrong. The upcoming 7,700 ton and 150 meter long Type 26 will be larger, but even they won’t take the top spot of the podium. The correct answer is the KNM Maud, at 27,500 ton and a mighty 183…

I planned a little surprise trip for Sarah as her birthday was coming up. We arrived at the airport without her knowing where we were going or what we were doing which was a nice bit of excitement for her - although it was hard to coax her into bringing clothes that would be appropriate for the unique activities I had booked us in for! The first being the Penguin feeding experience at Edinburgh Zoo and the second being a tour of the Chocolatarium. Edinburgh Zoo is STEEP. The calves were burning…

I bought my laptop in August 2024 and it's worked absolutely fine ever since. I made sure it came with proper Microsoft Office, and I made sure I bought it via a one-time-purchase, not some online subscription version. That's all worked fine too, but yesterday a message popped up telling me that Microsoft have ended support for Office 2021 and I should strongly consider upgrading. Support for Office 2021 ended on October 13, 2026 and there will be no extension and no extended security updates.…