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.…

What I like about my Macs is that it takes very little out-of-the-box tuning to have a very capable machine. I wrote about it here. Still, I have a handful of Mac-specific apps I consider to be very useful. In order of importance this here is my top five. Shottr If the builtin MacOS screenshot tool is enough for you, I get it. But I use Shottr. I pay for Shottr. The only Macc app I pay for. It's that good. Blur, erase, OCR, capture active windows and more. How else do you think I took this…

Today I finally deleted my last website on Netlify after using Netlify for almost 10 years. Netlify was fun when I first started using it. The Microsoft GitHub integration made publishing on the web fun. You push your changes to your repository and one minute later you can share your site with your friends. You can't beat the feeling of immediacy every time someone shortens the feedback loop. Yet every good thing must come to an end. Microsoft started slowly killing Netlify and GitHub…

Share the first song you ever heard from your favorite artist. A long long time ago, music used to be made into physical items. Black discs of grooved vinyl that you would buy from a shop to take home to listen to. This song was not exactly one of those. For starters, I didn’t buy it. Each week the hospital radio station I was involved in got a donation of the latest singles in the top 20. Usually a few small discs of black vinyl were picked up and added to the music library. The library was…

October has been incredibly hectic. I’ve redesigned this website, I’ve been to two concerts and one comedy show, spent a few days in Amsterdam, I’ve written maybe way too many posts, and there’s so much more happening. Let’s recap! ✍️ Website After a dormant summer, this website is now seeing much more activity. Earlier this month, I introduced a new design, which I’ve tweaked slightly here and there since: less on-the-nose link underlines, improved inline code rendering, and some other things…

rose I had a great start studying for this semester :) I set up everything on the 4th: Downloaded all materials, signed up for all live sessions, put all dates in the calendar, ordered all books I need, and hit my reading goal all in one day, despite my struggles (aided by medication and lots of support from my wife). I was very consistent with it since! Went hard at the gym when I had painfree times in the middle of the month. Sent a care package filled with coffee, tea, baked cookies, and cat…

A misheard line in Spinning Away becomes a playful meeting of Brian Eno’s songs and my paintings. From scattered marks to fading light and an open sea, each pairing follows a shared movement without closing down what the image might become. The post Turning Moments into Light appeared first on Friedrich Zettl Fine Arts.

Burnham pledges to be ‘relentless’ in curbing small boat crossings BBC News Germany turns first asylum seekers away at border DW Taiwan is worried about spying threats. That may mean a national security crackdown on Chinese immigrants Los Angeles Times Migration is one of the most contentious topics across the world right now. The collapse of globalisation, multipolarity, and competition for resources is making all of us a tad more tribalistic than we’ve gotten used to over the last 50 years.

The Little Leftover Witch by Florence Laughlin, 1960. Young Lucinda Doon has a great time on Halloween, running around the neighborhood in her ghost costume. During the night, though, she wakes up to hear someone crying or trying not to cry. When she looks out the window, she sees a young witch. The little witch says that her broom broke, and without her broom, she won’t be able to fly. If she doesn’t get back with the other witches by sunrise, she’ll have to stay on the ground and live among…

THE STORY: Research student of the arcane arts, and sometime occult detective, Tom Annesley has traveled from America at the request of some friends in London to search for their missing friend Hilda Brown. His search takes him to the town of Haddeston where he encounters a powerful sorcerer who has penetrated the darkest secrets of alchemy and Black Magic and discovered how to create and prolong life with the aid of a mandrake root. A series of hair-raising adventures ensues as Tom and his new…

In 1965, Georges Perec wrote ‘Les Choses: Une histoire des années soixante’ (‘Things: A story of the sixties’) a french novel about a couple, but more about everything they own, about all the things around them. Perec meticulously describes everything from their furniture to their carpets to their clothes to all their material wants. You know of the couple, but you never get to know them. But you do get to know all the things around them until they decide in vain to escape their life. Perec…

The weather started to warm up here in October, and as well as being busy at work, I even (for the first time in a long time) got around to attending some football matches. Nevertheless, I still managed to fit in some reading and reviewing, with a nice mix of review copies and interesting books from my shelves. Towards the second half of the month, I was starting to clear the decks, so to speak, knowing what was rapidly approaching… …but we’ll talk about that later. First, the stats ***** Total…

All the leaves are brown, and the sky is gray… It happens every year at about this time; radio stations add the song California Dreaming to their play lists. But not so fast. For someone not from New England it might seem that autumn has ended when they see all the bare trees and brown leaves, but those trees are mostly red maples. Red maples not only turn color before most other trees but they are also usually first to lose their leaves. But we shouldn’t give up so easily. The sky may indeed…

I stepped on to the platform at Uckfield with Will Lloyd a couple of weeks ago and expressed ‘this could be a Mosslanda’. The thought has niggled away ever since and I suspect was fuel for the concept of ‘The Mosslanda Manifesto’ - in the meantime though, here is another Saturday plan…Uckfield is the stripped back and pruned remnant of a former LB&SCR cross country route - whilst today people may lament the past I think it’s worth reflecting in some ways I suspect we’re lucky to have it at all…

Cobwebs and Confusion and Consternation Image by Author, created in AI. Click here to read this story from the beginning… Plexi Glass and Tupper Ware were in the murky basement of Plexi’s massive abode, standing in front of the gated wine cellar wherein Plexi’s undead husband was being held against his undead will. Tinted Glass, the Lazarus-esque husband, had just uttered a warning which made no sense to either of our anti-heroines. Plexi: “Maybe we just misunderstood him.” Tupper: “That’s…

Having skipped it last year I have finally committed to, and completed, Inktober 2026. For those of you who are not aware, Inktober was originally conceived as a month long analogue challenge for creating art with ‘pen and ink’ and posting one illustration a day throughout the month of October. As devoted fans of Inktober will have noticed, I haven’t followed the official subject list and instead chosen a theme of ‘Mutant Beasts’ (made up creatures) and then using fountain pen friendly pigment…

A good friend suffered from stage 1 breast cancer. During her treatment, we would always hang out for coffee. We shared many good laughs. She is now free from cancer. It was only recently I learned that during her treatment, she refused to see anyone including her family members. The only exception is meeting up with me. I am not aware of her decision as we never discussed about her feelings or her treatment. She explained that during that dark period I was the only person who treated her like…

A selection of quotes and pictures to represent October’s reading: commonplace book noun a book into which notable extracts from other works are copied for personal use. ~ Someone had said that if you thought about the unthinkable long enough it became quite reasonable. Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey (1949) ~ “Power is not a material possession that can be given. Power is the ability to act and that must always be taken, for no one will ever give that power to you. Those who have power wish to…

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Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. This time, we’ve got weddings, funerals and existential crises. First, some brewery rebrand news that seems to speak to a general trend in the market: Kirkstall has ditched its 2010s craft-beer-flavoured pumpclips in favour of designs that evoke the 19th century. Or, more accurately, that evoke (to our minds) Fuller’s and Shepherd Neame in their pomp. We think this is part of an industry-wide move to (a) ditch the…

When you are creating documents over and over again, whether it be a document, blog post or configuration files, by copying an old one and deleting/updating the old contents. That's a very error prone process, from getting the file naming, and location right, to ensuring consistent formating throughout. Wouldn't it be great if there was a repeatable generation process for any text file? Well that's what templates are for, they can eliminate friction and ensure consistency across everything you…

A photo day with Florian, three concerts, another museum visit, roller skating and some random stuff. (43 photos)

Anyone old enough to remember New York before the Disneyfication of Times Square will have vivid memories of open aired street dealing, aggressive panhandling, gold-toothed, feather hatted pimps, zombie crackheads, and a bounty of unenforced criminal behavior. As late as 1990 when the murder rate peaked, New York City still festered from decades of disorder, distinctly different from today.Say what you will about the bad old days, but if you took some lumps and survived, you emerged a stronger,…

Happy Halloween! I pulled two Halloween-y Disneyland scans for you, along with some vintage photos of Trick-Or-Treaters, including a young Major Pepperidge.The first two photos show the exterior of the Haunted Mansion circa October 1968; just under a year before the attraction opened to the public, to great acclaim. The antebellum house looks complete and ready to move into, and the grounds look beautiful. I'm wondering how our photographer got this photo - could he just aim his camera…

Alpha And Omega (2010)

I had the privilege of attending the Karl Brunner lecture by Mario Draghi1 at ETH Zurich on 1 October. In his lecture, the former ECB president described an arrangement with two parts: an independent central bank responsible for price stability, and governments able to manage their debts without leaning on it. He then added a condition that is harder to legislate into existence: an economy that grows. The arithmetic of debt and growth The shorthand we all learned in Econ 101 is r minus g: the…

25 things we learnt from TfL FoI requests in October 2026 1) Over 600 buses now have air-conditioning in the passenger saloon, with approximately 700 more on order. 2) The key unresolved issues with digital Oyster wallets are around the user experience to ensure that the right wallet is used by the reader. How this will work needs to be proven before TfL can progress with a digital Oyster proposition. 3) In the last financial year 2395 passengers made a DLR journey from Canary Wharf to West…

Leviathan! This game started as a joke, riffing on the idea of a “Creature of the Black Lagoon” TTRPG, much like Promethean is a Frankenstein game. You’ll notice this is a bit of a pattern: jokes being taken too far. Frankly, I’d be surprised if some official World of Darkness stuff weren’t jokes taken too far, too; how else can you explain Insert gameline you don’t like here? The game cold opens with its backstory, which has been mentioned above, and the core themes of the game. Mainly that of…