Michigan-based Trijicon won an Army contract to build an optic for the vaunted “Ma Deuce,” and the sight has made its first appearance in the field. First announced in July 2021, the Army tapped Trijicon to deliver its Machine Gun Reflex Sight, or MGRS, specifically for use with the M2A1 .50 caliber heavy machine gun. It basically looks like a huge RMR with a flip-in magnifier. Constructed of 7075-T6 aluminum, the MGRS is designed to withstand the jarring, rapid recoil produced by fixed and…
A collection of beautiful, high-resolution photolog scans reveals a colorful world of pastel-colored cars and whimsical signage.The very first post of this newsletter back in 2022 was about Connecticut’s highway photologs from the 1980s. Photologs were essentially an early, film-based version of Google Street View. Almost every state had one of these photolog programs with tricked-out vans logging every mile of road in their state, with some dating back to 1961. The Connecticut footage is a…
Some 70 years ago this week. A great view of LT(j.g.) H.C. Arnold of Attack Squadron (VA) 83 “Rampagers” taxiing his cutting-edge Chance-Vought F7U-3M Cutlass toward the port steam catapult on board the Essex-class attack carrier USS Intrepid (CVA 11) during flight operations 22 June 1956. This was during Carrier Air Group Eight’s (CVG-8) 1956 Mediterranean cruise (12 March to 5 September) aboard Intrepid after the carrier had received her SCB-27C conversion to better operate jets. The nose of…
Tough to get a great LSO image, but this one rocks. Remember the magic of long exposures in low light, folks. Official caption: A sailor signals to a Bell AH-1Z Viper attack helicopter aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Boxer during flight operations in the South China Sea, June 13, 2026. The helicopter and aviators are assigned to the Marine Corps’ 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit, deployed with the Boxer Amphibious Ready Group to provide deterrence and crisis response in the Indo-Pacific…
My recent blog post about categories was inspired by a discussion with Thomas about work he was doing on his site. Thomas then wrote a blog post in response to mine, and several people reached out with their ideas. I was delighted to see how much discussion and inquiry can come from a single blog post. Source: Bringing people together with the web - James’ Coffee Blog This used to be the norm. I am fairly confident that my preference for longer form writing isn’t just my penchant for verbosity…
Create one of those Uses pages. Still a work in progress, but there's a good chunk of the stuff I use on there now. https://kevquirk.com/uses Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.
This week will probably just be a writing log. 500 words down yesterday. I always console myself that Graham Greene only ever wrote 500 words a day. The start of a prose piece is always slow for me, because I’m finding the voice and the pace of the thing as I go. Those first 500 will get revised to death once I have my full first draft. It speeds up as I go – I wrote the last three thousand words of DEAD PIG COLLECTOR in a single day.
Anyone planning for FIRE 1 knows it’s hard to think about retirement living standards while you’re still having a blast in your 20s and 30s – or even when you’re neck-deep in your responsible 40s and 50s. Like a precog from Minority Report, you can only glimpse fragments of your future. Happily, intrepid retirees have sent us back reports from the frontier. And they’ve supplied just enough detail to fill in the ‘Here Be Dragons’ gaps in your FI map. The resultant research – Retirement Living…
I’m a heavy user of voice-to-text. It’s a key part of my workflow, and it improves my productivity — but only about sixty percent of the time. Lower than I expected when I first started using it. Here’s what I’ve realized. Voice-to-text improves the efficiency with which I get an idea down. But that’s only a gain when the bottleneck is the speed of capture. A lot of the time, the bottleneck is actually the thinking itself — and the act of typing, with its slight slowness, gives me the time to…
We'll take advantage of using temporary mpv chapter markers and FFmpeg to avoid needing to re-encode the video.
June 16th is always ringed or highlighted on my calender every year, not even birthdays get that level of note, it was and still is the day I get most excited about fishing, once again on running water and the thought of pootling around the Fens in my boat, stalking R.Thames and R.Lea carp or in this instance getting straight down to business with the 40 Rivers Challenge where I am currently on 30 completed rivers and have been settled on that figure since mid-August 2025!. There was to be no…
D got the first coat on the chassis and one end wall yesterday. I was even allowed to do the top bit as there are no windows for me to cover in paint! And today we are starting the next really daunting task, waxing on and off inside the cabin. So far the heat is bearable but we are only at 27 degrees with 32 forecast later and the cabin has less tree shade in the afternoon.
Something you won't hear me say often (because, as previously mentioned, I despise The New York Times), but this recent op-ed is essential reading. It's essential because computer scientist Cal Newport is one of the most thoughtful and clear-eyed voices in the AI debate. Anthropic recently dropped a classic of the form: a scary-sounding report titled “When A.I. Builds Itself” that claims A.I. could be moving closer to the capability of “autonomously designing and developing its own successor.”…
Most wine writing tells us three things: whether the critic liked the wine, what the wine smells and tastes like, and how good it is presumed to be. These are important to know, but they do not exhaust the task of criticism. What wine writing too rarely explains is how a wine produces its effects. We get the verdict, the descriptor list, and perhaps a score. What we less often get is an account of how the wine moves, how it creates tension, how it resolves that tension, where it changes…
There are books, movies and music that you would be missing something if you didn't experience. We may never know what we are missing but no doubt we are. And then there are those that wash over you, you snap out of it and you are not changed in any meaningful way. Disclosure Day uses tropes and dramatic camera zoom ins to Emily Blunts eyes as she stares at a cardinal - but after watching this movie you are no different for having seen it. No part of you is better or more aware. I want to say…
This post was last edited 0 minutes ago. I've been paying for Uruky search engine for several months now. Uruky's software engineer, Bruno, reached out to me in April with an offer to try it for free for a limited period; after that I began paying for the service. You might be wondering why someone would pay for a search engine when there are good privacy alternatives available for free. I put this question to Bruno last month; you can read his take on paying for private search in my interview…
Nightshade and Latte are fiends for woolly toys, but both have a tendency to attempt to swallow any tubular ones whole. This is unfortunate and inadvisable. So they get bagels. Or doughnuts. Round things with a hole in the middle. As of yet they have not choked on any, nor have they eaten any, though a few have ended up in human toilets courtesy Latte who likes to float toys in undefended loos. (Lid down, whenever he visits.) This is my (not actually any good at crocheting) version of Melissa…
The easiest place for an AI rollout to look successful is the velocity dashboard. Pull request count is up. Cycle time improves. More code gets merged. The tool has a tidy story to tell.Production usually tells the longer version. The review queue gets heavier. The same two senior engineers become the validation layer for a larger volume of plausible patches. Support sees more small changes with surprising edge cases. The team ships more often, but on-call starts to feel more expensive. None of…
The vibeThis was one of those weeks that had some fun tech stuff, some meaningful spiritual time, and one really hard life update right in the middle of it all. I am trying to focus on the good things where I can, but honestly, the job and insurance scramble has been a lot.Highlights⌚ The new Apple Watch Ultra 3 I ordered came in. I got it set up and, of course, installed the watchOS 27 beta on it. Because apparently I cannot just leave a brand-new device alone for five minutes.😔 Unfortunately,…
OMG! Mastodon (at least social.lol) now lets me add alt text to my avatar and header pictures! EEE!
Breezy and cool under a low cloud ceiling. A wood thrush sings sweetly just inside the woods’ edge. At the limestone quarry two miles away, something briefly gives the machine cause to roar.
23rd June 2026 It is that we keep appointing poor Prime Ministers that is the problem: an input issue not an output issue * There is an old adage that a litigator should not be “surprised” (or similar) by what their opponent does in litigation – one may be disappointed perhaps, but one should never be surprised. If a litigator is genuinely surprised by what their opponent does, they are probably in the wrong job. A similar thing may be said about political commentators who are “baffled” (or…
A year ago I didn’t know anything in particular about the Lincoln memorial reflecting pool and neither did you. I had seen pictures on television and publications, the occasional cameo in film or television. I knew there was a thing called the National Mall that nearby, and that the Washington monument was too. I had no idea what color it was supposed to be, the composition of its water, how many gallons it contained, its depth, or any other facts about its operation and upkeep. It was just a…
Other than watermelon, I’ve never been a huge melon fan – as Eric Kim notes in Korean American the honeydew melon is usually the most unloved morsel in American fruit cups. My aversion was why it took me so long to try his Honeydew Semifreddo … but if anyone can turn me into a convert, it’s Eric. I love the simplicity of a semifreddo. For this one, honeydew is puréed and sieved, then the juice is combined with egg yolks and sugar that have been gently warmed and whisked into a thick sauce. That…
A casino once announced itself with chandeliers, carpets, marble, and a door that felt slightly too important for a normal Tuesday. Online, the doorway is quieter. A player taps a screen, opens a wallet, waits for a balance, and expects the magic to behave. That is where a crypto casino provider becomes part architect, part mechanic, and part stagehand.The Lobby Is No Longer A RoomThe old casino lobby had one job before anything else happened: make people feel they had entered a designed world.…
Apple’s operating system upgrades this year seem to be focusing on scores of small improvements along with a ton of AI integrations so it’s no surprise that announced upgrades to Apple Maps in iOS/iPadOS/macOS 27… More
8606/21525A couple of days of being a pushy prick and I finally managed to get in touch with someone who could sort out appointments for the rest of my treatment. And the good news is that I don't have to start again. The two I have had still count, so I only have to be pricked three more times. If all goes to plan I'll be done by next Wednesday. Giving myself eleven days to recover enough to go on holiday (though I think I will still have to keep out of crowds if I don't want to be…
When the Brooklyn Bridge was in construction, and when it was new, there were any number of reports on how incredibly tall it was. To be fair, the bridges towers were the second and third tallest structures in the city when first built, with only the spire of Trinity Church being higher, but the towers are not in the middle of the city, but rather out at the edges of the East River. Here’s a view from a three-story building (the old Hall of Records in City Hall Park) during construction in…
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The Elgin, Joliet and Eastern was a railway operating on the periphery of Chicago, IL, and it was snapped up by CN in 2008, and fully absorbed into the Wisconsin Central on January 1, 2013.
