Beacons Four Tops. Essex family weekend. Hot and humid. Sonia, Sara and Me on the Diving Board, Fan y Big Walked the Beacons Four Tops (well, three of them to be accurate) on Tuesday with SSG and JP: Neuadd Reservoir car park – Gap Road track – Fan y Big (719m) – Gap Road Col / Bwlch ar y Fan (600m) – Cribyn (795m) – Col (680m) – Pen y Fan (886m) – below Corn Du (873m) because the wind was unbelievable – the ridge back round to the Neuadd Reservoir. Tea and cake in the Old Barn Tea Room on the…
Over this weekend Clare and I took a short camping trip down to Micalong Creek — a place dear to her and full of memories of camping trips with her family.So first of all, it was an incredible privilege to share time at a place that means so much and holds some fond memories!We arrived early on Sunday evening after a short ~1.5hr drive out of Canberra. The roads up were pretty devoid of traffic — which is to be expected on a school night (and in the middle of winter, and on the winter…
A nearly severe thunderstorm approaching Swindon, UK yesterday. I say nearly as I didn't see any hail, notice any strong wind gusts or read any reports to suggest otherwise. For a 'homegrown' UK storm it had a brief but somewhat photogenic shelf cloud for a while.
Feed readers and aggregators often permit the import and export of a web feed list. Typically in a single dreadful XML format. OPML - Outline Processor Markup Language <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <opml version="2.0"> <head> <title>Minimal web feed opml cluster</title> </head> <body> <outline text="pure garbage" title="Garbage collector" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://example.com/rss.xml" htmlUrl="https://example.com"/> <outline text="Atom is not RSS" type="rss"…
In April, Jody V. sent me a link to this New York Times article with the note "I noticed the word shouty in this piece. I can’t recall having seen the word used in an American publication before."Here it is in the context of the article: But in a social media post after talks with Mr. Rutte, the president reiterated his ire and threw in Greenland for good measure: “NATO WASN’T THERE WHEN WE NEEDED THEM, AND THEY WON’T BE THERE IF WE NEED THEM AGAIN. REMEMBER GREENLAND, THAT BIG, POORLY RUN,…
English version based on an automatic translation with Deepl. My (almost certainly) final post on the issue of FOSSGIS membership dues. As expected, yesterday’s virtual general meeting of the association approved the increase in dues. The only change adopted compared to the board’s proposal regarding individual memberships is that the reduced fee is no longer intended for members who are not employed, but rather for members whose financial situation requires a reduced membership fee. The…
Watching a Prime Minister resign in a flurry of headlines is a classic British distraction. While the news cycle fixates on who’s moving into Number 10, the laws they actually passed aren’t going anywhere. The “Nude Ultimatum” and the Online Safety Act were bought and paid for long before the tears started on the Downing Street steps. To understand why a new leader won’t just fix this… Source
Lovely art for today’s TDC Bleepflower flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license
I woke up feeling pretty good this morning. It was a little cooler and less humid too. There was a decent breeze and the light rain outside sounded nice so it had me in a good mood. Bench press felt great. Well great for what bench press can feel. It is not a lift hat I enjoy or even thing is all that useful. I only do it for balance. If I had to press I would rather to strict presses anytime. The weight felt heavy but the movement felt good as I warmed up and worked my way up through the sets.…
The following poem is about suicide. It uses "found" text, which creates intriguing, distressing, and often disagreeable juxtapositions. Engage, or don't, accordingly. Definitions are from the Chambers 21st Century Dictionary, 13th edition, in order. They have been edited. Which shoe fits?take verb. To reach out for and grasp; to enter for use. She considered taking her own life. To carry, conduct, or lead to another place. She considered taking her own life. To do or perform. She considered…
Just something I experience more and more these days. When it comes to reviewing code, the descriptions, commits and such can be massive blast of information: Full of extraneous details depicting what was changed. The main point is why was something changed. And often in only one huge commit with massive diffs. I'm sorry but my poor ADHD brain can't take this very well. I don't want to read a novel. Usually blurbs of text are fine: Extraneous detail I can ask about if I need to know. So this is…
I do not want YouPastor to become a machine that writes sermons while the pastor checks out. That may sound strange from someone building an AI workspace for pastors. But the more I think about the weekly pressure pastors carry, especially bivocational and small-church pastors, the more convinced I am that “autopilot” is the wrong goal. A pastor does not only need words on a page. A pastor needs to decide what is faithful to the text, timely for the congregation, gentle enough, clear enough,…
The pillars of Cincinnati society shook in 1910 as two very wealthy and very much respected women tussled over a man neither had ever met. The man in question was Abraham Lincoln, and he had been dead for 45 years.It was Eleanora Alms, or, as she was called in those days, Mrs. Frederick H. Alms, who first stirred the kerfuffle. Eleanora Cors Unzicker Alms was born in 1846 to Joseph and Margaret Unzicker. Her father was a very popular and successful doctor. Eleanora married Frederick Alms in…
I saw that there was going to be a Microsoft Windows Insider meetup in London. I registered for it, thinking ‘why not’. A while later, I got an invite to the event (probably due to someone else cancelling). I was unsure if I actually wanted to go (is it really the kind of thing I want to go to?), but I was free at the time of the event, so I confirmed my attendance (now thinking ‘what’s the worst that could happen?’). The event was a two-hour affair yesterday evening in London. I was given an…
Release date: June 26thRecord label: Bar NoneGenre: Experimental folk, folk punk, folk rock, singer-songwriterFormats: Vinyl, CD, digital Chad Matheny is one of the most unique and exciting songwriters of his era, and for the fast few years he’s been acting like it–self-releasing albums, hiding some of his best material on high-concept digital-only releases, appearing in opening slots for tours by bands much bigger (and less interesting) than his Emperor X project who nonetheless recognize the…
Over each of the last few years I’ve watched a handful of bloggers I follow leave WordPress for other platforms. In the last few weeks, two more left. Jon Konrath moved his long-running WordPress blog to a static site generated from files he keeps in GitHub. Dave Kellogg, whose marketing blog I’ve found startlingly useful professionally, migrated 750 posts to Ghost after two decades on WordPress. Kellogg mentioned almost in passing that writing posts is fun again. I was surprised by how envious…
In 1651, in the aftermath of a century of religious war, Thomas Hobbes set out to end the age of faith. Leviathan proposed to replace the quarrelsome authority of priests and prophets with a single secular sovereign, and it did so by recasting the human being as a piece of machinery: man as matter in motion, the commonwealth as an artificial man, sovereignty itself as an artificial soul giving life to the whole. Hobbes stands at the dawn of the disenchanted West, the world we have inhabited for…
More rain again this morning. But fair after dinner. A calf to burn and a small pig. Finished mowing round the courts. Started to get it up.
Six has gotta be more than coincidence
Yesterday, I wrote about how I’m fed up having AI everywhere. That’s also the case in work’s email. We use Gmail for work 🤯. Here’s a screenshot of one email thread: Gmail UI - 2026 What’s wrong here? At the top, AI overview… I don’t really need you to summarise it. Even if it wasn’t enough that Google read all emails, now even Gemini does it. Do they scan each email twice? Yesterday, I tried to switch to a plain text email configuration, but I couldn’t find it. Writing an email in plain text…
My good friend Chris has recently shared a lovely piece about his experience overcoming procrastination on his blog - and it chimed strongly with me, for I have been trying to exercise the same practices here with a few of my projects…Progress - what can I do that doesn’t need a clear end game?The source of inaction may be subtlety different, in my case, thinking I have an end result in mind without actually knowing quite what this is… the colour and texture of the ballast and groundwork around…
2009 romance/SF/mystery; sixth of its series but effectively stand-alone. Lyra Dore found a trove of a rare sort of amber, and the Company took it off her. And she was seeing Cruz Sweetwater, the Company's security chief, at the time. Three months later, he comes back into her life…
#109 in a series of articles about the technology behind Bang & Olufsen loudspeakers I’ve started working with a number of my colleagues on a series of videos for internal training at Bang & Olufsen. They were kind enough to make some of these videos publicly available. This video demonstrates some of the individual components of a room’s acoustical contributions.
A 2023 survey by Travel + Leisure invited readers to vote on the world’s most beautiful cities. Clearly the answer was different for everyone, but see their non-exhaustive list of the world’s 25 most beautiful cities. I chose Palermo. On Sicily's Nth coast the sunny city is a dream for architecture fans, right on the Mediterranean's cross roads. Palermo shows a striking mix of architectural styles, after centuries of conquest & differing cultural influences, a rich history of local…
B2EMO Just Different Enough to Make You Mad Star Wars Droid Depot Item No.: ??? Manufacturer: Disney Number: n/a Includes: Collector card, TC-332 left leg Action Feature: Removable dome Retail: $19.99 Availability: June 2026 Appearances: Andor Bio: All different types of droids populate the Star Wars galaxy. Each droid is different and has their own unique personality and colors. This droid helped Cassian and his friends build a new life on the grain fields of Mina-Rau, forging bonds with other…
In a previous post, I covered what Retrieval-Augmented Generation is and how to prepare data for ingestion. A companion post on the ingest pipeline walks through the data cleaning techniques that get content into the vector store. This post picks up where retrieval begins. Ingesting documents into a vector database is only half the problem. The other half is what happens when someone types a question: understanding the query, ranking results, validating citations, and handling failures along…
#107 in a series of articles about the technology behind Bang & Olufsen loudspeakers I’ve started working with a number of my colleagues on a series of videos for internal training at Bang & Olufsen. They were kind enough to make some of these videos publicly available. This video demonstrates some of the individual components of a room’s acoustical contributions.
#106 in a series of articles about the technology behind Bang & Olufsen loudspeakers I’ve started working with a number of my colleagues on a series of videos for internal training at Bang & Olufsen. They were kind enough to make some of these videos publicly available. This video demonstrates some of the individual components of a room’s acoustical contributions.
High in the hills of Assynt, these caves contain traces of animals that roamed the landscape between the ice ages
Every person is unique. No two people are identical. We differ in physical appearance, personality, fingerprints, heartbeat, gait, and DNA. Such differences are used to identify criminals and in video surveillance of citizens by nation states. Yet in other ways all humans are the same. We all have brains, hearts, and lungs. All our bodies use the same biochemistry to stay alive: whether to breathe oxygen, digest food, or fight infections. On some level we have common aspirations: to survive, to…
