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…
Dear Daring Adventurer, by receiving this Fediverse challenge coin, you hereby join the Fediverse Rebel Alliance. As you may notice, this coin has identical sides, unlike military-inspired challenge coins. That is because the powerful object now in your possession is not made to pursue petty personal competitions, where an individual is the winner and another one is the loser. This coin is a collective challenge to the rich, the machos, the arrogants, the ableists, the manspreaders, the…
My starting point is not what Andy Burnham said but points recently made by Chris Dillow. Here he argues that we shouldn’t worry about the bond market per se, because that market is just an early warning system for future problems that any government should be worring about anyway. In that sense, the bond market is no different from, and less important than, an OBR forecast. For example, if the government were to start borrowing more to increase public spending, interest rates in the bond…
My home audio system goes through a Denon AVR-X1700H as the primary receiver. My house has three pairs of ceiling speakers: one in the living room, one in the dining room, and one in the kitchen. When listening to music I want them all streaming from the same Spotify source, but if I'm playing video games I occasionally want Spotify from just the kitchen/dining room. Let's reverse engineer how the app controls the receicver so I can swap from my watch.
Polbrook Gurney Colliery skulks deep within an uncharted corner of the North Somerset Coalfield, in a mysterious region known locally as Titfield Thunderbolt Country—a place so elusive even the pigeons refuse to deliver mail there.You won’t find it on any map, railway atlas, or even scribbled on the back of a suspiciously sticky beer mat. However, it did make a cameo in an Ealing Comedy film during the early 1950s, which is clearly irrefutable proof of its existence—far more reliable than…
The heat persists throughout the day, and even at night it does not relent. Outside it is more pleasant, yet inside the house it is still nearly 30°C. On the late evening of such a hot day, I set out to take a walk and escape the trapped heat within my home. Twilight transitions into a tepid night. Having arrived at the top of the sports field, the world is shrouded in darkness. I walk deliberately slowly; in the distance lies a dark-red stripe across the horizon, each step on the gravel…
If you are tired of standard map-guessing games that rely on scouring satellite imagery or wandering through street-level panoramas, my new interactive game Sonar City offers a refreshing challenge. This game strips away the visual map entirely, plunging the world into shadow and leaving you with a single tactical tool: a glowing radar array. Your mission - if you choose to accept it - is
Daily Drawing 905
This post “Nature’s Calligraphy: The Art of Seeing” features a series of photos of ducks and swans. While it might look like a typical summer update, it illustrates a theme I’ve discussed before: we see how we think. [1] What occupies our mind shapes our vision. Looking at these photos, you can easily tell what was driving me artistically at the exact moment I pressed the shutter—whether it was a tourist photo, minimalism, calligraphy, or traditional Chinese painting. The sequence of the…
The seventh episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out:In Episode 7, I chat with Ana, the author of ohhelloana.blog. We talk about, among other things, the growth we see in our websites over time, finding an in-person indie web community, and connecting with people using personal websites.I hope you enjoy the episode!Wonders of Web Weaving has an RSS feed you can use to follow along from wherever you get your podcasts. Ana ohhelloana.blog The seventh episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out…
Despite all banks repeatedly telling us as customers about being wary of unexpected calls, and not giving out personal information,...
Well, if the Met Office are to be believed, Stratford-upon-Avon could be nudging 40 degrees this week. Forty! That's not weather for Warwickshire; that's weather for lizards, tourists with regrettable sunburn, and blokes who insist on wearing socks with sandals. I spent most of the morning wondering whether to fill the bird bath or simply climb into it myself.The talk everywhere seems to be air-conditioning. A few years ago, buying an air-conditioning unit in Britain felt about as necessary as…
One night is all it takes Developer: Takumi Corporation Publisher: Takumi Corporation Release Dates: 2001 (Arcade), October 10th, 2002 Available On: Arcade, Playstation Genre: Shoot ‘Em Up (Vertical) You ever feel wholly unqualified to do something but go ahead and do it anyway? I don’t typically fall prey to negative thoughts like that or imposter syndrome- I’m happy just doing my thing here with the audience I’ve cultivated- but Night Raid is a game that has me doubting myself perhaps more…
I'll admit it. I will. Just watch me! You think I won't but I'll surprise everyone! Uh, what were we talking about? Oh right. I have two "mid" Knott's Berry Farm scans for you. They're OK, but not that special. But I've zigged at the end for a little extra something. The cherry on top. The "Inferno" hot sauce from Taco Bell. Here's a nice lady (I can just tell) having fun posing with Whiskey Bill. Hey Bill, here eyes are up HERE! The lady is nice, but it's fun to pretend to be a little bit…
101 Dalmatians (1996)
