It all started, as so many things do, at a car boot sale about 20 years ago. We came across a retired pilot, military I think, who had flown all around the world and had collected many matchbooks on his travels. He had a bag of what must have been 300 or so and they were from all over the place; Europe, the Middle East, North & South America etc. and he simply didn't want them anymore. Nor did anybody else at the car boot it seems, as he practically gave them to us as soon as showed any…

My friend works as a chef. He spends 95% cooking, and 5% marketing on social media for his private dinners and to find catering clients. He used to work in marketing, a useful past expertise, but he doesn’t really focus on it. He makes videos for Instagram, reposts them to LinkedIn. That’s it. I found this approach refreshing (though I’d suggest he set up a guestbook during dinners and have people sign with their emails, just to keep in touch). A project can be important, overhead, or a…

Earlier this year I was invited to join a panel at Button Conference 2026: Harm reduction in content design: Living our values at work led by David Dylan Thomas. My co-panelists were Ayanfe Adewoye and Amanda Costello, two folks whose work I deeply respect. Though I am no longer working directly in the content design space, I was excited to participate in this conference I’d been following for a few years. I can’t share the recording, but I can share the notes I wrote up for the questions that…

Edgar Assing, Valentin Blomer, and Farrell Brumley are organizing an event at the Hausdorff Center in Bonn on Jan 11-15 to discuss recent developments regarding the Riemann zeta function and allied functions. From the announcement: “This includes in particular the recently established proof of the quasi Riemann Hypothesis over the rational numbers as well as over general number fields and its manifold consequences, ranging from Artin’s primitive root conjecture and torsion in class groups to…

Hey there. Before today’s links, a quick victory and a small announcement. Victory: This week, Street-Smart Coding turned 1 year old. One year ago, it felt like a distant goal. Today, over 90 devs are coding smarter. You’ve probably started getting these emails after grabbing your copy. If you’ve read the book, I’d appreciate a quick review on Gumroad, Amazon, or Goodreads. That’d help more devs code smartly. Maybe it’s time to start thinking about a new edition. Announcement: After 1 year,…

A classic red string board and an investigation board appear in the trailer for the second season of Where’s Wanda? (Apple TV+, 2026). ▲ Where’s Wanda? (Apple TV+, 2026) ▲ Where’s Wanda? (Apple TV+, 2026) ▲ Where’s Wanda? (Apple TV+, 2026) ▲ Where’s Wanda? (Apple TV+, 2026) From contributor toffph on Bluesky.

Forbes magazine has just published its annual list of the 400 wealthiest Americans, who this year hold a total of $8 trillion in wealth. It’s a gobsmacking amount of money, but we also live in a world where trillions are not unheard of. Here are a few thoughts and perspectives. The promised Social Security benefits under current law exceed the projected inflows of revenue by about $29 trillion over the next 75 years, according to the actuaries. The promised Medicare benefits under current law…

Since 2005, John Roberts has been the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. During his confirmation hearing that year, he explained his judicial philosophy. He made the case for his future career as one of the 12 most impartial people in america with this quote: "I will decide every case based on the record, according to the rule of law, without fear or favor, to the best of my ability. I will remember that it’s my job to call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat." Judges are the so-called…

Hello all, it's been a while! For the past two months, I've been immersing myself in spooky media in celebration of the season, and I have many, many thoughts about it. Hopefully this burst of inspiration to write will stick around for a while and I can tell you all about it. This post is very long (At around 2,500 words, it may be the longest I've ever put on this blog), and it gets pretty personal, but I think it's necessary to explain why I liked this particular story so much.…

I love that I could find a quote by punk icon Henry Rollins for this week. It’s perfectly “night before Halloween” as well so if you’re planning to go to a haunted house, watch a horror film or play ghost in the graveyard, may you make it to tomorrow. But in all seriousness, what helps get you through the day? Is it a snuggle from a beloved pet, kind words from friends or family, or knowing you accomplished a task? Take time to reflect on what will get you to tomorrow. And the next day… and the…

I’m playing at The Grove in Nottingham soon, supporting Foule, with Oiseaux also on the bill. It’s on Thursday 26th November. Tickets via Gigantic. It’ll be my first chance to air some new songs. I didn’t expect to play another show until sometime next year, as I’m focused on finishing the album, but I was chuffed to get this invite: playing live is a good catalyst for finishing songs and testing them in the wild. And rehearsal jams are often where the final layers come together, when all the…

I miss when a bunch of us weirdos overshared on our TiddlyWikis nearly every day. Most are gone or unmaintained now. Can we bring them back? I'll start: rudimentarylathe.org Nearly 5,000 notes going back to 2018, and man oh man, at least 4,800 of them are an embarrassment. I should keep this stuff to myself, but that horse left the barn long ago. We used to write "TiddlyMails" to each other (I don't think we actually called them that). I'd write a note that simply mentioned someone with their…

Sam only needed a few photos. He kept repeating this point. “They don’t even have to be good photos! This isn’t some school competition. But the publisher told me I have space for two more photos, and so I want two more photos. I’m greedy like that.” “Surely you could just find something online?” “No, I can’t just find something online, Olly! If the pictures were legit, I’d have to pay for them, and if they weren’t legit — well, you know me — I’d end up with some AI-generated slop that turned…

How Swatcher turns a description or a photo into a palette of paints you can actually buy. Swatcher has had palette generation from the start. Describe a room, get some colours back, matched to real paints. With the rebuild I took the chance to turn it inside out. The old way was the obvious one. Ask a model for some hex codes, then find the nearest paint to each. It mostly worked. But nearest can be a long way off, and the model’s reasoning was written for a colour that doesn’t exist. Nobody…

(It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories.) Everyone knows and hates a blue screen of death, but blue isn’t the only color for the job: Wikipedia has a list and while it’s very interesting, I think it tries too hard to fit anything into a formula. Can this below really be called a white screen of death? The most terrifying screens of death might be black, anyway. Even Macs have one: Earlier PC users would shudder thinking of this black screen of…

Wow, it’s nearly November! October was so busy that I could only watch one Chinese drama, Against the Current. A drama so hot that nearly 50% of China was watching it. I wrote a thorough review, and you can see how much I love it. One thing I noticed about Against the Current: if you approach it as a romance, expecting to be swept away by a wonderful love story, you will be sorely disappointed. Many who commented that they dropped the drama were waiting for big moments between the couple. But…

Moving again. This is the fourth time I write a version of this post, and the boxes were more or less the same boxes. This time there was an ocean in the middle. I flew alone, knowing the drill by now, with two colossal bags that had my whole home inside them. Gabi came a month later. When you move like this a few times you stop packing objects and you start packing a life, compressed, hoping it expands again on the other side. People describe cities with words like charming, or livable, or…

Back in February 2023 I launched Braggoscope, my unofficial spelunker for official best show ever, BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time (write-up here). You can listen to all 1,000+ episodes online for free (and see all books in the online reading lists). i.e. there’s a lot so don’t miss the visual explorer to find the good stuff. (“Spelunker” from George Oates’ use of the term: "an interface to let you wander around a big dataset, and … to show relationships between things.") 1. Notturnometer, late night…

Imagine offering someone genuine feedback, only to watch it spiral into a quarrel. The conversation veers off course. The original point is lost. Now the topic is no longer the feedback but the two of you, and how each of you is always treated. It becomes a matter of ego, where each wants to prevail over the other. You realise you only wanted to give feedback, and now it's a full-blown war. You grow resentful of the person. Frustrated, too. If this happens often enough, you lose the inclination…

This turned out to be a heavier lift for my thoughts today than when I started writing. Almost deserving of its own post(s). Nevertheless, here are today's thoughts! ¶ Regarding my post yesterday, asking about Bear Blog's potential toxitiy: Sylvia reached out to me by email to reassure me that Bear Blog is not toxic. The trend was newer users to the platform treating it like social media, which CAN be toxic. Herman recently updated Bear's code of conduct and the very first paragraph shows us…

Prunella Clough, Disused Land, 1999This week we went down to Chichester to see the Pallant House exhibition British Landscapes: A Sense of Place. The Prunella Clough painting above was one of the highlights, inspired by edgelands in the Portsmouth area and painted in 1999, just before her death. In the catalogue, written by Pallant Director Simon Martin, she is quoted as saying how difficult it was to paint such places, that really require something 'tougher and more brutal in terms of…

Amazon’s developed a pretty immense print-on-demand operation. You think of them as warehousing books and sending them off to customers. Well with some slower selling titles they don’t waste time and space by warehousing them in the first place.* They just print ’em and mail ’em. This video dates from 2021, and I’d expect that today there’d be fewer interruptions in the flow where humans handle the product and “expedite” it onwards. As book industry transformers maybe Amazon was bound to call…

Dear Constant Reader, It’s the Friday before Halloween! I hope you’ve been having a wonderful time and tomorrow is amazingly creepy! Here’s your tip! Look for post-Halloween deals on November 1st. In the past, the day after Halloween has been a great time to stock up on cheap make-up, costume bits, and decor (not to mention candy), as stores try to clear their shelves to bring in the Christmas stuff. However, these days stores are marking down Halloween items midway through October and removing…

"... to illustrate the possibilities" 1 Public Domain image from DOT/FAA/AR-00/30. Introduction Dr. Jeck was described as "A gifted physicist and innovator" 2. We have seen several examples in this series. Several of his proposals have been adopted, while others are still open possibilities. Dr. Jeck's own summaries Here are selected conclusions from three of Dr. Jeck's later works: "Icing Design Envelopes (14 CFR Parts 25 and 29, Appendix C) Converted to a Distance-Based Format 1: The methods…

"The confidence in the curves is strongest where the data points are plentiful."1 Introduction With over 6,000 measurements and 28,000 nmi of natural icing flight test data, there are many analyses that can be performed. Here, I will attempt to reproduce some of the Natural Probability curves. Files provided for the SCDB I will refer to Dr. Jeck's published values as the Supercooled Cloud Database or SCDB. The database files I received I will refer to at the spreadsheet or spreadsheets. There…

"A number of potential uses are illustrated for the new format, particularly for comparing icing test exposures to ... natural probabilities of occurrence." Public Domain image from DOT/FAA/AR-00/30. 1 Introduction In DOT/FAA/AR-00/30 1 Dr. Jeck wrote of Figure 23: 3.2 COMPARING WITH NATURAL LWC PROBABILITIES. ... Figure 23 shows a set of LWC probability curves derived from about 23,000 nmi of flight data in stratiform icing conditions. Any given curve indicates the probability that randomly…

"what is the probability of finding such a test exposure in nature?" Public Domain figure from DOT/FAA/AR-00/30. Introduction A 28,000 nmi database is large enough to calculate meaningful probabilities, which Dr. Jeck termed Natural Probabilities. He also used the data to make the remarkable proposal of replacing the figures in Appendix C with distance and probability based ones. While this has not yet been adopted, some of his proposals have been adopted as supplements. Natural LWC…

"Thanks are also due ... for their patience and support on this long project." 1 Public Domain image from DOT/FAA/AR-07/4. Introduction There are 28000 nmi of measured natural icing flight test data in the database, with over 6000 individual measurements. Data from more than two dozen organizations for flights between 1946 and 1988 (42 years) were collected into the database. Dr. Richard Jeck of the FAA was the lead in assembling the database. Dr. Jeck used the term "Supercooled Cloud…

"AN ENGINEERING-ENABLED (MEASURABLE! AND CALCULABLE!) ICING SEVERITY SCALE" Title from an outline of topics by Dr. Jeck. Image from an Icing Information Note. Introduction Dr. Jeck's "A History and Interpretation of Aircraft Icing Intensity Definitions and FAA Rules for Operating in Icing Conditions" 1 outlines the history in the US Code of Federal Regulations. Changes require a public comment period, so there was often debate (and on some occasions controversy). The definitions can affect…