It’s Friday, so it’s time for the Book Blogger Hop again, hosted by Billy @ Coffee Addicted Writer. I’ve made my own image from a stock photo (credit: Anna Shvets) to avoid adding images created via generative AI to my blog. Feel free to use it too if you would like! This week’s prompt is about Halloween tropes: If you could retell a Halloween story or trope from a fresh angle, what would you choose and why? Hm, I don’t really know. I’m not much for spooky stories, really — not in my own…

Three of the ten graffiti-adorned Cadillacs that make up Cadillac Ranch near Amarillo, Texas. The post Three Tagged Caddies appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

I have my Steam Frame currently sitting on a 3D-printed holder. It is fine, but offers practically no protection, which is why I've resorted to wrapping the headset in a microfiber cloth. This new Shield Case by WaterField looks like a much better solution, and I might just have to grab one. The case has a reinforced foam structure, a fleece-lined interior to prevent scratches, and waterproof zippers although I hope no one has to ever test this. There's also room for the wireless adapter,…

TL;DR Link to heading My everyday macOS account isn’t an admin, and a separate local admin account is the only one that can use sudo. That keeps my login password from unlocking root, though a compromised everyday account can still work around it. Going through it tripped me up in a few ways: globs, ~ and $USER resolve as admin, and each command asks for the password twice. I gave admin passwordless sudo and wrapped su admin -c 'sudo …' in a zsh function called asudo, so I now type one password…

Yesterday we stopped at Coston's Orchard, my favorite orchard, to get some more apples for teaching. Earlier this term, I got apples for my Nonfiction Writing class--it was a great way to have students write reviews--reviewing 3 different varietals of apples. Today I'll take apples to my Composition class.Yesterday my spouse pointed out that we drove past at least 5 orchards to get to my favorite; he is correct. Some of those orchards are more crowded, but I really don't have a great…

The photo I forgot to include in my previous post. Well, this is interesting. I have a post that has performed really well on the site bubbles.town. It was very interesting watching more and more people visit the site throughout the day. This was the most non-bot traffic I've received since restarting this website in May. It feels exhilarating to know that real people are looking at and appreciating my photographs again. Since I left Instagram and all other social media a couple of years ago,…

Two weeks of links and quite a few urbanism ones, mostly about the new Oxford Street. I recommend the podcast about the “fat bikes” ban in the Netherlands. The engineering articles about Coding Alone and small-change code reviews are very good too. Quote of the Week How does a manager motivate his subordinates? For most of us, the word implies doing something to another person. But I don’t think that can happen, because motivation has to come from within somebody. Accordingly, all a manager can…

I should be more excited for Grand Theft Auto VI.I should be fully hyped, planning what remains of my year-in-games around the fast-approaching November 19th launch. I should be bursting to get my hands on GTA VI. I thought I would be, yet I'm not.This lack of anticipation on my part isn't GTA VI's fault, as it looks fantastic. A generous, lavish, max-graphics, top gameplay-looking computer game. So if it's not the game, it must be me.GTA and I have history. I played both the original and GTA…

Last week was so busy that I skipped writing a weekly update here. I figured it’d be better if I wrote an ad-hoc update1. I’m writing this in a hotel room on Long Island, New York. It’s 5:00 AM. This is my first time experiencing jet lag. I can see why people are not fans of it. Yesterday was the first time I’d spent more than 4 hours on a plane. But it was much better than I anticipated. I finished Zamyatin’s book We and watched two movies: Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day (2026) and Zack…

Human beings don’t exist to serve you, to be “empowered” by you, or to be defined in relation to you. – “Up for Grabs” What “law enforcement” means in claiming it wants to “help” sex workers. Cops & politicians enjoy vast circle-jerk to fantasies of enslaved teen girls. It’s illegal to pay for sex in Sweden, unless you film it for everyone to see. Cops, fascism, surveillance, nightmares, spooky cartoons and much more. Americans keep pretending to be shocked, then keep caging more people. This…

I was sorry to read of the death of Sir Patrick Stewart on Thursday. Although I never met him, we had a memorable missed connection – at least, memorable to me! In one of my first jobs in publishing, I was the New York City and Westchester sales representative for Penguin USA. My role was to visit all the bookstores and review all the forthcoming books with staff, coax them to order new books and reorder older titles (backlist). I loved visiting all these bookstores, although sometimes carrying…

In the 1830s, Katsushika Hokusai ignited a golden age of Japanese landscape art with his Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. Capturing the topography, seasons, and human activity around Japan's sacred peak, Hokusai’s masterpiece inspired his contemporary, Utagawa Hiroshige, to create One Hundred Famous Views of Edo - a breathtaking visual survey of Japan’s bustling capital.Both series belong to Ukiyo-e (浮世絵), "pictures of the floating world," a genre of Edo-period woodblock prints. More…

Well October ended up mainly being an unexpected extension of my Autumn break. I knew I was going to be off in September but had expected to be back to work this month. In the end though apart from a fun couple of afternoons helping friends at Delib out with some stuff I’ve mainly been sitting on my hands or answering emails / filling out forms / sending evidence in an effort to get to a place where I can start work with at least one of my clients. Serendipitously Si has written a bit about…

Yesterday a security advisory was published for Trilogy, the MySQL client used by GitHub in production. GHSA-744p-w4gc-m3gh is a SQL injection in Trilogy#escape, rated critical with a CVSS score of 9.3. It affects every version up to and including 2.13.1 and is fixed in 2.13.2. There is no CVE assigned yet, and it was discovered by Anthropic’s OSS Scanner.

Dear friends and comrades in loitering It’s First Sunday, this Sunday and time to wander together. As the Autumnal light glows it feels more important than ever to walk together and create space for curiosity, conviviality and conversation so please do join us if you can. We will gather 2pm Sunday November 1st outside Peoples History Museum, Leftbank, Manchester M3 3ER @phmmcr The direction and pace will be decided collectively and after 1.5/2 hours we will retire for refreshments and story…

I made a photography zine. It is about aspiration. This has been so long in the making weirdly enough. The first idea for a zine was a juxtaposition between the natural and built environments, I shot photos specifically for that. I sent my film to the lab and then it got stolen out of their dropbox... It still has not turned up, the police don't know who took it yet and I have bassically assumed I have lost all 108 photos photos that were undeveloped. That was 5 weeks ago I also contacted my…

In her book Monsters Claire Dederer considers the question of what to do about artists who have created beloved works of art, but who have also been revealed to be, well, monsters. Woody Allen is one of her prime examples. At one point she uses the metaphor of a beautiful piece of lace that has been stained. It still might be a beautiful piece of lace, but it’s nearly impossible to not notice the stain. Dederer points out that many, too many, of our artistic icons have turned out to be…

A quieter month, and this might be the way for a little while as we start to crunch now on finishing the second Games That Weren’t book. Hopefully should have plenty for you at Christmas time as always, so watch this space. For now, check out our Commodore 64 set of updates over the past month. 1 new entry added Alla Ricerca dello Scarabeo d’Oro Several unpreserved educational titles saved Thanks to the continuing amazing work of Allan Pinkerton, yet more educational titles have been fully…

A cold day all day. Ron brought little Jane about 11am. She stayed until 6pm. Had a bath in the afternoon. Went to the pub at night. Saw old Horace.

London Station by David McCloskey published 2026 I read a lot of spy thrillers, but don’t generally blog on them; there are a few Mick Herrons, and a few John le Carres, on the blog – but mostly I read them for fun and then toss aside. And probably couldn’t tell you much about them a week later. This one is an exception for several reasons: it was a good compelling plot, it was unusual, it was funny, and it had an excellent clothes moment. Artemis Procter (who is a continuing character in this…

Hodiaŭ mi estas en kongreso scienca fikcia. Mi multe ŝatis la unuan paroladon. Skribisto parolis pri la neuzo de la teknologio estis maniero ke unu ol protagonistoj sentis al ŝi ekster la socio. Mi sentas al mi same kiam mi pensas pri kiel mi malakceptas la uzon de Facebook, Instagram, Google, ktp. Mi nun volas legi ŝian libron. https://bookwyrm.social/book/2418363/s/le-livre-des-souterrains #lang_eo #esperanto #libroj #books #scienceFiction #sciencfikcio #utopiales #nantes #deGoogle

It feels like cherry-picking to single out Patrick Stewart’s role as Picard when remembering the actor, who died yesterday, because he played so many roles so brilliantly, both on stage and screen. But to a lot of people – myself included – not only was our introduction to Sir Patrick his role as Jean-Luc Picard in ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’, but the quiet force, hopefulness, command and, above all, humanity that he brought to his character throughout his voyages on the Enterprise…

When the 2027 IndyCar schedule was released last Friday, there was one major change. For 2026, the weekend slot around mid-July was occupied by the race at Nashville Superspeedway. For 2027, that slot was filled by the new race in Barcelona and the Nashville race was nowhere to be seen on the schedule. Since I […]

VS Code’s built-in image preview is handy, but it only tells you the dimensions and file size in the status bar. When I’m working with images I often want to know more: is this JPEG progressive? Does it have a color profile? How big is this SVG once it’s gzipped? I used to switch to another app to find out, so I made an extension that shows it all right inside VS Code: Image Info. Open an image and the Image Info panel appears with everything about it, and EXIF data sits beside the other…

2020 police procedural mystery, tartan noir, fifth in the Jack Logan series. Logan and Neish are sent to the island of Canna, population 47. Well, 46 now.

Surely now in this series of ’nuggets’ of small incomplete blogs into the dark, mysterious and supernatural folklore of my home county, its time to do a ghost story. As this is my blog I’m going to pick my favourite which only just counts as Worcestershire (in the modern day at least). I grew up in Halesowen, which is now part of the West Midlands county although was Worcestershire prior to 1974. The current county line is drawn about 600m away from where this ghost is said to inhabit.

Margaret and I spent a long weekend in The Villages in central Florida in October. Margaret’s sister and her husband retired there and invited us. The Villages is an enormous planned community primarily for people ages 55 and older. It covers 57 square miles over three Florida counties, with a population of more than 150,000. It’s arranged into a bunch of adjacent neighborhoods (“villages”), each with its own town center. There are tons of leisure activities available. Golf stands at the…

I’d like to replace “move fast and break things” with “move fast and make things”. Keep the ambition, but take a bit more responsibility for the result. Facebook’s old motto always left something unresolved for me: who has to live with the things you break? There’s a fairly big difference between breaking your own prototype and breaking something another person relies on. With AI helping us build more quickly, I think that question needs a bit more attention. There’s a lot to be excited about…

The leaves fell early this year, an omen of what is to come. Time out of bounds, chronology breaking up. Fragmented.