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.

I have been using NetNewsWire on my MacBook for years to read tech blogs. My feed list is the most peaceful corner of the internet for me, and it has been nice to see RSS become cool again over the last couple of years. The only problem is that NetNewsWire does not have an Android app, and I have been travelling a bit over the last few months. Taking out a laptop to read a few posts is not always convenient. I tried a bunch of RSS reader apps on Android and none of them felt right to me. So I…

From BBC News: Political activist Tommy Robinson has been convicted of harassing two Daily Mail journalists. …The case concerned Robinson’s response to Daily Mail and Mail Online articles from August 2024, showing him on holiday in Cyprus while riots took place in England following the Southport murders. …Robinson had denied the charges, saying he had “panicked” and had been “scared” when the Daily Mail published a story accusing him of “stoking race riots from his sunbed”. …He said he had…

Having looked at the various developments of the method of exhaustion as produced by the ancient Greeks and independently by the ancient Chinese, which can seriously be considered as a sort of proto-integral calculus, we then turned briefly to look at the extraordinary developments of the Kerala School of astronomy and mathematics in the late medieval period, which however did not appear to have any know influence outside of Kerala. If we turn back to the developments in Europe following what…

Today is not a good day. Woke up to the news that Sir Patrick Stewart who was a gem of a human passed away aged 86 after a “brief and poignant journey” with Alzheimer’s and Lewy Body Dementia. I first encountered his work in 1995 when Star Trek: The Next Generation was launched in India. Initially didn’t like the character as much as Captain Kirk, but as I grew older I started to love it. Then I learnt more about the human behind the character and that is when I loved him even more. Unlike a…

I had a bizarre conversation a few months ago with an ultra-libertarian (in the American sense). I was talking with him about how Taiwan’s Youbike system is subsidized by the government such that the first 30 minutes of each ride is free, which is enormously useful for the city insomuch as it reduces traffic, reduces emissions, and essentially solves the last-mile problem for the city. He didn’t like it. He didn’t think it was acceptable that car drivers “had to pay” for bike riders (through…

Wrote section '"Functional rating" is the most dystopian thing ever'

Last year, Wicklow Wolf released a black IPA for Halloween called Devil's Glen. It seems they hadn't exhausted their supply of spooky Wicklow placenames, nor glow-in-the-dark label ink, because this year they're back with more of the same. Slaughter Hill is again 6.66% ABV, though they give us no further information on what it's brewed with. It's on point for the style, however, beginning on a pungently bitter and roast-forward aroma, suggesting burning tyres, mulchy leaf mould and damp wool.…

Fixing the valkey-status monitoring plugin to work with AWS MemoryDB (Valkey) ... again.

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There is nothing to be afraid of in searching privately. A person should be able to wonder or be curious about things without announcing that to the world. If you want to it should be fine to look into something strange or something really foolish or something you just do not yet understand. Explore.Curiosity is not a confession. A question is not a crime. What you search for in the quiet of your own head space belongs to you. Keep your mind's inner door shut but open the outer door. Ask the…

Is Marvel's VisionQuest worth watching? My spoiler-free review of the first three episodes, covering the writing, performances, action, and overall entertainment.

The last rose… … of Autumn. The only one on a large bush the other day. Quote of the Day ”I believe there is such a thing as real, historical truth. I am no post-modernist. I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And one of the nice things about Cambridge, Massachusetts is that “Baudrillard” isn’t in the phone book” Errol Morris Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Paul Simon | Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes Link Long Read of the Day Itch scratching Lovely essay by Cory Doctorow…

Well, October has certainly been a month full of some dramatic weather. Luckily, the storms don’t seem to have hit the East coast of the country too badly, although we did have several days with vicious rain and terrible winds; however, this *did* mean I could stay inside and storm through a lot of books! This was therefore a heck of a month for reading (some of it driven by the #1949Club) and here’s the pile of books I enjoyed: In case the images are unclear, they are: The Edge of Being by…

"All Seated on the Ground" is a 2007 science fiction novella by Connie Willis. It is about a woman who is part of an investigation into the glaring aliens that have landed in Denver. Non-Spoiler Summary In A Nutshell: "All Seated on the Ground" follows Meg Yates, a humorous newspaper columnist, who has been asked to join the commission studying the Altairi - aliens that have recently landed on the Denver University campus. The aliens, who do nothing more than glare at everyone and allow…

This spring I went on a pilgrimage to 88 temples around the island of Shikoku. There’s a tradition of giving gifts to pilgrims, called “osettai” – an important part of the pilgrimage. I experienced osettai in many forms. A volunteer on our second day of walking who stopped and offered a ride to the next temple, number 10. (We accepted, gladly.) An inn near temple 44 where the host threw in dinner for free, two nights in a row – she asked us not to mention it in any online reviews, because she…

Wildwood (2026) • View trailerFive stars (out of five); rated PG-13, for strong fantasy violence, bloody images, dramatic intensity and brief profanityAvailable via: Movie theatersBy Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.1.26 This film amazes, captivates and surprises on countless levels. Chris Butler’s script — lovingly adapted from the 2011 illustrated fantasy novel by Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis — is a touch of L. Frank Baum by way of J.R.R. Tolkien. The 13-year-old…

DuckDB 2.0 can trust your own signing key. Sign an extension with OpenSSL, put it in a bucket, and install it without -unsigned. Until DuckDB 2.0, hosting your own extension came with a catch. DuckDB only trusted its own keys: one set for core extensions and one for community extensions. If your extension couldn’t go through the community repository, which requires public source code, every client had to start with -unsigned. That switches off signature checks for every extension, not just…

Yes, somehow it is Friday again already! Lots to get through today, so I’d suggest pop the kettle on now and come back with a hot drink and make yourself comfortable…Something rather delightful and fun from the top left corner of Wales appeared this week on its way to a customer (remember you can pre-order anything from Rapido from me and I try to match the big shops discounts) - Ivor is a lovely thing… even better the sound is incredibly fun. I suspect we’ll see plenty of this little model…

They say that, in medieval times, there was a rather intense rivalry between the ports of Waterford (on the R.Suir) and New Ross (just downstream from the confluence of the Rs Nore and Barrow). I don't know nuttin' about medieval trade except that transport by water was considerably more efficient [in terms of, say, ton-mile-days] than by land. And if that's true it must have been a case of ¿porque no los dos? I mean if the final destination is Carlow, Kilkenny, or Kildare then New Ross is the…

I’m heading out to Dublin later today! So happy! I’m most likely going to share a journal of my adventures on Wordwrap (which should autopost to Mastodon), and then later compile things on here.

October 30, 2026 At least October is almost over! Although here in Chicago it’s still been VERY warm… not even sweater weather yet. Sigh… But one of you is looking for classic neutrals (navy and brown – cool & warm!) and classic patterns. This sweater was sited, and our heroine asked for plaids and stripes – let’s see what we can do starting with this sweater: Sweater – Madewell The color palette is pretty obvious, although if our heroine wants to add a couple of additional tops, sage green and…

Photo: © Stan B.

I’ve played a lot of investigation games, but I haven’t run very many, and so it was with both trepidation and excitement that I found myself in the position of reading Horror on the Orient Express, the classic Call of Cthulhu campaign, as I prepared the prologue for my players. As usual, I set out with my trusty highlighters and began to read, only to find myself absolutely flummoxed by the style of the adventures in the book. They read as 100% fully determined and totally on rails narratives,…

My piano teacher doesn’t know that I report back on my severe lack of progress. (Example: “I presume she’s gathered I write about technology, because lately she keeps asking me about noise-cancelling headphones.”) But if she read this, she’d unquestionably be giving me a bad look for that “severe lack” phrase. I mean, I figure it’s true. However bad you can imagine I am at piano playing, I know that I am worse. I’m just okay with that because I can see that I’m better than I was when I started…