Back in late 2022 when I built my current desktop computer, I opted for a mini-ITX case rather than the typical huge ATX case. I’d been interested in liquid cooling for a long time, and for such a small case, it seemed like the best fit. Liquid cooling promises superior cooling performance, quieter operation, and is better suited for compact builds which lack space for high air flow rate. Things didn’t work out that well: my PC has been quite noisy, and I had suspicions of thermal throttling,…
This post is by Phil.Some time ago I wrote some thoughts about “Neuromancer” ( https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/06/12/what-does-neuromancer-have-to-teach-us-about-the-role-of-ai-is-society/ ), which features two kinds of artificial intelligence, one of which seems like it could be realized with a Large Language Model, i.e. we could pretty much make it today. The other is something more powerful, an artificial general intelligence that not only has computational power but also…
After visiting the Yanesen area a month ago while walking between Ueno and Nippori, we made a re-visit, this time checking out the recommendations of some friends who live in the area. First stop on the list was armadillo bakes&coffee, a little cafe near Sendagi station. They made a good first impression with their armadillo mascot (look at that cute guy on the front of the store!) and we were excited to see that they had some pour over on the menu - and there were quite a few beans to choose…
The Lowe Institute published another of their excellent annual reports on Australian public sentiment. The polling results are unsurprising: Cactus spines are produced from specialized structures called areoles, a kind of highly reduced branch. Areoles are an identifying feature of cacti. As well as spines, areoles give rise to flowers, which are usually tubular and multipetaled. That’s clearly the wrong article. Let’s try again: Australians are wary of Donald Trump’s America. Only 31% of…
🇳🇴 Gotta say, that stadium collective boat row thingy is my favourite group football action since the Mexican wave.
I use a Mac for work and a PC for play, and this little box seems a good opportunity to play The Legend of Linux on a desktop or a couch, and help make it true.
For some reason my family has phenomenally crappy luck with Macbooks. Our second one in three years just died, right as my wife was needing to put together some slides with it. The thing is completely and utterly unresponsive, suffering the same mysterious fate as its predecessor three years ago. But that’s a story for another day once I have a chance to dig more into it. The main thing is that we were down a computer and my wife still needed something to get work done on. I decided to test out…
It turns out the term “whitebread”, used to insult white American racists/nativists has some actual history, involving actual… white bread?! White Bread and Your Humble Weekend Editor When I grew up in the American midwest in the 1950s - 1960s, white bread was sort of the “default” bread. Anything else was some ethnic variety (“German rye”), or for food nuts who wanted whole wheat. Now at my advanced age, I’ve learned to appreciate the virtues of many kinds of bread: whole wheat, pitas,…
Since the spring I feel like I have been living my life on a non-stop carnival ride. First it was getting the house ready for a renter then that blowing up followed by getting it ready to be put on the market to be sold. Post sale there has been paperwork and banking to take care of and a whole lot of crap from the house to figure out what to do with. A few weeks ago Mike and I spent a rainy Sunday putting together shelves and organizing the storage space in this house, and while that looks…
My longtime friend Catherine Hennessey died in March at the age of 92. Catherine was an inveterate collector of things: books, scissors, art, bells, building materials for a house she planned to build herself.As she aged, contracted, downsized, she moved this archive of interesting things from place to place, home to home, storage locker to storage locker. At one point she occupied 13 lockers in the parking garage at Harbourside, despite being only entitled to one.In an effort to consolidate,…
[basierend auf einem Mastodon-Thread ] Wir haben im März 2025 die Gasheizung abgeschaltet. Seitdem - also seit mehr als einem Jahr - heizen und kühlen wir das Haus mit Klimageräten, also Luft-Luft-Wärmepumpen. Die erste Beschreibung der Installation steht in Going fully electric , die Auswertung nach einem Jahr in One year gas-free . Das kurze Ergebnis: Es funktioniert. Im Winter wird das Haus schnell warm. Im Sommer bleibt der Arbeitsplatz unter dem Dach bei 23,5 Grad stabil, auch wenn es…
My brother sent me a link to an article in The Denver Post to the effect that the University of Denver is shutting down two departments, of Religious Studies and of Electrical and Computer Engineering. I thought this curious in part because DU had closed the entire College of Engineering about 1975, then revived it.(In this part of Colorado, the 'U' goes last in the abbreviation, wherever it appears in the name. The University of Denver is DU, the University of Colorado is CU, and references to…
My movie watching is outpacing my progress on the James Naremore book, so I don’t know the whole deal with Norman Foster and this Mercury Theater production, but it stars all my Kane and Ambersons buddies and is obviously a part of the big Welles picture. Annoyed to discover that there’s a longer reconstructed version with ten extra minutes that played MoMA a decade ago, but which never came out on video, so I watched the dull censored version, and it was still pretty great. The Kane Boys: An…
A Below Deck Med season 11 guest of Johnny Damon was so obnoxious someone fled the boat and a crew member may get fired for fighting him. Here's my recap!
Six wheels on my wagon – this 1936 Leyland Tiger with the special designation TS7T had an extra axle, which meant it was longer, hence more passengers.
A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review by Newell Dunlap RUSSELL H. GREENAN – The Secret Life of Algernon Pendleton. Random House, hardcover, 1973. Fawcett Crest, paperback, 1973, Bantam, paperback, 1988. Algernon Pendleton hears voices from unexpected sources — from philodendrons, for example. But his favorite voice source is Eulalia. a Worcester porcelain pitcher, and it is only with Eulalia that he carries on long conversations. In fact, this is pretty much the essence of Algernon’s existence — chatting…
🎧 Human Touch is the Phil Collins-est of Bruce Springsteen albums. From one Oscar winner of the 1990s to another.
Some music sounds like a throwback to the past. Other jams sound eerily apt for the moment. Then, there is the stuff that sounds straight-up from the future in some fashion. Bands that are ahead of their time, experimenting sonically in some wild fashion. Perhaps it is a new technique with technology that nobody else has attempted--think of the KLF and how they were doing sample-heavy mash-ups before, "Mash-Ups," were even a trend. The Pet Shop Boys feel like they were beamed straight from the…
In addition to the stuff we've seen, there were few other sci-fi/spacey things acquired at the recent Sandown Park toy fair, and we're looking at them now! Just a bit of fun! There was an astronaut too, but he was too silly, this at least has the saving grace of being an alien, and they might actually look silly . . . except, Fermi says they probably don't exist! Rocket USA 'Big Key',
This morning, I got a message from one of the rescue people, asking if today was a good day to bring back Domino. We were ready to set her up in the isolation shelter. She was spayed just 4 days ago, and should be in there for 10 days. While the rescue people where on … Continue reading Domino is back, and Damocles got checked
––– Anniversary favourite: Flagg’s 1917 Uncle Sam (top left) and Leete’s ‘Your Country Needs You’ Kitchener cover (top right) Alfred Leete’s brilliant illustration of a pointing Lord Kitchener created one of the world’s greatest visual memes. The combination image of two front covers above shows US artist James Montgomery Flagg’s version on this week’s Sunday Times Magazine and Leete’s artwork used in a similar way for the Daily Telegraph‘s centenary celebration magazine in 1955. The Sunday…
Book 17 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! What do you know, I’m back on track for the year! My link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there. A couple of weeks ago, I raved about the delightfully strange and compelling novel Strange Houses by the pseudonymous author Uketsu, and I knew I would have to check out any other works of his that are available. This meant picking up the more recent release, Strange…
The most controversial part of last week’s article on the Midjourney ultrasound scanner was medical experts’ recommendation against whole-body screening (including existing whole-body screening technology using MRI).Isn’t this crazy? Whole-body screening can save lives by detecting serious diseases like cancer. The experts counterargue that it finds so many false positives - minor zit-like imperfections that would never have caused problems, but which cost patients time, money, anxiety, and…
I made this for the Lisp Game Jam Spring 2026, and a month later I have a much more complete role-playing game: UNDER STONE 1.1 release! Complete game with: Help! Saving! Job change! Items! Merchant! Second dungeon! WOW! $10 or PWYW. Get it now on itch.io
If you've ever had to search for "how to make Excel quit removing leading zeroes," I have an app for you. SmoothCSV won't turn some random number into a date and then refuse to change it back. In fact, it won't format anything unless you expressly tell it to. It doesn't try to be a lightweight spreadsheet; it's a grid editor, first and foremost. It leaves your data as it is, with no helpful "guesses" at what you might be trying to do. That's the pitch, and it's enough to make this my CSV editor…
My interview with Dr. Claudio Vellutini on The Blue Hour is now available as a podcast. In this conversation, I speak with Dr. Claudio Vellutini, Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of British Columbia School of Music, about opera in Vienna and the cultural exchanges that shaped one of Europe’s most influential musical centres. Drawing on his recent chapter in Vienna: A Musical History and his book Entangled Histories: Opera and Cultural Exchange between Vienna and the Italian…
Eventually, every Linux user opens an app and finds a generic placeholder icon staring back from their dock/panel. It looks like the dock is broken, but it almost never is - the cause is a single line in the app’s .desktop file, and it only takes a minute to fix. Here’s how to find it and fix it yourself, on any desktop.
Gadzooks! This screenshot could be from any film! Aside from the man looking like John Glenn, there are hardly any clues here to even help in identifying this scene - but if you have a crackerjack memory, perhaps you'll guess it anyway. Give it a try! As always, if you are not familiar with the rules to the Impossibly Difficult Name that Movie game or the prize, click here.
The bell: Buttercup Festival 3-386www.buttercupfestival.com
