City Chicken. The delicious chicken dish that really isn't chicken. This fabulously tasty recipe is a Polish American recipe for making something very tasty which was developed during the Depression to help create a delicious supper dish that tasted like chicken, but was made with meats that were not quite as pricey to buy. It is a recipe which was first shared with me by my sister many years ago and I have to say it is incredibly delicious! Everything my sister does is done with great skill…

Programming Notes: We regret how late this is, even by the recent Friday standards. We have been working all day long, planning out not only today's post, but the next four after that. And we have been testing our Election Day setup. It takes time. On that note, we have so much news-related material, that we are going to do a news-focused post tomorrow, as if it is a weekday. Then, on Sunday, we'll have questions and letters. That is the only way to squeeze everything in. DesperationWatch 2026,…

I drove around Portland today looking for the last of the Fall color and wasn't disappointed. Here are a few shots from the Portland Japanese Garden.Then it was a quick jaunt after lunch over to Multnomah FallsThe old Columbia River Gorge road between Multnomah Falls and Troutdale was incredible looking, I wish I took some photos of it because the color along the route was unforgettable.

It's a two coffee kind of morning both fortunately and unfortunately. Unfortunately, b/c I am having to take OTC sleeping pills in order to get to sleep at a decent hour and those always make me groggy. Fortunately because it is also a cheeky 2nd cup of coffee b/c I am going to Les Utopiales today and I'm feeling excited. (Les Utopiales is a science fiction conference here in Nantes.) A few talks in the morning, and then gods willing, a few films in the afternoon and evening.

Venice had its own church organisation from the 800s, but the origins go back to before the Lombard invasion, and events in the Eastern Roman Empire.

Some late news to hand. British actor Patrick Stewart, known to Star Trek fans as Captain Picard, of The Next Generation (TNG) series of the iconic sci-fi show, died on Wednesday, 28 October 2026. This just days after Walter Koeing, from TOS died earlier in the week, on Monday. There is the erroneous tendency to believe TNG crew are considerably younger than those of TOS, given TNG is set almost one-hundred years later. I was slightly surprised to realise — or, should I say, be reminded —…

(I’m still looking for my next gig. You can get in touch by emailing job@ryanbigg.com.) As one of the people in the world not yet infected with the AI-mindvirus (Aperta Anthropicum), I feel qualified to share my opinion on AI by carving a post out of the raw marble of my keyboard with my bare hands. I wrote this on LinkedIn at the start of this month: After interviewing now at a few places these things are simultaneously true: EVERYONE is on the hype train Nobody knows how to REALLY use AI and…

Cailin O’Connor, professor at the University of California Irvine: Yesterday saw reporting on new, internal Meta documents released through the ongoing lawsuit. Meta had been using a favored industry strategy of including their attorneys on any risky internal correspondence so that this correspondence would be protected by attorney-client privilege. The judge called bullshit. The resulting documents reveal: Explicit plans by Meta to discredit psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who has been raising…

What colour is a CatBus? On stage, it's bright orange, but in the films, there is a bit more subtlety, so I've plumped for more AK Off-white (must get another one of those) and the same company's Brown. Even though the parts were primed in white, it took at least three coats to build a depth of colour I was happy with. Blasting things with a hair dryer is very effective. The paint seems to take quite a while, admittedly in cold conditions, to harden so one coat doesn't lift the previous one…

tl;dr; GitHub’s language bar counts every byte in your repo, including generated docs and test suites. A few lines in .gitattributes tell it what to skip. For my project, that took it from “75% HTML” to roughly 62% Rust and 38% Python, which is what the project really is. You know that colorful bar on every GitHub repo’s page, the one that says what the project is written in? I just learned you can tell it what to count. On one of my projects, it made a big difference. Why does GitHub think my…

So if you missed it, Proton was in the news recently because of their CEO (and CTO, for what it's worth) both seemingly in the throes of advanced AI psychosis (on top of just, you know, standard employee abuse). While Proton-the-product seems currently stable, I don't have confidence it will remain so. This is a bummer! I (mostly) liked Proton, and it has proven its historical strength as a privacy-focused online suite. I knew things were going bad when they introduced an AI Assistant (oof) but…

This is a strange album cover.

made it poetic so it sounded less pathetic like it were some reflection or imagined scene that speaks to... but no... i got very upset about people using semicolons incorrectly. other things said what ever Yesterday :: Thursday, 29th October 2026

SPECIAL NOTE: I’m in Reykjavík RIGHT NOW and will be giving updates on new performances including Nýtt eldhús eftir máli (tonight) and Ormstunga (tomorrow afternoon.)Þjóðleikhúsið (National Theatre) Over the last two decades a recurring topic of FITK has been Icelandic Theatre. Is it ironically appropriate in that the National Theatre building is the same age as me?Borgarleihusið (City

Charles Lamb in a letter to his childhood friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge on October 30, 1809: “I have put up shelves. You never saw a book-case in more true harmony with the contents, than what I’ve nailed up in a room, which, though new, has more aptitudes for growing old than you shall often see—as one sometimes gets a friend in the middle of life, who becomes an old friend in a short time. My rooms are luxurious; one is for prints and one for Books; a Summer and Winter parlour.” First, savor…

After a somewhat chaotic fortnight, I'm back on track. I think I'm back on track. We had a friend, Stacy, over from America and we made plans to go out a few times over the nine days she was staying. There were a couple of days where Mel and Stacy were up in London and I spent those days trying to catch up with orders; other days we all went out to meet other friends for lunch, visit shops

Back in the mid and late 1980s I considered myself to be a little “edgy” for listening to The Communards. I was blasting it on my the radio of my 1978 Plymouth Sapporo as I drove through the old hometown. I was happy and free to be me back in 1988. I had a crush on keyboardist Richard Coles back in the day, but I also wondered who the bassist was … I just figured it out this week because I can’t leave any thought resolved. It’s Dave Renwick, who also played with Bronski Beat and later on,…

Great gig last night. Just didn’t post yesterday for some reason. We do a variety show centered around the band English Teeth. Kevin plans, and we execute. We did a Halloween-themed show with the Misfits, the Cramps, Bow Wow Wow’s “I Want Candy,” and a bunch of goth-style music. And boy oh boy, did we really pull it off. The center of the whole thing is Kevin’s and my relationship, which is just mercilessly screwing with each other and, like, really going at it. We never really have a chance to…

the good thing about not knowing a lot is that you can’t be wrong about a lot either the beauty of simplicity what i try to do is to question the few things i think i know, regularly because i like to be wrong about things. that means i am growing and learning if you think i’m wrong about bitcoin or veganism, send me an email and let’s get a conversation going. i’m all ears

We haven’t done a sleep review in quite some time, so here we go: I plopped myself on the couch yesterday after work with the plan to have a nap before Taskmaster was on. I woke up at 5 this morning. That was a pretty good nap, not a proper night’s sleep. Still: 8/10 Reply by email

Presentation given at the Red Hat 3rd Swiss Dev Confederation, October 27th, 2026. Hi everyone, my name is Adrian Kosmaczewski and I’m a Senior Architect at Red Hat Switzerland. In my daily job I help software developers everyday use Red Hat tools to make better software, faster. And I can confidently say that we are standing at a fascinating intersection in the history of software engineering. On one side, we have the incredible power and complexity of cloud-native development: Red Hat…

So I’m an engineer, been coding a long time and love doing it. I’ve kept up with LLMs and vibe coding, and no exaggeration it’s the biggest change of my lifetime. I love it. I’ll let others talk the downsides; I am not blind to them but here I want to reflect a bit on a recent project and how late-2026-LLM tools drove it. Let me set the stage: I live in San Diego, where you can ride bikes and motorcycles year-round. Annual rainfall normally around 10″ and usually only for a few weeks, moderate…

I went into the study after a client call to check the status of something running in our homelab. I didn’t have my laptop on me to SSH, so I unplugged the 15-inch LCD from my B&W Power Mac G3, and connected it to the server. I was typing away on that for a solid ten minutes, before remembering I was also in the middle of something back in the home office nook. So I left the room and went back to it. My main work area has a 27-inch 4K Dell monitor. Not as good pixel density as the 21.5-inch…

Vicious Lips is not a great movie, nor does it fit well with my theme this month, but I had fun with it.Vicious Lips (1986)Directed by Albert Pyun, the premise follows an all-female rock band traveling across space for an important gig. In the course of their journey, they crash on a desert planet and have to deal with a killer alien, while spending much of their time in neon-lit sets looking as though MTV has exploded on them. It is an all-female Streets of Fire, but with a Heavy Metal…

Leica M11-P · Summicron-M 35 f/2 ASPH. · 35 mm · f/4 · 1/24 s · ISO 3200

Leica M11-P · Summicron-M 35 f/2 ASPH. · 35 mm · f/3.4 · 1/200 s · ISO 64

Last year Hasbro released Crystal Ball into the G.I. Joe: Classified Series and he ended up being my October 31st review for last year's 31 Days of Toy Terror. With his introduction, Hasbro introduced something of a new Cobra sub-team into G.I. Joe as an adversary for Night Force: Cobra troops augmented with D.I.R.E. tech, or Dread-Inducing Responsive Energy. The D.I.R.E. tech is a mystical energy that can be used to both induce fear in adversaries and to create tangible constructs and it's a…

Just slide smoothly into that second skin and get ready to rock the streets with your perfectly wrapped package. Yes, it’s time to shake that booty strong and get your moves on long because you look great, girlfriend. See, we all have that one perfect pair of pants that fits us best. And I think we all know how it feels to throw them on before heading out. AWESOME! Access my all-new awesome things when you sign-up for the daily awesome thing newsletter: Photo from: here The post #560 Putting on…

Here’s what’s happening in the thriving tech scene in Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, November 2 through Sunday, November 8! This list includes both in-person and online events. Note that each item in the list includes: When the event will take place What the event is Where the event will take place Who is holding the event This week’s events Monday, November 2 Tuesday, November 3 Wednesday, November 4 Thursday, November 5 Friday, November 6 Saturday, November 7 Sunday,…

I recently started working on a prototype called Inheritance. What lead to this idea was a game Buddhima showed me. It was a game from Taiwan in which players had to close their eyes, and the sense of touch was used. I thought it would be interesting to try making a game that limited sight, and used touch. I had another prototype that did both, but it didn't seem interesting. It