I finished the last post striding down the hill from the Seven Stars to catch the Shields ferry. Turned out I had lots of time to spare before the next crossing, so I could have drank my beer at leisure, could have listened to the whole of Telegraph Road and probably could have squeezed in Sultans of Swing whilst I was at it.In my humble opinion, the £7.50 Day Pass becomes great value for money once you incorporate the ferry into your travel plans. I spent ten minutes with a big grin being…

I was having a conversation with a friend recently about how easy it is to get completely lost in the sauce when you don’t have the right guidance. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot. He was telling me how he went through his old Notion notes from 2021. All the goals he had set for himself. How much money he wanted to make. Where he expected his business to be in 2, 3, 4 years. The crazy thing is… He’s nowhere near where he thought he’d be. But then he mentioned something that really…

When Chris Plante (no, not that one) asked on social media if he knew anyone who might consider themselves a Luigi expert, I humbly volunteered. Obviously, I’m a Mario expert and a Birdo expert, but in reading and writing about these games all these years, certainly I learned more than the average bear about the other brother. Right? Hopefully yes! Because I recorded the episode of Plante’s Post Games podcast, which is now live in both audio form (here) and video form (below). I’d like to think…

blanket your familiar star in solar panels. earth and her sisters trace ellipses in colder starlight now. devoting everything, everything, to one last simulation -- a world where trillions of koalas populate the ocean like krill

TIL: PHP IIS 8kb Request Limit? Today, at $dayjob, I was called into a remote debugging session. For some reason the DokuWiki install at a customer failed to save long pages. Instead of saving, the editor just reloaded and showed the previous state again. No errors in DokuWiki and none to be found in the various places PHP and the web server used for logging. Now this was on a Windows machine with IIS as the web server using PHP via CGI. Not my recommended setup but somewhat common in business…

A new post from ben.balter.com · Read it on the web →Early on at GitHub, I shipped a tiny diff that broke some of the millions of sites on GitHub Pages.1 For those users, it was a big change, and some of them took their complaints straight to my leadership. Soon after, I got a not-so-great message about how I’d handled the rollout. Not the breakage. Things break. The problem was that leadership heard about it from upset users first, with nothing in hand to explain or defend the call. I’d…

I wanted to share the news of this great line-up of Signum courses this coming January. I know and admire each of these preceptors, and had a little part to play in the background of the Inklings & Arthur and … Continue reading →

Damn. Patrick Stewart

[Sports are enjoyable, all on their own.] Since the Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on sports betting in 2018, gambling has gone disturbingly mainstream. I don’t wager myself, but I don’t have strong feelings on whether the activity should be legal. Still, it’s probably not something we should be encouraging. Sports gambling causes myriad problems1 with minimal benefits.2. And yet, If you watch any sports at all, it’s become impossible to avoid the constant pushes for gambling. There…

Gosh, what do I say about The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy? A book that people have been reading for two hundred and fifty years.I picked this up on the force of a placement on some Top XXX Books posted on The Guardian, maybe? I’d tried to read it a couple of years ago on Kindle but the version that I downloaded was really poorly formatted and the whole thing put me off. The copy I eventually picked up off World of Books online for two quid + s&h evidently had sat unread and untouched…

A história até o final ainda contém várias surpresas para o bem ou para o mal, que tal? Uma por uma, as verdades vêm à tona Olha que beleza! Tijolo por tijolo, máscara por máscara Do estilingue vai a pedra, da banana vai a casca BNegão tem um som bom demais. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9rQI7jR6No

I recently discovered a director I’d never heard of, Yoshishige Yoshida (aka Kijū Yoshida, but why?), who has become one of my favorites after seeing just one movie, his 1969 Eros + Massacre (エロス＋虐殺, Erosu purasu gyakusatsu). I’m not going to recommend it to all comers, because it’s over three and a half hours long and fairly incomprehensible on first viewing, but any fan of late-’60s Godard should eat it up with pleasure; I would go so far as to call it a mashup of Two or Three Things I Know…

Got Old Man’s War by John Scalzi 📚. I liked his villain book, and I like the guy from what I see online. One chapter in and I’m nodding and chuckling. I think I’m going to like this one.

It hit me harder than I thought it would. When I heard, today, that actor Sir Patrick Stewart had died, I teared up. And I immediately thought about how I knew him best – as Captain Jean Luc Picard on the TV series “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” I don't remember hardly anything from when I was six years old, but I do remember vividly watching episodes of the first season of ST:TNG and the awe and wonder I felt. Since that time Picard, and Stewart through much of his other work, have…

By default, Zsh globs skip hidden files and directories, meaning those with names starting with a dot. For example, in a project directory, * misses all the configuration files and directories: $ ls -d * README.rst generate_pigeon.py To include them, add the (D) glob qualifier, which stands for “dot files”: $ ls -d *(D) .env .git .github .pre-commit-config.yaml .venv README.rst generate_pigeon.py (ls -d lists directories themselves, rather than their contents.) (D) never matches the special .…

a couple years back, my holiday advent collages turned into a poetry/text project and eventually a zine called THE WOODS.You can read the whole thing HERE.

For the last three years, I've run a Planescape1 campaign through almost all of its modules. Now, after successfully finishing it, I want to look back and review these adventures, highlighting the pros and cons of each one. Each module will be rated in three categories, up to 3 points in each: Presentation: how easy it is to understand and run the adventure. Openness: how open the adventure's scope is, regarding the freedom of choice. Quality: Overall quality of the adventure, including the…

“For the last several years, Readwise has been building tools for power readers. There’s the eponymous product, Readwise, which stores and categorizes your Kindle highlights to help you remember what you’ve read. There’s Readwise Reader, an app for reading newsletters, PDFs, and web articles you’ve saved for later. And now there’s Readwise Books, a full-fledged platform for buying, reading, and talking about books. Readwise Books is currently in beta, available through invite or to existing…

Make it so. — Sir Patrick Stewart, as Captain Jean Luc Picard. May he rest in eternal peace.

In my post about Scraper Junkyard results, I proposed the existence of a centrally-controlled web crawler that made requests from Alibaba Cloud IP address ranges. After a closer look at the Apache combined format log files, I can confirm that at least one web crawler works out of Alibaba Cloud IP address space.

Patrick Stewart was a giant across television and movie franchises I enjoyed. In June, 1988 my friend Chris and I attended the Star Trek Creation Convention in Los Angeles. Star Trek: The Next Generation had released 22 episodes to that point. One season. It was a successful show. It would do 6 more seasons. Much of the cast was present there, interviewed. They were engaging and friendly, as they have remained since then. They took questions from the audience. I wish I could remember the…

My yard has been spooky for almost two weeks! I've been adding more things, including the coolest thing I've ever made. The band is playing! I did not predict how much this would look like a nativity scene so I've gotta do something about that. The twinkling lights are not helping the cause but I like them! I still want to get more things wiggling in the jungle so I've made a few generic oscillating devices out of wiper motors and scrap wood: These are pretty standard four-bar linkages that…

In a recent paper, researchers showed how to train to be better able to tell AI-generated face images from those of real humans. Compared with real faces, AI-generated faces tend to be more symmetrical, more proportional and more attractive—while also being less expressive, less distinctive and significantly less memorable. When the researchers taught participants to look for these six markers instead of fleeting artifacts such as malformed ears or mismatched jewelry, their accuracy in spotting…

😤 Just when you think you found a trustworthy provider, something like this drops. Why does good tech becomes so hard to find? https://www.404media.co/manifestos-fear-and-loser-thinking-inside-protons-ai-reckoning/

… from our 2010 film, directed by Rupert Goold. The post RIP, Sir Patrick appeared first on Illuminations.

“Make it so” This article was originally published at: https://andrei.xyz/quickies/rip-patrick-stewart/

I knew that it had to happen eventually, as it does to us all, and certainly I never knew the man, but the daylight seems a little dimmer knowing that Sir Patrick Stewart is no longer with us.

I recently discovered that the email account associated with my blog and its domain wasn't working, so if you have tried to email me about my blog recently and I never replied, I am sorry about that. I have been pretty busy lately, both with work and with my kids (one just started school!), and also a constant relentless barrage of illness (surely related to school) so it took me a while to notice the problem, and then about another week after that to fix it. I have committed to managing more…

I read Girl on the Net’s “4 reasons I will instantly swipe left” and agreed with quite a lot of it. There are sensible observations about dating profiles, making an effort, protecting children’s privacy, and knowing whether you want kids. Reading it as a man, I recognized several of the same frustrations. I’ve encountered them in women’s profiles and in conversations that never became dates. There was plenty there for me to nod along with. Then I reached the part about auditioning men for the…