These are the things that I've bought and haven't regretted this year. I'm not encouraging you to buy more crap. What I am doing is showing you the crap I bought and telling you that I genuinely approve and recommend this particular crap based on experience. Don't buy things if you don't need them. If...Read More

I have no hot take, but I did post this last year: Another Valve hardware announcement: the Steam Machine is back. I am immediately and predictably on board for it. -- me, November 2025 So I owe you a followup post, which is, TLDR: "too rich for my blood." 512GB: $1049 512GB w/ Controller: $1128 2TB: $1349 2TB w/ Controller: $1428 -- Valve's Steam Machine page I would guess that, back in the Devonian epoch of 2025, Valve was aiming this product at $600-$800, which would be an insta-buy for me.…

Every now and then a show-business documentary comes along that catches my fancy and lingers in my mind for days. Such a film is Peter Asher: Everywhere Man. If you’re old enough to remember the musical British invasion led by The Beatles, you may recall a popular singing duo known as Peter and Gordon. They unseated the Beatles from the number-one position on the charts with a mournful song called “A World Without Love.” The irony is that it was written by Peter’s good friend Paul McCartney,…

I was writing in my annonymous blog and trying to fight my mind which was trying to convince me we're not good enough. I wrote how we changed our routines and we're in the best place we've ever been. We even have what I like to call my 4 pillars of health. This holy war between my mind and my self is never over and may never will be. Regardless, here's my 4 pillars in case it inspires someone (no particular order because you really can't define an order, it varies according to your life):…

It's hard to believe seven years have passed since the release of TOY STORY 4 (2019).I sometimes complain about a lack of original ideas in modern cinema, but the newest film in the Disney-Pixar franchise, TOY STORY 5 (2016), presents viewers with the best of both worlds: Characters we love in a quality story on a very timely and original topic.It's not a retread, but a funny-yet-serious take on modern technology and the fight to protect innocent childhood.Since as I write this is a new movie,…

I doubt if I am the only one who gets fatigued from the constant use of the phrase “magic bullet” in school reform. Most often the words disparagingly describe reforms that once pumped up hopes for solving serious school problems and then either missed the target or caused collateral damage. Elderly readers may remember “Career Education” in the 1970s; “restructuring schools” in the 1980s; “systemic school reform” in the 1990s. Middle-aged readers may recall parental “choice” of schools and…

Carnival-like US Open – Flushing, New York Did you guess where we were going for our first New York City event? We headed to the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. That’s where they host the US Open every year at the end of August. I’m only a modest tennis fan, but my wife loves and plays the sport. The big reason we went to New York at this time was to attend the open. I was there for the first time during Fan Week, which happens just before the official tournament begins. The great…

Molinard is a house whose name echoes my own; I find the "Miller" of Italy to be quite the interesting fragrance house. Fragonard, Molinard, and Galimard are all Grasse firms whose lineage stretches back into the 18th and 19th centuries, with Molinard citing 1849 on the purple boxes of its "Les Fleurs" range. I've always wanted to own the now-discontinued Violette EDT, and finally got a chance to

I love what Jason Calhoun has to say about this first song from his upcoming album revelations of divine love: I enjoy working with abstracted, gestural melody that isn’t necessarily connected to a traditional beat. The tapping ‘bass drum’ rhythm in ‘tolstoy tatsoi’ offers a subverted sense of rhythm which feels disjointed yet in place with the rest of the track — similar to tapping your foot to a song in your head while the radio plays something else. As my daughter has gotten old enough to…

Ghost train is best train.

When I started blogging in 2004, I had one site where anything could go. Any topic. Short or long posts. It didn’t matter. I didn’t care to focus on one or two areas. And because I posted about whatever, nothing felt out of place. That worked for a while, up until I started making zines in 2020. I started posting zines to my blog, because that was the only site I had. But it felt odd. My zine posts felt more put together. Finished work. Info on where to purchase the zine. Process photos and…

My uConsole computer finally arrived after a 10-month delay. I started kicking the tires by installing fun software on it, and quickly realized it’d run better if it looked cool. Here’s how I did it. Change the boot image Raspberry Pi OS uses Plymouth to make show a boot splashscreen. By default, it displays the image file at /usr/share/plymouth/themes/pix/splash.png. I’m sure there’s a “better” way to do this, but I simply replaced that file with my own 1280x720 image (to match the screen’s…

In June 2026, the Salish Lodge & Spa celebrated its 110th anniversary. Perched above the magnificent and sacred Snoqualmie Falls, the lodge opened in 1916 as Snoqualmie Falls Lodge. Since that time, millions of people have visited the 268-foot waterfall, so naturally there are plenty of postcards for people to remember their trips. This card... The post Snoqualmie Falls and Lodge Postcard by Ellis Postcard Co. – 145022 appeared first on TWIN PEAKS BLOG.

Spending the day with the grandkids. And today my grandson and I decided to climb a few trees. Actually he decided to climb a few trees. I just snapped the pictures. And it was good. Thanks for reading. You can subscribe to this blog if you care to. You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above. This site does not use affilate links.

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.

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…

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,…

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!

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…