Deleting social media apps off of my phone isn’t a digital minimalism thing for me or “I need to be more offline” thing, I just want to spend my time a little differently, which boils down to using less apps. Here’s last week’s screen time report. I have app limits on IG and Bluesky even though I already deleted the app from my phone (but maybe it syncs to my ipad?) 7 hours on calculator is funny - I don’t have auto lock turned on and I guess I leave my phone on the calculator app more than I…

A bash script that emails Sam Altman once a day to report the RAM he missed. (It’s a parody, but it works; read the context.) Tip from @wilfredo@fosstodon.org.

I never noticed the practical applications list on the back of the black Field Notes before. It's a fun little list to jump off of for some quick journaling ideas Yesterday we drove downtown with K's brother and sister-in-law. We went to Sonic Boom and I got the Haute and Freddy record! We walked around Chinatown a bit and ate the most delish Chinese food. Favs: steamed dumplings and the Beef Shanghai Noodles. Yummy. When we got home, K and I watched Mobland. Helen Miran is delightfully…

The moon really is a reflector.

Bad Dollsby Rachel HarrisonGenres: Horror, Short Stories Pages: 192 Rating: Synopsis: In Reply Hazy, Try Again, an indecisive young woman finds a mysterious Magic 8 Ball that might just have the answers she's been looking for...or might lead her down a path of self-destruction. In Bachelorette, a bridesmaid attends her childhood best friend's bachelorette weekend only to discover the itinerary may demand more than she's willing to sacrifice. In Goblin, an unusually brutal dieting app wreaks…

Pull on my melatoninPull on my intestinesPull the Chi

In the last couple of weeks, I've been making some changes to my website (with help from Claude Code) to make some improvements to my site's look + feel, as well as some accessibility improvements. The last time I did a significant change on my site was in mid-2024, and I'd noted that: In recent years I've been deprioritising my personal website (and the many IndieWeb-y things I want to do with it), both because I have far too many other projects as well as life stuff, and far too many hours in…

The Paper Chase, by Andrew Lawler, The American Scholar 'We Were Inseparable': How Imaginary Friends Help Us in Real Life, by Isobel Heywood, BBC Why Are We So Good at Feeling Bad?, by Louis Menand, New Yorker Why Meal Kits Fell Out of Flavour, by Solarina Ho, The Walrus

The other weekend I went to a poetry bookshop that turned out to be a bookcase inside another shop. Which was even more charming, in fact. I got a book of poetry all written about a single loch, by the same person. I love this idea of coming back to somewhere, returning again and again. It feels very self-appointed artist-in-residence - Be the Artist-in-Residence of Your World, a whole series by Amy Stewart. No big retreat somewhere glamorous. No grants or permission needed. There's also…

I’m negotiating with myself; this is all just one instant. We really are a picture painted once.

It’s okay to be afraid to face all of the lies you’ve been telling yourself.

Don’t ever lose that child-like spirit. As you grow older it is a tremendous advantage. It is a form of nonverbal communication far stronger than any individual could ever dream of in a liminal context. Don’t worry; even what is lost can be found again.

Joe Rossignol, reporting for MacRumors: Siri AI is much more intelligent and personalized compared to classic Siri, but it is still not nearly as advanced as proactive, always-on agents like OpenAI’s Dots and Meta’s Muse. That may change, though, according to a new rumor. In his Power On newsletter today, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman said he was told that Apple could make Siri function “more like an agent” as early as next year. However, if this plan moves forward, the exact implementation remains…

Plenty of things in my life were survived out of spite and a tensed jaw. I used to be embarrassed how my optimism didn't really feel like optimism. When I convince myself it'll work out, I barely felt anything resembling hope or confidence, only a clench. I wouldn't call it denial/pessimism, because I can see the issue clearly. It isn't blind faith either, which asks for a surrender I've never been good at. In short, I don't utterly convince myself things will all turn out well, but I also…

Finished reading: The Living Realm by Jordan Tannahill 📚 Truly astonishing. So many memorable moments and elements captured in exquisite but earthy language. A masterpiece. You can order it from independent stores in NZ via Bookhub

Apple Intelligence gathers a huge amount of info about you, your relationships, and your activities to create a personal knowledge graph. It stores this info on your Apple devices. I'm not sure how I feel about this. A fairly technical article published by The Eighth Rank details their research into this subject and I came away from it impressed, but also concerned. On one hand, it makes sense that Apple Intelligence would need to build such a thing in order to better understand the context of…

After eight years with my Volvo V60, I’ve made the switch to electric motoring with a new Škoda Enyaq 85. The Volvo had some useful connected services, including checking whether I’d locked the doors and remotely starting the car on cold winter mornings. But an electric vehicle introduces a whole new set of data to explore, particularly around battery charge, energy consumption and electricity costs. I wanted to bring that data into Home Assistant. Getting started My Enyaq arrived on 5…

I was listening to the radio the other day and heard a version of the Ave Maria, aka “Hail Mary”, sung as a concert aria by Sumi Jo who performs it on this video. The piece was composed by Vladimir Vavilov around 1970, although it is often misattributed to the Giulio Caccini. What struck me listening to it, however, was the similiarity of its chords to one of my favourite jazz standards, All The Things You Are, which was composed in 1939 by Jerome Kern. I’m not a trained musician but I think I…

Pitchfork just published The 100 Best Indie Rock Albums of All Time (archive). As we know, Pitchfork is the premier expert on what music is worth listening to. Since I’ve been keeping a weekly playlist since 2023, I wanted to know how many of those 100 albums have made it onto one of my playlists at least once. I checked all 152 weeks (2,261 tracks) against the list, matching on artist and album. 19 out of 100. # Album Track(s) Week(s) 1 Pavement – Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain “F*****g…

By FARHA GUERRERO I'm going to Greece, but my mind is in Italy. What is this hold she has on me, always pulling me towards her...

I’ve had an urge to pop an autumnal wreath on the front door for a few weeks. After visiting a few shops, I wasn’t impressed with the quality or the prices of what I found. They all looked really fake and I’m sorry, but £30+ is ridiculous for a China-made piece of plastic. I have this Christmas wreath from Balsam Hill which I won in a competition several years ago. It’s lovely and includes LED lights, but it’s absolutely massive and I always hated how it used to attack you as you walked through…

The ruins of the Warden’s House at Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, San Francisco. The post Warden’s House, Ruined appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

You could say that Television ended many times in the past 50 years. When they initially split in 1978, just after releasing Adventure, when they reconvened just long enough to release a third self-titled album in 1992 and then disband again in 1993, or when their 2001 reunion lasted long enough to enjoy their now-legendary […] The post Television @ Tim Festival, Rio de Janeiro – October 2005 appeared first on Space Echo.

Last week I presented a framework for what I called a Simple Heroic Adventure Game. The core concepts I want to explore were creating a heroic archetype from a simple matrix, a blackjack-based resolution engine inspired by my Hellbenders work last year, and a basic set of heroic principles of play. If this game concept feels sticky enough to continue exploring then I will probably keep writing about the archetype matrix and the heroic principles, but today I want to expand on the blackjack…

Back to it: I went to the gym twice this week. The first visit, I made the mistake of arriving in the middle of aqua aerobics, so I was forced to cycle and run instead of swim for the first half hour. The second visit, I witnessed strong words being exchanged between two middle-aged women in the steam room. Eventful. I took H to football training in the freezing cold on Thursday, and then to his 9-1 thumping win away in North London on Sunday. His team really are soaring now, and must be due…

For our last movie night we watched Princess Mononoke. I remembered loving that movie when I was younger, but watching it as an adult made me once again realize how Miyazaki has a way of expressing diverging sides without picking one. The film shows people, animals and spirits with legitimate and largely incompatible needs, and each faction is further engaged in infighting. A central arc of the story is Lady Eboshi’s Irontown, which gives people who were largely rejected by society work,…

What sparks the “Holiday Season” for you? For many years, it was preparing for Yuletide in the Country. We danced our way through night after night of rehearsal through October and November with festive songs ringing in the season. I absolutely loved the candle-lit romance of the event. The event consumed nearly three full months with […]

friendly reminder that a good cord cutting can and will have you on the toilet for 3 days. drink water ladies.

Link: Medium is launching a new note-taking app called TK, by David Pierce in The VergeMedium is launching its new app, TK:“The company is launching a new app, called TK, that combines note taking and journaling with something resembling a private social network. The app is meant to get you writing more, and help you share that writing with friends and fans. And it’s part of a much bigger idea about blogging, and a much broader thesis about the state of the internet.”I’ve been using it for a…

The newest book in the AAUGH.com Reference Library is The Great Pumpkin Case… and, despite it’s name, it’s not a licensed Peanuts book. In fact, it’s not a Peanuts book at all. And if you’re saying “hey, it’s got to have at least been influenced by Peanuts to be named that,” well, no. I am absolutely certain that Charles Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts was no influence on it. How can I be so sure? Simple: while in some ways it’s the newest book in the reference library, it’s also the oldest book.…