A new album of music and songs is about to arrive at a point of your choosing here on earth. It all comes from the brain and industry of Mr NL apparently. Click on the pic to make any easy pre-order purchase sort of thing. It should despatched to you via the post. Nice art work too. All reasonably priced.

I love creating models of locomotives and rolling stock. Whilst most aspects of railway modelling appeal, it is the story telling through lead actors that is my favourite pastime…This has, over the years, led to an eclectic mix of scales, gauges and prototypes. The latest is Canadian N scale and here, I’m reminded of my early H0 exploits 30 years ago - taking ‘standard’ American models and making them more distinctly Canadian with a smattering of details and fresh paint.Dawson Creek, ex NAR,…

4:30pm on a Thursday and Siri is drunk. 🔗

★★★★ Nothing like a short book to get you out of a reading slump. This is only the third book I've read this year! A friend lent me her copy last month and I just now got around to reading it. A quick read like the others, took three sittings. Book 4 closes the arc that started in All Systems Red and sees Murderbot dealing with the consequences of his actions from all the way back to the beginning and coming to terms with his existence as a rogue SecUnit. Still a fun quick read and this time…

One of the most important skills in working with AI is agency: being willing to try new and ambitious things. This is true for what you build, but it’s also true for how you build. AI models are improving so quickly that most of us are bottlenecked1 on noticing that AI agents can help automate particular tasks. Here are some examples of that from my daily work. Asking the agent to run my dev server. Agents are very good at fixing weird dev environment issues because they work fast, have…

What with all the library books and occasional review copies I have cluttering the shelves, I can sometimes be a little guilty of overlooking and neglecting books I’ve purchased, and the subject of today’s post is one that’s been languishing out of sight for far too long now. It’s a classic of early-twentieth-century English literature and takes us off to the continent for a little R and R with two delightful couples – or so it initially seems. In truth, there’s far more to our new friends than…

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CLONE TROOPER (Halloween Edition) The Black Series 2022 Closed Box Line Look Halloween Packaging, Target Shared Exclusive Item No.: No. F5608 Manufacturer: Hasbro Number: n/a Includes: Porg as Dracula, black trunk, Beskar chocolate bars Action Feature: It's green! Retail: $27.99 Availability: October 2022 Appearances: n/a Bio: Celebrate the season with specially designed Star Wars figures from The Black Series! (Taken from the box packaging.) Image: Adam's photo lab. Availability: Click here to…

This conversation plays out hundreds of times a day, but (thankfully) only a handful of those involve me: Person: “I have [problem].” Cryptography nerd: “Oh, you probably want to use [sensible recommendation].” Person: “Ah, well, can I really trust that? The NSA probably backdoored it 30 years ago. Dual_EC, amirite?!” Cryptography nerd: … Koblitz and Menezes, unheard: “You fucking wot m8?“ Conspiracy theories about the NSA and/or NIST are a dime a dozen these days. And, ever since the Snowden…

Vulcan Stev's Database gives us this months prompt Magic Items, the Weirdest and Best for the RPG Blog Carnival. We have previously visited the Dwarf Roads carved by the ancient dwarves when their airship-empire buckled under the cults of the Final Star, let us now look at some more specific artefacts from their early epoch of alchemical-botanic mastery before the meat grinder of the war against the Final Star. 1. Portable Forge - 'portable' in a dwarven sense, this cunningly wrought…

I was watching old-school music videos on TV, and saw a video I had never seen before. Which is peculiar in itself given the scandalous amounts of hours I watched MTV in the 90s. The video was Let's Get Rocked by Def Leppard. The video features some very early CGI: I only watched it briefly but then, I saw some computercode flash by. Interesting! This was most definitely C-code, with printf statements all-over the place. And I spotted a pointer. I went to YouTube, scanned the video and…

Touchscreens on conventional laptops make no sense. You’re forcing a mobile interaction paradigm onto a user interface that was never designed for it. For work built around typing, keyboard shortcuts, and precise pointer input, reaching up to tap an upright display introduces another unnecessary place to move your hands. If you don’t believe me, think about the last time you used an iPad with a Magic Keyboard. Every time you took your hands off the keys to poke at the screen, how much did it…

Vanilla Aube by Ormonde Jayne is lovely: All the colors of the sun melding into each other, producing something soft and caressing like a feathery cloud. An atypical vanilla, non-sweet, non-foodie, though gourmand in structure, it emphasizes the woody, lightly spicy (cardamom, pepper) and musky-soft elements to project as a fluffy cashmere shawl on naked shoulders. borrowed

So, after replacing Lilo with Grub legacy, I now had a booting SuSE Linux 7.2 Professional, just not a pretty one. I remember Marcel Gagné writing, in Linux System Administration, that he spent most of his time in text environments and would only start X when he actually needed it. I am not of his generation. SuSE’s X configuration tool, SaX, had failed me during the installation procedure, but SaX2 was also available, and that responded a lot more promising on an installed system. The first…

Nintendo Switch Sports Resort Yes, that is I, Dad Parent Mike the Jellyfishman. Also: Nice. Did some more of this today, taking on the island champ series in archery and table tennis. Archery definitely loses some of its zen like quality when you're playing against someone. It obviously becomes much less about perfecting yourself and doing the best you can. Although, I suppose it still is and maybe that says something about how I view competition. I got to rank 10 in archery, the last one was…

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions. Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align. Tracks are added to…

Unlike in Taiwan, where citizens must travel to their registered home electorate to vote in person on election day, overseas New Zealanders can vote remotely—at any time during the couple of weeks leading up to an election.We can vote online, or in person at an embassy. In Taiwan’s case, this means a de facto embassy: the “New Zealand Commerce and Industry Office”.(The New Zealand and Taiwan governments have an unofficial relationship. Consequently, the de facto Taiwan embassy in New…

i met shannon right at the end of may this year. we had our first date june 17, 2026. i took her to a hammock cafe. we traded journals and created pages for each other. shannons a poet, so she wrote an excerpt of one of her poems into my journal. i remember how nervous it made me, having said something about a kiss. i cant remember why we were talking about heartbeats, but she brought my hand to her chest for a moment. i have not felt butterflies like that in a very long time. eventually, we…

Here's the last of Lou Perry's photos of the then-new Big Thunder Mountain Railroad - photos scanned by Sue B., Lou's daughter. Big Thunder had debuted a little more than a year before these pictures were taken... given Lou's interest, I assume that it's the first time he'd seen this attraction with his own eyes. And he was obviously impressed! Just looking at this picture gives a small impression of how complex this ride is.I've always wondered if the mostly-yellow mine cars were a deliberate…

Carry On Camping (1969)

LONDON A-Z V is for Vale of Health We're now at the tough end of the alphabet for unsung suburbs. There's Victoria and Vauxhall but they're way too well known. There's Kingston Vale, Putney Vale and Streatham Vale, but that's stretching alphabetical licence too far. The only other V in the Ordnance Survey's 681-strong list is a small residential hollow at the top of Hampstead Heath, essentially just one street, but in the absence of anything better it'll have to do. Thankfully it's fascinating…

This will be November's book club book. Join 3000 other readers. How to Not Know is here to help us deal with the three problems the author identifies with our fear of uncertainty. First we aim for comfort and thus avoid the signals that life may be sending us. Second, hubris leaves us so sure of ourselves that we avoid the contradictions that may help us grow. Third, we exert so much control over everything that we put far too much effort into mundane things that should take up no room in our…

Had a conversation about liveblogging today and it got me thinking why I can’t do it. I’ve tried before, but I always inevitably get no more than a couple posts in before I give up. I think about doing it regularly because it seems like an easy way to post more on social media and start more conversations. I enjoy watching people do it because it’s fun to see people react to whatever they’re watching (it’s also led to me discovering new shows and movies and the like). I just don’t have the…

I love when people are passionate about things. I love it even more when people are passionate about the same thing in completely different ways. It started with Joel who is getting a little fed up seeing AI used for blog posts: Every day I am more and more annoyed by the way some of the blogs I have followed for years have started to “get with the times” or “catch up” on using those “tools” to “improve” their blogging in one way or another. Which prompted Dale to share what he thinks is…

28 Trophy | INDEX | 30 Cookie Self-imposed constraint: Use the letters of the prompt word inside a 2-inch square to illustrate its meaning. Hongdian Black Forest fountain pen, EF, black ink on 120 gsm paper.

At the very start of this year, I saw the Robert Redford caper The Hot Rock (1972). This movie is very good, but until recently it was kind of hard to see without performing some shenanigans, I'm told. I was only able to see it because some friends got professional help securing a theater screening for their joint birthdays. Part of the reason they did this is that they wanted their friends to see The Hot Rock... but it was too hard to see! Well, now you can see it here if you are in the US. I…

I regret my behaviour in a relationship if I don't integrate all these aspects.

Space is not a friendly place. Without our shield, we would be done.

Thursday 29th October 2026 After the Mayor of London finally got his pedestrianised Oxford Street ‘dream come true’ (see Tuesday’s blog) there’s been another ‘dream come true’ this week and that’s for the new ruling Plaid Cymru politicians in Wales desirous of a long held ambition for a faster public transport service linking north and south across the country. The new TaithCymru branded express coach route launched on Sunday linking Bangor and Carmarthen via Caernarfon, Portmadog, Dolgellau,…