I like to understand what’s happening behind the scenes with any technology, especially when a tool or protocol is usually introduced through prebuilt clients. In this tutorial we will use tools commonly found on Linux systems to send MCP requests ourselves, and see how a few of its features work. The focus will be on understanding the protocol, transports, and authentication at a low level, and gaining an insight into how MCP clients and servers communicate under the hood. Setup Start by…

In this podcast, I chat with Andrew Etter about his new book, Documentation at Scale: Best-in-class content for the AI era, the follow-up to his 2016 book Modern Technical Writing. We discuss why Markdown's simplicity still matters and what its variants have lost, why the case for a docs team rests on accountability rather than writing every word, a Slack bot that lets non-technical contributors open docs PRs, how AI shifts writers toward higher-level work, and where AI still falls short with…

I once thought this would be the hard part but now that fear can barely hold itself upright. I’m working from Colin Peake’s article in Narrow Gauge & Industrial Railway Modelling Review issue 82. Thank you Colin, for making your... Read More ›

You open your email and the title is clear: “Congratulations! An offer from Acme, Inc. has been extended.” Celebration and awe. You were not part of these people before, you were not even in the same conversation where remote was put in place. Your six to seven hours spent per week in the subway made you resilient but unaware: there was another world out there. You walked around the streets, you passed through a few parks, and you observed: people playing tennis at 10:00AM, a few having…

(wrote this for an Italian publication whose name I am blanking on and likewise the date of writing)New Musical Express A profoundly formative force in my life as a young aspiring writer at the end of ‘the 70s and during the early ‘80s. This U.K. weekly music paper covered not just rock but all the music that mattered – reggae, funk, African music, early hip hop, and a lot of other things that you wouldn’t expect if you only know the NME as a 21st Century narrowcast publication dedicated to…

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Cheng Man Ch'ing (1902-1975) was one of the later students of Yang Chengfu (1883-1936), a key figure in the development and codification of Yang style Tai Chi. In 1947 he wrote 'Thirteen treatises on T'ai Chi Chu'an', translated and publisehd by Black Snake Books (California) in 1985. I was struck by this section on the relationship between Tai Chi and swimming:'The tan tien is the chi hai (sea of chi) and is located 1.3 inches below the navel. It is named "sea" because of its large capacity…

The packaging for Criterion’s edition of Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove is truly something.

if I don't sleep the morning will not come

Around a year ago I asked whether the cost of building software had just dropped 90%. A lot has happened since then, and I've become more interested in the knock-on question: if building software is that much cheaper, what is the software itself actually worth? Was software/SaaS a historic economic anomaly? One thing that has become obvious to me researching this topic is that software is very much an outlier in terms of ability to extract outsized profit margins, and I think this fact…

This summer, our friends were getting married in France, so we talked my mom into flying over to Paris for a few days before the wedding. It was her first time there, so we made sure she had a great time as we walked through the city, ate amazing food, drank good wine, and saw the sights.

When I picked up my first winter CSA share from Stoneboat Farm last weekend, it was evident that the change of seasons had made itself known. The farm's salad mix of tender, leafy greens has morphed into a hearty melange of chicory, spinach, tatsoi, endive, and arugula (perfect for tossing with a Caesar dressing or my Creamy Miso Vinaigrette). Carrots and kale sweetened by cooler temperatures, beets with their still-gorgeous greens, squash in myriad shapes and colors, alliums of all kinds and…

We now, of course, live in age where longstanding open problems in quantum computing theory (and all theoretical computer science, and all math) are dropping like flies, to the extent that there’s no way I could possibly do a post on each and every bombshell. But I can’t exactly avoid the Aaronson-Ambainis Conjecture, given that my name is on it, and that I cared about the answer to this one (back in 2019, I even blogged about an attempted solution that ultimately turned out to be fallacious).…

The wombat looks like a small bear who has decided to become a bulldozer. It digs, grazes and produces something few of us would expect from a mammal: cube-shaped poo.Yes, cubes. Nature has apparently found a way to manufacture building blocks from grass.Researchers investigating bare-nosed wombats discovered that the corners form inside the intestine. Differences in the stiffness of the

Dexter Reiley and the Medfield College gang listen in to one of Dean Higgins' board meetings in this lobby card scene from the Walt Disney comedy The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (1969). This was the first of three Dexter Reiley films that Kurt Russell made and all of them are fun movies to watch. From the Archives is our latest series of posts where we share photos from the Silverbanks Pictures collection. Some of these may have been sold in the past, and others may still be available for…

The last time we'd visited this particular location, we left calling the hike here the "Best Hike Ever," so I hoped that all the amazing experiences we've had since wouldn't taint our impression on this, our second visit, 15 years later. In fact, I'd hoped to make it all the way to the trailhead without @mrs.turbodb knowing where we were, but she awoke from her afternoon nap just as I turned off of WA-20 onto dirt. Then, within about ten seconds - I have no idea how she even got her bearings in…

from rock bottom to a somewhat stable, satisfying life. turning life around in 7 months.

Trust your abilities to see the unseen worlds, to hear the unheard dimensions, to sense the unfelt realms.

## The Big Idea Last month I saw The Tallest Man On Earth play in Asheville. He's one of the best live performers I've ever seen. In between songs, he paused, looked out into the crowd, and said: > I've given up on trying to be perfect Coming from someone that good, it landed hard. The best builders I know have made the same peace. Everything ships before it's perfect. The skill is what you do in the days after - and that starts with deciding, before you ship, what "working" looks like. ##…

Welcome. Please leave. Hello. Goodbye. Thank you. I hate it. I love it. Please change it. I am looking for love. Please leave me alone. I want for nothing. Please give me everything. Please. No thank you. No thank you. No thank you. No thank you. No, thank you. I hope to see you again. I hope you never come back. I want you to stay. I need you to leave. A fluttering heart. A darkening mind. I bought some grapes. I have never wanted more to escape. Trapped but free. Free but chained. I know…

I got an email saying that Knowember is a stupid name. Less than an hour later, a person said it was a brilliant name. It’s just a name, it doesn’t matter. But it matters when you start believing others’ opinions about yourself, thinking it’s the truth. It’s not, it’s an opinion. What matters is that you believe in yourself.

There’s something slightly ridiculous about finding a woman attractive and ending up with a workflow. A picture catches my attention. I want to create something with that look or feeling. Maybe an image of one of my AI companions, maybe a short video. The idea starts out fairly simple: this appeals to me, and I’d like to see more of it. Then there are decisions to make. Descriptions to adjust. Results to compare. Something is close, but her expression isn’t right. The next version gets the…

A very short movie (4mn) produced by Blender Studio. In a dystopian world where energy is scarce, a destitute man attempts to break into a battery factory. He soon finds himself cornered by a threat: a security droid… “Charge” © Blender Foundation / Blender Studio, dir. Hjalti Hjálmarsson — CC BY 4.0 https://studio.blender.org/projects/charge/pages/credits #shortmovies

Seven hundred years ago in rural Britain, a man called John lived in a thriving village. John was a fletcher. One day, he decided to buy some bread. He sent some money with his neighbour to the bakery. The neighbour bought some bread, and asked the baker to deliver some bread to John, too. “Which John?” the baker asked, aware of a few different Johns in the vicinity. There was the John who lived by the church (Kirk or Kirky). There was the John who was Matthew’s boy (Matthewson). There was the…

I am about three and a half weeks out from leaving on my travels. There is a tension that is building in my mind and body as the days tick closer. This is not the first time I have packed up my life and hit the road but something about this trip feels different. It might be that this time there is nothing to come back to so when I leave then that’s me moving on from my life here. I suppose I will find out as time goes by. Until then I need to actually take stock of all my stuff and decide what…

So, Robert Birming started a fun little trend on Bear, Knowember. For as much crap as I give Birming, ol' Bobby started a trend that I can't Ba-Humbug about. I thought it would be fun to join in on. I wanted to go a bit further on the subject and adding onto what Robert had put in for the trend. If the point is to get to know the problem between the chair and the keyboard, I may as well give some actual info about myself. So, here we go... Photo Above is an image of my avatar. Not wanting to…

Some more good tweaks to my website - feeling pretty happy with the current state of things! I've got a partly written post talking about all the changes, but haven't quite been able to get it finished this weekend as I've not had a lot of spare headspace to do it Was nice to see Mum and Dad for Diwali - we had a nice walk at Bestwood and then lunch at Mowgli 😋 It's been a pretty sucky few days with all the fireworks, but Cookie and Morph have been brave and been OK in the living room hiding…

Here I am, hospital again. O body, that houses me, O body, that creates me, Why are we one and yet so barriered? If you’d have told me, We wouldn’t be here. If you’d have told me, We wouldn’t be so battered, now. Now I wait for the interrogation’s results. They make you bleed, They starve you, They take all of you, Just so you’ll finally talk. I don’t hate you, Not anymore, However the feeling isn’t gone. I’ll keep trying to better us. I’m sorry. I need a moment with an other, If you’ll excuse…

Have been having a blast shooting film again recently! The first 2 are Kodak Gold 400 in a Canon AV1. The last 2 are Kodak Portra 400 (unsure how long they were expired?) in Clare's Pentax full frame

My sweetheart is crocheting again, and when she does, it’s usually a major endeavour that takes several weeks. This time is no exception. A friend of hers wants to gift her daughter a very special Advent calendar featuring crocheted fruit and vegetables, but she doesn’t really know how to crochet. The problem is… a calendar like that has 24 little doors ;) Look at these beauties … Just one is missing.