Speaking of annoying things that are difficult or unintuitive to remove, I noticed Slack added a new icon to the menu bar on my Mac today. I immediately went looking through Slack's settings for a way to turn it off, but came up empty. Then I remembered you can remove most menu bar icons by holding Command and dragging them off the menu bar (keep holding until the little "Remove" popup appears, then let go). That worked fine for now, but we'll see if Slack tries to add it back again later.

I've been visiting bookshops in the surrounding small towns. They're all so charming. I peruse the staff picks, and soak in the curated atmospheres of each shop. One of them had twenty years' worth of bookmarks taped to the wall; another, a check-out counter of pure delight. If this were my shop... mentally checking off what I would do differently in each. I'm reading Frankenstein, taking pictures of neighborhood dying foliage, watching spooky shows: Something Bad Is About to Happen, Midnight…

A multimillionaire lecturing someone about what it means to lose a game was the icing on Survivor 51 episode 6's shit sundae of an episode.

A glorious warm sunny morning. Riding my ebike out for a coffee, I happened upon an undiscovered (for me) singletrack that was set along the base of Red Hill. The track meandered amongst wildflowers and shadows, passing above the backyards of some very expensive houses, offering glorious other-peoples-lives peeping opportunities. ⌾ : Ricoh GR IV Monochrome.⚲ : ///panel.fleet.stack Distracted by the flowers, the trees, the kitchen layouts, and whatnot, I failed to notice that the track (without…

I wanted to acknowledge the passing of Michael Gray, and how deeply the news was felt by so many, at least based on social media.It surprised me, I’ll admit. Though responses to the deaths of celebrities shouldn’t be a contest, it seemed that Gray’s passing had an impact beyond what I would have expected, and beyond what I’ve seen for actors of a more prominent stature.Maybe it appeared that way to me because most of my friends online are in my age group, so we all grew up at the same time and…

Writing my weeknotes two days late the week SOWWY. I was sick last week so I didn't really do anything. It was kind of nice though because despite being really busy with fun things all the time the combination of that and being driven slowly insane at work was making me feel really burnt out so a week with no plans (besides working from home) was exactly what I needed. Spent a lot of time in bed looking at my phone but in a positive healing way. Saturday though I was feeling back to normal…

Main Escalators, Uniqlo – New York, New York Switching to an interior view of escalators at a retailer seems like a rather abrupt change after showing an Atlas statue at Rockefeller Center yesterday. But I have my reasons, even though the relationship might be a bit tenuous. As you may recall, I have a repeating pattern of having three pictures that have some kind of relationship to each other. Sometimes the relationship is quite obvious. Other times, it might be subtle. The relationship…

A month ago, slugmax wrote a post about LLMs invading gopher via an MCP server and now that MCP server supports the /robots.txt standard. He gives a sample file that should work for Gopher: User-agent: gopher-mcp Disallow: / User-agent: GPTBot Disallow: / User-agent: ChatGPT-User Disallow: / User-agent: OAI-SearchBot Disallow: / User-agent: ClaudeBot Disallow: / User-agent: anthropic-ai Disallow: / User-agent: Claude-Web Disallow: / User-agent: Claude-User Disallow: / User-agent:…

Our last United game of the season. Go Loons!

The wonderful DataPhilly meetup community asked me to come give a talk on any topic, and I talked for half an hour on embedding-based retrieval, machine learning model artifacts creation and inference, general versus smaller models, and understanding latency and ONNX conversion tradeoffs. People also had some fantastic questions around what can we embed, tradeoffs in hosting your own models versus API for inference, and whether a model’s data or achitecture is more important. It was especially…

Tonight is my oldest son's birthday, and he wanted to watch a Kaiju movie. We have seen all the Godzilla movies and wanted to see something from the same era. To our mutual surprise, we had never seen the first Gamera movie. So tonight it is giant, flying atomic turtles! Gamera (1965)Some airplanes carrying atomic weapons fly over the Arctic. One crashes, explodes, and awakens Gamera, "The Devil's Envoy."And we are off.There is no question that Gamera owes a lot, ok everything, to Godzilla.…

In spring 2000, Bob King, the editor of the (tragically) now-defunct Classic Images newspaper, invited his readers to share their top 25 classic movies. As a frequent contributor to the publication – and a to-my-very-soul lover of lists, I broke every speed record to send in my favorites. Fourteen years later, after coming across a copy of that list, I decided to update the movies, and was interested to see that 10 films from my original list didn’t make the 2014 version. Today, while…

One of the varied trove of extant Birney bodies has gone up for sale, according to this post on the Ahead of the Torch Facebook group. The car, shown above, is Kansas City Public Service 1545, and it has an unusual and slightly sordid history. It's a standard single-truck Birney built by American in 1919, notable in part because it remained in service long after most Birneys had gone to scrap. Car 1545 was the last Birney to run for KCPS, on May 1, 1949, and it was one of two KCPS Birneys…

ROSS MACDONALD – The Drowning Pool. Lew Archer #2. Knopf, hardcover, 1950. Reprinted many times, in both hardcover and paperback. Film: Warner Bros., 1975, starring Paul Newman. PI Lew Archer is hired to investigate an anonymous note sent to Maude Slocum’s husband 9accusing her of adultery], intercepted before he could read it, but one that could ruin a marriage. Yet it’s also one hardly worth saving, as James Slocum’s daughter has her own dark secrets . Then the grandmother is pushed into a…

Judd-stacked drawers by Arne Jacobsen at Phillips next month These four wenge & formica drawers by Arne Jacobsen were originally installed in the guest rooms of the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen on a matching wall panel, and in a row, like a desk or vanity. vintage photo of the 1960 Arne Jacobsen all-encompassing design for the SAS Royal Hotel, Copenhagen, which I’m sure a million people will claim copyright to But I think Phillips is right. I like them better as a Judd stack. Or at least the…

IntroductionIn async Rust the Future::poll method is called to progress the state of the future, which reports its progress via the Poll enum. This enum contains two variants: Poll::Pending: means that the future is not yet ready to produce a value, and poll will need to be invoked again later. Poll::Ready(T): means the future is ready to yield some value T. Futures are called that because they will eventually resolve to a value, in the future. But that’s value singular, not values plural. The…

“A letter is never ill-timed; it never interrupts. Instead it waits for us to find the opportune minute, the quiet moment to savor the message. There is an element of timelessness about letter writing.”” –Lois Wyse Lee So-ri is a secondary student who lives in Seoul. When she was younger, illness kept her hospitalised. This […]

On this page I attended a workshop on Tangled at NixCon 2026. Tangled is a code forge that federates over ATProto. That means you can self-host your own instance while maintaining the social aspect of walled garden forges like GitHub. A Knot is one of the parts you can self-host and acts as the headless git server. I also attended sessions on Clan at NixCon. Clan is a peer-to-peer computer management framework for NixOS. It lets you fully provision a remote machine in a declarative way. I've…

interpreting narrative-level boundary-breaking

I'm using my 1:144 Halberstadt D-II model to fiddle with generating disruptive pattern textures in Blender.There's an enormous amount you can do with the node shading system, but I am the merest beginner when it comes to texturing objects in Blender.

Quoted Sumo: 33-yr-old Churanoumi becomes 1st komusubi from Okinawa Pref. by Mainichi (The Mainichi) Churanoumi became the first wrestler from Okinawa Prefecture to reach the three "sanyaku" ranks below yokozuna on Monday after he rose to komusubi in the latest rankings announced ahead of the Kyushu Grand Sumo Tournament in November. Churanoumi became the first sumo wrestler from Okinawa Prefecture to reach sumo wrestling’s sanyaku ranks. He will make his sankyaki debut at Komusubi 1-East at…

I have published many articles featuring Halloween decorations in Brooklyn over the years. The first was The Happy Halloween Ghost, published on October 18, 2020. In that article, I documented a friendly-looking inflatable ghost decoration holding a Jack-’o-lantern in Brooklyn Heights. The photo itself was low-quality because my then-Blackberry Classic camera did not fare well in the dark. But I published it as a vehicle for a general take on Halloween decorations. I quote from my 2020 short…

Terrible people and undead. A lot of last night really felt like a waste of time so tonight I was a bit more focused and productive. I went back to the refugee camp first and met the one former pig I was able to talk to after saving and she has a great merchant inventory. I got the whole gory backstory of the priestess and gave her her soul jar. Since she's helping us out it only seems fair. And also I can't really use the soul jars that easily so who cares. I understand you can absorb source…

Some people know me as a guy who started a music blog back in 2001. Or from the other music blog I started in 2008. Or the heavy metal trivia thing I started on social media in 2011. So when people ask me what I’ve been listening to lately, well, ummm… it’s an awkward conversation, since I’m listening to so much electronic music. Dark ambient, drone, jungle, minimalist techno, and stuff like this (above).

In the hours following the release of CVE-2026-98432 for the project Linux, site reliability workers and systems administrators scrambled to desperately rebuild and patch all their systems to fix a use-after-kfree where retransmitting a crafted connection request while finishing the handshake of that same connection causes funny things to happen up to and including arbitrary code execution. This is due to the affected components being written in C, the only programming language where these…

Today I have no motivation to work at all. I have a long list of tasks which are rather important. I do not feel like doing any of it. I know that if I do not finish the tasks, I will regret. First, I go to toilet, I got myself a cup of tea, sit in front of the computer, start a forest river video and I start my work. I aim to work for five minutes. If I reach five minutes without distraction, it is a win. Then I repeat the 5 minutes clock again. Sometimes when you are having a bad day or lack…

I've just added a /domains page to my growing list of /slashpages. /domains is my proposed new /slashpage for people who, like me, have a problem with "collecting" domain names. Mine's semi-automatically generated: it periodically probes the APIs of three of the domain registrars I've most-frequently used and, in theory, if I register anything new it'll show up on that page all by itself (unless I pre-add it to a "blocklist" of domains not-to-show). There's a few others manually-added, usually…

Stop whatever you’re doing. Just stop. I need to tell you about one of the weirdest, wildest, and most interesting board games I’ve played all year. Scratch that. Ever. That’s right. Ever. This is Grinivil. It was designed, illustrated, and published by Rudy Priecinsky. It’s tempting to lob a jab in there — “I can tell!” hardy har — especially once you get a look at the scattershot rulebook, the potato-headed character portraits, the mishmashed card layouts, the box itself… okay, as soon as you…

i barely made it here and i keep my coat on because i am still exposed, well i would simply write "hopeless" one million times but that wouldn't be interesting, would it? it would take a long time, too. and yet every single fucking day other things said hopeless Yesterday :: Wednesday, 28th October 2026

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