This is a thing I've seen on the Fediverse where people post three good things about their day, life, etc. I thought I'd give it a try here. A little more verbose than the average Mastodon post. Today has been a rough day. I'm dealing with some troubling physical symptoms and the urgent care doc prescribed antibiotics because it's likely an infection of some kind. I won't go into more detail than that. Suffice it to say, I've not been feeling great, don't feel like eating much, and have been in…

Our AppleTV has proved perfectly serviceable for the decade we’ve had it, but… actually, scratch that, besides its mediocre remote, it’s been excellent. Apple could have abandoned it years ago and forced us to upgrade, but it’s still been getting patches and new features this whole time. That feels unusual in our current world of planned obsolescence, enshittification, and everyone’s favourite two letters of the Latin alphabet, so it’s worth calling out. Good job, Cupertino. That was a stilted…

# Introduction The main laptop I use is a Lenovo x390 with only 8 GB of memory, which is not a lot nowadays with a web browser and a few applications opened. The memory cannot be upgraded on this laptop because it is soldered on it, but thanks to memory compression I can easily squeeze a few extra GB out of it. I wrote about compression with BTRFS in a previous article, it can save a lot of disk space depending on the data. This time, it is about compressing memory with zram or zswap, two…

Disclaimer: While I’m trying to be as factual as possible with this story, it happened more than 20 years ago, and, while my sources are mostly interviews and articles of people who were there (especially Joel Gallen, producer and director of the event), you know how stories sometimes get embellished with time. Also, sadly, two of our main protagonists have died since then.Our story starts in 2003, when David Fricke of Rolling Stone Magazine (probably the most influential music magazine in the…

Before I get into his newly reopening Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden, here are a couple of useful backgrounders of Hiroshi Sugimoto talking about museums, architecture, and museum architecture: “My idea was to transform the Hirshhorn’s Lobby into an artwork that symbolizes what is unique about both the building and the collection. Ideally, this piece is sculpture, furniture, and conceptual art, all at the same time.”—Hiroshi Sugimoto, NMRL/Yukihiro Sakakida, Hirshhorn Lobby, 2017-18, : HH/SI/Cathy…

Returning to Cephiro: My First Impressions of the New Magic Knight Rayearth I was surprised when a new Magic Knight Rayearth anime was announced. It was one of those series I had fond memories of, but not quite in the way you might expect: I’ve never actually watched the original anime. My introduction to Rayearth was through the Super Nintendo game. I played through it years ago and really enjoyed it. It was a fairly traditional Japanese RPG, more in the style of Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest,…

Created a fun real time walkie talkie app https://svandragt.github.io/over-and-out/ share a link with someone and get vintage realtime communication link courtesy of PeerJS with push to talk and who needs Skype or WhatsApp, over. #projects #overandout

Om Lahore: RemoveMacAI turns off Apple Intelligence and deletes its models. It also switches off Mac Analytics and personalized ads, fixes small things like the wallpaper click that hides every window, and clears out old installers and caches. You see each change before it happens and can undo it later. On my partner's MacBook Neo, Siri AI somehow turned itself on and she was understandably upset about it. This got it turned back off. I particularly like that this app doesn't require you to…

Got some items to sell? Build out a tinylistings instance and send some more eyes to your eBay listings. Demo: https://listings.vandragt.com/. v1.0 just out #projects #tinylistings

Much of my career has been spent deciding what software is allowed to do, and every system I worked on eventually had to answer the same question, which is what happens when the code in front of you does something you did not expect. Agents have made that question urgent again, and most of the conversation about them is about making the model behave. I think that is the wrong place to start. As I put it in Containing the Optimizer, safety is a design problem, not a policy problem. The more…

Wally’s “Flashes of Insight” were working great. That is, they were working great until they failed miserably. Last issue, Wally thought he stopped three bridges from blowing up, but his “Flashes of Insight” didn’t stop that from happening. Explosions in Central City, Star City, and Metropolis! Add to that the fact that innocent people are in jail for a crime Wally only thought they were about to commit. There are members of the Justice League that are watching, and they are definitely NOT…

By Richard McKenna / October 28, 2026 The Woman in Black Directed by Herbert Wise ITV (1989) The year is 1989 and I am now a super cool punk rocker and art student. Okay, maybe not the “super cool” part, but I do have important punk rocker stuff to do (read: traipsing around in the drizzle, reading old comics, and feeling cold) and no access to TV listings, so I therefore foolishly miss out on the original transmission of The Woman in Black, British independent channel ITV’s adaptation of Susan…

The heart of the matter For the past few years, tech has progressively filled me with different types of ‘fatigue’. Now it’s the turn of ecosystem fatigue. The initial ‘digital hub’ vision made a lot of sense at the time. As Steve Jobs said, the Mac with its capabilities gives value to all the satellite devices we use (or used at the time) — CD and DVD players, digital cameras, PDAs, MP3 players, camcorders — and also interconnects them. The example he made was the synergy between a device like…

The Stranger Diaries – Elly Griffiths I’ve been listening to this on audiobook on and off for a week or so. Not that gripped, and not a big fan of spooky whodunnits, so I’m stopping. Author page: The Stranger Diaries – Elly Griffiths

Modica at dusk, its old town stacked up the hillside. I awake in Modica knowing that I need to wash my clothes in the sink and get them out into the morning sun to dry. I plod up from the basement to find Iva in the living room, holding a bottle of nail polish up to the window and frowning at it. I open the doors to the balcony and the city beyond. Sicily has some of the world’s most beautiful villages, Cefalù and Erice among them, but Modica is not a village. Modica is an entire city, built on…

A mast on the cruise ship Liberty of the Seas is silhouetted by the morning sun on the Gulf of Mexico. The post Morning Mast appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

Earlier this week Labor announced its first substantive bus promise in its campaign to retain government in next month's state election. Monbulk MP Daniela De Martino was able to win support from her party for a new bus route between Emerald and Monbulk. The specific assurance of a new bus route is superior to the promise of a mere review (as offered for Melton). That's because reviews are vague and are easier to break promises on (as Labor did with the large north, north-east and Mildura…

There was a time when Halloween specials were unknown on American television, even though Halloween episodes of television shows were common even in the Fifties and Sixties. Even after the success of It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, Halloween specials would be relatively rare. This began to change in the mid to late Seventies when several Halloween specials debuted. Among this specials was the Canadian special Witch's Night Out.Witch's Night Out begins with a witch (Gilda Radner) who…

In some of the recent articles on this blog, we tackled the structure of logic, the nature of truth, and the meaning of existence. With these beginner topics sorted out, we can now talk about God.St. Michael Triumphs over the Devil, Bartolomé Bermejo (1468), detail #1.Rest assured, I’m not going to guilt you into going to church. Instead, we’ll talk about an ancient philosophical frontier: the efforts to use reason to prove the existence of God. These proofs are commonly lampooned by atheists,…

Ghosts is probably my favourite Ibsen play and one of the most frequently-produced; both things may or may not be connected to it being comparatively short. In fact while watching Kwame Owusu's production at Jermyn Street I did think maybe I could do with a break from it for a while as I'm a bit too familiar with every beat of the story to be surprised by any of it, although as with Shakespeare there's always the chance to see what particular angle each production will take. In this case the…

I'm so happy about this I could cry. For years, I've "played" my visual world: objects, architecture, cityscapes, landscapes, and anything interesting. I map the shapes and patterns I see to shapes and patterns on the fretboard. I make little compositions with those shapes and patterns. People already think I'm weird wandering around town plunking a rubber-stringed bass ukelele, so I've I've never told anyone that I do this. It's just how my mind works. I never thought I'd be able to articulate…

As rumored, Apple unveiled a new MacBook Pro with touchscreen for all your swiping, pinching and rotation needs. Something that I didn't read on the rumor mill: the return of the glowing Apple logo on the back of the laptop screen. This is the pro version of the MacBook Pro, and the price tag reflects that. It may take quite a while before the MacBook Neo gets a touchscreen, I think. Jason Snell, Six Colors: Another question I had coming into this event was just how much effort Apple would make…

My wife brought me back edible gifts from Texas. These are incredible.

[A lot of mistakes were made.] Personally, I’m not interested in even a week-long cruise, so it is very difficult for me to imagine deciding to live permanently on a cruise ship. Nevertheless, hundreds of people chose to rent or buy permanent ​residences on board the cruise ship “Odyssey”, and they’ve been sailing around the world since late 2024. This week, that ride came to an abrupt end. Passengers were kicked off the ship in Cambodia, purportedly due to unsustainable fuel costs. Yikes.Link:…

28th October 2026 What events in Serbia and Brazil and perhaps Isreal tell us and don’t tell us * There is a lot of news and there is a lot to take in: Serbia, Brazil, United States, Israel, France, and so on. At home we have a Budget, an event which seemed to once mean more than it does now, but is not yet altogether meaningless. For once the supply of news is keeping up with the demand for news in our current media environment. The attention market is being cleared, as economists would tell…

One year ago, writing a book felt like a distant goal. Today, Street-Smart Coding turns 1 year old. It’s the book I wish I had when starting out as a coder. A roadmap with 30 lessons to build skills that last a career. From the most conventional to the most unexpected. I wrote it for my younger self Googling “how to get better at coding.” Street-Smart Coding became a book series After one year, Street-Smart Coding became the second book in a 4-part series. I wrote a prequel, Street-Smart Coding…

Apart from stiffing recent graduates and dragging more people into higher tax bands, Martin Lewis was quite pleased with John Healey's budget statement. Which fits the label Aditya Chakrabortty applied to it: this was a budget to please everybody's favourite money expert. But what about the politics? This was far from the big offer Andy Burnham sold during his Labour leadership conference speech. Of the 10-year plan, there was nary a sign. Instead, this was a tinkerer's budget but one designed…

This is interesting and useful to precisely nobody other than myself and Clara, but we feel accomplished, so I’m writing this here. In the last month we’ve finally: Had a plumber in to repair all the taps and bathroom fixtures. The assembly under the second bathroom’s taps were in such poor shape they had to replace the entire thing. The seals on all the taps were “as hard as concrete”. They also installed taps between the pipes and the wall, so the next plumber doesn’t need to turn off water…

Close friends of Bill have arranged for a Celebration of Life gathering at the University of California at Davis. From the organizers: Hello Ladies & Gents, As many of you know, we lost Bill Gardner on July 24, 2026. I’m Joan Barclay. I began working for Bill in 1999 at Statistical Signal Processing, Inc. (SSPI) in Napa, CA. After retiring in 2010, I returned in later years to help care for Nancy, Bill, Pepper (Nancy’s African Grey), and Weasel (the dog). In late 2020, Bill and Nancy found…