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…

Sharing a collection of items focused on my favourite Pokémon, Rowlet

It feels a little overwhelming to observe the sheer number of note-making apps that promise to “revolutionize your thinking” or something similarly impressive. I came across a website called the Markdown Handbook, which lists about forty markdown editors and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. If you’ve felt it’s too much, you’re not alone. Most of these tools offer endless variations of the same features, minor tweaks disguised as major innovations. We have an abundance of options, yet…

With thanks to X2Brute for pointing it out, I've corrected a silly error on the Pokéwalker Battle Mechanics page, namely that both the text and strategy analysis code was missing the fact the wild Pokémon counterattacks for 1 HP of damage after you score a critical hit. I was extremely thorough in my original analysis of the precise flow of what happens in each possible case, and I had the critical counterattack written up there, but somehow it got lost when I wrote up the descriptions of the…

I just read this on Mastodon, and found it striking. I’m republishing it here, with permission from François Rincon, exactly as originally posted. The more scientific papers I write, the more I realize that the only truly substantial reason left for writing science these days is to improve your own self and to hone your own understanding of a problem. There is essentially no attentive readership anymore for science papers anyways (except perhaps for reviews, which a lot of young people in…

I attempted to make a shrink keying, but it curled up and stuck to itself in the oven, then cracked when I tried to flatten it. I was quite happy with my drawing though!

lights out, wait for sleep hope for cuddles that's all I need

Corpus Parisinum 506 (tr. Denis Searby): A plant being continuously transplanted bears no fruit. Φυτὸν µεταφερόµενον συνεχῶς καρπόν οὐ ποιεῖ.

At the bottom of a quiet hill, in a small, warm burrow, lived a porcupine named Hollis. He had a partner who wore a flower behind her ear, two little ones who never walked when they could run, and a coat of quills that stood up whenever he laughed, which was often. Beside the front door stood an old…

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others. Wendy Wimmer follows up her impressive story collection Entry Level with a debut novel, The Doomscroller’s Companion, that dazzles with its storytelling through a variety of narratives.…

Even find yourself frustrated with Spotlight and Finder search? HoudahSpot might be the answer. HoudahSpot 6 Search Window Spotlight is a great tool for finding files on your Mac. It’s (generally) fast and uncomplicated. If you have some documents in your Documents folder and a bunch (ma)lingering on your desktop, Spotlight is probably the best way to find something. HoudahSpot, however, lets you drill deeper, specify (and restrict) search locations, and apply just about any criteria you can…

I moved my Mastodon server into my house DMV.community has lived on a Vultr VPS for a while now. This week I moved it onto the server that sits in my house and already runs a few other things I self-host. It's a Ryzen 7 3800X with 32 GB of RAM and a fast NVMe drive, which is a lot more machine than the VPS ever was, and I'm already paying for the electricity. It went pretty well. It also went sideways in a few fun ways I didn't see coming. The move itself The actual cutover was the boring part,…

The rumours are true - Bill's days of being "on the run" (or, more accurately, "hiding in his house") have come to an end, and he's back in police custody.I will update this post with additional details once I have them.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799), Waste Books B.78 (tr. R.J. Hollingale): Every man has his moral backside which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers of decorum. Jeder Mensch hat auch seine moralische backside, die er nicht ohne Not zeigt, und die er so lange als möglich mit den Hosen des guten Anstandes zudeckt.

So here I am, back in Maynooth. I’d like to thank the members of the Astronomy Research Centre in the School of Mathematics and Physics at Queen’s University Belfast for inviting me and for stimulating discussions during and after my talk, and of course for the hospitality, especially the nice lunch and tea & cakes this afternoon. The hotel I stayed in last night is very close to the campus, in the University quarter, and I got up early enough this morning to have a walk around before my talk.…

(It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories. After this and this, the post below feels like a third story in an accidental “angry rectangle” trilogy.) If you used Windows in the 1990s or 2000s, it’s likely you’ve seen this effect, which today we’d call a “glitch”: The reason for it had to do with window compositing. If you look at how things are drawn on screens, at some point you realize that despite all the handwringing about additive vs. subtractive…

Register now for the remaining opportunities to attend this free and unique learning experience focused on amplifying creative connections and productive collaborations. As a recent participant commented on my new fireside.rs venture: anything which takes us out of our heads and into our hearts is so important these days! Join us (and / or feel free to share with those in the region), for the final free workshops this year before they transition into a paid-for-service, hosted by these…

An anonymous reader writes:As someone who is planning on buying an Impulse cooktop I would love to read more about how you use it and how (or if) it has changed how you cook and/or eat. Thanks!I've had an Impulse Labs cooktop for about six months ago. It arrived in March, and I wrote a little bit about how I was using it then.I've been meaning to write a longer and "with videos" review but I also have limited time to write this week and want to give an initial answer to the question without too…

This is a quick followup to the blog post about having a dedicated li’l keyboard for doing translations. The problem is that this product category — small keyboards — is cursed. It’s not surprising, because it’s not something that the major producers are involved with much (they concentrate on actual, real keyboards), so you get a lot of semi-no-name producers pumping out junk. One of these was the smallest keyboard up there — the M4 — which is complete junk: It drops half the keystrokes. The…

AI mass deskilling here. Don't believe me? Just ask a developer to implement a circular list without AI. In this video, we cover the existing literature on the topic, ranging from software to non-software cases, see how learning skills have atrophied, and end with what software […]

We're a week out from election day, and Jill and I have submitted our ballots. But what will the nation do? I'll give my predictions below, in a fun, not-at-all-anxiety-laden game for everyone!(One note: I'm historically pretty bad at this.).U.S. HouseNot going to do individual races here, but I will predict that Democrats retake the House, and by a pretty comfortable but not overwhelming margin. We'll go with a 25-seat Democratic majority when all is said and done.SenateAlaska -- Mary Petola…

The Day of the Jackal from 1973 is the original film version of Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 novel. It shouldn’t be confused with a couple of remakes — one in 1997 with Bruce Willis (just called The Jackal) and a TV version in 2024 with Eddie Redmayne.It’s quite good, in an unique kind of way. There’s not a lot of action, because the entire film is essentially an asynchronous chase scene.A terrorist group hires an assassin (”The Jackal”) to kill Charles DeGaulle (likely set in the mid 60s, since an…

We went for a lil punt today. Was a very nice vibe, but quite expensive. Apparently you're meant to haggle a bit but I don't have a haggling gene.255 words · 5 images

$405.85, to be exact. I didn’t get a picture of the cart this time, though. My daughters both came along and had their own shopping, and everything was in one cart. It was just a trip to the nearest Walmart, not the big city trip where we would go to multiple stores I also don’t … Continue reading First Stock Up Shop; this is what I got for $400

That side of the room. Dull Tool Dim Bulb the Blog

I’m giving a talk at Rowan University tomorrow October 29. It takes the framework from my new book Good Vibes Only: Phenomenology and the Biopolitics of Algorithmic Legitimation and extends it to talk about slop, in particular slop and vibes...

I’m writing this post from a hospital bed. And I couldn’t be happier. You hear folks say chemotherapy sucks, but until you go through it yourself, you don’t really know how bad it can be. It remains a popular activity only because it’s better than the alternative. My first exposure to chemotherapy was with this contraption: a fluoroscope. Lovely to look at, less lovely to lie on. Every week, they used this machine to tap into my spine, extract 5 mg of fluid for analysis, and replace it with 5…

Last week, President Macron tried to annul the right to protest. In France. In France. Whatever next: a ban on casual infidelity, impossibly ornate tiny cakes, or dismissive shrugging? How did we get here? The 17th of October¶ On the 17th, the government lost control, both within metropolitan France and in its overseas territories. The police added to their bloody tally of eyeballs and hands. An English retiree (who we can probably safely assume was not taking part in any protest) had a hole…

Deansgate Market Street Northern Quarter St Anne's Square Cross Street Tarriff Street Moseley Street