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.

Contents Introduction Practical Application Armor & Weapons Troop Type to Armor Class conversion Troop Type to Weapon Class conversion Bonuses Introduction ↩Generally, you have about five combat systems available when running OD&D1 with Chainmail:2 Troop Type System Man-to-Man Combat Jousting Fantasy Combat Alternative Combat System (ACS) 📝 NOTE: Additional combat systems appear in later supplements: Alternate Combat & Hit Dice System from Greyhawk3 (expanding ACS), Psionic Combat from Eldritch…

"I've spent most of my life under the cover of trees, and the rhythms of the woodland year have been a kind of metronome: that burst of brilliance and energy in the spring, the long, dense trance of summer, the sumptuous fading-away of the autumn, the clean, bare months of winter, the season of working and cutting back. I reckoned I could always lose myself in a wood, not just in its spaces, but in the layers of history bound up in its grain and forkings and clow cycles of light and shade. A…

2nd November - 8th November The maples in the graveyard are near bare now, their leaves blanket the ground the colour of bonfires at night. Gravestones stand proud like ancient marble sea stacks in an ocean of fire. These are Dusty Springfield mornings; her husky voice and vinyl crackle blending with the smell of tea. The fog is thick like my glasses have steamed up. A security light slices the crepuscular rays the dawn can't manage. Later today I will buy a Leonard Cohen album. I got a…

Painting the German WW1 lozenge pattern in 1:144 scale isn't actually all that difficult. The exact geometric shape of the individual lozenges isn't all that important in this small scale, as they really just resolve visually to fairly indistinct blobs anyway.What is more important is the relative size of the individual blobs of colour, and their spacing relative to each other. Having a more or less accurate starting point makes that a whole lot easier.To that end, I've made these FDM 3d…

Just a few days ago, I shared an example of what to me felt like a crammed interface. Here’s a look into an adjacent problem, into how apps deal with making room for your stuff. Let’s say I have two pages on my home screen in iOS: (The third “app library” page is kind of an overflow page – automatically generated, and always following whatever pages I create.) Whenever I enter the customization mode (e.g. “jiggle mode”), iOS thoughtfully adds a third, empty page: This is a nice gesture that…

Links How big is the difference? Smartphones vs Cameras: Closing the gap on image quality - DXOMARK Browser alternative: Lens: Simple, Private Browser for iPhone and iPad Do you like runs? Runmeter Running & Cycling App for iOS and Android Camera's everywhere: The motorola signature 27 sets a new flagship standard Print all the things: Bambu Lab A1 mini | Desktop 3D Printer | A1 series | Bambu Lab US M365? Tiny Little Office Video Ranking the worlds most popular pens Godzilla vs. Ghidorah -…

I've listened to, and read, the words of many of the first-time Democratic winners of last week's midterms, and they're all brilliant and insightful in each of their own ways, but Texas' young Senator-elect James Talarico's words are Biblical in their import, their effect, and surely their consequence. HCR wrote about Talarico's victory speech in her November 7th letter, and this passage resonated instantly with me: “[W]e are tired of being pitted against each other,” Talarico continued. “We…

I read Kev Quirk's response to Tuesdays Child about whether money buys happiness, and one sentence struck me: "For me, money doesn't buy happiness - it buys the removal of financial stress." I think there is a LOT of truth in that. Having lived through some difficult financial years myself, I can relate. My parents divorced when I was young, and my brother and I were raised by our mother. We had support from our grandparents, and while we were by no means financially secure, I honestly don't…

On October 27 I was part of the final session of D2L’s AI Literacies in Practice series, hosted by Cristi Ford of D2L and Angela Gunder of Opened Culture. Also on the panel was Sean McMinn, who directs the Center for Education Innovation at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Sean argued that […] Source

It wouldn't be yet another retirement tour without a focus on side hustles. I've been focusing most of my time on the projects I've been kicking the can on for Holiday API but have also been working on something new with my wife. The past few years, she's been dipping her toes into day trading both stocks and options. To help support her, I started to build more focused tools than what the current landscape of software has to offer. Cuppa is those tools, productized. Things are very early, but…

Ho completato una storia breve ispirata dall’immagine di un colle coperto dalle ombre proiettate dalle nuvole. Un’altra volta, poi, scriverò del suo periodo di gestazione particolarmente difficile: Luci e Ombre Hey, thanks for reading my blog via the RSS feed! Feel welcome to get in touch!

When I have interviewed for roles in ecommerce, some people see a company that is known for its crystals on my resume and get really excited. I wasn't running ads, I wasn't running their store. Fun fact: The difference between low quality and high quality crystal? The amount of LEAD used in the process. I was in the factory. Powder Coating and putting metallics on the parts, everything was made to order. All the fabrication was done in-house. It wasn't a glamorous job, but this job got me…

I’ve been doing a bunch of client-facing work again recently, and have had places to be in the morning. Today I’m back on the balcony again having a coffee and watching the morning sun while we wait for some tradespeople to come in for some maintenance. It’s been a while since I’ve done this, and it’s lovely! It’s almost as though we bought this place because it had a nice semi-enclosed balcony. I’m glad I’m wearing a scarf, though! Forcing myself to sit on the balcony for fresh air and…

Rey showing off her art being hung at the art gallery . The post On The Wall appeared first on @Kevuhnn / 📸 / 📚 / 🇨🇦.

I know that I shall meet my fateSomewhere among the clouds above;Those that I fight I do not hate,Those that I guard I do not love;My country is Kiltartan Cross,My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,No likely end could bring them lossOr leave them happier than before.Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,A lonely impulse of delightDrove to this tumult in the clouds;I balanced all, brought all to mind,The years to come seemed waste of breath,A waste of breath the years…

Sally Thomason (LH: 2017, 2022) mentioned something very interesting in a comment to a Facebook post: I found evidence in an early (17th-century) missionary account that the Delaware Pidgin was created by the Delawares deliberately, as a way of keeping outsiders at a distance — as in, We have to talk to you people, but we aren’t going to let you learn our real language. That was the first time I’d come across that motive for the development of a pidgin language; since then I’ve found it in…

I’d like us to read something together. I’ve been listening to a lot of old-time, bluegrass, Americana-type of music as of late. I’ve always felt a call to this musical tradition. I can’t really explain why. I think it has something to do with its sound, which is neither major nor minor in its tonality, but rather something that crosshatches between the two, a “lonesome” sound, as its practitioners term it. It also has something to do with its lyrical quality, which prizes a kind of oblique…

"Don't think about it; just do it!" People who say that usually encourage their audience to start implementing their raw idea immediately, without spending time on upfront planning and instead adapt along the way. Some people even promote this idea for projects, especially those run in startups. This advice may be correct in some cases, but not always. Generalizing it is incorrect and can end up causing disasters. When should we "just do it" and when should we take our time to plan and design…

Percorrendo la strada maestra da sud, lasciandosi alle spalle un fitto querceto, quasi tutti i viandanti emettono un sospiro di meraviglia. Anche i più bastian contrari ammetterebbero che lo spettacolo davanti ai propri occhi è affascinante: la valle che pare a dir poco fatata. La via punta verso nord-ovest, seguendo le morbide curve di verdi colli coperti da campi, paesini in pietra e piccoli boschetti di faggi o castagni, lasciati volutamente incolti per potervi cacciare. Ogni poggio ospita…

I now live in Bristol. Our kiwi movers unloaded two lorry loads of my London life into our new house on Thursday, and we collected the remaining remnants of Rina’s past Bristol life from a storage container on Friday. Two more full days of deep cleaning and unpacking, and it almost feels like a home already. This is all very discombobulating. One of the main reasons I loved living in London was how experienced at it I was. I like being competent, and I was a proudly competent Londoner. Right…

If someone is assigned a task, be it to review a PR, work on a reasonably complex coding task, or even just asked a simple question, and literally all they do is prompt the agent "do X" and copy-paste the results back to you, with zero guidance or validation on behalf of the human (meaning it was 100% handled by the agent), and sometimes not even disclosing that this was the case, in my opinion this should be grounds for getting the dev in question punished in some capacity, and potentially…

Good systems design can be a major determinant of business success. Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, CEO of Mayflower-Plymouth I just read an article from an author I follow on Medium that summarizes system design perfectly: Slow reads? Add a cache. Write spikes? Buffer with a queue. Too much traffic? Add a load balancer. Read-heavy database? Add read replicas. Write-heavy database? Shard the data. Slow queries? Add indexes. Slow file loads? Object storage + CDN. Temporary failures? Retry with…

It’s been a few years since I last published a coherent photographic project. The last one was “Where the Story Begins”, which attempted to tell the story of the sometimes chaotic early days of T.’s and my relationship and marriage. After we got married, we focused hard on building a life in London, and then we had kids. I told myself that while the kids were little, I would focus on shooting, rather than editing work. Editing1 requires long stretches of focus time, which is just not available…

Updating my reading catalog fell to the bottom of my to-do list. Reading List on my phone knew when I’d finished a book, but the site only updated when I typed it in at a terminal with a cumbersome sequence of cli.py code. Now it takes one tap and one merge. A Shortcut pushes my Reading List export to the site’s GitHub repo. An Action picks out the new books, pulls metadata from Open Library, and asks Claude to suggest themes, using my own shelving as examples. Then it opens a pull request. The…

The announcement was made last Thursday: The business realities of independent digital journalism have changed profoundly over the years. After careful consideration, we have reached the difficult decision that our publishing model is no longer sustainable. I haven’t read Salon much in recent years, I was following their RSS feed though maybe the URL changed and I didn’t notice. Many of their articles piqued my curiosity, such as the one about a uni student living in his van parked on the…

Boutique in Cape May Back in December of 2023, my parents treated Rhonda and me to an overnight stay at the Virginia Hotel in Cape May, NJ, to celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary. We had such a great time that we’ve gone back several times since. Last year, we went down for an overnight on a big holiday weekend in early December (I think there was parade or something), and it was too crowded for our taste. Carpenters Square Mall in Cape May We have a tradition of going to Rehoboth Beach, DE,…

I find programming much more tiring than it used to be. To judge from what I read, so do many other programmers. But I'm struck by how many of them think the fatigue is a bad thing and a sign they should change their workflows. I've been perceiving it as good, and even comforting. My reasons are simple: if I'm mentally fatigued, it suggests that I've been (i) diligently at work (ii) at things that require human brainpower and judgment. This is comforting because it is compatible with an…

Looks like the folks here in Nashville might be putting up a new little sports thingie. And yes, there is construction noise! So much beeping and clattering! Not that I really noticed; once I got into my room (early check-in FTW) after a very early wake up and arrival, I lost consciousness so fast. I am adequately slept now and spending my Sunday early afternoon being lazy. But tonight! I‘ll be at Novelette Booksellers at 6:30! You should come see me! And then tomorrow, I will be in Louisville,…