I recently shared this map (above) showing the countries of the world as drawn by over 3,000 people playing the Borderline country border game. This combined map brings together all the borders and coastlines drawn by players in Borderline and its companion game, Coastlines.In Borderline, players attempt to draw the outlines of individual countries on a blank map from memory. The results can be surprisingly interesting, which is why, alongside the global map above, you can also explore How the…

The Statue of Liberty was dedicated on October 28, 1886, with President Grover Cleveland and many dignitaries in attendance. The graceful statue was a gift from the people of France, and the pedestal was financed by the people of the United States. The sculpture was taken apart and shipped from France to New York City in crates, arriving in the summer of 1885, where it awaited the construction of a pedestal and then reassembly.Not just a tourist destination, I think many New York City-area…

A nice mild day. Some showers and strong wind. Raked leaves up drive and burnt them. Bryan and I put a new valve on ball tap outside T. Jane, Dot H.

I remember that during my teenage years, I had this strange, tired feeling in one of my legs that just wouldn't go away, no matter how comfortably I positioned it. I later found out this was called Restless Legs Syndrome, abbreviated as RLS. After a while, the feeling went away, only to return a few weeks ago, some 45 years later. After a few days of discomfort, I asked ChatGPT what the causes of RLS are. It gave me a bunch of possible causes, one of which was caffeine intake. That clicked: I…

1. A Great name for a zine Print of the postcard for sale on eBay. 2. Imagine this was your front door In Provence, only 10 kilometres from Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, this village is made up of two hamlets around the remains of a 12th-century Cistercian abbey. The house’s facade overlooks the main square of the village and the property includes a square stone defensive tower with a pointed-arched porch at its base. The tower overlooks the two-storey house, with a rendered stone facade beneath an…

WebKit fixes failed modulepreloads that could block recovery, while Safari and Firefox improve performance tooling and browser responsiveness.

I've been posting videos to LinkedIn once a week for a while now. Mostly inconsequential work stuff. The things I used to write about for Campaign. I'm enjoying the discipline of it.But, I'm trying to build some buffer, get ahead of myself, have something in reserve. So, this week, I've been making more than usual. Which means, if you'd like exclusive previews, they're on YouTube.Like and subscribe! For no good reason I'm trying to get to 1,000 subscribers by the end of the year.

This past Monday, I went through the 2027 schedule race-by-race and gave you my thoughts – for whatever that’s worth. While some labeled it as a lazy-man’s schedule, I think IndyCar did an OK job – imagining what all it takes behind the scenes to put together a schedule each season. There is a lot […]

On my Mac I’ve been using ImageOptim for years. Drop some images onto it, wait a second, and they’re smaller. No settings to fiddle with and no worrying about whether the images still look the same. On Windows I never found anything quite as simple, so I made one: Image Optimizer Plus. Drop AVIF, GIF, JPEG, JPEG XL, PNG, SVG and WebP files (or whole folders) onto the window and each file is optimized and replaced in place. You can also right-click images or folders in File Explorer and choose…

Generative Overload Is Killing Your Productivity Westenberg: Your AI tools can produce a research brief in 45 seconds. A 1,500-word competitor analysis with tags and backlinks, filed in the right folder before you finish your coffee. A full knowledge graph connecting everything you’ve read this month to everything you saved last quarter. The problem is - you’re not reading any of it. ✍️ Reply by email

Gas station cookiesKodak Brownie Twin-20Kodak T-Max 100Bellini Ecofilm 1+12026 I bought this circa-1960 camera for 620 film on eBay earlier this year, on impulse. A proper review is forthcoming. It’s an interesting beast: much like the Arthur Crapsey-designed Brownie Star series of 127 cameras, just bigger for 620 film. It features the same film loading as the Brownie Stars: drop the works out of the bottom of the body, spool the film on, reinsert the works. The images from my first roll…

2025 science fiction. The corporate plundering mission meets an enigma: a gas giant's moon, with obscuring toxic atmosphere and so much radio noise that they can't even get a map of the terrain. Of course, no human should go down there… Mild spoilers.

New links… “Proportional to student body size,” the number of students majoring in philosophy at Harvard is “about 10 times the national average” — why is philosophy doing so well there? (though do see this and this) A philosophy prof’s mission statement: “reproducing the foundations of Western civilization, one lecture at a time” — one challenge, says Joseph Heath, is that “the two sets of governing principles in our society—liberalism… and capitalism—are second-best arrangements” “Philosophy:…

A song that you discovered on a film soundtrack. Safe to say that Quentin Tarantino raised the bar in terms of song choice for his soundtracks. It’s also pretty safe to say that the cultural impact of his first two movies still resonant, particularly with people of my generation who were lucky enough to see them at the cinema. I love movies, my childhood is peppered with memories of rainy Sunday afternoons watching old westerns, or lavish musicals, and when I review those ‘100 lists of movies…

I don’t believe every day is a new adventure, and I don’t believe every moment is bliss. Most of life is getting through it: waiting, and damage control. Take the vacation we just got back from. It was bliss in a lot of ways, and it covered two weeks of the fifty-two. Add a few long weekends and a week in Spokane, and you’ve still got a year that’s mostly Tuesdays. Even the vacation wasn’t wall-to-wall rapture. Most of it was settled before we left: whom we’d visit, where we’d sleep, how we’d…

Land of Green Ginger by Winifred Holtby published 1927 [excerpt] Lorna Lavine, turning to greet the little secretary of a Kingsport Nursing Home, saw instead a tall, magnificent young woman in a flamboyant dress of black and gold, cut far too low (the scissors had slipped at the last moment), about her splendid back and shoulders. Joanna’s eager vitality dimmed that evening her husband’s delicate charm. With lips slightly parted and bright, glowing cheeks, she seemed to be a little breathless,…

It's the second and final installment from the October beer festival at JD Wetherspoon. You can read about the first 13 beers here. Will I get all 30 ticked off?I'm sure the autumnal theme was deliberate, and it was an all-amber affair on my next trip to The South Strand. Conwy had that nailed on with Autumn Red, a 4.5% ABV "ruby" ale. It's on the darker side of red, and a bit murky with that. Centennial hops give the aroma some fresh citrus in with a warm cookie malt effect. The two aspects…

Double Maths First Thing picked the wrong week to give up Lemsip Hello! My name is Colin and I am mathematician on a mission to spread the joy and delight of doing, thinking about, playing with and suffering from mathematics. I am not on a mission to suffer from a cold the week I’m meant to be recording an album, but here we are. I’m also emerging from a cloud of too much work, which is likely related to the lurgy. Hopefully I can put some more time into doing maths I enjoy over the next few…

This project is in its infancy state and I’m sharing my early experiments with hopes that my ideas spark discussions, improvement ideas or inspires someone else to build similar things for themselves. The plugin is not currently installable anywhere but if you want, you can take the code below and build your own. I might publish it at some point in Obsidian plugin directory if it reaches a good enough state. The concept of sharing individual notes with people is a topic that comes up constantly…

Because I’ve been writing this blog for so long, I often share links to very old posts. Three years ago, I added a feature: if the post is more than five years old, there’s a message next to the dateline indicating the age.The age descriptions adjust automatically when the post is rendered. I had fun implementing the human-style age descriptions: “nearly 12 years”, “more than seven years”, “exactly nine years”, etc:NUMBER_NAMES = dict(enumerate( "zero one two three four five six seven eight…

I hope readers won't mind one more post about art in Berlin... I've been to the Gemäldegalerie before, but it was before I started this blog, so I want to mention three paintings here with beautiful, detailed landscapes. They each illustrate ways in which shapes and repeated patterns were used to provide harmony and visual interest, linking distant space with details in the foreground. Johann Koerbecke, Christ Carrying the Cross (detail), 1456/57Triangles dominate this first example, by…

It is difficult now to imagine using the web without starting with a search box. If I want to know something, find a particular site, look up a product, or locate an obscure bit of technical information, search is usually the obvious first step. That was not always how the web worked. Before Google became dominant, finding things online was a mixture of search engines, human-edited directories, bookmarks, links from other websites, recommendations from people, and a certain amount of wandering…

, Gym musings: When you wander around aimlessly looking nowhere, I have no idea what equipment you're currently using. And you're getting in everyone's way. Please do not talk on your phone throughput your while workout. Largely because this leads you to sitting on a equipment doing nothing way longer than you should be. "The new desk guy is cute with his cheery smile and glasses. That's all. #gym #workout #thoughts #weightlifting

Something I've long wanted is the ability to paginate this Hugo website's pages by day. Given this is an IndieWeb website, I post a mix of content from articles, likes of others' posts and my daily step counts, totalling roughly 46000 posts. Although this may make it easier to browse, it's also an operational want - every time I post something new, each of the feeds on my site that are paginated will move forward one entry, leading to effectively all of my feed pages re-building, leading to…

Every year in October one part of my extended family has a big gathering at one of my uncle’s homes. And over the years, a certain routine in running that event has emerged – everyone has their role and by now it is a well oiled machine. Being one of the cousins I’m part of the group of people who move around all the furniture and set the tables.In the first year or two, it took us more than an hour to get everything set up. We now have it down to just about a quarter of an hour. (And since we…

It has been a bit of a week so far, some success (retro-fitting working headlights to a new tool Bachmann 37) and equal disappointment (struggling to get DCC to control a Mashima/Highlevel combo) - I’m exhausted from Uckfield and as a result it feels my own modelling is ‘on pause’.Defiance is just what I need…I mused earlier this week that these tasks were somewhat ‘going through the motions’ and now that is a good thing. Familiar, tactile and predictable modelling. Quick results too, something…

Excerpt from Ho Che Anderson's afterword for THE SOLAR GRID: Ganzeer’s The Solar Grid, tells the story of a future we’re going out of our way to create. One of environmental collapse and a rabid technocracy in which humanity is expendable if it means fulfilling the whims and fantasies of an enlightened elite. What upsets me about this reverie of Mars, aliens, and space lilies, is how real and current it all feels, replete with shitty oligarchs and imperialists who always fail upwards, gorge on…

🎵 Death Cab for Cutie - Punching Flowers Filed under scraps with tags: Jam Reply by email Add an emoji reaction: 🥕 🚲 🐾 💜

27 Dumb | INDEX | 29 Tusk Self-imposed constraint: Use the letters of the prompt word inside a 2-inch square to illustrate its meaning. Hongdian Black Forest fountain pen, EF, black ink on 120 gsm paper.