We'll take advantage of using temporary mpv chapter markers and FFmpeg to avoid needing to re-encode the video.
June 16th is always ringed or highlighted on my calender every year, not even birthdays get that level of note, it was and still is the day I get most excited about fishing, once again on running water and the thought of pootling around the Fens in my boat, stalking R.Thames and R.Lea carp or in this instance getting straight down to business with the 40 Rivers Challenge where I am currently on 30 completed rivers and have been settled on that figure since mid-August 2025!. There was to be no…
D got the first coat on the chassis and one end wall yesterday. I was even allowed to do the top bit as there are no windows for me to cover in paint! And today we are starting the next really daunting task, waxing on and off inside the cabin. So far the heat is bearable but we are only at 27 degrees with 32 forecast later and the cabin has less tree shade in the afternoon.
Something you won't hear me say often (because, as previously mentioned, I despise The New York Times), but this recent op-ed is essential reading. It's essential because computer scientist Cal Newport is one of the most thoughtful and clear-eyed voices in the AI debate. Anthropic recently dropped a classic of the form: a scary-sounding report titled “When A.I. Builds Itself” that claims A.I. could be moving closer to the capability of “autonomously designing and developing its own successor.”…
Most wine writing tells us three things: whether the critic liked the wine, what the wine smells and tastes like, and how good it is presumed to be. These are important to know, but they do not exhaust the task of criticism. What wine writing too rarely explains is how a wine produces its effects. We get the verdict, the descriptor list, and perhaps a score. What we less often get is an account of how the wine moves, how it creates tension, how it resolves that tension, where it changes…
There are books, movies and music that you would be missing something if you didn't experience. We may never know what we are missing but no doubt we are. And then there are those that wash over you, you snap out of it and you are not changed in any meaningful way. Disclosure Day uses tropes and dramatic camera zoom ins to Emily Blunts eyes as she stares at a cardinal - but after watching this movie you are no different for having seen it. No part of you is better or more aware. I want to say…
This post was last edited 0 minutes ago. I've been paying for Uruky search engine for several months now. Uruky's software engineer, Bruno, reached out to me in April with an offer to try it for free for a limited period; after that I began paying for the service. You might be wondering why someone would pay for a search engine when there are good privacy alternatives available for free. I put this question to Bruno last month; you can read his take on paying for private search in my interview…
Nightshade and Latte are fiends for woolly toys, but both have a tendency to attempt to swallow any tubular ones whole. This is unfortunate and inadvisable. So they get bagels. Or doughnuts. Round things with a hole in the middle. As of yet they have not choked on any, nor have they eaten any, though a few have ended up in human toilets courtesy Latte who likes to float toys in undefended loos. (Lid down, whenever he visits.) This is my (not actually any good at crocheting) version of Melissa…
The easiest place for an AI rollout to look successful is the velocity dashboard. Pull request count is up. Cycle time improves. More code gets merged. The tool has a tidy story to tell.Production usually tells the longer version. The review queue gets heavier. The same two senior engineers become the validation layer for a larger volume of plausible patches. Support sees more small changes with surprising edge cases. The team ships more often, but on-call starts to feel more expensive. None of…
The vibeThis was one of those weeks that had some fun tech stuff, some meaningful spiritual time, and one really hard life update right in the middle of it all. I am trying to focus on the good things where I can, but honestly, the job and insurance scramble has been a lot.Highlights⌚ The new Apple Watch Ultra 3 I ordered came in. I got it set up and, of course, installed the watchOS 27 beta on it. Because apparently I cannot just leave a brand-new device alone for five minutes.😔 Unfortunately,…
OMG! Mastodon (at least social.lol) now lets me add alt text to my avatar and header pictures! EEE!
Breezy and cool under a low cloud ceiling. A wood thrush sings sweetly just inside the woods’ edge. At the limestone quarry two miles away, something briefly gives the machine cause to roar.
23rd June 2026 It is that we keep appointing poor Prime Ministers that is the problem: an input issue not an output issue * There is an old adage that a litigator should not be “surprised” (or similar) by what their opponent does in litigation – one may be disappointed perhaps, but one should never be surprised. If a litigator is genuinely surprised by what their opponent does, they are probably in the wrong job. A similar thing may be said about political commentators who are “baffled” (or…
A year ago I didn’t know anything in particular about the Lincoln memorial reflecting pool and neither did you. I had seen pictures on television and publications, the occasional cameo in film or television. I knew there was a thing called the National Mall that nearby, and that the Washington monument was too. I had no idea what color it was supposed to be, the composition of its water, how many gallons it contained, its depth, or any other facts about its operation and upkeep. It was just a…
Other than watermelon, I’ve never been a huge melon fan – as Eric Kim notes in Korean American the honeydew melon is usually the most unloved morsel in American fruit cups. My aversion was why it took me so long to try his Honeydew Semifreddo … but if anyone can turn me into a convert, it’s Eric. I love the simplicity of a semifreddo. For this one, honeydew is puréed and sieved, then the juice is combined with egg yolks and sugar that have been gently warmed and whisked into a thick sauce. That…
A casino once announced itself with chandeliers, carpets, marble, and a door that felt slightly too important for a normal Tuesday. Online, the doorway is quieter. A player taps a screen, opens a wallet, waits for a balance, and expects the magic to behave. That is where a crypto casino provider becomes part architect, part mechanic, and part stagehand.The Lobby Is No Longer A RoomThe old casino lobby had one job before anything else happened: make people feel they had entered a designed world.…
Apple’s operating system upgrades this year seem to be focusing on scores of small improvements along with a ton of AI integrations so it’s no surprise that announced upgrades to Apple Maps in iOS/iPadOS/macOS 27… More
8606/21525A couple of days of being a pushy prick and I finally managed to get in touch with someone who could sort out appointments for the rest of my treatment. And the good news is that I don't have to start again. The two I have had still count, so I only have to be pricked three more times. If all goes to plan I'll be done by next Wednesday. Giving myself eleven days to recover enough to go on holiday (though I think I will still have to keep out of crowds if I don't want to be…
When the Brooklyn Bridge was in construction, and when it was new, there were any number of reports on how incredibly tall it was. To be fair, the bridges towers were the second and third tallest structures in the city when first built, with only the spire of Trinity Church being higher, but the towers are not in the middle of the city, but rather out at the edges of the East River. Here’s a view from a three-story building (the old Hall of Records in City Hall Park) during construction in…
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The Elgin, Joliet and Eastern was a railway operating on the periphery of Chicago, IL, and it was snapped up by CN in 2008, and fully absorbed into the Wisconsin Central on January 1, 2013.
Our bodies do not have a maintenance mode. Every system that keeps us functional — muscle mass, bone density, mitochondrial capacity, neuronal connectivity, immune calibration — is maintained only in response to demand. Remove the demand signals, and the biology interprets absence as permission to downregulate. What we call aging is substantially the accumulation of unrepaired degradation in systems that require demand signals to repair themselves. The mitochondrion is where this convergence…
This one was exciting for me, because I think it is the first matcha I have ever pre-ordered! General InfoAs you can already see with the packaging and name, this one is spring-themed! Harukasumi means "Spring Cloud". It was very limited and is only available for a month (probably each year?), and I got it in May. It's from Uji, and works for both usucha and koicha. I paid 57,50 Euro for it (I know...). Seems that right now, my usual supplier only has the 20g version left. Color and Smell The…
hmm.......I'm trying to reverse engineer how I made this frame and I ain't doing so good. Don't remember how I did the beading on the inside edge. The outside edge I used a router bit and I dimly recall using a hand plane to do the bead. The miters look good and there isn't any chips or blowout on any of the bead heels. The initial plan is make the 2nd frame look like this one.howIt kind of looks like I half lapped the corners but it looks too small. There also isn't any evidence of that other…
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy 1979, Douglas Adams My rating: Decent I remember loving this book when I was a pre-teen so perhaps this rating is a bit unfair. I was looking for some light reading before bed and landed on this one, but I guess the humor doesn’t work on me anymore. Some good quotes here and there, but most of it felt like an adult’s attempt at saying things kids would find funny. It probably works for a lot of people but I think I outgrew this specific kind of silliness (but…
I don’t prompt Claude anymore. I have loops running that prompt Claude and figuring out what to do. My job is to write loops. — Boris Cherny Over the last months I have watched more and more people build something on top of coding agents that feels meaningfully different from just using a coding agent. Some of this happens on top of Pi which is cool to see for sure! The pattern is the same everywhere though: work is put into a queue of sorts, a machine picks it up, attempts it, stops, and then…
Nicola picks me up at 10, and we drive the 50 km or so to Ferrara, a small city filled with Renaissance buildings, many of them built by the Este family. As we drive Nicola tells me of some of the challenges of being in charge of much of the response to the pandemic. We stroll like flaneurs into the centre of the city. I ask Nicola if there is an Italian word equivalent to flaneur. Surprisingly, it seems that there isn’t. Ferrara is peaceful and has nothing like the frenzy of tourists I’ve seen…
I am moving to Substack. When blogs were a thing, I blogged. Now that Substack is a thing, I shall stack my subs. Those who wish to read my writing, whether motivated by pity, morbid fascination or nostalgie de la boue, can simply click, or press with your despairing finger upon this link.The Inky Fool advances confidently into the future
Sunday was the summer solstice which, in the northern hemisphere, is the day with the longest duration of the day. Many traditions of witchcraft celebrate solstices and equinoxes as a way of keeping in tune with the seasons, but where I live we don't really have the four "classical" season. The solstice is the longest day, which means that after that the night start encroaching again, but you would be hard pressed to notice it here. We have just entered the period when the sun sets but doesn't…
There is a recurring problem in modern activism and alternative movements, the attempt to remove the uncomfortable parts, everything has to be friendly, to be safe, to be acceptable. The difficult questions, the conflicts, the power arguments, the risks and the sharper edges get pushed aside because they are seen as “too political”, “too negative” or “too confrontational”. This mess is where the #dotcons culture creeps in. The same platforms that turned social interaction into engagement…
