The Gateless Gate is a collection of Zen koans, short cryptic stories, assembled by a Chinese monk in 1228. It’s one of the strangest books ever written and one of my favorites. So I gave it a modern upgrade with a fully interactive edition. This was one of the most unusual and challenging projects I […]

Waking up well before dawn, I could see a thick blanket of fog over the lake. After a quick cup of coffee I pack my small camera bag and make the short walk down the street to the Upper dam where I am treated to a most enjoyable 30 minutes of sunrise.

Stairway to…? And if that reminds you of Led Zeppellin, then join the club. Quote of the Day “Learn from the mistakes of others. You can never live long enough to make them all yourself.” Groucho Marx Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Mozart | Laudate Dominum, KV 339 | Patricia Janečková – Soprano Link It doesn’t get any better than that. Long Read of the Day Posterior Analytics The US mid-term elections are next Tuesday and there’s a lot of wishful thinking about them delivering…

by Nathaniel R THE INVITE nabs four nominations at the Gotham Awards Hi strangers! I know I’ve been absent but I will now be inching back into the site. It's that time of year again! The Gotham Award nominations are in, unofficially kicking off “awards season”. Awards season continues to always be both shape-shifting and staying exactly the same. Each year is familiar in terms of narrative tropes, genre "slots" and more, but also brand new with a new set of films and constant awards show…

Roger Langridge is one of my favorite artists. He’s so accomplished and funny! And he has a free Patreon where he sends out art Every Single Day. It’s so cool starting the day with a convention sketch (particularly when they’re Muppets!). You can subscribe for even more art. Or read five years (!) worth of his diary comics (2019-2024) at a dedicated website. The book versions are available at his webstore, and I own them all because he’s such a [...]

Nota bene: For reference, here are my previous installments — parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 — in my multi-part series on Adam Smith’s day-to-day duties as a commissioner of the Board of Customs of Scotland. In one of my previous posts (see here), I repeated the oft-quoted words of Sir Walter Scott about smugglers — “Smuggling was almost universal in Scotland, for people unaccustomed to imposts and regarding them as an unjust aggression upon their ancient liberties, made no scruple to elude them…

energy for nothing, i prepose: i wish my jumper were within reach and at least that's a solution i can imagine. i can almost feel it, you know? it's not the jumper, but it's there, you know? other things said to let Yesterday :: Tuesday, 27th October 2026

Sometimes you want your shell scripts to take options, like --verbose or --help, along with any positional arguments. Handling options is fiddly to do by hand, with the traditional portable approach being a large block of code using a while loop, a case statement, and some shifts. Bash has the getopts builtin, but it only handles single-letter options, like -v. Zsh also has getopts, for compatibility, with the same limitation. Zsh has a better tool: zparseopts. It handles both short and long…

Today’s recording starts with the end of Dennis The Menace. There’s a trail for The Sarah Jane Adventures. Then it’s a repeat of What’s New Scooby-Doo? – Mummy Scares Best. Media Centre Description: Children’s animated series about a group of teenage sleuths and their cowardly dog. The gang travels to Egypt where, on an archaeological dig, a mummy is on the loose and turning everyone into zombies. Recorded from CBBC Channel on Sunday 10th October 2010 16:08 BBC Genome: CBBC Channel Sunday 10th…

181 Cabrini.

We remember the late and much-loved Malcolm Johnson, author of Crypts of London, who wrote this brief history of crypts. Malcolm was formerly Rector of St Botolph’s, Aldgate, where he ran a homeless shelter in the crypt. At St Clement, King Sq After the Great Fire of 1666, it was decided not to replace thirty-two out of those churches destroyed in the Square Mile. Yet St Paul’s Cathedral and fifty-one churches were rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke and others, and almost all of…

For a number of years, I’ve been enjoying the peace and quiet of active-noise cancelling headphones and earbuds. I think they do wonders to de-stress your commute, isolate you from your environment, help you enjoy music better in a sub-optimal environment and fight listening fatigue by reducing the need to turn up the volume (which risks hearing damage). But sometimes, you don’t want to be disconnected from the world around you. Maybe you’re out-and-about and crossing the road – apparently…

John Beltran’s “Ten Days Of Blue” was released 30 years ago. Commissioned by Music For Dreams’ Kenneth Bager, “Sunrise And The life We Live” is its spiritual successor. During the 3 decades that have passed, Beltran has remained prolific and forward facing, working with many labels and experimenting in a wide range of musical genres. However, his remit here was to specifically revisit the tone and texture of his classic sophomore album. The title track, and other numbers, such as “Éire”, in…

This is my set recap for the Hobbit MTG set! I honestly kind of forgot about the set, so this is coming a bit late. I knew going on that I would not be playing a lot of this set. It was the third "small set" in recent times, and the first two (Spider-Man and TMNT) were not very good limited environments. The smaller set size leads to samey drafts which is boring. So for that reason and the fact that I was looking forward to the next set Reality Fracture, I decided ahead of time to not do too…

(It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories.) Early home computer games came with awkward anti-piracy schemes: “grab a word from the instruction manual” prompts, code wheels, or other mechanical gizmos. Not knowing the answer meant no play. Later on, as we’ve talked about before, some games tried to be more sneaky, or cute, or gaslighty, depending on your point of view. Instead of closing the door outright on you trying to play a pirated copy, they…

It is nearly a decade since NoFlo 1.0, and it is time for a new major release. NoFlo was on hiatus for a while as I worked on the boat but now on the world cruise there are good chunks of time sitting at anchor waiting for a weather window. And so we’re close to a 2.x release. The NoFlo ecosystem is quite big, and the current breed of LLMs and the Pi Coding Harness have made the sizable mechanical conversion and upgrading tasks a lot more feasible. TL;DR: ES Modules with zero external…

Discussion resulting from a remark about the quality of the code of the Tiny C Compiler.

For the first time in his life, Jacob summons his family to worship God saying: Then let us arise and go up to Bethel, so that I may make there an altar to the God who answers me in the day of my distress and has been with me wherever I have gone." Genesis 35:3 (ESV) "Wherever I have gone." These four words carry so much weight for Jacob. "Wherever I have gone" includes God's omnipresent knowledge and presence while Jacob deceives family, shows favoritism to wives and children, dabbles in…

. Design magazine in the first episode of Gerry Anderson’s UFO ‘Identified’, the opening episode of Gerry Anderson’s sci-fi TV series UFO in 1970 shows one of the inhabitants of Moonbase reading Design magazine while chatting to an interceptor pilot. This was a real magazine published by the Council of Industrial Design (later called the Design Council) from the 1940s until the 1990s. The actual issue used was dated November 1967, about three years before the episode was shown. The main cover…

This is a lovely site dedicated to the people who keep many of our devices and services running. 🫡 And often how underpaid that responsibility is. Source: sheets.works

I can't believe October is almost over. It's crazy. This has been a chaotic, emotional, whirlwind of a month, to say the least. But my dad is finally settled into his memory care home and is doing very well. I'm realizing how many exceptional human beings there are in the world, which is uplifting. I'm also working on building a new routine for my life and for the

March 2018 Today was the first day of a 4 day trip to the Llŷn Peninsula. This meant I was starting the day at home. As I wanted to get a walk in before it got dark (this was in March) I was making an early start as I was coming from Surrey. I drove up and had a good journey until the M56 which for some reason was all jammed up and delayed me by about 40 minutes. When planning this trip at home I knew there was extremely limited public transport to Whistling Sands (Porth Oer) so I planned one…

Joining the Merchant Navy allowed gay men to escape the atmosphere back home [and to] travel the world This comes from Professor Paul Baker in Fabulosa!, his wonderful history of the Polari language. In his chapter about the escape into the Merchant Navy for young queer men of oppressive 1950s Britain, Baker transcribes part of a drag performance by Lorri Lee about how she and her friend Crystal allegedly ended up on the ocean waves. It begins when they follow a pair of good-looking men into…

Dalya Alberge at The Guardian: Depending on where a light source is positioned, the Lycurgus Cup changes colour, from jade green under normal lighting to ruby red when lit from behind – an astonishing feat of optical engineering that has confounded historians and glass-makers for centuries. Now scientists from the University of Sheffield have replicated its remarkable optical behaviour, using an ancient recipe derived from a fragment of the Roman “dichroic” (two-coloured) original. Don't miss…

This Saturday will mark both Halloween and the latest QuadCon in Saint Charles. QuadCon puts on all kinds of great shows, and it is fun that folks can spend the morning and afternoon at a great comic show and then spend the evening/night going trick-or-treating! The show will go from 10AM to 4PM, costing just $5 to enter, with kiddos 12 and under getting in free! It will be at its usual great spot, The Steel Shop Event Center. One especially exciting element of this Fall's show is a cosplay…

Mercedes-Benz at Abandoned Motel – Santa Rosa, NM – Fujifilm X-T5 – Provia Positive Provia, which is found on every X and GFX camera, is Fujifilm’s standard Film Simulation. Each camera is default set to Provia out of the factory. It is named after Fujichrome Provia slide film, but it wasn’t actually intended to mimic that emulsion. Instead, Fujifilm designed Provia to produce pleasing colors, especially to those who come from a digital photography background (which is perhaps why those who…

Knusper knusper Knüsschen, wer mag denn wohl ein Nüsschen? Bei diesen Vadouvan-Gewürznüssen greift jeder gern zu, denn der Geschmack ist einfach umwerfend und süchtigmachend. Über Vadouvan hatte ich ja hier ein 'Referat' gehalten und ich kann mich nur wiederholen, es ist wirklich ein tolles Gewürz.Gemischte Nüsse kaufen ich übrigens meist beim Discounter, dort gibt es sie recht günstig und die