From Wednesday 21 October to the end of the weekend, I was patching an old VPS and moving a handful of sites onto a new one. PHP2Shell finally made the decision for me. This blog carried on regardless, because it’s just files. The sites I’d built with a CMS were another story. I was a WordPress person long before I was a static site person. It ran my blog, and then a number of pub and company websites I built over the years as Marmalade & Jam. I never used off-the-shelf themes. I built…

There's a post from Dan Luu that is currently going around titled "We should be more ambitious with the software we build". I really like the sentiment. I believe that we could all do with pushing a little further than we think we're capable, especially when putting things out into the world.In parallel I have noticed that there are now lots of people building lots of things. Some of those things are very big and full of features. In some ways that makes them ambitious but I think there are…

Per norm, the clews keep dashing in. Jeopardy! S43E28. October 21. First round. For $600 in the category Tales of the City: “(Sam) Spade paid his fare and left the taxi cab”; this city’s “night-fog, thin, clammy, & penetrant, blurred the street” Contestant buzzes in: “What is San Francisco?” Ken Jennings: “That’s right. The Maltese Falcon.“

An hour of Claude Code on my Raspberry Pi added native HomeKit support to the RuuviTag firmware.

Don’t start writing a book by writing a book. It’s tempting to start your book by creating a new Google Docs and throwing words into a page. You’ll doubt every step in the process. Start by writing about your book subject months or years in advance: You’ll validate your ideas even before they become your table of content. You’ll grow an audience to sell your book to. After writing Street-Smart Coding, my first coding book, I write almost all my books backwards. That’s what I learned from a book…

Well, today was a day almost entirely lost to the infuriating, time-consuming, soul-sapping business of dealing with a banking fraud. It was an ingenious and thoroughly plausible one, and fortunately, in the end, the damage was undone, but Lord it was a long, exhausting haul. Inevitably, after much online to and fro and hanging on the telephone, I ended up making my way to the actual physical bank (and counting myself lucky to have one a short walk away). Before I was bamboozled into taking up…

Chillin’ on the porch

A new study has just been published that examines the best existing evidence for achieving a nutritious and healthy diet. It is presented in that well familiar structure of the food pyramid. The framework was created by an international team of nutritional scientists through a combination of systematic comparison of existing dietary guidelines, an integration of best evidence (across 250 publications), and expert consensus. The results are by no means groundbreaking, but it does not hurt to…

i’ve been finding it more difficult to get out of bed in the morning for work. it’s not because i dread work, not at all. i’m pretty good at my job and i’m happy to report i’ve been feeling better about myself these last couple of days. my alarm and how i feel in the morning seems to be my enemy. i’ve made a conscious effort to go to bed earlier but i still feel the same. i’ve worked out i can stop my alarm by saying “hey siri” even if it’s at the other side of the room without even getting up.…

I missed writing the past week’s post because I had such a weird post. This one will be very different than all the other posts, it’s going to have some updates, but a lot of rambling. First, a song you should check out. I love this song, it reminds me of quiet summer days where you have nothing to do during the day, you’re sitting there in the shade but the warmth of the sun is present, some far away mill is thumping while this song places on old speakers. Update on Smokey Smokey has been…

As I've said innumerable times on this blog over the years, I am not a regular attendee of gaming conventions and yet, over the last couple of weeks, I've attended not one but two of them, specifically Gamehole Con in Madison, Wisconsin and CleriCon in Glen Williams, Ontario. I've attended both before and greatly enjoyed them, hence my return this year. Even so, my attendance, even after all these years, is somewhat contrary to my shy and introverted nature. I've never been all that comfortable…

The Trouble with Miss Switch by Barbara Brooks Wallace, 1971. Rupert is a budding young scientist, just entering the fifth grade, and his new teacher is an unusual woman called Miss Switch. A lot of teachers say they’ve got eyes in the back of their head, but it seems like Miss Switch really does. Right from the first, she seems to know what kids in class are doing when she’s definitely not looking. She even seems able to read minds at times, and when kids act up in class strange things happen.…

It's cold out again, and so I'm back to my blog. I hadn't expected to take a break over the warmer months, though I'm glad I had a lively enough summer that documenting random musings took a backseat. I'd drafted all kinds of posts, but I kept getting stuck at the point. I guess I struggle with the open-endedness of something that could be anything I want it to be -- something all for me. That's not a new problem in my life, but it's one I'd like to work on. So here I am, writing about not…

The last time I attempted to travel to Belfast to give a seminar, in 2019, it didn’t go very well. This time it went better, in the sense that I’ve actually arrived in Belfast. The Enterprise service between Dublin and Belfast has doubled in frequency since 2019 and the price is still modest, just €17.50 each way, including a seat reservation, which is the full fare standard price. Unfortunately the train that arrived in Dublin to take us to Belfast was much smaller than the regular one – only…

😲 Ok, this is weird. I changed email address on a shopping website some months ago. Today I got a message on the former email that a new account was created on the same website, and I even got another email with an order done via that account. What the hell?!My account is not compromised, but it’s weird a new account got registered on my old email address. What do people get from this?

Two new Raspberry Pi boards have quietly turned up in Raspberry Pi’s Linux kernel tree, and neither of them is quite what I’d have guessed. Device tree files for a Raspberry Pi Zero 3 W and a Raspberry Pi 4 Model A have landed (Phoronix spotted it first), and whilst there’s no official announcement just yet, device tree files tend to give away a surprising amount if you can decipher them and I gave it my best shot. Raspberry Pi Zero 3 W: A Pi 4 Shrunk Down? The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W launched…

Commenting might be the ultimate growth hack on social media for some. For me, it feels unproductive and time-consuming. I still comment from time to time. And to avoid make it a waste of time, here are 5 random comments I shared on social media in recent weeks: #0. Change is part of the job description of software engineering. Decades ago, we were punching cards. Years ago, we were writing every single line of code by hand. Well, not anymore. Change is probably the most exciting and…

Lunch is served: Buttercup Festival 3-404(hey did you know I sell stuff? see website for shirts, prints, originals, thanks)Latest on PatreonOct 25th: Fall watercolor sketchbookOct 18th: October pen & ink sketchbook

I got a job pressing a long sequence of buttons in order. I was proud of it. I practised the eight thousand, six hundred and eighty four pushes daily. Soon, what was frustrating became easy. My muscles knew more than I did, twitching my fingers to the next link in the sequence before I thought about it. I set new records for speed, then accuracy, then both combined. Good things will come your way, the bosses told me, although they were vague on the exact details and got annoyed when I asked for…

indiewebblogging Polish Your Postings, Please https://khleedril.org/blog/2026-10-27--polish-your-website.html khleedril.org/2026-10-27--polish-your-website Dale Mellor https://khleedril.org/dale-mellor 27th October, 2026 Joelchrono at https://joelchrono.xyz/blog/unpolished-human-websites writes that they want to read rapid, raw thoughts, quickly and messily put down by human bloggers. Thatʼs fine, but I donʼt. In fact, I take a diametrically opposite view to almost all of Joelʼs opinions (apart…

You can’t have a duology without an enticing cliffhanger at the end of the first book, and thankfully New York Times Bestselling author Kevin J. Anderson managed to write the second installment in his Nether series, despite a broken ankle setting him back some. Journey through his writing (and speaking) process to see how Nether Vortex follows up on that suspenseful cliffhanger. KEVIN J. ANDERSON: I grew up as a wide-eyed kid, looking up at the stars with a Star Trekian wish to boldly go where…

My father died early, and his death colored my view of life in such a way that erased my cognizance that one's life can be long and full, spanning multiple completely different lives even. My grandfather died at 85 when I was in primary school. Nothing of this fact seemed odd until I was old enough to realize that I, the de facto first grandchild in the family, was only halfway through primary school when he was 85. It may not sound particularly odd to a younger generation, but back when people…

Model Man – Xylitol Sometimes a song is titled just right. British artist Model Man hit the nail on the head with this one. Xylitol is a sugar alcohol that is naturally close to the sweetness of table sugar, but with 40% fewer calories and instead of rotting your enamel, actually inhibits the growth of oral bacteria and supports a healthy oral microbiome (which is why it’s often found in toothpaste and chewing gum). Similarly, this track has all the pleasant qualities that a mainroom pop-dance…

I started to meditate around 2 years ago. Since then, and particularly within this past year there are a number of changes in my day to day experience that seemed worth documenting for future reference and hopefully as motivation for others that may be considering starting a meditation practice. A note of caution is that meditation is not the only thing that I've done during this time. My mom died earlier this year, and I had been doing a particularly intense form of somatic psychotherapy for a…

John Pound, Investiture Souvenir Chairs, 1969, with seats of gilt-embossed, ash-veneered plywood and frames of beech, original Welsh tweed cushions, formerly in Malcolm Forbes’ collection, being sold 11 Nov. 2026 by Bliss on Fifth LLC at Stair Galleries Anthony Armstrong-Jones, Earl of Snowdon, is usually credited with designing the souvenir chair for the 1969 investiture of Charles as Prince of Wales because he is the most famous, and because he was married to Princess Margaret. Carl Toms, a…

This is my monthly link dump, a regular monthly series containing a mix of links to interesting blog posts I’ve read from the past month covering arts & culture, myth, folklore, landscape punk, hauntology, anarchism, utopianism, the gothic, neo-fabulism, and the Weird - all discovered through my RSS feed reader (another reason why you should get a feed reader too). Hopepunk and the the Suburbsby Bill Caraher at Archaeology of the Mediterranean World That said, an approach to heritage that sees…

so theres been a new forum lately that has been picking up popularityquxnet, and it recently hit 1000 memberspart of that seems to be that the sysop consistently emailed tons of people in the communityskimming through the intro pages, it seems a good chunk were from direct emailsthe thing is though that i never got an email like thatthe only reason i ever found out about the forum was someone mentioned it in 32b cafeand sure, THIS TIME i found out about it by sheer chancebut what if theres more…

The American actor, who died on Monday at the age of ninety, was best known for his portrayal of Russian navigator Chekov, on the star ship USS Enterprise, in the Star Trek original TV series, from 1966 to 1969, and the subsequent movies. I obviously don’t follow the sci-fi show as much as I used to, and was surprised to learn yesterday Keonig reprised his role as Chekov in a 2015 fan made film, Star Trek: Renegades, trailer. In Renegades, he’s over one-hundred-and-forty years of age, and holds…

differential 1.1 merges branches cell by cell. Conflicts are resolved with a table, schemas can change, and results go back into main, locally or through S3. Since the first post about differential, the answer to “how do I get my branch back into main?” has been: you don’t, not really. differential_restore can adopt a branch’s entire state, but that throws away everything main did in the meantime. The 1.0 post said so plainly in its list of limits: No merge. Branches and conflicts are kept,…

If you are looking for a Duo, you may get lucky at your local Apple Store. I was at mine half an hour before opening, was the first person in line, and one of just three folks who were able to buy one. I have like 90 minutes of use with it, but uhhhh this phone is weird.