Everybody can make an app now, right? Apple’s slogan, “There’s an app for that,” holds more true than ever. There’s an app for everything. In fact, there are multiple. There are probably too many apps for “that” now. How did we get here? Let’s look at how our superpowers as developers have become…what’s the right phrase here…less of a competitive advantage than they used to be? I think there are two distinct events: SwiftUI: “Designers should code.” That whole movement got started around here.…

The Gate of the Feral GodsAuthor: Matt DinnimanGenre: Sci-fiReleased: 2021Rating: ★★★☆☆New Achievement! Total, Utter Failure. You failed a quest less than five minutes after you received it. Now that’s talent. Surviving in a multilevel dungeon that also happens to be the set of the galaxy’s most watched game show has taught Coast Guard vet Carl and his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut, that there’s only one thing they can count on apart from each they never know what’s coming next. And this…

Yankee & Carameliserby Chiuko UmeshibuGenres: Manga, Romance Pages: 164 Rating: Synopsis: Take one influencer and one bad boy extraordinaire, whisk in a sprinkling of sweets, a scoop of social media and you get...? Maki and Akito's love story, hot out of the oven! After all, even though Maki might have a bit of a bad rep, the guy must be just as gooey on the inside as the glorious goodies he posts all over social media. So when Akito gets a taste of how dangerously delicious his desserts are,…

gonna rank from worst to best song ranking system 😇- need to have a looong conversation with whoever made this song 🥹- teared up a little 🥰- i love love love 😊- very good 🙂- good with some issues 🤔- i would let it play in the background ig.. 😪- not feeling it 😠- no this is bad. 😡- this is really bad. 🤬- play this around me and im taking a gun out for both of us. wave 😪 waiting for something interesting to happen love anxiety 😪 not moved cheetah 🙂 we were doing so well until the beat drop...…

Wanting to do something is one thing, being able to is another, and actually doing it are a few more things entirely. Nikolay Haytov Somewhere in your company there is a slide. It has a bell curve on it. The bell curve is labelled with the sacred words of Everett Rogers - innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, laggards - and a little arrow suggesting that your organisation is currently "crossing the chasm". Next to it is a proud number, something like 73% of employees have…

This book is art. It's incredibly poetic, beginning with a children's story of a perfect house and family assumed to be white but never stated. It isn't enjoyable—it's a hard read for the level of tragedy, shame, and disgust. It was very difficult to process. Honestly, I'm not sure I've really taken it all the way in, even after several weeks. I think this story will live forever in my back of my mind. For its unpleasantness and shame, but also for its prose. When I read these final paragraphs…

An exciting find for Curious British Telly today in the form of a 99.9% complete episode of Packing Them In, the 1992 Channel 4 standup showcase hosted by Frank Skinner.The programme originally started life as Packet of Three in 1991, but was renamed Packing Them In for its second and final run in late 1992. As with Packet of Three, the newly titled series followed the same formula: Frank Skinner acts as compere at the Crumpsall Palladium - actually Wakefield's Theatre Royal - whilst also…

I actually was pleasantly surprised by this one. Not that that’s a ringing endorsement, however. I was really not looking forward to this one, nor am I looking forward to any of the slasher-style horror films on the list. First because I have a bit of a tender heart about blood and gore and jump-scares, and I always have. When I was very small I was known to run out of the room when scary stuff came up in TV shows – and I was scared by a lot of non-obvious stuff, like the salt vampires or the…

Earlier this year, I moved from running HomeAssistant in Python venvs to HomeAssistantOS. After an initial challenge with proxying, it has been working fine. I still don’t like using HAOS, but I can live with it. It seems to need updating a lot, and there is no - at least, not that I have found - automated way of doing this. So I am using an automation based on this template to automate updates. This works fine, but I have noticed that my Tasmota devices - of which I have quite a lot - are…

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I left my hometown when I was 19. After nearly two decades in a dozen Dutch cities, Sydney and Shanghai, I’m back. I push Hasse’s stroller and see once again these streets and buildings that are old yet ever new. Everything is closer than I remember it, distances I travelled as a teenager seem now […] The post The Lies We Tell appeared first on Jaap Grolleman.

Rocky Morgan and the Rockin' Guitars"Wolf Whistle Baby" B. Motola, R. Morgan, J. DaltonWheel Of Fortune Music, BMIb/wMike Hufford and the Rockin' Guitars"Turn That Gun Around"R. Morgan, Echo Whalan, Peer International, BMIPic Records#907Record listed at Rockin' Country Style (no date or label location given). The other Pic records listed by The Jaguars is unrelated and were from Mitchell, Indiana.Short-lived company founded in 1958, Pic Records was jointly owned by Buddy Motola and Rocky Paul…

This NeurIPS'26 workshop paper takes TLA+ specs from GitHub, translates them into Verus, and has LLM agents prove the safety and liveness properties in the specs.The motivationThe paper aims to address two problems it raises with TLA+. First, nothing ties the spec to the code, so they drift apart. And second, it claims that proof support is thin: TLC only checks small configurations, and TLAPS is weak on liveness.They abandon pursuing the first weakness they raise at the onset of the paper.…

AI and vibe coding is nothing new to me, but today I finally gave vibe reverse engineering (or better said, reverse vibing?) a try. To scratch an itch I had for a long time: downloading invoices from o2 Business. There are three mobile contracts in two different accounts on my name for various family members. All via o2 Business, as they offer good conditions for mobile plans that not only work in the EU but also in Switzerland as well. The oldest one is running since 2022. Since then, each…

For the longest time my backup strategy consisted of two parts: Personal files are automatically synced with OneDrive on my PC and laptop. My NAS mirrors some of that data and occasionally exports it to an external HDD. And then every few months I rotate that external HDD with a different one and store the other at my parents. So for most of my data I did actually have 3 copies on 2 different media types with 1 (or 2 even) stored off-site. But when I upgraded my NAS to 4 TB drives I couldn’t…

Tuesday, October 27, 2026 - 12:11 bookreview.jpg Want to know what a year in the sales life of a very small-time author looks like? Let me nerd out about numbers for you. Due to several factors, mostly relating to my retirement last year, 2026 has been the first year I've made a serious push to participate in in-person book sales at events, mostly local Pride events and book fairs. Since the in-person season has come to a close, I thought I'd share what that looks like for a small author who…

Took the above photos during a quick run to the pharmacy. I’m already dreading the dark months ahead. Meh… On a more positive note: Lots of work went into this blog today. I added more slash pages. There is now /blogroll and /uses, both are still works in progress. I updated the Photo Stats Kirby plugin so that the stats now calculate the focal lengths for medium format cameras correctly. Caching across the site should also be much improved and users of a Chromium-based browser should see a…

My web development class is several weeks into learning CSS and we're finally at the point where we can position elements on the page. For this assignment, students create book covers or movie posters to practice setting up container elements and positioning other elements inside. I also do this project because I don't often get a chance to do some creative work - most of my code these days is prepping and grading assignments. I recently read [John Scalzi's Old Man's War] which had a sweet…

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT It feels a while since I saw a play in which the staging had the wow factor. Did the play of The Lives of Others based on the film have a similar impact? With this cast, Keira Knightley, Luke Thompson, Stephen Dillane, and director Robert Ike, I went in with very high expectations, and pleased to say that those expectations were definitely met. What I loved about the film is that it’s so tense. This is the story of covert surveillance of citizens. It’s set in East Berlin after…

It's been a very leafy day. We went to the Cambridge botanical gardens, and it was beautiful. We did the little stamp trail, which was a strangely nice way to see the gardens.110 words · 15 images

Django’s bulk_create(), bulk_update(), and update() are fast because they skip save(). That also means they skip the pre_save and post_save signals, so your receivers never fire. It’s documented for bulk_create(), bulk_update(), and update(), but nothing warns you at runtime. If a signal invalidates a cache, writes an audit log, or syncs a search index, one bulk call quietly skips that critical work. This post shows how to make those calls fail loudly instead.

Finally watched Bigas Luna’s ANGUISH, and it was… interesting. OK. Odd. It serves up far more than the usual horror flick, but somehow doesn’t feel like enough. Michael BARTON FINK Lerner is a murderous eye specialist who steals his victims’ eyeballs. His mom Zelda POLTERGEIST Rubinstein has a hypnotic/psychic relationship with him. This is somewhat […]

I sat down to meditate last night, and an unpleasant thought popped into my mind. I squeezed my eyes shut and used all my mental energy to stop the thought - it was a visual thought that I didn't want to see. I promptly identified it as an intrusive thought, as I have identified many other "intrusive" thoughts over the years. Then I wondered what makes this thought intrusive, but other pop-up thoughts not intrusive, thus beginning a think session before meditation proper. I don't really know…

I always find it disheartening when I see a ranking of Friday the 13th films that has the 2009 remake on top and the 1980 original near the bottom (in dreaded JASON GOES TO HELL territory). I realize that tastes change and attention spans have been obliterated but it feels like so much disrespectful Pamela Voorhees erasure to me. Don’t get me wrong, the revamp is entertaining, Jared Padalecki is a fine lead and Derek Mears is a top tier Jason but something intrinsic is ruefully missing. I…

[ Dear unix nerds: I am about to blow smoke. I’m so excited I might be totally wrong. ]As I have belabored before, I’ve been using Linux since I was a babe, and have gradually become comfortable doing most tasks from the command line.But my mental model of what the command line is has always been wrong!The four stages of understanding:1. The command line is scaryOkay, sure, the command line is scary. We don’t talk about that. Because the command line is scary in the same way fire or the ocean…

Here's a spec from my own repo. It lets an admin change three strings on a signup widget, and it came out at 666 lines, nine design decisions, 35 test scenarios and 54 checkboxes. In February I wrote that a spec gives an agent guardrails so it doesn't hallucinate. About 300 […]

It is becoming a new recurring topic on my blog, a short video recommendation. Short in a sense of less than 10 minutes or so, not a few seconds long reel (god save). Today I’d like to recommend not your usual YouTube video, but a piece of art. Anton, designer living in Tokyo, collects memories of his life in various forms, from journal to an incredible complex graphic intensive hand crafted videos. I enjoy visual arts a lot, and follow him for some time already. And if you liked this video,…

Or, @gruber, they do call the new MacBooks “Duo” but it is because they dual-boot to iOS. Eliminate the need for an iPad from both ends! Which is why it would never happen, but it would be a valid use of a good name.

L-R Rachel Barry, Ben Wiggins and Beverley Klein in Memoriam, Southwark Playhouse. Photo: Charlie Flint If scientists could extract memories and replay them through virtual reality headsets for others to experience, whose memories would be worth preserving and who benefits? That’s the premise of Noga Flaishon’s play Memoriam at the Southwark Playhouse. Rachel (Rachel Barry) works at the company that preserves memories and then puts an edited version up for rent for people to experience. It’s an…