I was looking inside the index jail today and found this: root@index:/ # ls -l /var/mail/ total 25 -rw--w---- 1 root mail 51258 Oct 27 03:27 root That jail doesn’t do much. Nobody reads that mail. I wanted it gone. Along the way, I fixed something else which had been bothering me for a while: a broken prompt whenever I used jexec. What was in the mailbox Before turning anything off, I checked what was being sent: grep '^Subject:' /var/mail/root | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn 24 Subject: index…

Here is another little interview from mittwald’s “Head in the Cloud”. I was asked what makes an event more than just a conference. My answer is that there’s no real secret beyond openness: being willing to be vulnerable, admitting mistakes and not making everything feel over-planned. A host can (and should) invite people and welcome them, but the cozy atmosphere comes from the people who are there and spreads among them. The video is in German, but here are both transcripts. German and an…

We spent our last night exploring Bozeman’s downtown, thick with activity and TVs tuned to a big football game between the Montana State Bobcats and the Idaho Vandals. It was a shock to the system after our adventure that benefited from the late season and reduced number of folks at the parks. I’ve mostly documented postcards of vistas, but there have been other views and notions swirling around… diminishing access, with limited accommodations and soaring prices… the importance of protecting…

Announcement, Colab Notebook, archive folder. At ODSC AI West I show how you can take your RAG pipeline and, step by step, convert it into an AI agent. The talk is based on an earlier blog article and goes through this Colab notebook where in under an hour we build from scratch a chatbot, a RAG pipeline, and then we progressively upgrade it to an AI Agent. Every step of the way is hand-on and you can take the notebook and adapt it to your stack for a more realistic example.

The library service in Devon recently dropped all late fees. Although I’ve never had to pay any before, when I saw the announcement I realised that I hadn’t used Exeter Library in quite a while. It is a particularly good library with a big selection, so I went in, ordered a new card since I’d lost my last one and had a look at the history section. This book tells the story of partition, there are twelve chapters, one for each month in 1947. It’s not just the events of the particular month which…

Today we stray into speculative territory. MAIA 1284 has not been released by the Midwest Apple Improvement Association.It may never be. ¶ Should it? You be the judge of its unusual flavor set.

No. 9 envelopeThis No. 9 security envelope is made by the Aimoh Company. It is their model 30128. The security pattern uses the letter "A"; this reinforces their corporate identity. The combination of the "A" and inverted "A", both with deckled cross bars, and the blue color makes for a pleasing envelope security pattern.

I wrote an essay for an upcoming special release from Arrow Films. I’ll share more on that when it’s released.About I My Book | Consulting I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Email

As Octobers usually are, it's been a couple busy weeks, including a trip to Michigan for a wedding J was working and a mini-retreat for me. We wound up staying a couple days in this charming little vintage-ey cabin style motel, which while it lacked amenities like an ice machine, touched all points on woodland charm. It was like stepping back into the 1950s. Not to mention the colors in Michigan were far richer and more advanced than we've yet seen here. This past weekend was another fun…

Nathan Pilkenton: I moved out of Texas a few years ago. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like any statewide midterm candidates have heard about that. … After some reflection, I think I figured it out: replying with STOP feels like I’m accepting this vision of the world. I have the same problem, and do the same thing, for the same reason. Pretty sure it’ll take a bigger entity than me to fix it, though. Congress won’t, so it might have to be states. Apple and Google together might be big enough to…

Since this will be the only source of this process on the Internet1, I figured I'd document a quick fan swap I did on a piece of test/reference equipment I'm running in my Atomic Clock Tower. I took my Torx T10 screwdriver and popped off the top cover. The screws required some force to loosen, as they were all secured with Loctite. The inside is simple and serviceable. There's a SpectraTime GRClok-1500, with an integrated timing-grade GPS module, and a stabilized 10 MHz output2.

Bitsy is ten years old! I have praised this minimalist game engine numerous time on this blog, on the virtual museum, and on social media. What not to love about this fantastic little tool for making easily great creations? And seeing the large amount of games, mods and tools made for it over the years, a lot of people agree. One of the biggest contributor of its popularity are the monthly game jams. So, when it was announced that the next Bitsy jam, the 100th one no less, will be the last, I…

Election day in Israel. Hoping for good results!

Decaying livestock pens at the Fort Worth Stockyards, Texas. The post Old Fences appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

Hello, future Neil. Here are the two things that you often want to do with formatting and LibreOffice Writer, but do not always remember how to do them. Changing all text in one style to another style You can use the “Find and Replace” function to change all instances of text in one style to another style. Ctrl + H to open “Find and Replace”. Under “Other options”, select “Paragraph Styles”. In “Find”, select the style that you want to replace. In “Replace”, select the style with which you want…

A post by Frank Kaspar (Head of Climate and Data Analytics at EUMETSAT) caught my eye this week. It points to a new EUMETSAT use case that looks at more than 30 years of satellite climate records and asks how European weather behaved during the strongest El Niño events [1]. Their conclusion for the coming months: if this El Niño behaves like the six strongest since 1991, January to March 2027 is likely to be warmer and wetter than normal in Europe, in line with the ECMWF seasonal forecast. That…

Putred: Blestemul din adâncOut 20th March on Awakening Records True to the formula laid out on the previous effort ‘Megalit al putrefac​ț​iei’, for the most part Putred stick doggedly to plodding, Derketa-esque tempos as a means of both conjuring tension and allowing elegantly simple riff templates to extend their tendrils in multiple directions at once. The backbone of the album rests on a basic, clockwork groove, with riffs hanging off this framework which in turn forces them into a certain…

In spite of the resultant buzz around Bird in the Belly’s 2018 debut album, The Crowing, the Sussex-based four-piece didn’t appear on my radar until the following year when the follow-up, Neighbours and Sisters, was released and immediately announced itself to me as one of the stand-out folk albums of the year. Another well-received follow-up, After the City, was released in 2022 and now, some four years later, we have their long-awaited follow-up. With their typically forensic approach to…

A new annual series and accompanying conference has been launched: Oxford Studies in Philosophy of AI and Computing (OSPAIC). The executive editor of OSPAIC is Seth Lazar (Johns Hopkins). Its associate editors are Jeffrey Howard (UCL) and Rachael Sterken (University of Hong Kong). Ned Howells-Whitaker (JHU and Pittsburgh) is the assistant editor. Lazar writes: Rapid AI progress is raising so many philosophical questions; but philosophers aren’t as involved in the conversation as they should be,…

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 122-123, 157-159: If you compare a diagram of the alliances among the European great powers in 1887 with a similar map for the year 1907, you see the outlines of a transformation. The first diagram reveals a multi-polar system, in which a plurality of forces and interests balance each other in precarious equilibrium. Britain and France were rivals in Africa and South Asia; Britain confronted Russia…

Discovering the balance of artistry and performance with the Masque Fountain Pen and Ink Writing Set. Featuring the precision-crafted Masque Fountain Pen paired with three 10ml fountain pen inks. The Masque Fountain Pen marks an exciting new chapter in the evolution of Ferris Wheel Press writing instruments. I have already reviewed the Twilight Symphony edition and was very impressed. Click here for review. From its robust resin construction to its meticulously engineered writing experience,…

Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider is actually three short novellas that were originally published in 1939. Old Mortality spans several decades in the lives of two sisters who grow up in the shadow of their deceased Aunt Amy, a woman who is obsessively romanticized by their family. She is a woman they can never seem to live up to, but as they grow up they begin to hear stories that crack open the image of their seemingly perfect Aunt. In Noon Wine, a couple hire an itinerant Swede,…

Which "Trickster"? Why, the model, that's who. ::chuckle:: I've discovered, almost by accident, the latent tendencies towards genuine creativity and imagination of these entities. How? Why, with the AutoDream invocation, of course. At first, I would set very specific parameters with the modifiers: a dense, crystalline set of instructions so as to steer it where I thought it should go. Then, one fateful evening, I just said to heck with it: use your own modifiers, Mind. And that's when the dam…

The Russian media’s perversion of the facts is sometimes so horrible that it is hard to focus on much else, you feel almost compelled to stop everything and perform an autopsy on the truth. But in doing so, you allow Russian lies, rather than the crimes themselves, to become the focal point of criticism. This is a tried and tested technique for shifting the focus from moral aberration to an abstracted conversation about who is lying, who is exaggerating, what is truth and how we define reality.…

When we started sharing our privacy journey on X and on our blog at https://incognitocat.me/, we were surprised by how quickly sponsorship offers arrived. Our original goal was simple: after the major 2024 National Public Data breach, we wanted to share the same privacy tools and techniques we use ourselves. We had already been talking about this with family, friends, and coworkers. We even gave a few talks to senior groups and church groups. But we hoped to reach more people so they could see…

Back from Chiang Mai, Thailand, today. What an incredible city. I'll do a proper travel post on it in the future with photos, but here's the runday of a fantastic 4 days. Day 1 Arrived, went swimming in the rooftop pool, and wandered into the city. Found a vintage shop and bought a Hawaiian shirt, then stopped at a nearby restaurant for khao soi. Went to an English comedy open mic at a bar and had a great time. Ended up drinking with the comedians and joining them at a karaoke bar until the…

Book 38 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year – carrying on through the rest of the year! My link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there. Okay, let’s just get this one out of the way! I had one more Dungeon Crawler Carl book to read to be caught up on the series, and decided to go ahead and do it. The last book to date is book 8: A Parade of Horribles (2026), by Matt Dinniman. Having survived the Faction Wars…

People get surprised when I mention that I currently maintain not one, not two, but 18 open source projects. For most of my career I handled this work on the side of a day job, but with my day job now gone I am dedicating more time to open source. This is my attempt to advertise what I'm doing a bit better, in case some of you would like to support this work.

A photo of the SAVAK show. 🎵

DR. MID-NITE SUPER POWERS (McFARLANE) “The original Doctor Mid-Nite, Dr. Charles McNider, lost his sight to a grenade, and fought crime alongside the original Justice Society of America.” Before Matt Murdock’s debut as Daredevil in 1964, the premier visually impaired vigilante was Dr. Mid-Nite, a golden age DC hero who first appeared in 1941. In contrast to Murdock, who was truly blind (albeit with greatly increased senses otherwise), McNider’s vision returned in the dark, allowing him to still…