Today’s TDC says Read a nursery rhyme aloud in a bad snobby accent. Now, last week when we were out for a drink a pal told me I always sound posh, so here’s a nursery rhyme in my own acccent This is a rhyme mum said to us every time she dried our hair – I can’t find this exact version online. I still say it to myself every time I dry my own hair. Rub a dub dub Rub a dub dub Three men in a tub The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker All wrapped up in a rotten potater Green peas, tuppence a…

Here we go again. Today Fujifilm introduced the instax MiniEVO 2, yet another in their long line of instant cameras. Like the instax Pal 2 that was introduced earlier this fall, we again get the panda-style legacy look popularized by the X100 models and now popping up nearly everywhere in Fujifilm’s lineups.First off, good on Fujifilm for establishing clear branding. Nikon has pretty much gone for a DSLR branding (other than the Zfc, Zf, ZR), and Sony seems to have mostly locked in an Alpha…

It’s really hard to write about this game without spoiling anything. If you plan to play it, do yourself a favor and go in completely blind. I’ll hide any story stuff behind a spoiler wall, but I’ll talk a bit about the mechanics and how they differ from the main game. I’ve written and gushed about the main game, so it seems only natural to write about the DLC too. Let’s start by talking about the scope a bit. The main game had you flying around a whole solar system, piecing together story…

before the teeny dovetailsThe finish is done and the Soss hinges are getting secured. There is a 'space' on both sides of the hinges for a screw and I'm only using one screw on the box and one on the lid. hmm......Hindsight sucks pond scum. It would appear it would have behooved me to screw the lid first and then the box. I stopped here and went to the VA to get the Rx pulmonary put in this friday past. This got done before I started the next box.The trip from the front door of the VA to the…

If you have an expression in n Boolean variables, how long does it take to find out whether some assignment of values to the variables makes the expression true? There is an obvious upper bound: you can find out in 2n steps by exhaustive search, trying all possible ways of setting each variable to true or false. You can often do better than exhaustive search for a particular problem, but can you always do better, even in the worst case? The Monien–Speckenmeyer branching algorithm, published in…

In the kitchen, I’ve got this humongous sansevieria plant… Well, actually, it’s a number of plants in the same pot: This sansevieria variety has only a single leaf per plant, and then it propagates by setting out a new rhizome that then has a single leaf. Allegedly. So when I bought it a decade ago, it was just one little leaf that poked up, and I’ve been repotting it gradually until it’s now reached the biggest size of this series of terracotta pots (which is the only series I use — having the…

I bookmarked a story in the Times Higher a couple of weeks ago, with the intention of doing a post about it, and then promptly forgot. Such is the effect of old age. Anyway the story is about the the fact that Lancaster University is undertaking a disciplinary investigation into one of its staff, Mike Ryder, who wrote a blog post of his own with the title Why are universities so bad at marketing? I’ve linked to it in order to boost its readership. He’s also done a video with the same title: The…

Levitating potatoes, maybe? (2013)I need to do something about how or if I continue to participate on Mastodon. The unrelenting flood of discourse around LLM use, although often ethically relevant, is more often intellectually dishonest and exaggerated to the point of silliness. I'm bored by it. Y'all have fun. I'd buy an iPhone Duo just to run this (via Daring Fireball) Community – Marco.org And as I grow, I’m learning to declare fewer absolutes in a complex, imperfect, and constantly changing…

“You can have the other words - chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I’ll take grace. I don’t know what it is exactly, but I’ll take it.” - Mary OliverHello friends! Perfect temperatures, colorful sunrises, and plenty of bird surprises. I even had a beaver swim around the corner right in front of me - and then give me a tail slap. Many things in the world are crazy, but some things are just right.Here are my photo choices for today:October 25, 2026 - we sure have had a string of beautiful…

This is a test post to make sure Pages CMS is working, and so that I can finally write posts on a web app instead of in VSCode.

Aerial broadside view of the USS Hitchiti (ATF-103) underway off the coast of Hawaii, 12 January 1970, by Chief Photographer’s Mate T.J. Taylor, National Archives K-81123 Named for a North Florida/South Georgia Creek tribe, the 205-foot Abnaki (Apache)-class fleet tug USS Hitchiti (ATF-103) was built at the Charleston Shipbuilding & Drydock Co. over nine months from August 1943 to May 1944. Her first of 21 U.S. Navy skippers was LT Harry Alonzo Guthrie, a regular who had volunteered in 1927 and…

Oh, the year was 2026.How I wish I was in Nova Scotia now.I am not, though. I grew up there and lived near Chester, on the South Shore, until my 20s when I moved to France for a year that ended up turning into 20.The most distressing news crossed my feed the other day:Nova Scotia to host massive data centre to power Anthropic's AI assistant ClaudeA Data Centre is coming to Nova Scotia this is what you need to knowThat's right, a monorail datac entre is coming to Canada's Ocean Playground.It is…

I’ve been paid, so now I can tell this story. Last summer, I taught a version of my scientific writing course for a university located in a rather regressive part of a sadly regressive country. You can probably guess where I was if I tell you that I had to submit the course syllabus so […]

Ground crews prepare to launch F-117 Stealth Fighters from Holloman Air Force Base, N.M. at the direction of the Secretary of Defense, William Perry, in response to an Iraqi missile attack against two F-16s flying over the northern no-fly zone. The 49th Fighter Wing F-117 Nighthawks were headed to Kuwait. By MSGT. Val Gempis. Published in Airman Magazine, November 1996. Exact Date Shot Unknown. 330-CFD-DF-ST-98-06090 Lockheed built a grand total of 64 F-117 Nighthawk airframes (5 YF-117A…

In the end, I am far less compelled by the notions I set out to explore than by those elements of a story that seemed to have sprung up on their own. I believe that farmers and gardeners call them “volunteers.” I have come to rely on them, and to fear the day they cease to emerge. In the case of “Here Now,” what began as a story about a tumultuous period in early twentieth-century Hudson Valley history – the forced displacement of entire villages to make way for the flooding of what is now the…

About 100 years ago this week, the Officers of Marine Aviation at Brown Field, Quantico, Virginia, sent an invitation to participate in a “Hop” Over the Moon in what appear to be Boeing O-2s. The costumed dance was scheduled for 22 October 1926. From the Alfred A. Cunningham Collection (COLL/3034) at the Archives Branch, Marine Corps History Division In 1926, Marine Corps Aviation operated a modest fleet of roughly 100 aircraft. During this interwar transition period—shortly before active…

– This isn’t the sort of thing that happens very often. In fact, it may well be a first. Francis Kurkdjian, current in-house perfumer at Christian Dior, has gone back to the archives, enlisted the aid of a team, and re-orchestrated thirteen of the house’s creations in order to bring them closer to the vision […] The post Christian Dior Dioriginals showcase review (2026) appeared first on .

TL;DR Link to heading Our image pushes from GitHub Actions to Google Artifact Registry kept failing with failed to authorize: DeadlineExceeded: context deadline exceeded, always about 60 seconds into the push, and usually passing on a rerun. The 60 seconds is BuildKit’s limit on how long it waits for the buildx client to hand back a registry token. The client asks Artifact Registry for that token with a POST first. Artifact Registry doesn’t support it and answers 405, which normally takes 20ms,…

Over a decade ago I tested immutable data structures inside RavenDB. The verdict at the time was simple: the performance was unacceptable. That was a long time ago, and one of the things I decided to do recently was to revisit all of it. I looked into that, and the situation didn’t change.The reason this matters is a piece of code inside of RavenDB that is called the Page Translation Table. It is how RavenDB handles MVCC (transactions, isolation, etc.), and to call it critical for performance…

Bloodborne 2015, From Software My rating: Loved it! Some art pieces just hit the right spot, and Bloodborne is one of them. It is a great game to play, yes, but it uses every single tool at its disposal to portray a terrifying, hopeless, gory and undeniably beautiful world. From the incredible views of Yharnam to the twisted, glorious creatures that inhabit it, not to mention the impeccable soundtrack, Bloodborne is one of my favorite games ever and after 6 playthroughs I still hunger for more.

I'm proud to announce I've successfully migrated my personal site to Eleventy, a static site generator written in JavaScript. There's lots of static site generators in most programming languages (even Bash). I wrote my own once, with PHP and Makefiles, but it was slow and inefficient. This time I wanted to learn a new thing and add it to my toolbelt. I was surprised at how fast Eleventy was. It exceeded my expectations. I like that it has several template engines and you can mix them. My pages…

Making friends in your 20s feels harder than it used to. A personal reflection on growing up, changing friendships, and starting over as an adult.

TL;DR Link to heading Image pushes from GitHub Actions to Google Artifact Registry kept failing with failed to authorize: DeadlineExceeded after 60 seconds, because the buildx client’s token POST gets a 405 and sometimes doesn’t complete. Setting BUILDKIT_NO_CLIENT_TOKEN=1 on the runners stops the client sending that POST, and I haven’t seen the error in the first day since. Motivation Link to heading At work our image builds run on self-hosted GitHub Actions runners and push to Artifact…

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. no looking back 😪 i hate these coming of age corny songs these subunits have started putting at the end of their albums. im not…

In June 2020 Jay Rayner wrote about Land, and then, somewhat more importantly, in August 2022 so did I. I have no idea what Jay (lovely man, big hair, big shoes, etc) ate, nor can I be arsed to look to look it up, but I know what I had; little tartlets, and tuiles, and inspiration that ran across Europe and into the far east like an episode of Race Across The World, finished off with a sweet and bright strawberry dessert that kissed away summer with a big juicy snog. I loved it, just like the…

Summary: While AI may transform our world in many ways, it seems to me that programming is especially exposed to automation. Below I share 6 specific reasons why. Many decades ago, people imagined that advances in cybernetics would give us intelligent machines in the form of humanoid robots, speaking in metallic voices and helping people with various physical tasks. Robby the Robot from "Forbidden Planet", a sci-fi film from 1956 Things have developed differently. AI in the form of LLMs can do…

One ideal I’ve found hard to live up to: being consistently loyal to people who aren’t in the room. So much of what we talk about is our reaction to other people, because so much of our life is shaped by them. Here’s an alternate ideal I’ve found helpful to aim for. With the people you work with regularly, or care about, be someone they know will tell them directly when there’s a problem. So, you never let things fester. That way, when you do end up talking about them behind their back (and you…

My wife has kidney stones, the last two days have been spent waiting in A&E, then waiting for a CT scan, then waiting for assessments, waiting waiting. I still love the NHS though. Our motorhome —Vera—needs an assessment too, an altercation with a roadside rock (on a small narrow road) has damaged the passenger door, pushing it out of alignment. And the main habit door of Vera is broken. A common fault and I already have the part to fix it but now need time/weather to play ball. On top of that…

Yours truly in front of Denzil Forrester's sublime 'Blue Tent', Dance Out at RWA Bristol, 2026I have a new website so if you want to see what I'm up to, sign up to my occasional newsletter or read new blog posts, please visit JAMESRUSSELLART.COM. There's almost twenty years' of material on this blog so I'm going to leave it here for the time being. I know a few people find it useful/enjoyable and to transfer everything to the new site is beyond my capabilities!

Bankers get short thrift in post-apocalyptic storytelling. As our heroes sit around a wasteland campfire – burning dollar bills for warmth and one-upping each other with reminiscences about air travel and chicken nuggets and being able to breathe without a respirator – no-one ever says: “Oh, and let’s remember the bankers. How I miss those guys!” I mean, perhaps the bankers brought it on themselves? Either way, we might soon discover how much we miss banks as we know them, if the latest…