When I think back to my trumpet-playing days, when I played music and aspired to build a professional life around the practice, I think of the utter simplicity of it all. Wake up, drink coffee, head to the practice room and breathe. That's it. Just "wind and song."I'm sure there were frustrations, and like many memories, I tend to romanticize them, but the act itself seemed so utterly focused compared to what I confront today.I find writing difficult at the best of times. There was a distinct…

Even the NYT noticed. Following up from Friday.NEW AD: Have you seen these anti-Talarico attack ads? Elon Musk paid for nearly all of them. The world's first trillionaire knows if he drags the most corrupt politician in Texas across the finish line, Ken Paxton will owe him everything. Elon Musk: Texas is not for sale.[image or embed]— Team Talarico (@teamtalaricohq.bsky.social) October 22, 2026 at 11:44 AM [You should definitely watch the ad.] Bayliss Wagner writing for the New York Times.On…

Securence is the cloud-based email security and management division of Minnesota-based internet provider U.S. Internet (USI), and they're getting out of the hosted services business.Hosted Exchange, POP/IMAP email services, webmail, and authoritative DNS zones (managed through USI and Securence) will cease operations completely as of November 11, 2026. Find more details here.Which domains does this cover? Per USI, affected consumer email domains include: alohausi.com, hula.net, luaumail.com,…

I am allowing myself a moment of semi public reflection on this thing I started. Like many things I am sure it will have an end to its life cycle down the road but I have so loved doing it this past year and aim to continue. The reading room in my mind is the Morris Reading Room at CU Boulder. It was a library of philosophy books that I felt I always wanted to enter more fully but for reasons which are still opaque to me, the room, the books and philosophy as a whole, remained largely…

2025년 합계출산율 0.8. 신생아가 판다만큼 귀한 나라 대한민국에서 갓 태어난 강고요의 미래는 어떨까. 한 치 앞도 내다볼 수 없는 것이 인생이라지만, 인구의 변화는 어느 정도 예측할 수 있다. 강고요가 만 19세가 되는 2045년, 우리나라의 인구구조가 어떻게 변화할지 통계를 살펴봤다. 국가데이터처에 따르면 2045년 우리나라의 인구는 약 5,100만 명에서 4,800만 명으로 줄어든다. 반대로 중위연령은 47.3세에서 56.4세로, 고령인구(65세 이상)의 비율은 21.6%에서 37.3%로 늘어난다. 14세 이하 어린이 한 명당 노인이 약 4.6명인 나라가 되는 것이다. “60대도 청년이다”라는 소리가 절로 나올 법한 세상이다. 생산연령인구(15~64세)는 약 3,500만 명에서 2,700만 명으로 줄어든다. 지금은 생산연령인구에 속하는 사람 세 명당 노인이 한 명꼴이지만, 2045년에는 세 명당 두 명꼴이 된다. 연금과 의료, 돌봄에 필요한 돈을 마련하기가 지금보다…

Last Saturday morning we were at Balai Seni Negara, the National Art Gallery, to visit its conservation unit, to pore over its collection of wayang kulit puppets.Balai has over two hundred puppets. All belonged to a Kelantanese dalang (shadow-play puppet master), Abdullah Ibrahim, the legendary Pak Dollah Baju Merah.+Shadow puppetry as practiced in Kelantan was a popular artform. Troupes of dalangs and their musicians would tour villages all over the northern states. Crowds will turn out for…

Ginkgo survivor of the 1945 atomic bomb in Hiroshima, registry number E13a25-01 (photo from Wikimedia) 27 October 2026 In less than two weeks Pittsburgh’s ginkgo trees will turn brilliant yellow and start dropping their leaves. Their bright color will draw attention to a species that is hardly noticed the rest of the year. If you’re lucky, you’ll see a single ginkgo drop all its leaves in one day. Ginkgos (Ginkgo biloba) are hardy trees that are often planted in cities because they cope well…

Has anyone seen the new Firefox ad? Of course you do. The ad did/does the thing as intended: Right in the feels of the Early Adopters of the Internet. I admit, I went, “aaawwww!” when I saw Gary Brolsma (The Numa Numa guy) and Matt Harding (Where the Hell is Matt). Had they added The Kid President and the whole Soul Pancake team, my life would be complete. I admit, I downloaded Firefox to my phone after watching the ad for nostalgia sake. Firefox was my browser of choice. followed closely by…

Hey, Bear. It was 30 days deployment in total. The return was safe and no long walks. I went to the shopping center of the village to get the fruits, chips and sweets. The next day russians bombed that center with the bombs. Right into the middle of it. One erased the post building with everyone in it. Another one hit the grocery store. I went in immediately to see if I can be of help. Not like I am used to see bodies and torn people, but still I wasn't in a shock. We went through the buildings…

Last week a friend and I were given some tickets to see Think of England at The Greenwich Picture House. The movie is about an incentive, said to have been OK'd by Winston Churchill, using sex as a survival carrot to bolster our boys fighting abroad, giving them the notion that when they get back to Blighty their wives will give them a special welcome home. Inside the picture house we struggled to work out where we were supposed to be going – should we head upstairs? Five screens yet no…

Mitzi and I went to Taughannock on Sunday to hike the gorge. It's almost a form of mental health therapy. I've been preoccupied by HVAC issues, and it was making me unhappy. I took along the little OM System PEN and the 12-50mm kit zoom from the original E-M5, thinking I might see a bug and it has a nifty close-focus setting. It was a good walk. Chilly, in the low 40s in the shade of the gorge. Few people. And so I spent some time mindfully practicing gratitude that we live in a place like…

1951-52 Chevrolet. I’m sure one had to actually ‘drive’ this automobile. No automation,no cruise control, no power steering, no automatic transmission, no power brakes. You arecompletely involved in the act of driving. This is no self-driving Tesla. (click to enlarge)A few posts ago I wrote an article wondering if we photographers are becoming fatigued by the hype, false excitement and extraordinary expense each time a new camera is introduced. The rumor sites start posting a few ‘leaked’…

From 1930, a postcard[1] titled “View from the Woolworth Tower looking West, New York City”: It’s a little strange that the building named is not visible and the single building that is visible and might be of interest is not named. That’s the New York Telephone company headquarters, still used by the corporate descendant Verizon. It was never among the tallest buildings, having been built when there were already skyscrapers far taller than its 500 foot height, but, as seen here, its isolation…

It is entirely possible to be an expert wine taster and have rather boring taste in wine. I suspect this is more common than wine educators would like to admit. Consider someone who can identify grape varieties, distinguish among regions, recognize winemaking techniques, and detect subtle faults that ordinary drinkers would miss. These are impressive skills, acquired through years of study and disciplined practice. But does any of this tell us whether the person has good taste? I don’t think…

Before DroidDeck even had a name, two developers were exchanging screenshots, logs and increasingly excited messages as they worked towards something Android PC gaming enthusiasts had wanted for years: getting Valve's actual Steam client running properly on their devices. Max, the developer behind WinNative, had been working on the Gamescope runtime and getting Steam itself to boot, while The412Banner was developing a rootless Wayland environment through Bannerlator. Building on earlier…

Every young person between the ages of 18 and 21 should provide 2 years of mandatory national service. Accepted service goes beyond military service and includes civilian service like teaching, or construction, or emergency response. Everyone serves. There are no exemptions for wealth or connections, or even handicaps; service would be matched to ability, not waived. This would be good for them, good for their country, and good for the world. There are several main benefits: This duty partially…

I'll be taking a hiatus during November for travel and other things, so expect the Pagecord updates to go on hold too. There are still a few announcements to make on the blog, but those changes are actually already live – you just have to find them! 😊 I've put in a tonne of effort in the past few months and I love where the product is at now. Numbers are up, but it's painfully slow going because acquisition is dreadful and churn is massive problem, mainly because people like the idea of…

This article goes over the major improvements made to the typing module in Python 3.15. Since static type hinting is becoming more and more popular in the Python world, every Python release brings with it major improvements to the world of typing. This article goes over the main improvements made to typing in Python 3.15 like the improvements to TypedDict, the addition of typing.TypeForm, or the addition of the decorator typing.disjoint_base. 15 days of Python 3.15 To celebrate the release of…

Vaclav Havel, via Donny: Being spellbound within me and Being spellbound within the world can join hands anytime, anywhere and in any way: when I look into the crown of a tree or into someone’s eyes, when I succeed in writing you a good letter, when I am moved by an opera on television, when a passage from Levinas sets my thoughts swirling, when our visits work out, when I understand the meaning of my compassion for the weather-woman, when I help someone or when someone helps me, when something…

New York City month continues here at Kieran Healy Industries, an effort that will eventually produce something properly scholarly in nature. But in the meantime—and with my apologies to the many great urbanists of times past—we can enjoy ourselves by messing around with some data. Specifically, New York’s 311 Services and Complaints data. The 311 phone line and website is the the main point of contact for city services when it’s not an emergency. The city logs all the calls it gets and makes…

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Ok look I’m a little early on the Halloween special I guess but I highly doubt I’ll be painting or positing anything on Halloween. I’ll be too busy scaring the neighbourhood kids and stealing their candy. When we decided to add a little something spooky this year I planned on sculpting something but realising I was out of putty and clay and being far too busy to go out and buy some I thought bugger it I’ll do that next year. So I put my thinking cap on… then errr procrastinated for a good long…

This is the second interview in my series about metagames in tabletop RPGs. This interview is about Your Magic Circle by Kienna Shaw and her perspective on how "the magic circle" works in games. I conducted it in preparation for publishing Mousetrap: A cursed game-within-a-game that won't go back into its box.Kienna Shaw (she/they) is a well-established writer for tabletop RPGs with credits for projects with Paizo, Wizards of the Coast, Free League, Exalted Press, and Larian Studios. They are…

Last night was a perfect night for an outdoor gathering at one of our local breweries, Appalachian Mountain Brewery in Mills River. We were there a month ago, and half of us spent a good part of the night squinting into the setting sun. Last night, we sat at a different table and didn't have that problem.We chose that brewery because they have a full kitchen. Last night I had an amazing salad with steak on it, much better than last time's felafel. Both times I got fries, and both times, they…

When you take on a small documentation project, you can inform each step with data. It might seem like overkill. Small projects are often ones that you tend to consciously plan or build a process around — they’re mostly an execution task: An interrupt from a colleague that you pick up while on triage, letting you know that they changed the title of a chart in a dashboard. A tag from someone on a Slack thread where a customer is confused about when a specific type of query is run. A page quality…

If you are about to start a medium-sized documentation project, you can inform each step of the process with data. If you do, you can more easily assess the scope of the work, prioritize and plan the implementation, and write more relevant content. A medium-sized project is one that might take you a week or two of work, like a new feature that needs one or two new documentation topics, or a few different pages that need to be updated with new content for some to-be-released functionality. For…

Back to WebMCP, this time for the W3C developer meetup alongside TPAC in Dublin. Fitting, since WebMCP is being standardized at the W3C. Agentic browsing today works despite websites, not with them: agents scrape the DOM, guess where to click, and break when the UI changes. In this short talk, I argue that agentic browsing should be built by web developers, and show how WebMCP lets websites expose tools, where it shines compared to server-side MCP, and how to try it in Edge today. Come join the…

A couple is silhouetted by the rising sun as they walk along a Port Aransas, Texas, beach. The post Morning Beachwalk appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

If you’re about to start a large documentation project, you can inform each step of the process with data. Why? So that you can be more confident in the decisions that you make, and to base those decisions in what customers are actually doing and asking about. In the context of this post, a large documentation project is something like reorganizing a large set of existing documentation, or writing a large set of documentation from scratch to support a new feature. Maybe a longstanding bit of…

How you can do data-informed documentation depends on your organization. The data sources available to you, tooling, expertise, support, and time all contribute to the available capacity of your organization to do data analysis, and thus to perform data-informed documentation. Using data to inform every stage of every project of your documentation practice isn’t the right approach for every writer, or for every documentation team. For some writers, projects, or workflows, it might not make…