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…

This is very good news! adactio.com/links/22816

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…

I took this picture yesterday but forgot to post it. At this rate it might be selfie a day for a year and a half 😆 Selfie a day for a year, day 56: Oct 26, 2026 edition.

It’s alluring to use data to drive every sort of decision and action. When you write content for the web, you can gather all kinds of data about your website traffic. Why not put those metrics to work for you? The content marketing industry is experienced at using data to guide content development, but documentation isn’t marketing. While documentation can drive qualified leads and be helpful to prospective and existing customers, the ultimate goal is to support users in solving their problems,…

Deciding on a Linux distribution is a bit like choosing a wrench in the dark, everyone swears by their favourite, half the advice online is five years out of date, and what works for a kernel developer running bleeding-edge enterprise silicon is probably going to make a casual user want to throw their laptop out the window. My stance has always been quite simple: I don’t believe in… Source

Dr Tobias Rupprecht’s seminar at St Antony’s College was The Tragedy of Soviet Market Economists: The Failed Quest to Civilise Russia, 1972–2022. But sitting through the discussion, I was left wondering whose tragedy we were really talking about, and who gets to define what it means to civilize a country. The nitpicking Oxford event kinda made sense, but pull back and my impression was that this was an apologetic account of the #neoliberal project in Russia: a story that gives market liberalism…

This is a detail from a Panorama of Berlin painted by Eduard Gärtner (or Gaertner) at a time when the prosperous Bierdermeier city was booming. The eminent looking gentleman with grey hair gesturing from the roof of the Friedrichswerder Church is none other than Alexander von Humboldt (whose writings I discussed here ten years ago). The panorama's six panels can be seen in the Schloss Charlotteberg, and I will quote here their wall description:With its joy in detail, it conveys to us a lively…

This week’s topic for Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl) is: “Halloween Freebie”. I’ve joined in with the Halloween Freebie topic every year for the last few years and have already posted lists of books with Halloween related words in the title, horror novels I read before blogging, books with monstrous animals and creatures, and books about witches. This year, I’ve chosen books with vampires in them. I decided to only include books I’ve actually reviewed on my blog – as you can…

Our outside cat, Rocky, died early Sunday morning; when I went out the back door about nine he was lying on the mat, and though he was cold he was not stiff. He’d been very thin for some time, but was still active and happy, and killed at least two rats in the past week that I know of; it’s possible such a fight may have contributed to his demise because there were signs of some kind of scuffle on both his body and in the area. He was native to Sunset; when we first started moving here in the…

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday post is a Halloween freebie. I thought about maybe trying to get my wife to write a post for me, since I exhausted my creativity on freebies lately (and Lisa’s a horror fan, much more so than I am), but then I figured… I’ve been reading quite a bit of horror lately, despite thinking it’s not a genre I really enjoy — and I mentioned a rather creepy children’s book in my last Book Blogger Hop post. So let’s see what I can do! These won’t all be horror, but they all had…

This morning I woke up feeling exhausted. I was up late watching the World Series and woke up pretty early. The way that game went I almost felt bad for the Rays and my sister that was at the game. Not really too bad though? What an opportunity to actually be able to go and see your local team! I know she’s a lifelong baseball and sports fan, so I am so happy she could go to the game. I expect the Brewers to win and they deserve it. They did last year too but the Dodgers problem . . . This…

My new book is out! The Demon's Peace should be available on most platforms, and in paperback and hardback. It's a standalone dark fantasy, where a bitter, relentless widow forces a demonic assassin out of retirement to avenge her murdered daughter. Also, I like to release a bonus short story with each new book. The short story connected to The Demon's Peace is here, The City of One Million Lights, right now: Let me know what you think.

Corridors of PowerNo map this time - The City of Westminster is about 6 km north to south and 5 km east to west. Today's walk concentrates on a thin strip along the river - from Westminster Bridge down to Vauxhall Bridge and no more than a couple of streets back.As usual, the guidebook commentary runs to pages. The area is packed with history going back centuries and into recent times. My blog will concentrate on the items that tickled my interest.First - obtain a GPS Signal - among the statues…

A dull, cloudy day but mild. Cleaned out all the Ts. Cut up some wood for incin. A big pig in for burning. Brushed boiler room out. Raked some leaves up.

Last weekend, Brasil concluded it's 2026 presidential elections. It was a very tough one. Even more polarization than the past one 1. I have tried to have meaningful conversations with people that voted for the other candidate. But unfortunately all I heard in response was the same set of sentences and arguments. 2 It seemed that the people that I approached were not able to sustain a simple debate, were not able to argue on ideas other than the ones that are printed in their heads. The point…

With the mid-semester cloud of grading and deadlines lifting a bit, I actually found time to do some quasi-pleasure reading this past week. I reading James C. Scott’s final book, In Praise of Floods: The Untamed River and the Life It Brings (2025). As someone who has lived next to a river for 20+ years (and an untamed one at that), I’ve developed an affinity for rivers. In fact, when I think about my archaeology work in the Mediterranean, my most recent two projects, in the Western Argolid…

On a modern Linux computer, systemd lets you run a program and automatically restart it when the computer reboots and/or the program crashes. (Among many, many other things.) tl;drSave a file like the following to /etc/systemd/system/myserver.service: [Unit] Description=My Python server [Service] User=brian WorkingDirectory=/home/brian/myserver ExecStart=/home/brian/myserver/.venv/bin/python /home/brian/myserver/myserver.py Restart=always [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target This is a unit…

Lately, I’ve been wondering why there's been such a dearth of interesting map styles among all the new "vibe-coded" projects floating around. My guess is that AI toolchains encourage developers to churn out projects at breakneck speed, leaving little time to jump into Maputnik and craft a bespoke style that actually complements their app’s aesthetic.But just as I was losing hope of ever seeing another genuinely inventive style - reminiscent of the golden age of Stamen's Water Color Map or the…

9726/21645Have I gone football crazy? Or only football mad? Or just football relatively sane? Or football thinking with great insight and clarity?I don't know. But I do know that I have been to an awful lot of football (compared to my usual intake of the game) in the last four days. On Saturday I saw my daughter's team lose to Harpenden and then Tottenham Ladies get beat by Arsenal Ladies. Tonight I sampled some action from the men's League 2 as useless Barnet took on the greatest and most…

1956 historical fiction for young people. Frytha and Bjorn are descendants of Vikings and part of a community of the same, resisting the new kings' rule in newly Norman Britain.