I have three titles on my big text file for all my drafts. One titled “Strange Jigsaws”, one for “The Left Hand of Darkness”, another for “The House on the Borderland” and one more for “Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye”, yet I’m about to go on vacation, and write my weeknotes instead! At last, let us begin. Wait. That’s four titles, aaargh. Anyway, here are some things that happened between October 20 to 26, 2026. 📚 I’ve done a lot of work on my website to improve my bookshelf once again! Make…

I'm reading all of Stephen King's fiction in publication order. It's been 14 years since the first (and only) time that I read 'Salem's Lot. I can date it pretty precisely, because I was re-reading The Dark Tower in the wake of the publication of The Wind Through The Keyhole and decided I should read the novels that link to that series. I remember enjoying it at the time, but it's long enough ago that I don't remember any of the details of the book, so this felt like a first read all over…

Before we ended our time in Scotland last summer, I just had to spend a little time with some of the many amazing seabirds that call the icy North Sea home. While visiting family in Dunbar, Scotland, we were conveniently close to the town of North Berwick, home of the Scottish Seabird Centre. From this delightful seaside village, visitors may embark on boat trips from the harbor at North Berwick out to several of the rocky islands that rise from the waves where the Firth of Forth meets the…

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Walter Koenig, best known for playing Ensign Pavel Chekov on Star Trek, died yesterday, October 25, 2026, at the age of 90. He also played Psi Cop Alfred Bester on Babylon 5.Walter Koenig was born on September 14, 1936 in Chicago. His parents were Russian Jewish immigrants from the Soviet Union. His father was a translator for RCA Victor. The family moved to Manhattan in New York City when Walter Koenig was young. He acted in school plays at Fieldston High School in New York. He attended…

Today I went and picked up my Sam’s Club pick-up order. I had finally run out of some of the bulk items I buy from there like toilet paper and dish detergent. After getting all my household bulk essentials (plus spending more than I care to admit on full-size candy bars for trick-or-treaters), it came out to about $200. This is not an unusual amount for my Sam’s Club orders. When I was turning into the parking lot, I saw a houseless man set up on the corner of the intersection there, sitting…

Melancholic and keenly attuned to the world of low-level New York City crime, The Only Living Pickpocket in New York provides an old-school helping of urban life that revolves around John Turturro’s performance as Harry, a pickpocket nearing the end of his hustle. Times have changed. Credit cards have put a crimp on light-fingered activities. The bricks that held up the old street order are crumbling. The movie can be taken as an ode to New York City as a haven for layers of hidden subcultures…

With Curt Jaimungal: The title Curt put next to my head could’ve been in reference to many, many things! But sorry, he just mean AI. He and I start with the Mathacre, of course, but then we get onto the firewall paradox and then Curt starts asking about computational complexity and the Second Law, and then about Integrated Information Theory. OK, despite the title of this post, short break from “The Topic.” Here’s an absolute masterpiece of mathematical exposition, from the “Polylog” YouTube…

you say I'll bloom and I don't argue do I believe it or only want to, I don't know but the soil is being watered and the light keeps flickering on

I have written before about my lazy and largely unsuccessful journey to become a polyglot. (TL;DR Duolingo doesn’t work, LanguageTransfer is cool, and the only thing that makes a difference is crossing the cringe minefield and talking to people before you know how to talk to people.) I stand by what I said, but talking to people is, like, a lot of work and super embarrassing. Here’s a way to practice your foreign language of choice that doesn’t require talking to people, in a way that feels a…

Random thoughts too long for a Mastodon post, but not long enough for a full-blown post. 🍂 Autumn appears to be a dud this year in the Midwest. The dry summer has led to the leaves on the trees either drying up and dropping off early, or switching to muted shades of color. It was one of the few disappointing aspects of the Dubuque trip 10 days ago, as I had hoped going further north would mean a more colorful display would be on hand. Alas, that wasn’t to be, and it looks like the leaves will…

Martin Langeveld (“Old newspaper guy”), a longtime friend of the Hattery, sent me a link to Elizabeth Bromstein’s NiemanLab article about her search for the origin of the “statistic” that 75% of your emotions are generated by smell, which turned out to be unsourceable: There’s a name for the particular way an unsupported claim can acquire the appearance of fact through citation: citogenesis. Coined by Randall Munroe in an XKCD comic, the term describes the process by which an unsupported claim…

2026-10 – İstanbul, Tűrkiye – Derek Sivers meetings Istanbul is super-social. Faces look at friends, not phones. Cafés, restaurants, coffee shops, always full of people talking. The later the hour, the bigger the crowd. Coffee shops are open until midnight. Speaking of Derek, here’s his report and interviews from time spent in İstanbul. A fascinating first person glimpse into another country.

Stepping StonesMy 2026 season drew to a close with four days on the Ure in glorious autumn weather, bathed in golden light. On three of the days the water was below optimal height, while on the other we suffered a small muddy spate that precluded fishing. The water temperature was a perfect 12-13C throughout. Nevertheless, I found the beauty of the surroundings and the company of my guests supremely relaxing and satisfying. It was a delightful way to end the season.Yorkshire autumn…

I have not thrown off the yoke of my watch yet, but the feeling of looking forward to that moment has not passed either. I also have not become a person daily driving his Jolla, but I have settled into a interesting new balance. Trying to connect my Airpods has so far been an exercise in frustration. They would be discovered, appear to connect, even give the connection chime, then I would hear nothing from the phone, then a few seconds later I would get the disconnect tone and sometimes even…

OpenAI launched GPT-6.1 Terra today at $1 per million input tokens, $5 for output and $0.05 for cached input. That is pretty similar to what happened with 6.1-Sol, since it is half of what GPT-5.6 Terra costs now, and the cached input rate is a fifth of what my piclaw pricing table recorded for it back in July. This is kind of interesting to me for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I have been tracking these numbers for months both at work and as I use my OpenAI…

In my last post (The Ottawa Conundrum), I shared that I was becoming ambivalent about railways in Ottawa. There just isn't enough happening here to justify my blog. That isn't to say that I'm giving up my blog. By no means. I just thought I'd try to get some ideas about how to handle my local content in a way that is more interesting than posting the same photos of the same Via Rail corridor trains at the same spots over and over again. Also, I don't want the blog's local content to be solely…

I only now understand what I missed about music in all the years I let algorithms decide on what I listen to. Searching for and discovering songs and albums from artists I previously never heard of or mostly ignored is one of my new favorite activities. And Last.fm is actually giving me some good inspirations. And then having a library where you like almost every song and can just play on shuffle without the instinct to skip every other song. I’m still not someone who needs sounds in the…

We’ve been to the ‘living ghost town’ of Chloride, Arizona, several times since our first visit last March. With a current population hovering ~250 people, this quirky, quaint little town nestled in the Cerbat Mountains is considered the oldest continuously inhabited mining town in Arizona. When we were here a few weeks ago with Brennan showing him the Purcell murals, we stopped in Yesterday’s Restaurant for an after-hike beer, and we were reminded by our waitress about the upcoming 50th…

Motley Peg – The Department of Lingo: WHAT kind of kitchen?! “An ingredients kitchen. That’s what we call it now.” Like the author, I’d never heard the term until my wife forwarded me this. I’m pro “ingredients kitchen” but do have some “snack kitchen” items too. One can have a mix.

I started October at the third Festival of Commoning, in Stroud again. As seems to be normal now at the Festival, there was discussion about what this commoning thing actually is (I blogged them too - Commoning and Festival of Commoning take two). But this year it felt like maybe it didn't matter so much, or the tent is just tacitly agreed to be a big one. In the welcome session it was described as "a global movement, acting locally," and the poster had some examples. What if we had more say in…

A/SIDE — Private photo sharing and encrypted messages Photos, videos and everyday updates from the people you know. Newest first. Nobody else’s idea of what you should see. I could certainly see some use cases for this.

About — slashfriends A page on your site where you link to the people you like and follow. Make the Internet more human! The idea is a riff on Derek Sivers /Now idea. Create a page that lists your online friends. Like the blogrolls of the past.

[James Dolan is the worst.] You may recall the smallness of New York Knicks owner James Dolan, who abuses facial recognition to bar people he dislikes from his venues. It appears that in addition to being a surveilling creep, Dolan is also extremely cheap. In particular, after the Knicks won the 2026 NBA championship, he’s cheaped out when it comes to championship rings. Team employees received an email offering them their own rings, free of charge, but that was a test: “Congratulations, your…

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] Yesterday, Numberphile released a delightful video with James Grime (redundant, I know) in which he walks us through a geometry problem first posed by Henry Dudeney in 1902. It’s known as the “Haberdasher’s Puzzle” and is reproduced in Dudeney’s 1907 book The Canterbury Puzzles. The problem was solved by C.W. McElroy after Dudeney published it in a…

Begrudgingly checked out of the Village Inn this morning. It was the last day of the season and they needed to winterize the lodge. Made our way back up the Going-to-the-Sun Road to Logan Pass for a hike to the Hidden Lake Overlook (After seeing folks along the edge of the Highline Trail yesterday, I knew my nerves couldn’t handle such treachery.) Turns out I could barely handle the moderate hike to Hidden Lake. Steep steps form the first half of the trail, I was out of breath after several…

⌾ : Ricoh GR IV Monochrome.⚲ : Near home. This photo was taken on a walk near my home and shows a bunch of Noisy Miners (there were actually more involved) harassing a Cockatoo. The Noisy Miner (Manorina melanocephala) is a small grey bird with a black headpiece and high-res yellow beak. They are endemic to eastern and southeastern Australia, and for a long time I wrongly thought/assumed they were an introduced pest. The truth is that this particular species is native. I strongly dislike these…

I hadn’t rotated the site banner for a while. This month we have a scene from Fagan Park, which I explored with my in-laws earlier this month around Hornsby Shire in Sydney. It was stunning. As always, I generated a pixilated image with dithering to render it as though it came from an early 1990s CD-ROM. This time I posterised it down to monochrome, then applied a teal cast. I had some feedback on my last banner that it was too “busy”, which made the overlaid text harder to read. This one is…

Search's first green is gold. An impossible hue to hold.

So I haven’t done a leg workout in weeks, to have my Achilles heal. And it’s gone down in pain, to the point where I’ve had a couple days without remembering it is there. So I picked some leg lifts today. Nothing with calf raises. My legs will surely be sore tomorrow but let’s hope my heel is not. Unknown location (probably inside)