We had a lot of fun this weekend in the Nashville store. IYKYK We had a lot of fun this weekend in the Nashville store. IYKYK What’s Still “Worth It”? (via Rachel’s Reflections). An interesting look at recent fountain pen price increases, in context. Bloggiversary. Fountain Pen Blog is 10! (via Fountain Pen Blog). Any bloggiversary is a worthy accomplishment now that everything is seemingly moving to social media more and more. 10 years is amazing!Larger Notebooks from My Collection (via…

Photography comes with its own logic. By that I mean that there is a general expectation why photographs might have been taken, whether to document a moment, to preserve it, or whatever else. What if that logic is broken, though? What if a set of photographs resists interpretation along the kinds of standard avenues that are generally used? As a vehicle for such an approach, the photobook is particularly well suited. With explanatory text usually absent, a photobook relies on its photographs…

It turns out that my Siri for Families post is way more viable than I ever guessed, which raises the question of why Apple hasn’t surfaced more of this in the Home View. Once I have the time, I will certainly see how I can leverage it in Shelf, which I have been neglecting of late in favour of sorting out my server-side agents.

It seems that some people take the time to stop by here. Worse: they take the time to read, and even to write to me by email. I've been thinking for a long time about a way to bring people together. Sure, there's Discord, Matrix, and all that... but they aren't self-hosted, and there are so many different channels and tools that, well... It just doesn't work for me. What if I host an instance of something... The ridiculously self-hosted idea # Ok but what to choose ? Discord: Create a "online…

I often wonder what our desktop environment would look like if the industry prioritised evidence based UX research.

Dark and gritty on stilts.

An idea from Knowember, get to know your blogger by Robert Birming I don’t post everything that do in my life online, only what I want to put out there, but want to join with the community when I feel like it A photo Dunluce castle on a foggy day, I like getting out to see old buildings and castles, also photography is something I enjoy doing Name or nickname I go by “Mufusa Fox” (or Mufusa) on my blog after I found the domain for sale and wanted to start a blog again and I thought it was fun…

I just finished Ann Patchett’s Whistler, which I waited nearly 5 months for on Libby. It was a gorgeously written book, still with the dreamy quality that I remember from reading Bel Canto, the last Patchett I read, over a decade ago. It engrossed me, and I think I truly liked it. And yet… I felt that the characters, though they strike me as being real, were also quite privileged. Everyone has hurts and retreats and insecurities, yes. But only that when it happens to characters who, taken all…

I just got back last night from a trip to Albuquerque, New Mexico to give my Falling Felines and Fundamental Physics talk. While I was there, my host was gracious enough to invite me to an evening event at The National Museum of Nuclear Science and History, dedicated to “preserving and presenting the story of the Atomic Age.” I didn’t have a lot of time to spend at the exhibits, but I took a few photos and thought I would share them here! The event itself was a talk and ribbon cutting for a new…

This is an unusual post for me as someone used to signposting data, research and studies, as well as telling some stories of how infrastructure came to be designed; but the London Assembly's recent behaviour has angered me.Dear Members of the Greater London Assembly,I watched the Assembly's plenary session of 5th November 2026 which included a vote calling on the Mayor to instruct Transport for London (TfL) to pause the installation of all new floating bus stops [here, from 5h18m]. With the…

I got a letter in the US Postal mail purporting to be “Official Business”. It’s actually a scam.

I continue to check my little dashboard of #SanFrancisco COVID numbers each morning to decide whether to go out for coffee, overhearing anecdotes from SFFD EMTs about patients so disoriented that they're not sure which limbs they can/can't control; or stay home, where there is nothing interesting to overhear. Lately, it's been good news! The COVID-in-wastewater number dipped below the pretty-safe level, and has stayed there for more than a week. The positive PCR test% has also dipped under the…

Fun fact about a song which has somehow become a much-hated symbol of 80s production excess but which is actually great: “We Built This City” shares a lyricist with “Your Song” and “Bennie and the Jets” (Bernie Taupin) and a lead singer with “Fooled Around and Fell In Love” (Mickey Thomas.)

What a great week this has been, with a sizable majority of American voters finally waking from their stupor to give a massive repudiation to Trump and his sycophantic Republican party. I’m feeling even more hopeful now than I did when Joe Biden was elected in late 2020. OK, back to the music. My love for Fontaines D.C. continues to grow, and their song “Marianne” remains at #1 for a fourth week. Many others appear to share my love and admiration for the Irish band too, as evidenced by my…

Wayne (Bob) RobertsJapaneese RhumbaRhythm & Range 45-102 B"Reavis Studio" in the deadwax |Nashville studio] 1956Nashville, TennesseeRecord listed in Rockin' Country Style (no location)Kicks Magazine #7 published a review of this record (see above). And we learn a little more about it. This was a posthumous release :"According to the accompanying promo sheet, Wayne Roberts was an aspiring crooner and when he met with an untimely death Mama Roberts had a band pop the bop onto some of his old…

A week is a long time in AI boosterism, bubbles and so on...1. The people versus the ugly big boxesYou might have noticed there was some kind of election in the US. Voters treated the big greedy sheds that keep the chatbots running as a claim on power, water and the skyline, backed by billionaire money. Unsurprisingly to everyone except the billionaires, this did not end well for them.So now Elon and the gang are looking at the stars and wanting to move datacentres off the planet. I can't help…

Going through a collection of old parts, CuriousMarc encountered some ICs that he couldn't identify. He opened up one of these ICs, and I studied it under the microscope. After some reverse engineering, I determined that it was a logic chip that implemented four NAND gates using old-fashioned diode-transistor logic (DTL).1 The chip turned out to be the ST680A, a member of the Signetics 600 series of chips from 1965. In this article, I discuss the circuitry in this chip and how diode-transistor…

#SilentSunday

Happiness is like a butterfly. Constantly chasing it isn’t very useful. But if you sit still and be present, then it will eventually find you. Anything that distracts from you being present stacks the odds against happiness finding you. Perhaps happiness is also like a mushroom. It grows best when you leave it alone in the shade. Any effort you add to it is futile. Similarly any messages that promise a direct path to happiness ought to evoke your skepticism. Happiness is much more well suited…

Taken shortly before midnight on Loop 101. I consider myself a lucky man. I have been to all 50 states and I have driven in all but three major cities in the United States (the outliers being Seattle, Miami, and Portland, Oregon). As a road geek and an almost civil engineer with a specialty in traffic management, I appreciate how each municipality approaches their metropolitan transportation needs. Phoenix, Arizona did not implement non-road dependent mass transit until 2008. Conversely,…

Welcome back Bearblog! I've been out for some months. Not that anyone cares (me included), but welcome back! It does feel nice to be here. The topic for today is: Lately I have found myself giving way more credit to the software that sustains my day to day. I think it is deserved. Thanks Navidrome for managing my 2.5K songs as if it was nothing, among others. I have never liked programming. I tried, I really did, I'm that "it guy" friend in a group, and some of my friends daily drive Linux, so…

This week’s Sunday Stills color challenge theme is ‘Leather browns and burgundies.’ See more responses here. Just the one photo for this one. One of the riders in the Kamehameha Day birthday parade a few years back. A bit of brown leather saddle and an abundance of burgundy foliage fits the bill.

schläfrig Ich war gerade im Fitnessstudio und bin jetzt ich schläfrig (ein neues Wort für mich). Neue RoutineIch habe bereits früher in der Woche darüber geschrieben. Ich finde meine neue Routine sehr hilfreich. Structured ist auch einen nützliche App. Nachts habe ich die meisten Aufgaben automatisch erledigt, z.B. das Geschirr spülen. Es ist wie ein Dominoeffekt. Sobald ich Tee mache, folgen die übrigen Aktivitäten. Nur gestern Abend habe ich nichts in mein Tagebuch geschrieben, weil ich zu…

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Very much not — indeed very much better than — what we often think it is.Assumed audience: Theologically-orthodox Christians, or folks interested in things that theologically-orthodox Christians think. Properly speaking, law is about the fact that God comes to his people with his own kind of merciful majesty, showing us what we must be if we are to be truly human, setting the law between us and our limitless capacity for self-destruction. God’s law is God interposing himself between us and our…

by George Pritchard I said this to the Traveler, and I will say it to all of you. I did not want to cover Straw Dogs, but any justification I could make for excluding it would be hypocritical considering the films that I and others have already happily covered on the Journey. A newly popularized … Continue reading [November 08, 1971] Who Leaves A Grave Open… (The French Connection and Straw Dogs) → The post [November 08, 1971] Who Leaves A Grave Open… (<i>The French Connection</i> and <i>Straw…

It might surprise you, but it turns out that a bit of lemon juice and honey wasn't enough to stop the inevitable. I hate knowing that I'm getting sick and not being able to do anything about it. I don't like being sick. Crazy, I know. But it's just so overwhelming and boring at the same time. Everything itches, stuff keeps coming out of my nose, and coughing is just plain annoying. I'm very pathetic when I'm sick. And knowing what's coming ruins the three days leading up to it, too. I feel like…

Over the past few months I’ve been working on mapsnap, a program to automatically georeference old insurance maps. My previous post introduced the project and explained why it’s so interesting and worth doing. This post gets into some more of the technical details. You can browse all the georeferenced maps at mapsnap.org. Most volumes of the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps come with some special sheets that we can use to guide georeferencing. The most important one is the keymap. This is a graphic…

The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the dumb and the grim. Michael Green My pal GK3 introduced me to Michael Green’s book1 which I immediately had to pick up a copy of. If you’re looking for a philosophy text swimming in artwork created back in the 80s on the Mac, this is the book you’ve been waiting for. A digital reproduction is available in full from the Internet Archive, but it’s not the same as having a printed copy to…

I popped my head into the sun room tgis morning, and found a cat quietly looking at me in the middle of the floor. A cat I had not seen in so long, I had to come back later to get a picture and confirm it with my daughter. That is Judgement! He has been … Continue reading Look who is back!